c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 149 Under the direction of the Chancellor of the Reich, Otto Fürst von Bismarck (1815-1889), Germany introduced during the 1870s legislation on social insurance as well as developed further rules on industrial welfare. In 1890 the young Emperor Wilhelm II (1859-1941), in conflict with Bismarck, declared that the state ought to regulate the terms of working life, in regard to tasks, time and volume in order to protect the workers’ demands concerning healthiness, cleanliness and statutory fixed equality of rights.300 A statute in 1891, die Reichsgewerbeordnung, also called Lex Berlepsch, reduced the federal states’ space for establishing particular rules as well as the individual parties’ freedom of contract.Work on Sundays and holidays was restricted, as was night work for women.The entrepreneurs were enjoined to keep the work place in a condition that did not threaten the workers’ health. Lex Berlepsch also made possible the employees’ right of participation, not least regarding the employer’s issuing of plant regulations. Moreover, the freedom of contract applied only to trade and crafts, but did not concern agriculture, domestic work and civil servants.Thus the German variant of the law on master and servant (das Gesinderecht) was still applied until 1918, postulating a social relationship of inequality (das Herrschaftsverband) in which the servant was placed under the master’s supremacy.The working party was obligated not only to an open-ended duty of obedience and loyalty within the workplace,301 but even outside the workplace he or she was legally expected to promote the best interests of the master (“der Herrschaft Bestes zu befördern”).302The parties’ mutual obligations and rights still to a large extent were 300 Bismarck 1922, pp. 66 ff. 301 “Gehorsam undTreu… seine Dienste treu, fleissig, und aufmerksam zu verrichten”. See section64 in Prussian General Landlaw II (ALR), 1794 and Prussian Order for domestic servants, (Pr. Gesindeordnung), 1810. Münchener Handbuch zumArbeitsrecht 1992, pp. 16-21. 302 Section70Pr ALR II 5;PrGesO1810;Münchener Handbuch zumArbeitsrecht 1992, p. 813.
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