The politics of industrial efficiency in the Weimar Republic: Technological innovation, economic efficiency, and their social consequences in the Ruhr coal mining industry, 1918-1929

This study examines industrial rationalization in the Ruhr coal mines in Weimar Germany. It argues that various interest groups, including trade unions, state agencies, and Ruhr coal industrialists implemented technological efficiency and production reorganization as a means to compensate for social and economic concessions made to organized labor during the revolution, for greater state control of the economy following World War I, and for altered domestic and European coal markets in the 1920\u27s. The thesis analyzes characteristics of the coal mining labor force from 1916 to 1929, showing that miners became generally older, more skilled, and more married later in the period than in the postwar years. This reduced incentives to political activism. Unemployment due to economic downturn in the later 1920\u27s is distinguished from that due to rationalization. Analysis shows that a significant amount of unemployment resulted from rationalization measures in the late 1920\u27s even before the onset of economic depression in the early 1930\u27s