Abstract
At present, the concepts of “employee” and “subordination” have become the core concepts of labour law, which determine its objects, scope, and methods as a legal science. In the 19th century, “subordination” was not yet a legal concept. It was mainly used by theorists of social policy, such as Karl Marx. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Imperial Insurance Office adopted the criteria of personal and economic subordination for the first time in the judicial practice of insurance law, to determine whether a person in question should be a compulsory insured or not. Before the First World War, the founder of labour contract theory, Philipp Lotmar, avoided the discussion of subordination, to consolidate the scattered and contradictory labour legislation of his time. After the establishment of the Weimar Republic, the first generation of German labour lawyers debated whether the concept of “subordination” should be legalized and how it should be formalised. The debate essentially concerned the compatibility of labour law with the dichotomy of public and private law, and the compatibility of Marxism with the subjectivity of German Pandectist jurisprudence.
Keywords
employees, labour contract, labour relations, subordination, sociology of law
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