ABSTRACT
The causes of greater unemployment lie in far-reaching economic crises, inherent in the nature of major industrial concerns, industrialists' organisations and company cartels, quite apart from any natural influences. If one looks at the development of the three related means of combating unemployment directly and of alleviating its consequences, on which the socio-political programme and practice concentrated from an early stage: the labour exchanges; job creation; and unemployment insurance. All three measures were not unknown in Germany at the start of the 1890s for those reasons, the problem of unemployment was tackled with a breadth and an intensity hitherto unknown. The 'significant and lasting contribution' of the first major, methodologically inadequate, unemployment survey of 1895 organised by the Imperial Statistical Office was in 'correcting and determining the lasting features of public attitudes to the scope of unemployment. Until the Weimar Republic, unemployment protection was relegated to the level of welfare–this did not carry the stigma of poor relief.
