Arbeitsstatistik (1892)

Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg’s journal article makes labour statistics a problem of statistical organization and social classification. Its eight sections move from the unity of administration and official statistics to a definition of the working classes, then examine censuses, vital registration, establishments, wages, mobility, and household conditions. Its central claim is that understanding workers requires the coordinated resources of general statistics, not an institution that isolates labour from the society sustaining it.

The opening argument derives statistical centralization from the interdependence of social life. Departmental knowledge cannot adequately grasp relations extending across administrative jurisdictions. Likewise, moral and welfare statistics are perspectives on the whole of society, not separate domains possessing exclusively their own facts. Isolating conspicuous symptoms risks producing tendentious evidence. Labour statistics presents the same methodological problem:

Die Arbeitsstatistik ist das Problem der Gesellschaftsordnung selbst, nur unter einen besonderen Gesichtspunkt gestellt.

English translation: Labour statistics is the problem of the social order itself, viewed only from a particular perspective.

This formulation makes workers’ circumstances inseparable from the effects of their position on society as a whole. Class distinctions cut across occupational branches; they cannot replace those branches as the primary framework of classification without grouping unlike conditions together and repeatedly describing shared circumstances. Moreover, dependence on earnings does not establish a homogeneous social identity: occupation can distinguish people more powerfully than their shared status as employees.

Sections 3–4 therefore define labour statistics through the study of social position within wider demographic and occupational groups. The object is the working person as a social and ethical being, not labour power measured as an equivalent of machinery. Yet the boundaries of the working classes remain unstable, while sex, age, and marital status strongly shape the demographic outcomes attributed to class. Inama-Sternegg’s conclusion is organizational as well as conceptual:

Die „Arbeitsstatistik“ kann also nicht zu einem selbständigen Hauptgebiete der Statistik ausgebildet werden.

English translation: “Labour statistics” therefore cannot be developed into an independent principal field of statistics.

Sections 5–6 identify the population census as the indispensable foundation. It supplies both workers’ characteristics and the wider population against which those characteristics acquire meaning. Household, family, and housing information should be connected with individual records, overcoming the fragmentation introduced by counting-card techniques. The accompanying Austrian tabulation scheme gives practical substance to this programme through combinations of occupation, social position, age, household membership, birthplace, and property ownership. Often the obstacle is not missing information but the expense of processing combinations already available in census material.

Vital registration and migration statistics complement the census snapshot with evidence of change. Their population-wide comparisons remain relative, however: workers form so much of the population that their disadvantages also shape the supposed benchmark. General statistics provides a starting point for reform, not a final judgment on attainable well-being.

Section 7 extends this relational approach to establishment censuses. An enterprise matters here as the setting of workers’ livelihoods, rather than simply as a productive unit. Its scale and equipment distinguish small masters from manufacturers and workshop employees from factory workers. Linking establishment and population censuses also prevents the disappearance of tiny enterprises from the statistical picture.

The final section differentiates methods according to their objects. Wage statistics requires continuing records of actual payments; insurance registers might substitute for inaccessible or nonexistent employers’ payrolls. Occupational and geographical mobility call for more individualized evidence. Welfare institutions and household budgets require description and monographs where numerical aggregation would erase decisive differences. Inama-Sternegg thus resists both indiscriminate averaging and exaggerated expectations of a specialized labour office.

Mit Enqueten kann man eben nicht Statistik machen.

English translation: Inquiries simply cannot produce statistics.

The sentence distinguishes functions rather than dismissing inquiry: detailed investigations should rest on a statistical account of the population and clarify its findings. The article’s enduring significance lies in this connection between classification, comparison, and institutional authority. Centralization promises not merely efficiency but an integrated evidentiary framework, whose independence and breadth are meant to secure public trust amid sharpening social conflict.