Research on the attitude of the German labor movement toward migrating working men has largely concentrated on either labor's stance on workers emigrating abroad, particularly to the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, or on the position of trade unions and the socialist party toward the in-migration of workers from southern and eastern Europe at the turn of the century. By comparison, the working-class movement's attitude toward migrating workers within Germany has been much neglected. The only exception is Christiane Eisenberg, who gave some attention to this problem in her important comparative study of the development of English and German trade unionism up to the late 1870s.

Nevertheless, in the following I will challenge her argument that the tradition of artisan migrations and travels organized by labor obstructed the emergence of the trade union movement.

This essay is only a first attempt to discuss some of the major aspects of the complex relationship between labor migration and the development of the working-class movement in Germany. It is largely based on an examination of some of the more important nineteenth-century trade union journals, socialist newspapers, and a selection of workers' autobiographies, all of which cover a broad range of skilled occupations. In particular, I focus on two aspects neglected by Eisenberg: the role of tramping journeymen and skilled workers in the spatial expansion of labor organizations as well as in the spread of socialist ideas and union principles; and the various tasks traveling working men performed during labor struggles. The first section examines the tradition of craft migration and the diffusion of radicalism by traveling working men and their organization-building activities. The second discusses labor's efforts at regulating the labor market by assisting itinerant workers. The third section deals with the relevance of traveling workers in the context of industrial disputes. Next, light is cast on the debates within labor's ranks about the use of traveling benefits in the trade union movement in the era of internal mass migration. A short biographical sketch illustrating the travels of a cigarmaker at the beginning of this century concludes the article.