Study title

“Strike waves represent the conflict potential of the industrializing process and the regulatory needs not only for the industrial working relations but for the entire society. Strike waves occur periodically and are characterized by organizationally innovative, spontaneous, often euphoric protest actions that not least through their production of symbolic conflict and expression forms entered deeply in the consciousness and behavior of the working class… The present study tends to identify scope, importance and internal dynamics of European industrial actions around 1890, which formed a new international spirit of solidarity of a broad working class and induced the organizational breakthrough of trade unions in Germany and the ‘new unionism’ in England. Given the surprising parallelism of these developments on the one hand and the extraordinary divergence of political and trade union systems on the other hand the question arises how it could come to such a comparable, parallel happening strike and organization wave, and which similarities emerged from the initially-stated coexistence or which similarities were formed by political action and how the movements fall apart again through their nation-state confinement” (Boll, a. a. O., p. 62 f). The research question of this study is about the syndicalisation in terms of union integration of strikes that occurred during the strike wave and was quickened by this wave. The national, regional or branch-specific strikes should be measured according to the research question. Starting point of the deliberations of the first chapter (I. national conflict schemes and international trends, comparison of strikes and strike waves) is the different conceptualization of national working class movements, those that were responsible for the strike waves in England and France and for the continuous changes of the industrial actions in Germany. The chapter is based on statistical material that is presented in three overviews –...