Social movement and economic statistics in interwar Poland. Building an alternative expert knowledge on the condition of the working class

The growth and operation of welfare states were accompanied by a considerable public production of statistical information describing the living and working conditions of populations. However, this information was also produced by private actors (workers' unions, associations, etc.), who collected their own data either in addition to or in opposition to the publicly collected data. This was particularly the case in Poland between the two world wars: this new state aimed to take up the challenge of creating a modern system of economic and social information, but, faced with the financial crises that made a large part of the population insecure, it found itself rivalled and overtaken by the provision of information by private institutes representing workers' unions. These private institutes often pre-existed the state itself and had previously represented the voice of the populations of the Polish territories under imperial rule. This chapter shows how a private institute, the Institute of Social Economics, helped to set up a statistical information system concerning wages and prices and to organize a survey on the budgets of workers' families both in partnership and rivalry with the Polish Statistical Office in order to construct a cost-of-living index.