The Institutionalization of a Market in Labor

The restrictions on the level of wages which had proven so useful to British employers during the genesis of capitalist relations of production were thrown aside but a few generations later. To be sure, the statutory rates of wages could restrain pay increases. Under altered circumstances, however, they also limited wage reductions. Since the employment relation did not arise through free contract, masters could be required to support dependent laborers both when there was work to be done and when there was not.^[94] The employing class that had once welcomed legal intrusions to bind and discipline workers came to find the limitations on their purchase of labor power odious. "The Statutes for regulating wages and the price of labour," wrote Dean Tucker in 1757, "are another absurdity and a very great hurt to trade. Absurd and preposterous it must surely appear for a third person to attempt to fix the price between buyer and seller without their own consents. . . . How can any stated regulations be so contrived as to make due and reasonable allowance for plenty or scarcity of work, cheapness or dearness of provisions, difference of living in town or country?"^[95] By the time Tucker and others, including textile entrepreneurs, had formulated their criticisms, however, regulation was becoming superfluous.^[96] As the landholdings of wage earners shrank, they became increasingly dependent on wage labor for their subsistence and unable to withhold their labor from the marketplace. To curb wages, manufacturers could rely on the coercive power of the market alone.^[97]

[94] Kahn-Freund, op. cit., p. 519.

[95] Quoted by Laski, op. cit., p. 198. Although Tucker objected to the regulation of wages, he retained the older belief that low wages spurred productivity. George Shelton, Dean Tucker and Eighteenth-Century Economic and Political Thought (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 55–57.

[96] Textile employers in Gloucestershire applied the language of laissez-faire in 1757 to the purchase of labor. In response to a new rating of the weavers' wages, the employers said, "We think it repugnant to the liberties of a free people and the interest of trade that any law should supersede a private contract honourably made between a master and his workman." Quoted by Lipson, op. cit., p. 268.

[97] Kelsall, op. cit., p. 100; Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 274; W. E. Minchinton, "Introduction," in his Wage Regulation in Pre-Industrial England (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972), p. 27.

The statutory rating of wages had weakened in some trades when the eighteenth century commenced; by the middle of the century it was moribund in many branches, though not forgotten.^[98] The system, Sir John Clapham judged, "died harder than historians used to think—and the memory of it did not die."^[99] In the textile trade, as ever the leading department of manufacture, the assessment of wages by the justices became ever more difficult as the varieties of weaving proliferated in response to market enticements.^[100] The surviving records do not let investigators date the demise of wage assessments for cloth production with precision.^[101] In the West Riding of Yorkshire the steady enforcement of assessments faded after 1732.^[102] In Gloucestershire, the clothiers generally ignored the rating of wages issued in 1728.^[103] With the slow disappearance of assessments to guarantee minimum earnings, the judicial rationale for compel-

[98] North, op. cit., p. 64. In agriculture, to be sure, wage assessments appear to have guided effective wage rates until 1812. "The wages of labour do conform, notwithstanding the continual increase in the price of the necessaries of life, to the assessments of the Quarter Sessions, and the system continued under legal sanction till 1812." Rogers, p. 353. Perkin shows that wage regulation in manufacture was not only unenforced but unthinkable at the end of the eighteenth century, despite the wool workers' brief campaign, initiated in 1802, to revive ancient employment laws. Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780–1880 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 185, 188.

[99] J. H. Clapham, A Concise Economic History of Britain from the Earliest Times to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), p. 215. For a contemporary reference revealing the survival of wage rating, see P. Colquhoun, A Treatise on Indigence, Exhibiting a General View of the National Resources for Productive Labour (London: J. Hatchard, 1806), p. 16. Marx emphasized the extraordinary longevity of wage regulation in Britain. Kapital , op. cit., p. 768. For evidence that agricultural workers as late as 1833 believed that Justices of the Peace could fix wage rates, see Howell, op. cit., p. 62.

[100] Many statutes were not applied to the new worsted trade, because wage law was considered valid only for occupations existing at the time of its promulgation. Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries , op. cit., p. 310. In 1738 Parliament abolished the requirement that narrow cloth manufactured in the West Riding follow standard designs established by statute. Lipson, op. cit., p. 326.

[101] Ramsay, Wiltshire Woolen Industry , p. 125; for evidence of the survival of fixed customary wages in the textile industry into the mid-eighteenth century, see Robert Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England 1700–1780 (London: Hutchinson, 1981), pp. 125–126. Local authorities occasionally called regulation back to life when perturbations in the supply of labor threatened to push wages upwards. A. Holderness, Pre-Industrial England: Economy and Society 1500–1750 (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1976), p. 195.

[102] Heaton, "The Assessment of Wages," op. cit., p. 232.

[103] Lipson, op. cit., p. 266; Mann, op. cit., p. 110. In 1756 Parliament instructed justices in Gloucestershire to rate wages in the textile trade. Mann, op. cit., p. 110. On the Colchester weavers' attempt in the 1740s to preserve locally mandated wages, see A. F. J. Brown, Essex at Work 1700–1815 (Chelmsford: Tindal Press, 1969), p. 25. In 1757 Parliament repealed the legislation that had enabled justices to govern wool weavers' wages. Lipson, op. cit., pp. 269–271.

ling idle laborers to work for any farmer or tradesperson needing help also faded.^[104]

The changes in the institutional framework for determining the price of labor established the background for a momentous change in the appreciation of labor as a marketable ware. During the first century of liberal commercialism in Britain, the belief persisted that workers delivered their labor only under the compulsions of law and hunger.^[105] Many enterprises in pottery, mining, and textiles bound their laborers by servile terms of indenture that held them to the same employer for terms of one to twenty years.^[106] After the middle of the eighteenth century, employers began to rely upon cash rather than coercive stipulations to secure labor. The opinion slowly and tentatively took hold that workers could be stimulated to work harder by the promise of higher earnings.^[107] It required several decades for this viewpoint to become general.^[108] By 1776 Adam Smith was able to draw upon it confidently. "Where wages are high," Smith observed, "accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious, than where they are low."^[109] Indeed, some eighteenth-century employers came to worry that if laborers were remunerated according to the quantity of their output, they would overexert themselves and ruin their constitutions.^[110] By the time Smith set down his thoughts, the Statutes of Elizabeth that had mandated terms of apprenticeship as a requisite for legal exercise of ancient craft occupations were dead letters.^[111] Labor power was belatedly christened as a commodity.

[104] Holdsworth, op. cit., p. 475.

[105] N. J. Pauling, "The Employment Problem in Pre-Classical English Economic Thought," The Economic Record Volume XXVII, Number 52 (1951), p. 59; Peter Mathias, "Leisure and Wages in Theory and Practice," in his The Transformation of England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), pp. 150–151; Marx, Kapital op. cit., pp. 290–292.

[106] Pollard, op. cit., p. 191.

[107] A. W. Coats, "Changing Attitudes to Labour in the Mid-Eighteenth Century," The Economic History Review second series, Volume XI, Number 1 (August 1958), p. 46. Pollard, op. cit., p. 191.

[108] See William Temple, A Vindication of Commerce and the Arts , 1758, reprinted in Copley, editor, Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England , op. cit., p. 154.

[109] Smith, Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 91.

[110] The Monthly Magazine , "On Taken-Work," by "A Farmer" (May 1799), pp. 273–275; Rule, op. cit., p. 124; L. J. Hume, "Jeremy Bentham on Industrial Management," Yorkshire Bulletin of Economic and Social Research Volume 22, Number 1 (May 1970), p. 6.

[111] For testimony about long-standing ignorance of the terms of the apprenticeship statutes and about their nonenforcement, see United Kingdom, Report from the Committee on Woollen Clothiers Petition , PP 1802–1803 VII, pp. 5–7, March 13, 1803; United Kingdom, Minutes of Evidence, Committee on Woollen Bill , PP 1802–1803 (95) VII, pp. 7, 357; United Kingdom, Minutes of the Committee on the Woollen Trade , PP 1806 III, pp. 135, 197, 198,231; Wadsworth and de Lacy Mann, op. cit., pp. 351–352. On the weakening of urban corporations after the revolution and their virtual extinction by the mid-eighteenth century, see ibid., pp. 63–67.

But under what name? The employment of wage labor was assimilated to the prior notion of labor sold as it was embodied in the product of an independent artisan. Strange to say, this continuity is illustrated most vividly in what may otherwise appear to be an historical rupture: the issuance of Smith's Wealth of Nations. Smith's formulations about the efficiency of the market may have recast the field of high theory, but his portrayal of labor rested upon the appropriation of simple, long-standing ideas from social practice.