The starting point of this chapter is an observation made by German sociologists during the early twentieth century concerning the occupational fate of elderly workers in large-scale industry. A series of studies on single enterprises led to the conclusion that at around the age of 40, workers in these industries experienced a “critical turning point” that led to a serious deterioration of their working conditions and living standards and, most frequently, to their expulsion from industry altogether. Sociologists have argued that this “second phase” of an industrial worker's life course remained “in the dark.” The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the experiences of these elder workers by going beyond single enterprises and industries and analysing contemporary comprehensive statistics. The German Empire’s occupational statistics from 1882, 1895, and 1907 offer excellent data; parts of these surveys have been made machine-readable, which allows scholars to follow age cohorts over the entire period between 1882 and 1907. My analysis of this data reveals the strong impact of life-course related transitions from agriculture to industry (during the early years of one’s working life) and back (in middle and old age), and from wage labour in crafts and trades to economic independence. I argue that in Germany during the era of “high industrialisation” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wage labour was still not yet an overall life-long attribute of the working life but was for the majority of workers a phase in the working life course or a preliminary step towards independence as peasant or craftsman, be it as small employer or through self-employment.
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