ABSTRACT
Estate owners employed migrant workers on a huge scale during this period, as I have outlined in the first chapter. They did so because they were much cheaper than locals or other Germans, despite the cost of transporting them from Prussia’s eastern border. From the point of view of management they fitted the rhythm and pace of the new, more profitable, intensive farming, particularly, as we have seen, of root crops like sugar beet; like the free labourers they could be employed from the spring to the autumn when there was work to do and sent home when there was not. Unlike free labourers however, who decided themselves when they worked, they were on site and under contract for the entire period. They were also paid lower wages. Sometimes, though this became less true over the period, this was simply a matter of paying foreign workers less than locals for carrying out the same work. Mostly, however, wages were lower because the majority of the seasonal workers were either women or classified as ‘youths’ (Burschen), both paid at a lower daily rate to men.1 Seasonal workers were also cost-efficient because they were usually paid on a performance-related piece-rate basis and worked longer hours than locals. Crucially, they were also much cheaper to house. The purpose-built barracks accommodation, which became common during the period, crowded workers into a single building, required little or no maintenance and contained the bare minimum in the way of furniture. Bed-frames, sacking and blankets (‘Schnitterdecken’) could be bought in bulk from suppliers.2 This standard of housing was one of the main reasons why seasonal workers remained more cost-effective than resident labourers before and after 1918 when the wages of locals and foreign workers were equalized. It was estimated that the cost of housing a worker in barracks was almost six times
1 Of the 4699 seasonal workers registered in Mecklenburg-Strelitz in October 1914, 2188 were women and 742 were male youths. Mecklenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv, Schwerin (MLHA), Ministerium des Innern (MdI), 17 251, f. 660. Here, in the same year, the labour office suggested rates of pay for seasonal workers of between 1,30M and 2,20M per day for men (depending on their skills and the type of work) and between 1,10M and 1,60M for women and young men. MLHA, MdI, 316, f. 10.
