Social Movements and Work: A qualitative study of the Workers' Welfare Organisation between 1919 1933

The Workers' Welfare Organisation was founded in 1919 as part of the socialist labour movement and operated at the intersection of charitable and social-revolutionary approaches. With the founding of the Workers' Welfare Organisation, socialism was established within the labour movement not only on a theoretical level as a science, but also in practice as an ethic, a worldview and a way of life; this served to curb the influence of bourgeois welfare on working-class families and to stabilise the proletarian social milieu. As an explicitly political organisation and one that operated in opposition within the welfare landscape of the Weimar Republic, it can contribute to the development of a critical theory of social work and demonstrate how, through democratisation and self-help, ideas for a critical, non-colonial form of social work can be derived.