8—
The Monetization of Time

Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale.  . . . The commodity description of labor  . . . is entirely fictitious.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation

The rites of practice in which the commodity form was brought to life not only structured agents' everyday relations to each other, but these conventions also defined the forms of understanding by which people would criticize and attempt to transform their social relations. As for the construction of practices by which employers and workers effected the transmission of "labor," so for struggles to modify that transfer the commodity form established the symbolic coordinates of the most fundamental dimensions of experience at the site of production—those of time and space themselves. Let us consider in this chapter a single field of effects, those resulting from the contrasting means of demarcating, exchanging, and consuming time in Germany and Britain.^[1]

Inspired by E. P. Thompson's classic essay on "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," historians have accumulated an imposing body of evidence about the development of time consciousness in early industrial societies.^[2] Their inquiries have focused on the historical processes by which individuals came to value the methodical expenditure of time and by which collective undertakings, including the daily labor activity, came to follow the rigid and precise cycles of the mechanical clock.^[3] For the comparative in-

[1] In Chapter Ten, the end of Part Three of this work, we will examine the contrasting uses of space in workers' struggles, based on the disposition of "labor power" in Germany and of the transmission of "objectified labor" in Britain.

[2] E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present Number 38 (December 1967).

[3] Thomas Smith, "Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan," Past and Present Number 111 (May 1986); Mark Harrison, "The Ordering of the Urban Environment: Time, Work and the Occurrence of Crowds, 1790–1835," Past and Present Number 110 (February 1986); David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1983); Christoph Deutschmann, Der Weg zum Normalarbeitstag (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1985). On the development of time discipline in eighteenth-century agricultural communities, see David Sabean, "Intensivierung der Arbeit undAlltagserfahrung auf dem Lande—ein Beispiel aus Württemberg," Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen für Unterricht und Studium Volume 6, Number 4 (1977), pp. 149 ff.

quiry at hand, we know already that most producers in nineteenth-century Germany and Britain had sensitized themselves to this time economy. The question before us is more precise: how did the cultural definition of labor as a commodity influence workers' perception of the significance of time for remuneration in the labor process? The landmark studies conducted by Thompson and others correlated the differing appreciations of time with the necessities of work. Thompson, for example, associated the imposition of an unremitting time-discipline among the English common people with the transition from independent manufacture at home to supervised, regulated labor at the factory. More recently, in an investigation of the time regime of Tokugawa Japan, Thomas Smith underscored the functional requirements of social relations in agriculture.^[4] These studies treat the perception of time as a response to immediate instrumental requirements.

This chapter investigates instead the independent effect of the cultural encoding of practice upon producers' demarcation and manipulation of time. German workers and employers handled labor time itself as a commodity in the employment relation, whereas British workers and employers treated time only as a means for producing commodities. This difference shaped workers' understanding of the source of their income, their rationales for demanding payment from their employers, and, ultimately, the emergence and goals of their strike campaigns.

Units of Payment and Production

A conceptual scheme begins with division and distinction. The segments into which workers partitioned time to gauge their earnings reveals time's meaning for them in the employment relation. Unlike their British counterparts, German weavers calculated their earnings in a temporal framework based on the delivery of abstract work time at the site of production. In both countries, the piece-rate earnings of the weavers fluctuated severely from week to week even when business remained steady. Employers generally paid workers the earnings due at the end of each week, but the workers received credit for work performed only upon completion of an entire piece.

[4] Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism," op. cit. In Smith's view, the assumption in Japan that time comprised a collective rather than an individual resource reflected the demands of a farm system that relied upon tight cooperation within the family and community. "Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan," op. cit.

It required at least several days' effort to come to the end of a piece. If a weaver had not quite finished a piece at the end of a pay period, he or she would take home nothing for it that week. In the following week, however, the weaver might be paid for twice as much work as in the preceding week. The procedure for disbursing wages due was the same in both countries, yet German and British weavers arrived at different interpretations of the relation between remuneration and the passage of time.

Weavers could count their earnings in either of two basic ways: they could quote the wage they received per piece of cloth handed in, or they could convert their pay to a wage received over an interval of time. The reports about wages and working conditions submitted to the textile workers' newspapers in Germany and Britain provide an index of workers' choice of expression. I analyzed weavers' descriptions of their wages from the earliest surviving issues of the textile union newspapers, those from 1890 in Britain and from 1899 to 1902 in Germany. In both countries, the reports, which often quoted verbatim the negotiations over piece rates and the scales for remuneration, often cited wages in terms of earnings per piece without reference to time (see Table 6). This is hardly surprising, since the choice depended on the purpose for which the pay was cited. For example, comparing past and future earnings per piece (without reference to the time required for completion) sufficed to convey the magnitude of a pay hike or decline. The real question of interest, however, is how German and British weavers converted the bare amounts received

for cloth into a temporal framework to judge their well-being or the returns they received for their effort.

Sharp differences emerge if one considers the specific intervals selected by British and German weavers when they did allude to time. When British weavers put their earnings into a temporal framework, in virtually all cases they chose the week as their unit (see Table 7). They simply followed the cycle of paydays. German weavers were less likely to choose the period of a week, and when they did so they had a specific purpose in mind. They chose the week when they were complaining that the pay was inadequate for the survival of their household, as Table 8 shows. The week was the most meaningful unit for making a comparison between the family's receipts and its expenditures.^[5] Workers cited this fraction of time when they wanted to complain that their earnings granted only a beggarly existence or, as they often put it, amounted to "starvation wages."

In contrast to British practice, German weavers who converted their piece-rate earnings to a time equivalent expressed this in the majority of instances in periods other than the week. In more than a quarter of cases, they chose the interval of a day, whereas the British weavers never did so.

[5] For examples of German workers paying for their lodging and budgeting other household expenses by the week, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 1, 1909, "Ein Jammerleben," and Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , Düren, January 27, 1900. For British parallels, see Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, Nov. 11, 1891, hearing, pp. 210, 229, 235.

When German workers used the unit of a day to express their piece-rate earnings, they were demonstrating their orientation to the daily expenditure of labor power in the production process. If German weavers referred to specific daily earnings, they could relate the pay to the disposition over their activity during this time interval in the production process.^[6] For example, in the textile town of Schildesche the weavers who threatened a strike in 1905 informed the owner of their expectation that "a middling worker [should] earn with normal exertion at least two and a half marks a day."^[7] In only two out of twenty-six instances in which German weavers converted their piece-rate earnings to a daily average did they also make a reference to the adequacy of this wage for supporting themselves or their families. This indicates that the Germans did not associate the period of a day with the cycle of household expenditure or consumption.

[6] Der Textil-Arbeiter , Gera, Oct. 4, 1901; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Aachen 1634, February, 1900, Düren. See also the discussion of the effort needed to earn an adequate "daily wage" in home weaving, in Der Rheinische Weber , September 1, 1899. German weavers who complained about the hard work that defective warps caused them could convert their piece rates to earnings per day. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , Düren, January 27, 1900. Likewise, the German textile unions calculated the exploitation of the worker's expenditure of labor power in terms of the employer's daily profit per worker or per machine. Der Textil-Arbeiter , August 8, 1902, Chemnitz.

[7] Staatsarchiv Detmold, I.U. 429, March 21, 1905. See also Die Westdeutsche Arbeiter-Zeitung , September 17, 1904, Krefeld; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 8, 1899, Kempen; Stadtarchiv Velbert VIe 7, Bestand Langenburg, March 25, 1889, strike report.

In adopting diurnal or even hourly intervals to measure their earnings, German weavers applied an abstract time frame to their employment relation, one that was removed both from the tangible cycle of paydays and from the rhythm of finishing a piece of cloth. The vagaries of the weaving process, with unpredictable changes in the speed at which difficult warps could be turned into cloth and fluctuations in earnings over time, did not intrinsically suggest the day or the hour as a convenient measure of earnings, for no piece of fabric could be completed so quickly. German weavers distanced themselves from the delivery of cloth credited per week and from the weekly disbursal of wages, in order to analyze the wage they received as a return for the disposition of hypothetical intervals of time in the production process. For instance, weavers in Gera who required many days to complete a piece of fabric converted the piece-rate earning to a quotidian wage based on what they called the "daily expenditure of time."^[8] Even workers who were paid a fixed weekly wage converted their earnings into a remuneration for each day's work.^[9] German workers often negotiated with employers for wages measured by a daily calculus, even if the exact amount of remuneration depended on piece rates.^[10] German piece-rate workers were so accustomed to looking at the daily cycle of production that they determined average weekly earnings by first considering average daily earnings and then multiplying by the days of the work week. Regardless of the final time frame in which they were interested, they began their reckoning with the unit of a day.^[11]

[8] Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 14, 1902, Gera.

[9] Vorwärts , May 8, 1908, jute spinning mill.

[10] In February, 1900, when weavers in Düren issued an exhortation for strike support, their leaflets averaged out their piece-rate earnings and expressed them as wages per day. HSTAD, Regierung Aachen 1634, Düren. Similarly, the dispute at the town of Emsdetten in 1906 turned on the question of whether weavers' earnings averaged 3.2 marks per day. Stadtarchiv Emsdetten, "Industrialisierung am Beispiel Emsdettens: Ein Rückblick aus dem Jahre 1924." For an example of employers and weavers on piece rates negotiating over wage increases in terms of daily averages, see Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Jahrbuch des deutschen Textilarbeiterverbandes, 1913 (Berlin: Karl Hübsch, 1914), Aachen, p. 113. Even when German piece-rate workers formulated their ideal earnings, without reference to particular employers, they thought in terms of earnings per day. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , July 13, 1901, Krefeld. When the Christian textile union in the area of Krefeld took a survey of members' piece-rate earnings in stuff weaving during 1904, they formulated the results in terms of the average wage per day. Die Westdeutsche Arbeiter-Zeitung , September 17, 1904, Krefeld. For a parallel example, see Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt 1116, December 11, 1910, Neunkirchen.

[11] Gauvorstand des Textilarbeiterverbands, Arbeitszeit und Löhne in der Textilindustrie der Niederlausitz (Berlin: Franz Kotzke, 1909), pp. 25–27; Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Soziale Gegensätze oder die Lage der Textilarbeiter in Augsburg (Berlin: Carl Hübsch, 1907), p. 8.

An explanation for the difference in the units of time German and British piece-rate workers used to calculate their earnings is not to be found in the circumstances under which they spent their payments. In both countries, workers on piece-rate systems generally received their wages either weekly or biweekly.^[12] German workers did not differ from their British counterparts in the frequency with which they actually paid their rents or in the timeframe, that of the week, that they used for budgeting household expenses.^[13] When German workers expressed their earnings per day, therefore, they diverged from a consumption-based framework to orient themselves to the daily cycle of the production process. This assumption shows up in the way German workers expressed their grievances over low rates of pay: when they complained that this remuneration was not commensurate with their skills, experience, or effort, they spoke in terms of daily rates.^[14] "As a result of bad warp and

[12] In the area of Aachen, to be sure, some weaving mills paid workers immediately upon completion of the warp on which they were working. Artur Peltzer, "Die Arbeiterbewegung in der Aachener Textilindustrie von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ausbruch des Weltkrieges," Ph.D. diss., Universität Marburg, 1924, p. 50. A practice such as this might be expected to have made it more difficult for German workers to adopt the week as their periodic unit for payment of wages. The rich evidence available about payment customs elsewhere, however, indicates that Aachen comprised an exception in this respect. See Germany, Reichskanzler-Amt, Ergebnisse der über die Verhältnisse der Lehrlinge, Gesellen und Fabrikarbeiter auf Beschluss des Bundesrathes angestellten Erhebungen (Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1877), p. 235; Karl Emsbach, Die soziale Betriebsverfassung der rheinischen Baumwollindustrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1982), p. 486 and the sources cited there. And, even in Aachen, some firms paid on a weekly basis: Jahres-Berichte der Königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe, 1899 (Berlin: W. T. Bruer, 1900), p. 599.

[13] Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 8, 1904.

[14] For example, the weavers in Greiz in 1857 calculated the number of shots of the loom completed to justify a certain daily wage. Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, a Rep. A, Kap. XXI/2c, Nr. 400, Petition of the Leinen-und Zeugweber-Innung of Greiz, May 20, 1857. For an example of weavers lodging pay demands based upon their calculation of the inserted weft thread per day, see Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Zwickau Nr. 1547, August 18, 1903. The view in Germany that workers alienated their labor through sale of the timed disposition of their activity structured the workers' understanding of employers' attempts to increase work loads. In the three decades before the First World War, German manufacturers in many kinds of wool and silk weaving ordered weavers to tend two looms instead of one. The weavers equated the intensification of effort with an increase in the work time equivalent. Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, Die Tuch-Konferenz in Crimmitschau 26. und 27. Februar 1910: Unterhandlungs-Bericht (Berlin: Carl Hübsch, 1910), p. 51. German weavers analyzed their cloth as an index of shuttle motions. Then they counted the shuttle motions they could execute each day to estimate daily returns to effort. See, for example, Der Textil-Arbeiter , December 10, 1909, p. 397, and July 14, 1911, pp. 219–220. For other references to the expenditure of labor power per day, see Der Rheinische Weber , September 1, 1899; HSTAD, Regierung Aachen 1634, February 1900, Düren. For a later example of a worker referring to pay in terms of the daily quota of motions of the loom completed to receive it, seeDeutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Hauptvorstand/Arbeiterinnensekretariat, Mein Arbeitstag—mein Wochenende (Berlin: Textilpraxis, 1931), p. 24.

poor materials," the Märkische Volksstimme said in 1906, "a worker can with extremely hard effort earn at the most only 1.5 marks daily."^[15]

The preference for the interval of the day as the unit to calculate use of labor power was shared by German employers. When German managers considered the construction of their piece-rate scales, they often began by setting a proposed average daily wage.^[16] The in-house memos generated by company clerks on weavers' actual earnings also cited daily averages,^[17] and managers founded their calculations of production efficiency upon the unit of a day.^[18]

For the British weavers, time was a quantifiable resource but the use of time per se was not what they sold their employer. As would be expected, therefore, when British weavers looked at their earnings over time, they did so only with regard to the cycle of actual paydays. They did not invent an independent framework based on the delivery of abstract labor time; they merely reported what they received in the same units as it came to hand. Does this mean the German weavers (and German employers) were more adept at rational calculation? Did only the German weavers theorize receipt of the wage?

The abstractions of a conceptual system can of course take radically different forms. British weavers also calculated their earnings based on abstract theory, but what they considered the object of theory the Germans hardly noted. Rather than figuring the average pay per day, the British weavers calculated the average per loom per week, emphasizing that the total was nothing but the sum of the looms operated. For example, to summarize for its readers the level of earnings for weavers in the town of Hindley in Lancashire, the Cotton Factory Times in 1897 said that weavers "are not

[15] Märkische Volksstimme , October 10, 1906.

[16] For spinning and twisting, see Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie , 1913, Nr. 10, p. 286; for mangling, see Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie , 1911, Nr. 8, "Arbeitslöhne für Mangeln."

[17] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf 24692, J. Hellendall memo, October 14, 1899; Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, B25-319, 1895–1896.

[18] Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie , 1902, Nr. 9, p. 605; 1902, Nr. 10, p. 683; 1910, Nr. 11, p. 321; Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , 1912, Nr. 37, p. 768; Centralblatt für die Textil-Industrie , 1893, Nr. 10, p. 147. German employers who felt compelled to defend the piece-rate scales they had constructed for weavers informed the public about the weavers' earnings in the form of daily averages. See Viersener Zeitung , Nr. 102, May 5, 1908; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf 24700, 1904 pamphlet, Deuss & Oetker, p. 288; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , July 18, 1903, front page.

averaging more than three shillings six pence per loom."^[19] For weavers assigned several looms at once, as most were, the pay per loom naturally oscillated more than the total take-home pay. Estimating a weekly loom average represented no less a feat of abstraction than the German calculation of daily total averages.^[20]

The direction of thought pursued by the British weavers was guided by their understanding of labor's commodity form. The language of the British weavers, as we have seen, revealed the assumption that they took charge of a loom to manage it for a profit, as if they were petty commodity producers. When they sought employment they inquired whether employers "had any looms to let."^[21] Once engaged, they were holders of a machine and its output rather than peddlers of labor power.

The British weavers carried into their trade union activities their picture of themselves as entrepreneurs who ought to net so much per loom.^[22] Whenever weavers in Yorkshire and Lancashire took up a special collection to provide strike support, to compensate their fellow workers for attending meetings, or to gather the initial funds necessary to support a

[19] Cotton Factory Times , January 8, 1897. This newspaper also reported that the average in Nelson is "9d per loom" higher than in Burnley: Cotton Factory Times , February 19, 1897, p. 6. Unions calculated their members' welfare by earnings per loom: Nelson Weavers' Committee Minutes, LRO, July 2, 1891. For Yorkshire, see Yorkshire Factory Times , Feb. 21, 1908, p. 4; February 14, 1890, Bingley.

[20] Even when German reports took note of variations in the number of looms per worker, they calculated only the aggregate wage per day given a particular loom assignment, not the pay per loom. Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 5/660, August 29, 1910; Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 1c 913, July 2, 1912.

[21] Yorkshire Factory Times , November 1, 1889, Leeds, p. 7, December 26, 1902, April 17, 1908, Burnley; interview tape with H. Jennings, by Bob Turner, at Centre for English Cultural Traditions and Language, University of Sheffield. It may be significant that the British textile workers did not use the expressions "piece rates" or "piece-rate system" to describe their wages but used the entrepreneurial phrase that they "kept what they could make." See Joanna Bornat's interview with Miss V., born 1901, p. 21; Yorkshire Factory Times , June 12, 1890, p. 4; January 2, 1891.

[22] When a report from Rochdale complained about a firm's custom of paying out only full pennies for completed pieces, keeping any halfpennies for itself, the correspondent's way of summarizing the aggregate effect of this measly withholding revealed a significant habit of mind. "This may not look [like] a large matter in itself," the writer reasoned, "but when it comes to be applied to hundreds of looms it multiplies quickly as time goes on." Cotton Factory Times , February 26, 1897, Rochdale. Here the correspondent adopted as the basic multiplier not the number of individual employees but the tools they used. Some employers punished weavers for leaving their job without giving notice. Rather than fining each weaver equally for the lost labor power, they levied a fine of sixpence for each loom the weaver should have attended. See United Kingdom, PP 1899 XCII, Strikes and Lock-outs in 1898 , Burnley and Oldham.

union, they imposed a levy on each weaver of so much per loom.^[23] An analyst might suppose that establishing a contribution on this basis served as a shorthand way of graduating donations to the earnings of weavers. In all likelihood the custom did originate with this purpose. Yet by the late nineteenth century weavers in the West Riding earned less on two looms than on one, because they tended two if they manufactured simpler fabrics.^[24] Weavers also charged a levy on each loom when they took up collections in districts or in factories where every weaver served the same quota of looms. In the Huddersfield district, for example, each worker served a single loom.^[25] Despite the uniform rate per person , weavers there still spoke of levying a fixed sum on each loom.^[26] This habit was not confined to fund-raising for the trade unions. Weavers adopted the same unit of calculation when they undertook voluntary subscriptions to charities such as "Indian Famine Relief."^[27] In Germany, by contrast, weavers who made special collections simply assessed themselves a certain sum per person.^[28]

The British custom of seeking donations per loom originated in the era of home manufacture, when weavers operated as independent commodity producers. It began at least as early as the mid-eighteenth century and, despite the changed technical environment, survived into the early twentieth century.^[29] In Germany, by contrast, the loom-based view of contributions did not surface in factories which an analyst might suppose would closely parallel the British case. It did not arise in Krefeld or the cities of Thüringen, for example, where handweavers had strong organizational traditions and legacies of collective struggle under the aegis of craft associa-

[23] Archive of General Union of Dyers, Bleachers, and Textile Workers, Yeadon and Guiseley Factory Workers' Union, Minutes, January 19, 1891, and March 10, 1891, Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 209; Yorkshire Factory Times , February 26, 1892, Yeadon & Guisely; LRO, DDX 1274/1/3, October 14, 1873; LRO, DDX 1274/1/1, March 5, 1872.

[24] United Kingdom, Earnings and Hours of Labour of the Workpeople of the United Kingdom , PP LXXX, pp. 86 ff.

[25] Textile Mercury , August 2, 1902, p. 83; United Kingdom, Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 199; B. Riley, Handbook, Sixteenth Independent Labour Party Conference (Huddersfield: Town Hall, 1908), p. 18.

[26] Yorkshire Factory Times , August 12, 1892, p. 4, Huddersfield.

[27] Cotton Factory Times , January 29, 1897, Brierfeld, and February 12, 1897, p. 7.

[28] Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 12, 1909.

[29] J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer (London: Longman, 1979), p. 169. See, for the mid-nineteenth century, H. Dutton and J. E. King, "Ten Percent and No Surrender": The Preston Strike, 1853–54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 34.

tions. The differences in how weavers in the two countries expressed their earnings and dues shows that their understanding of the transfer of "labor" gave weavers different conceptions of the source and denominators of their income over time.

For the purpose of comparing the development of textile labor movements in the two countries, the workers on piece rates represent the key group for investigation. In Germany weavers provided the leadership and the majority of members for the textile unions. The predominance of piece-rate workers in the unions was so great that the Christian newspaper reported in 1908, "For some time now the day-wage workers have planned to found their own organization, because in their opinion the Christian Textile Workers' Union is only for weavers or other piece-rate workers."^[30] Where the surveillance records of the police report the job category of a speaker at a textile meeting, it was almost invariably that of weaver.^[31]

In Yorkshire, too—that part of Britain which gave birth to the Labor Party and which most resembled Germany in the timing of formal unionization—the textile unions were led by weavers. In Yeadon and Guiseley, for example, the Factory Workers' Union began as the Powerloom Weavers' Association. Not until 1892, when it sought to organize the spinners, did it adopt a more inclusive name.^[32] In Lancashire, of course, mule spinners

[30] Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , February 15, 1908, Bocholt. For statistics on the occupations of union members in the Christian textile workers union showing that weavers were a majority of the members, see Archiv der Gewerkschaft Textil-Bekleidung, Zentralverband Christlicher Textilarbeiter Deutschlands, "Geschäftsbericht," 1908–1910, p. 43; 1912–1914, pp. 94–95. For comments from the free textile workers' union about the predominance of weavers and the need to expand the membership beyond this occupational group, see HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24691, May 1, 1899, report on meeting in Viersen.

[31] To cite a handful of illustrations: HSTAD, Präsidialbüro, 1272, report on meeting of January 8, 1899, p. 42, and January 22, 1899, p. 46; HSTAD, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach, 99, August 25, 1901, p. 180; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24691, March 20, 1899, Neuwerk. Weavers took the leadership posts in the textile unions over other skilled male textile workers. Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Glauchau, Nr. 327, membership list 1891, Hohenstein, pp. 6 ff. Textile employers surveyed by the police reported that the weavers dominated elections to factory committees. Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Aachen, 13886, October 10, 1895. Dyers in Germany complained that the weavers took the lead over other textile workers. Stadtarchiv Gera, Gemeinde Zwötzen 133, November 19, 1904.

[32] Archive of General Union of Dyers, Bleachers, and Textile Workers, Yeadon and Guisely Factory Workers' Union, Minutes Book, March 2, 1892. The evolution of union terminology in the Huddersfield district followed the same path, indicating that the weavers served as the core of the organization there as well. Joanna Bornat, "An Examination of the General Union of Textile Workers 1883–1922," Ph.D. diss., University of Essex, 1981, p. 75. Spinners, the largest occupational group after weavers, accounted for only one-fifth of thisunion's members. Compare the figure of five hundred spinners listed by Keith Laybourn, "The Attitude of the Yorkshire Trade Unions to the Economic and Social Problems of the Great Depression, 1873–1896," Ph.D. diss., Lancaster University, 1973, p. 145, with membership figures published in PP 1900 LXXXIII, p. 731.

played a key role in the development of unions, but this group, too, was one that depended upon remuneration by piece rates.

While keeping in mind the predominance of piece-rate workers in the union movements, a restriction on the applicability of my comparison to the British and German textile work forces should be noted. For unskilled workers who received a flat day-wage, British employers and workers found it convenient and probably unavoidable to carry over on occasion the same unit, the day, to measure earnings and production.^[33] This sometimes happened in ring-frame spinning, for example. In such an environment, however, the calculations of the owners and workers for output and earnings merely copied the temporal unit used for remuneration, a unit owners adopted for an entirely pragmatic reason: by paying a flat wage for each day worked, in place of a flat sum per week, owners could avoid paying workers a full wage during those weeks that included holidays. The position of these day laborers contrasts with that of weavers, who received irregular piece rates and had to rely upon implicit assumptions about the labor activity to choose a conventional unit of time over which to average them. However, as we have seen, it was the piece-rate workers who organized and led the labor movements among textile workers. They selected the ideas and planned the programs of the unions. It is they who are of most significance in any comparative analysis of the effect of workplace culture on the development of workers' responses.

The Influence of Concepts of Time on Strike Demands

The workers' understandings of the sale of time guided their efforts to protect their interests. Weaving mills in both nations suffered from frequent interruptions in production. Factories usually waited for a merchant house to submit orders for a particular run of fabric before they began its manufacture.^[34] If the orders arrived sporadically, weavers found themselves wait-

[33] Leslie Marshall, The Practical Flax Spinner (London: Emmott & Co., 1885), pp. 198, 234: Cotton Factory Times , April 9, 1897, p. 1.

[34] Germany, Jahresberichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe, 1896 (Berlin: W. T. Bruer, 1897), p. 439; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, Jahresbericht des Fabrikinspektors, Mönchengladbach, 1902; Hans Botzet, "Die Geschichte der sozialen Verhält-nisse in Krefeld und ihre wirtschaftlichen Zusammenhänge," Ph.D. diss., Köln, 1954, pp. 65 ff. For Britain, see Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 295.

ing for overlookers to install warps in their looms. Or, if a mill had a full line of orders, it could mishandle the winding of warps and procurement of weft yarn. In this case, too, weavers were left waiting for materials for their work.

The days textile workers lost waiting for materials amounted to a significant portion of work time in both Britain and Germany. In Germany, the union for Christian textile workers kept statistics on the matter, and its reports show that days lost waiting accounted for most of the time that its members spent "unemployed." The union calculated that from 1910 to 1912, for example, 64 percent of the workdays members lost resulted from waiting for materials.^[35] In Britain, overlookers' estimates and the report of the secretary of the weavers' union in Yorkshire indicate that Yorkshire weavers normally lost about one-quarter of their work time for lack of warps or weft.^[36] Allen Gee, secretary of the union, testified to the Royal Commission on Labour, "A man never expects to be fully employed as a weaver."^[37]

British and German weavers developed contrasting responses to this shared predicament. The samples of complaints from the German and British newspapers near the turn of the century (see Tables 1–5, above, Chapter 4) provide one source of evidence of their divergence. In thirty-one cases cited by British weavers from 1890 to 1893, workers complained about higher-ups who distributed work materials unfairly.^[38] This grievance thus ranks among the dozen most frequently voiced. In my German sample, by contrast, weavers complained only five times about favoritism in the distribution of materials. This represented about 0.5 percent of the German sample. The relative absence of complaints about favoritism in distributing materials in Germany cannot be dismissed as an artifact of the circumstance that the German weavers minded less about waiting for warp and weft. After all, the list of major complaints shows that they

[35] During these years, the union received over nine thousand reports of unemployment due to this cause. The workers who waited for materials lost on average more than ten days of work per year. Archiv der Gewerkschaft Textil-Bekleidung, Zentralverband Christlicher Textilarbeiter Deutschlands, "Geschäftsbericht," op. cit., 1910–1912, p. 112 (b).

[36] Yorkshire Factory Times , August 5, 1892, p. 8. In its wage census of 1885–1886, the British Board of Trade estimated that "broken time" might reduce the estimated annual earnings of weavers by 13 percent in woolens and by 10 percent in the worsted trade. Laybourn, op. cit., p. 315.

[37] Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, transcript of November 11, 1891, p. 200.

[38] In 76 percent of these cases, the British weavers blamed overlookers.

complained about waiting for materials slightly more frequently than did their British counterparts.^[39]

Does the lower incidence of complaints about unfair allocation of materials in Germany indicate that German overlookers dispensed the warps and weft more equitably? The possibility cannot be excluded. It seems significant, however, that many of the complaints about waiting for materials that did not blame the overlooker came from districts where mills concentrated on short runs of specialized patterns. Mills in these regions, such as Barmen and Aachen, gave the overlookers responsibility for allocating warps among the weavers so that overlookers could match the skills of individual weavers to specific fabric orders.^[40] The lack of blame assigned to the overlooker might indicate that, in reaction to favoritism exercised by overlookers, German weavers who waited for materials simply focused on the more basic issue of losing their time, whereas British weavers particularized the problem and interpreted it as a product of their overlooker's character. What remains certain is the outcome in workers' consciousness: the German workers' relative emphasis on the underlying issue of losing time is in keeping with their view of the employment relation as the sale of the disposition of a labor capacity. The German workers did not attribute lost time to the prejudices of overlookers but addressed it as a basic problem in the employment relation.

Drawing upon their view of employment as the commitment of the use of labor over time, German weavers argued that they had a right to payment for the period they spent waiting without working (Wartegeld ). "During the period of the labor contract we must place all our labor power [Arbeitskraft ] at disposal," the workers in Lörrach complained in 1906. "In return the firm is contractually obligated to take care of the prompt delivery of work tools and materials."^[41] In Forst, the textile workers issued a statement in 1899 that called the worker's time a kind of capital for which workers had to be paid even while waiting for materials.^[42] German workers attached a value to the commitment of time with such precision that when they formulated strike demands for

[39] German weavers complained about waiting for warp and weft twenty-five times; the British weavers, twenty times. General complaints about waiting for materials comprised 3.0 percent of the German sample and 2.2 percent of the British sample.

[40] For similar responsibility for distributing warps in Britain, see Textile Manufacturer , October 15, 1907, p. 353.

[41] Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, B25-319, May 11, 1906. Weavers said that the time lost waiting for materials "curtailed the weaver's natural entitlement to his wage." Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , July 7, 1900, Viersen.

[42] Stadtarchiv Forst, Kommission der Forster Textilarbeiterschaft, August 8, 1899.

waiting money, they often requested that managers graduate the pay not only for lost days but for fractions of lost hours.^[43] From a cross-national perspective, the issue is not simply the lodging of the demand but its design and rationale: the indemnification did not just ensure workers' minimum take-home pay but was finely graduated to lost minutes and was justified as payment for the timed disposal of labor power.^[44]

The contestation of uncompensated time was so important to German workers that as individuals they initiated legal complaints against their employers. A weaver from Neugersdorf took the trouble to file a claim in court during 1909 to recover the value of two hours spent waiting. He demanded restitution for the lull caused when a company official had to check the fabric pattern installed on his loom.^[45] The difference between the German and the British responses to wasted time cannot be explained by the statutory environment. When textile employers in Germany wanted to be certain that they could escape from threatened litigation over lost time, they merely inserted a disclaimer in their factory rules against providing payment for "canceled time," a tactic which persisted into the 1920s.^[46]

[43] For examples of strike demands for hourly compensation for waiting, see Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 1c 913, March 26, 1912; Staatsarchiv Detmold, I.U. 429, March 21, 1905, Schildesche; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24701, February 23, 1906, p. 223; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach, 70, February 22, 1906, p. 103; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24699, May 1, 1905, p. 286; Stadtarchiv Wuppertal, Verband von Arbeitgebern im bergischen Industriebezirk, "Bericht des Verbandes von Arbeitgebern im bergischen Industriebezirk., 01. Januar 1905 bis 31. März 1906," p. 15; Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1311, July 25, 1906; Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 24, 1902, Sonthofen, and February 12, 1909, Mönchengladbach, "Aus der Bewegung in der Textilindustrie"; Westdeutsche Landeszeitung , March 7, 1906; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , June 27, 1908; for waiting for design cards, Die Textil-Zeitung , October 27, 1902, Gera, p. 989; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschat Chemnitz, Nr. 10, p. 130, Oct. 10, 1889. Another complaint indicates the precision with which German weavers gauged their time: at some mills weavers objected that the waiting time for which they were compensated extended only to the moment when the warp was delivered to the loom, not to the point at which the installers had actually completed putting in the warp. Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 4, 1907.

[44] In the language of the German workers, the payment for waiting time represented, not an allowance, but an indemnity (Entschädigung ). Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 12, 1904, Elsterberg. It is conceivable that British workers who could not easily demand money for a tangible output (such as railway personnel, perhaps) or those for whom interruptions occurred too irregularly to comprise a normal portion of a product's time of manufacture would resort to demands for waiting time for the sake of minimum take-home pay.

[45] Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 12, 1909, Neugersdorf. Weavers filed cases to recover small portions of unremunerated time through much of the Wupper Valley as well. HSTAD, Gewerbegericht Elberfeld, 80/47, 1888, case 39; 80/50, 1891, case 225; 80/50, 1891, case 282. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 6, 1903, "Wie Fabrikordnungen entstehen."

[46] Der Textil-Arbeiter , November 26, 1920, p. 201; Landesarchiv Potsdam, Rep. 43, Gewerbeaufsicht Cottbus, Nr. 149, June 18, 1906, p. 8. See also HSTAD, Landratsamt Greven-broich, 271, pp. 94 ff., supplement to the "Arbeitsordnung" of J. A. Lindgens Erben, 1909, and p. 192, Erckens & Co; Günter Loose, Betriebs-Chronik VEB Baumwollspinnerei Zschopautal , Landesarchiv Potsdam, May, 1956, p. 108; Kölner Zeitung , November 18, 1900, Mönchengladbach; Der Textil-Arbeiter , Jan. 3, 1902, Saxony. Officials judged that the insertion of the disclaimer into the factory ordinance did not violate labor law. Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amtshauptmannschaft Zwickau, Nr. 2368, pp. 54–55. August 10, 1901. Stadtarchiv Cottbus, A II 4. 7 i, Nr. 11, April 5, 1905. A firm in Bremen that lacked such a disclaimer lost its case. Yet even here the court's reasoning reaffirms the supposition that labor's commodity form structured the debate. The court declared that a worker had a right to materials sufficient for him to "make full use of his labor power." Cited in Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Protokoll des 10. Generalversammlung für das Jahr 1910 (Berlin: Karl Hübsch, n.d.), pp. 286–287. The Berlin industrial court ruled, however, that piece-rate workers who were denied sufficient materials to put their labor power to use had the right to leave their employment but had no claim to restitution. Ludwig Bernhard, Die Akkordarbeit in Deutschland (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1903), p. 224.

Strike demands for reimbursement of waiting time originated in each of Germany's major textile regions, including the Wupper Valley, the lower Rhine, the Münsterland, Saxony, and Silesia.^[47] The demands arose both in urban centers and in remote areas where workers supplemented their factory employment with agricultural work.^[48] Not only weavers but spinners, beamers, and spoolers demanded "waiting money."^[49] The workers enjoyed a measure of success: reports from the textile workers' newspapers and factory rule books show that the custom of paying "waiting

[47] See the preceding two notes and Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Landratsamt Euskirchen, February 27, 1905, p. 355; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Aachen, Birkesdorf, January, 1900; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24690, December 3, 1898, p. 148; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24692, August 3, 1899; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24692, August 16, 1899; Staatsarchiv Detmold, Reg. Minden I.U. Nr. 431, Buntweberei von Knemeyer & Co.; Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, 77 2524, Nr. 3, Volume 1, p. 13; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , April 6, 1901, Viersen; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , March 6, 1909, Münsterthal; March 13, 1909, Mülhausen i. Els.; Stadtarchiv Augsburg, No. 1670, May 16, 1912, p. 11; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Glauchau, pp. 71–72, July 12, 1910. For other complaints about waiting for warps, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , December 28, 1906, Sommerfeld and Mönchengladbach; August 12, 1910.

At the town of Rosenthal in Thüringen, workers went on strike in 1888 after their factory was closed for three days as a result of a breakdown. During the wait for completion of repairs, the factory owner promised one mark daily in restitution. The workers rejected the offer, since it did not equal their usual earnings, and they went on strike. Staatsarchiv Weimar, Reuss älterer Linie, Reuss Landratsamt Greiz, Nr. 2533, Sept. 18, 1888.

[48] See the preceding note, as well as Staatsarchiv Münster, Regierung Münster, 718, May 9, 1891, p. 140.

[49] Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 31, 1905, Mönchengladbach; May 29, 1914, Gronau. For spinners' informal requests for "waiting money," see Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 19, 1905, Zwötzen. For examples of spinners who received "waiting money," see Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , February 3, 1900, Düren; Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 21, 1909, Zwickau; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , June 12, 1909. For spoolers and beamers requesting "waiting money," see Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 13, 1905.

money" was geographically widespread.^[50] In the Wupper Valley, a survey of thirty-nine ribbon-weaving firms near Barmen conducted on the eve of the First World War found that almost half paid weavers for waiting for materials, including sixteen companies that offered restitution calculated to the hour.^[51] The payments became a permanent and taken-for-granted procedure.^[52] They offered a first step toward demands for payment for vacation time in Germany. The female winders at a firm in Viersen included among their strike demands in 1909 the proposal that they receive their regular pay for labor on days before holidays, when the firm operated only part-time.^[53] Workers at a textile mill at Neugersdorf went a step further in 1914 when they asked for compensation for the complete days off for holiday observances.^[54]

[50] Stadtarchiv Velbert, VI e 7 Bestand Langenburg, December 15, 1893; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24692, August 16, 1899; Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Jahrbuch, 1913 , op. cit., p. 134; Archiv der Gewerkschaft Textil-Bekleidung, Zentralverband Christlicher Textilarbeiter Deutschlands, "Geschäftsbericht,' op. cit., 1906–1908, Gronau district, Firma Gaidoel, p. 72; Bocholter Volksblatt , October 1, 1901; Der Textil-Arbeiter , September 13, 1901, Pennig; May 30, 1902, Kettwig; January 24, 1902, Sonthofen (Allgäu); October 27, 1911, Krefeld; March 2, 1906, Rheydt; May 14, 1909, Neustadt a. d. Orla; August 6, 1909, Viersen; October 29, 1909, Bergisches Land; December 10, 1909, Wuppertal; January 27, 1911, Kunzendorf i. Schl.; May 19, 1911, Hof; August 4, 1911, Unterurbach (Württemberg); Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , December 9, 1899, Süchteln; February 1, 1902; May 16, 1908, Gronau; July 2, 1910, Grossschönau; September 10, 1910, Bocholt; May 20, 1911, Coesfeld; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Gewerbegericht Elberfeld, 80/50, 1891, case 225 and cases on p. 2; Die Textil-Zeitung , September 11, 1899, p. 734; Stadtarchiv Greiz, B Nr. 5977, Kap. IV, Nr. 97, p. 67, 1909.

[51] Der Textil-Arbeiter , July 3, 1914, Barmen. An inquiry in Bocholt, taken in 1901 during a severe business downturn in which more than a quarter of the town's looms were taken out of operation, showed that the practice of paying "waiting money" could persist during periods when employers enjoyed an abundance of labor. During this extreme slump in the textile business, nine out of forty-two weaving mills in Bocholt paid workers for lost time. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , August 10, 1901.

[52] An article in a German technical magazine took the practice of paying Wartegeld as an automatic assumption. In an article published in 1897, for example, a manager said, "It often occurs that looms sit still for two or three days and not only fail to produce anything, but the weavers who are waiting must receive indemnification." Die Textil-Zeitung , March 9, 1897, and March 16, 1897, "Krebsschaden." German employers also distinguished themselves from their British counterparts by guaranteeing that workers who were transferred to another job in the same mill would not suffer a reduction in their earnings while they were learning the new job. Having sold the disposition of their labor power, which had a known market value, workers were not to be disadvantaged if the employer put their labor potential into operation in an unanticipated fashion. Stadtarchiv Steinfurt-Borghorst, B379, September 20, 1913 ordinance, A. Wattendorf; HSTAD, Landratsamt Grevenbroich, 271, Anton Walraf Söhne, 1910, p. 243; Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 12, 1909, Chemnitz.

[53] HSTAD, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach 303, Viersen, 1909, p. 10.

[54] Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 3, 1914, Neugersdorf. On comparatively early experiments with paid vacation in German textiles, see Jürgen Reulecke, "Die Entstehung des Erholungs-urlaubs für Arbeiter in Deutschland vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg," in Dieter Langewiesche and Klaus Schönhoven, editors, Arbeiter in Deutschland: Studien zur Lebensweise der Arbeiterschaft im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1981), p. 261.

By contrast with German practice, British textile employers did not offer their piece-rate workers waiting money. Nor did British textile workers ask for it in strike negotiations.^[55] In fact, the textile workers' press shows that British workers did not conceive of this as a possible issue of contention. A sampling of the Yorkshire Factory Times from 1890 to 1893 uncovered more than twenty complaints from weavers about reductions in earnings due to waiting for materials.^[56] Not one mentioned that the employer ought to compensate personnel for unused time. Nor did the complaints up to 1914 voice such a demand. Weavers argued, rather, that prices for fabrics delivered ought to take into consideration time lost waiting.^[57] For the intermittent time they spent installing the warp or waiting for a warp, they wished to receive payment via the selling price of the finished good in the market. A beneficent owner in Yorkshire proposed to pay workers for vacation time, but the mouthpiece for the textile union, the Yorkshire Factory Times , scorned the notion. For owners to offer money to workers for time not worked would be condescending, the paper claimed. "I should be glad if workers were sufficiently well paid to be independent even of these [payments]," its editorialist wrote on the front page of this journal in 1914.^[58] To avoid such "charity" at vacation time, workers had a right to earn enough for the work completed. True, the powerful unions for mule spinners in Lancashire saw to it that owners might pay workers something when the machines were stopped for repairs. But the employers owed such pay only if they needed the spinner's

[55] British miners who complained about idle time (as well as other problems) in the great strike of 1844 requested a minimum of five days' worth of labor out of a work week of six days. These miners were, however, engaged under a yearly "bondage" system that prevented them from switching employers when earnings declined below subsistence. The employers successfully resisted this effort to guarantee a minimum wage, one that would not even have been based upon the full number of workdays miners were expected to show up. Robert Galloway, Annals of Coal Mining and the Coal Trade , second series (London: The Colliery Guardian Company, 1904), pp. 167, 176–177.

[56] I sampled only every third issue of The Yorkshire Factory Times from this era; a full count of the number of complaints appearing about lost time would surely yield a larger number.

[57] As an example, see United Kingdom, Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, pp. 208–210, Nov. 11, 1891. If a spinning mule became unreliable, the spinners negotiated for extra payment for the output. Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1965 [1897]), p. 312. But on lack of compensation for waiting even eight hours in spinning, see Cotton Factory Times , Jan. 1, 1897, Stalybridge.

[58] Yorkshire Factory Times , March 12, 1914.

assistance in carrying out the overhaul.^[59] The money served as compensation for extra labor, not, as in Germany, for the commitment of time when weavers were not used for any purpose in the mill.^[60]

British textile workers' failure to demand reimbursement for waiting time certainly cannot be attributed to a lack of "time thrift" or to a disregard for time as a resource. Even in Elland, a sleepy village outside Bradford, weavers complained in 1889 that their employer forced them to wait for weft at their shop rather than giving them the chance of "profitably utilising" their time at home.^[61] The textile workers' union in Yorkshire reported that some of its members were so concerned about waiting for a warp that they unrealistically expected to qualify for out-of-work benefits from the union.^[62] British textile workers sought remedies for the loss of income but did not articulate a demand for compensation from the employer.

Why did the German employers, but not the British, provide "waiting money"? From a comparative perspective, the economic environment does not offer promising ground for generating this variation. A market analyst would be apt to assume that owners paid "waiting money" to discourage the unoccupied workers from seeking employment at another firm. German

[59] British Association for the Advancement of Science, On the Regulation of Wages by Means of Lists in the Cotton Industry , Manchester Meeting of 1887 (Manchester: John Heywood [1887?]), Spinning, p. 7; Bolton Library Archives, Spinners of Bolton, "Annual Report," 1883, p. 63; Bolton Library Archives, ZGR/7, Taylor & Co. Rules, 1904. The same provision governed the Nottinghamshire lace trade. See W. A. Graham Clark, House of Representatives Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Lace Industry in England and France (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909), p. 27. Analogously, in many British towns the masons and builders who were called to a site outside the locality received compensation for "walking time." The payment covered effort invested, not the commitment of a labor capacity. Webb and Webb, op. cit., p. 313.

[60] Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, B25-319, Tuchfabrik Lörrach, June 18, 1906. Yet British employers shut employees inside at the mill even when, for lack of materials, the employees had no work. For examples of managers restraining workers from leaving even when there was no work to carry out, see Joanna Bornat's interview with Mr. B., born 1901, p. 55; Yorkshire Factory Times , January 15, 1892, Golcar. In Wigan, Lancashire, the owners kept the workers' remaining wages if they quit without notice during a period when the mill had no orders to work up and thus no pay for piece-rate workers: Cotton Factory Times , May 21, 1897, Wigan.

[61] Yorkshire Factory Times , November 1, 1889, p. 5.

[62] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 23, 1891. In Lancashire, too, workers proposed that the unions undertake the task of supporting members who had not been formally laid off but were waiting for materials. In the end the projected expense caused the textile unions to reject such plans. Cotton Factory Times , May 28, 1897, Rochdale; Archive of General Union of Dyers, Bleachers, and Textile Workers, Bradford, Yeadon General Union, minutes, Sept. 11, 1908. The unions granted out-of-work pay to weavers who were discriminated against in the distribution of materials. Wakefield Library Headquarters, Local Studies, C 99/585, January 27, 1903.

managers might have had a greater incentive for holding on to their workers under either of two circumstances: if labor resources were scarcer in Germany than in Britain, or if the skills the owners required were so specialized that they could not easily be purchased in the general labor market. The evidence does not support either hypothesis. Factories in Britain that suffered from severe labor shortages paid no waiting money,^[63] nor did British companies who relied on unique skills from their workers, such as the isolated silk firms in Bradford and Halifax.^[64] In Germany, the incidence of compensation for lost time also contradicts economic logic. The highly paid weaving branch, which offered "waiting money" more often than other textile departments, was the sector least likely to suffer from labor shortages, for spinners, who had lower status and wages, transferred to weaving when they had the opportunity.^[65]

The terms under which German firms dispensed waiting money also indicate that the practice was not crafted for the purpose of retaining labor. Companies began crediting the money to workers before the workers had lost enough time to consider changing employers. The payments could begin after as little as two hours of waiting, and almost always began within one workday after the commencement of idleness.^[66] If companies wanted to retain labor, moreover, they had other means at their disposal. They could, for example, offer bonuses to workers who stayed in their employ for a long period, a plan implemented by several German textile firms.^[67]

[63] For reports of textile labor shortages in Britain, see Yorkshire Factory Times , August 11, 1905, Bradford; Journal of the British Association of Managers of Textile Works (1912–1913) p. 93. On May 15, 1906, the Textile Manufacturer reported, "More or less through the whole wollen area of Yorkshire the shortage of labour is becoming a serious trouble" (p. 161).

[64] Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, November 11, 1891, hearing, p. 222, and November 13, 1891, p. 282.

[65] HSTAD, Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24652, October 24, 1878, p. 8; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Grevenbroich, 319, October 28, 1899; Handelskammer Mönchengladbach, Jahresbericht, 1896 (Mönchengladbach: V. Hütter, n.d.), pp. 5–6; Handelskammer Mönchengladbach, Jahresbericht, 1897 (Mönchengladbach: V. Hütter, n.d.), p. 5; Hermann Hölters, "Die Arbeiterverhältnisse in der niederrheinischen Baumwollindustrie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der männlichen Arbeiter," diss. Heidelberg, p. 21.

[66] Some managers used tallies of waiting money to monitor lost production time and to check the efficiency of production. The custom provides another indicator of German managers' formal approach to the use of labor time. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie Volume 12, Number 68, p. 68.

[67] For the woolen industry of the lower Rhine, see Franz Decker, Die betriebliche Sozialordnung der Dürener Industrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Köln: Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, 1965), p. 87. Elsewhere: Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25015, p. 43, for 1893, and Regierung Düsseldorf, 25022, p. 42, for 1900; Hölters, op. cit., p. 23; Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IX a, Nr. 148, reports of factoryinspectors, 1879–1886, p. 133; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , November 26, 1910, Allersdorf; Germany, Enquete-Kommission, Reichs-Enquete für die Baumwollen- und Leinen-Industrie: Stenographische Protokolle über die mündliche Vernehmung der Sachverständigen (Berlin: Julius Sittenfeld, 1878), p. 397.

If the German employers did not introduce waiting money for their own benefit, then the workers' understanding of labor's commodity form must have comprised the critical force in its introduction. How did the demands for compensation of time originate? Could differences between Germany and Britain in the lodging of time revendications have reflected nothing more than textile union officials' decisions as to which among many grievances to support and articulate? This would be to say that formal organizations for the propagation of ideology intervened to decide whether workers would focus upon and engage the issue. Alternatively, did the claims that attached to time arise as an expression of assumptions about the workday that workers acquired in the labor process? If the specifications of labor as a commodity were imparted to workers by the daily enactment of cultural practices rather than by discursive instruction, then the ideology workers carried into their collective actions could have originated, almost naturally, from the very construction of the labor process. The initiation and distribution of the demands for waiting money allows us to adjudicate between these possibilities.

Weavers in Germany had laid claim to waiting money prior to their incorporation into the factory system. In that era, textile employers had shamelessly enjoyed a gross oversupply of skilled and common labor.^[68] They certainly did not institute the payment of waiting money as a response to labor scarcity. In the Wuppertal, for instance, where a surplus of workers in the 1840s led to a disastrous decline in their earnings, handweavers in that decade began to receive money for the time lost between contracts or for the time expended setting up the warps for their next job.^[69] Indeed, as early as the 1830s, the entrepreneurs who ran putting-out networks included the weavers' "loss of time" during the changing of the

[68] Hermann Körner, Lebenskämpfe in der Alten und Neuen Welt , Volume I (New York: L. W. Schmidt, 1865), p. 391; Emsbach, op. cit., p. 322; Willi Brendgens, Die wirtschaftliche, soziale und communale Entwicklung von Viersen (Viersen: Gesellschaft für Druck und Verlag, 1929), p. 109. In the matter of labor supplies, as in many other respects, the Bielefeld region comprised an exception. Herbert Petzold, "Die Bielefelder Textilindustrie," diss., Rostock, 1926, p. 35.

[69] Körner, op. cit., p. 391; Emsbach, op. cit., p. 179. Weavers in France received payment for waiting time as early as the 1830s. L'Echo de la fabrique , March 3, 1833, p. 71, and December 29, 1833, p. 6.

loom's fabric patterns as part of the expenses to be covered.^[70] In 1848 weavers in the putting-out networks in the Wuppertal, on the left side of the Rhine, in Brandenburg, and in Saxony advanced demands for officially guaranteed compensation for waiting for materials.^[71] Cotton printers in manufactories also pressed for waiting money during those revolutionary days.^[72] But weavers in particular advanced such claims in the first days of the 1848 revolution, before organizations of workers had extended across trade lines and before standing, citywide assemblies of artisans and factory workers had convened.^[73] The articulation of claims for waiting time before weavers had come into contact with organizational leaders suggests that the demand emerged as part and parcel of the everyday experience of the employment relation rather than out of a formal discourse imported by intellectual elites.

The demands raised by the British handloom weavers in response to similar predicaments reveal the influence of a different view of the exchange of labor as a commodity. The handloom weavers in Britain proposed all manner of remedies during the early nineteenth century to arrest the decline of their earnings, including a legislated minimum wage. Yet they never arrived at the notion that the employer owed them compensation for the simple commitment of time.^[74] Their proposals set forth minimum piece

[70] Die Ameise , April 7, 1834, p. 171. For an example of home weavers demanding and, in some instances, receiving compensation for the changing of the warp, see Kenneth N. Allen, "The Krefeld Silk Weavers in the Nineteenth Century," Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1988, p. 81.

[71] Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, Tarif of June 1, 1848; Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 120 I 1, Vol. 2, Nr. 60, March 28, 1848, Berlin, pp. 310–316; Alphons Thun, Die Industrie am Niederrhein und ihre Arbeiter (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1879), Zweiter Theil, p. 195; Peter Kriedte, Eine Stadt am seidenen Faden (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), p. 320; Emsbach, op. cit., pp. 648–650.

[72] Die Verbrüderung , March 16, 1849, pp. 189–190.

[73] P. H. Noyes, Organization and Revolution: Working-Class Associations in the German Revolutions of 1848–1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 135–136.

[74] Kenneth Carpenter, editor, The Framework Knitters and Handloom Weavers: Their Attempts to Keep Up Wages (New York: Arno Press, 1972), pamphlets from 1820 to 1845; Duncan Bythell, The Handloom Weavers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 175; United Kingdom, Report from Select Committee on Hand-Loom Weavers' Petitions , 1834, PP 1834 X. The Northern Star reported in 1841 that two handweavers from Carlisle went to court for compensation "for payment for lost time, on account of their being disappointed of weft." Their complaint rested on the circumstance that the putter-out had them install new warps and then refused to let them take the warps out when the necessary weft did not arrive. The British weavers did not protest about waiting per se, and, unlike German weavers, they did not complain about having to pause between warps. Northern Star , September 4, 1841, p. 5.

rates for cloth actually delivered.^[75] In keeping with the principle of the exchange of labor via its products, they thought that they ought to earn enough for products delivered during the busy weeks to tide them over slow periods.^[76]

We should not suppose that the handweavers in Britain believed they sold their products instead of time; they sold time, but as it was embodied in products. When the putting-out system for home weavers was in its prime, the distributors sometimes assigned a standard piece of fabric a time equivalent, which they used to establish the weaver's payment. If the clothiers in this system altered the remuneration for completion of that cloth, they expressed this as a change in the time investment expected for the work. For example, the clothiers of Wiltshire in 1801 reduced the time allocation for a standard piece of cloth from twenty-three to twenty hours.^[77] From the earliest days of radical political economy in Britain, critics of the market system asserted that workers did not get back from their employers all the time they had delivered. In 1805, Charles Hall asserted that the poor enjoyed only "about one-eighth part, or the produce of one-eighth part of their time."^[78] But the British workers considered the unfair transfer of time only as it was embodied in products.

[75] Frederick James Kaijage, "Labouring Barnsley, 1816–1856: A Social and Economic History." Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 1975, pp. 312 ff.

[76] Bythell, op. cit., p. 149. In contrast to many of their German counterparts, British handweavers did not seek or receive compensation for the time regularly spent changing the warp. United Kingdom, Report from Select Committee , op. cit., testimony of Hugh Mackenzie, p. 60, and of James Orr, p. 95. To the contrary, contractors reduced payments the handweavers received for a variety of cloths after the loom had been adjusted for that fabric pattern. The putters-out knew that the weavers would accept lower rates for additional pieces of cloth of the same type, rather than absorbing the set-up costs to prepare for a different variety. United Kingdom, Select Committee on Settling Disputes in the Cotton Manufacture , PP 1802–1803 VIII, testimony of Thomas Thorpe, April 25, 1803, p. 17. In parliamentary hearings British putters-out said they granted weavers an indeterminate bonus under one condition: if a weaver set up a different kind of warp and ended up receiving only one order on that kind of warp. If two or more orders were carried out, the effort invested in the installation was remunerated via the regular piece rate for the cloth. United Kingdom, Committee on Cotton Weavers and Petitions, Minutes of Evidence, Settling Disputes in the Cotton Manufacture , PP 1802–1803 VIII, pp. 97–98. Approximately one-eighth of the handloom weavers' time was lost changing from one piece to another. Kaijage, op. cit., p. 144.

[77] John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry (London: Croom Helm, 1981), pp. 137–138.

[78] Charles Hall, The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States (London: T. Ostell, 1805), p. 118. Perhaps due to their belief that time was transferred as it was incarnated in finished products, English economists such as Hall struck Marx as the originators of a theory of value, but not of a theory of exploitation. Alexandre Chabert, "Aux Sources du socialisme anglais," Revue d'histoire économique et sociale No. 4 (1951), p. 382. Bray claimed that "theworkmen have given the capitalist the labour of a whole year, in exchange for the value of only half a year." John Bray, Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy (Leeds: David Green, 1839), p. 48. The concept of labor as a commodity in Britain could of course include allocation of compensation for time invested in acquiring skills—cultivating one's "labor power"?—when the products of labor were sold. For an early example based on exchanges among independent commodity producers, see Adam Smith's Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms , edited by Edwin Cannan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), p. 174.

Not only the original appearance of claims for waiting money in Germany but its geographical incidence after the establishment of mature factory regimes demonstrates that the demand rested on a popular conviction about the nature of the labor transaction. Weavers demanded restitution for the commitment of time in backwater areas where neither union organizations nor union spokesmen had appeared. A strike in a rural area of the Münsterland offers a telling emblem of German textile workers' belief that they ought to be compensated for the loss of their time. When workers in the village of Neuenkirchen left work to counter a proposed wage reduction in May, 1891, they not only succeeded in maintaining the previous piece rates, but they also drew compensation (Entschädigung ) from the company for the time out of work due to the strike!^[79] The demand for the reimbursement could hardly have been recommended by union leaders, for organizers did not target this rural area until almost a decade later.^[80] German textile workers raised the demand for waiting money in other remote areas where union representatives had not campaigned.^[81] Requests for the restitution of time commitments rested on established assumptions that were generated and sustained by the arrangement of workaday practices.^[82]

[79] Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1311, May 2, 1891, Neuenkirchen, and Regierung Münster, 718, May 14, 1891, p. 146.

[80] Karl Hüser, Mit Gott für unser Recht: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gewerk-schaftsbewegung im Münsterland (Paderborn: Gewerkschaft Textil-Bekleidung, 1978), pp. 28–29; Heinrich Camps, Geschichte und Entwicklung des Bezirks Westfalen des Zentralverbandes Christlicher Textilarbeiter Deutschlands (Münster: Bezirkssekretariat Christlicher Textilarbeiter, 1924), pp. 7–12. Indeed, the initial promoter of textile unions in this region, the Christian textile workers' association, had not yet been established in Germany. Michael Schneider, Die Christlichen Gewerkschaften 1894–1933 (Bonn: Neue Gesellschaft, 1982), pp. 74 ff.

[81] In Eschendorff, a town in the Münsterland, weavers went on strike without notice in 1899 and by all accounts spontaneously demanded an end to waiting without pay for materials or equipment. Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt 1311, Eschendorff, March 29, 1899; Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, 77 2524, Nr. 3, Vol. 1, p. 13, April 1, 1899, Amt Rheine.

[82] Workers and employers in other branches of enterprise in Germany, including construction and metal work, also battled over compensation for idle time. A contract for Berlin journeymen carpenters and masons in 1870 tried to preclude demands for compensation of unused time. It specified that "the employer is obligated to keep the employee engaged withwork; if circumstances force the employer to lay the employee off against the employee's will, the latter cannot request a wage during the time in which he is inactive, but he can in this case request his immediate release." Der Volksstaat , February 5, 1870.

The expectation in Germany that employers would provide compensation for the commitment of time also surfaced in the norms for disbursing wages in the event of the temporary closure of a factory. German textile workers successfully demanded that they receive compensation when their mill was shut due to breakdowns or alterations of machinery.^[83] British owners failed to offer compensation for disruptions in employment even when they required workers to wait in the vicinity for the mill to reopen.^[84] The columns of the textile workers' newspapers in Britain in the decades before the First World War frequently referred to engine breakdowns and stoppages due to the transfer of looms. They never suggested, however, that workers ought to receive compensation from employers during these intervals.

The German workers' readiness to battle for waiting money formed part of a larger struggle over the control and valorization of inappreciable segments of time, a contest in which British workers did not so readily engage. German workers not only complained about the petty ways in which employers controlled their time without compensating them for it, but they went ahead and seized upon that complaint as a cause for launching strikes. Weavers in Mönchengladbach struck with the sole demand of compensation for minutes that some of them lost waiting in line to punch out on the time clock.^[85] When the weavers at a mill in the same town went on strike in early 1900, they combined their request for higher wages with a demand related

[83] Der Textil-Arbeiter , July 3, 1914, Barmen; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , May 8, 1909, Mülhausen i. Els.; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , August 20, 1910, Forst, Lausitz; Hölters, op. cit., p. 27; Stadtarchiv Augsburg, No. 1667, p. 1, June 15, 1903; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , October 29, 1910, Augsburg. For other complaints about the owner's failure to provide compensation during engine breakdowns, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , July 4, 1902, Lörrach; April 23, 1909, Bautzen. The extent to which payment for factory shutdowns became the norm can be judged from the reaction of a mill owner in Mönchengladbach to a momentary break in production. He felt compelled to post an official notice in 1911 disavowing compensation to workers for disruptions resulting from the transfer of machinery to a new plant location in town. Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , March 18, 1911, Peter Brunen. See also HSTAD, Landratsamt Grevenbroich, 271, pp. 94 ff., 1909 factory ordinance.

[84] Cotton Factory Times , February 19, 1897, Preston; Yorkshire Factory Times , October 9, 1903, Dudley Hill. British textile workers who received piece rates as well as those who received time wages, such as dyers and mechanics, were denied compensation by employers for mill closures. Cotton Factory Times , February 5, 1897, Mossley.

[85] Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , August 26, 1911, Mönchengladbach. For an example of German weavers complaining about the time lost fetching cops, see Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , November 27, 1909.

to the expenditure of time. They proposed that the owner cease making the weavers wait to have their spools of yarn weighed (a means of calculating yarn wastage upon completion of a piece),^[86] or, alternatively, that the owner "compensate the worker for the resulting time loss."^[87] The German workers' enumeration of tasks for which they ought to receive compensation extended to the personal maintenance of their bodies. When the workers at a large silk firm outside of Krefeld in 1905 requested pay for auxiliary chores that consumed their time, they included the task of carrying the coffee water.^[88] In Mülhausen, textile workers told their owner in 1909 that for changing their clothing they wanted an extra five minutes' wage credit.^[89] If the workers transferred to the employer the labor power lodged in their person, they could expect compensation for sustaining it at the work site.

Even the ritual of handing workers the coins and currency of their pay absorbed time and as such became a contested interval in Germany. As early as 1848, home weavers in Chemnitz asserted that an excessive wait for the processing of their finished warps at the receiving office constituted a violation of the employment contract. When German textile workers negotiated with their employers over wages, they sometimes specified that clerks were to hand the pay out to them during work hours, not during a break or upon the conclusion of the regular workday.^[90] In Spremberg, police surveilling workers' meetings at the turn of the century reported that a major complaint of workers concerned the receipt of the pay packet after the close of the workday.^[91] In the course of strike negotiations at a mill in Mönchengladbach, the workers requested that their pay be brought to them at their machine.^[92] Reports from the Yorkshire Factory Times leave no doubt that British workers considered it offensive when employers detained them after normal working hours to dole out pay.^[93] Some employers made it a

[86] Seide , July 25, 1900, p. 466.

[87] Gladbacher Merkur , January 20, 1900. For another example of the same problem, see HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24692, December 27, 1899, p. 160.

[88] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24699, May 1, 1905, p. 286.

[89] Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , March 13, 1909.

[90] Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 21, 1909, Gera. The handweavers in Chemnitz asserted that the time expended waiting at the office of the contractor should be reduced or separately remunerated. Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, Tarif of June, 1848.

[91] Landesarchiv Potsdam, Rep. 6B, Landratsamt Spremberg, Nr. 490, 1901, p. 34.

[92] Westdeutsche Landeszeitung , Rheydt, March 7, 1906. German workers also filed court challenges to recover the value of minutes they lost fetching their pay or waiting to exit the factory. Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , November 25, 1911.

[93] Yorkshire Factory Times , April 25, 1902, p. 4.

policy to do so.^[94] Yet British workers never introduced these lost minutes into strike negotiations; they did not conceive of a small period of waiting as an unauthorized appropriation of their property—their time. British workers were no less vigilant than their German counterparts to protect themselves against the illegal prolongation of work for even a minute or two.^[95] In comparative perspective, the issue is not workers' concern about the length of the work shift—or, for employees on time wages, the performance of work without pay. The question is workers' sensitivity to payment for small increments of time in which the labor capacity is unused.

If German workers treated time itself as a kind of currency, so did their employers. They demonstrated this through their handling of the monies withheld from workers for coming to their jobs late. After 1891, German law prohibited factory employers from putting into their general till the funds they collected from disciplinary punishments. They had permission to pocket fines collected from workers for property damage, however. Employers could keep as compensation deductions made for broken windows or for the misuse of equipment, for example. Therefore employers kept two sets of books for the fines they imposed: one for the disciplinary fines, which they transferred to workers' welfare committees, and one for destruction of property. The important point here is that some German owners believed that the fines they levied on workers for tardiness belonged in the category of compensation for property losses.^[96]

It would be easy to dismiss the employers' conduct in this instance as underhanded, unprincipled attempts to appropriate funds. But the evidence conflicts with this interpretation for two reasons. The books in which employers recorded their fines, the very records the factory inspectors and the courts used to arraign the avaricious employers, did not group other disciplinary fines, such as those inflicted for socializing away

[94] LRO, DDX 1274/6/1, July 1, 1900.

[95] PP 1892 XXXV, p. 14; Yorkshire Factory Times , April 19, 1901, Spen Valley. On convictions for illegal overtime work, see Yorkshire Factory Times , April 24, 1908, p. 7. German commentators considered the British to be extremely sensitive to employers' attempts to run the engines a few minutes overtime. Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 15, 1907.

[96] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24684, May 26, 1894; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25027, printed story on employer from Neersen at Oberlandesgerichts Köln, published December 22, 1904; Germany, Jahres-Berichte der Königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäte und Bergbehörden für 1895 (Berlin: W. T. Bruer, 1896), pp. 511–512; Germany, Jahresberichte  . . . 1904 (Berlin: R. v. Deckers Verlag, 1905), p. 433. For brief absences employers also confiscated the deposit workers paid upon beginning employment. Geraisches Tageblatt , April 12, 1890.

from one's workstation or for inattentiveness, in the category of damage compensation. In these cases as well, the employers had lost the full use of the labor time they needed for their machinery. But the company books showed that owners did not attempt to profit from these other kinds of disciplinary fines, as they would have been likely to have done if they had merely sought to enrich themselves. Second, the employers whom the factory inspectors accused of misappropriating fines for tardiness presented their reasoning to the courts. Rather than avoid the publicity of a trial—a matter about which employers generally showed acute sensitivity^[97] —they supported their practice in public.

In each country, the conflicting expectations of the employers and workers arose from a foundation of cultural agreement, a shared understanding of labor as a commodity. In Germany the transmission of labor via the disposition over workers' time monetized time itself, whereas in Britain the transfer of labor as it was materialized in products meant that time was a resource whose gain or loss was measured in merchandise. In Germany the scales on which employers graduated per minute the amount of the fine they would assess for lateness treated time itself as a form of property—and so workers reciprocated. In Britain employers who locked tardy workers out of the mill enforced their expectation that anyone working for them deliver products at a regular pace, but as a rule employers did not treat the workers' time itself as property for whose loss they claimed a metrically graduated restitution. And, in parallel fashion, neither did British workers. The form of labor as a commodity laid out a distinctive playing field.^[98]

[97] One owner specified in the factory's employment rules that workers had to notify the owner before going public with their complaints in the courts. HSTAD, Landratsamt Grevenbroich, 271, p. 184, circa 1910.

[98] The constellation of factory procedures also raises questions about the relation between culture and the actors' pragmatic, manipulative conduct. Did the agents cunningly support certain specifications of labor because they offered advantages lacking in alternative notions? The question has a meaning for social investigators only if they view ideas as an exclusive possession of individuals who appropriate them to act upon the outside world. If, instead, institutions are themselves constituted as symbolic forms, if ideas are materialized in forms of practice, then agents may reproduce these ideas without internalizing or consciously exploiting them. For example, the German weavers who labored under the system of pay per shot and the German employers who calculated weavers' efficiency as a fraction of possible shots executed did not have consciously to endorse and esteem the notion that the commercial transmission of labor depended on the process of converting it from a potential to a product. Their conduct reaffirmed and transmitted the assumption every day. Once the definition of labor was installed, agents employed it to advance their self-interested action, but that definition and the corresponding symbolic form of their action were not created by their private conception of self-interest. Nor did they passively internalize the specification of labor as anorm; rather, they actively embraced it. The execution of practices in the factory reproduced specifications of labor without agents either cynically choosing which concept of labor to use or helplessly internalizing the concept.

In this culturally mediated struggle, the selection of labor's commodity form never conferred a univocal advantage upon a contestant. For example, the specification of labor in Germany may have enabled employers to justify shifting employees between jobs in the firm, since employers had purchased the disposition over the subordinates' labor power. But for employers it also had an unwanted effect. It immediately led German workers to press far-reaching demands based on the treatment of time as transferable property. Similarly, the specification of labor as a commodity that appeared in Britain may have discouraged textile workers from seeking pay for idle moments; at the same time, however, it encouraged workers to demand the full product of their labor. Even in the first decade of the century, Adam Smith's elaboration of labor's commodity form in The Wealth of Nations served as a handbook for working-class radicals who objected to sharing the product of labor with employers. The complex network of response and counterresponse engendered by a particular commodity form shows that the adoption of that form did not offer either side a straightforward instrumental benefit.^[99]

The German workers' treatment of time as a form of property guided their articulation of grievances about workloads. In both Germany and Britain, weavers opposed their employers' efforts to have each weaver tend more looms, a contest that reemerged in different periods during the nineteenth century for each kind of fabric manufactured. But in Germany, weavers saw the introduction of more looms per worker not just as an intensification of effort but as a prolongation of work time. For instance, a speaker at the weaving conference in Crimmitschau in 1910 said that if weavers operate an additional loom, it "is indirectly an extension of work time. We must try to combat this with all the strength at our disposal."^[100] German weavers converted an issue of concrete effort into a matter of the employer effectively controlling more time.

[99] The struggles conducted within the regime established by a particular commodity form also show that the shape of labor as a ware provided the signs and cultural definitions out of which those practices were forged through conflict, not a pattern decreed from on high. David M. Schneider, "Notes Toward a Theory of Culture," in Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby, editors, Meaning in Anthropology (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), p. 219.

[100] Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, op. cit., p. 51.

The contest that developed in Germany over the allocation of time did not just concern the total remuneration to which workers could lay claim. It revolved around the point at which the employer converted labor power into a product. Accordingly, strike demands about the use of time followed a different pattern in Germany than in Britain. German workers agitated for adjustments in the partitioning of the workday, not just for changes in its length. A recurring issue for German strikers was how the hours of the day, which as a rule in the late nineteenth century totaled at least ten, would be divided between morning and afternoon. For 1899 through 1906, the years in which official enumerations of the separate demands lodged by German workers in strikes have survived, the textile industry experienced thirty-five outbreaks in which workers lodged requests for changes in the periods for rest pauses, extensions in the lunch break (although this meant workers would labor until later in the evening), or other demands related to the apportionment of the work hours. Workers contested the allotment of time, which sometimes comprised the sole ground for strikes, under many different structures of workdays. Where the lunch pauses lasted an hour, they wanted one and a half; where one and half, they wanted two.^[101]

German workers bargained down to the requisitioning of small time fragments. Consider the long strike of weavers in Neumünster in 1888. Over one hundred workers there sustained a labor stoppage for two and a half months because employers refused to extend the lunch hour an extra fifteen minutes.^[102] In Luckenwalde the female workers in a weaving room launched a strike in 1904 to gain the right to a ten-minute wash-up break each day.^[103] Every fraction of time conceded to workers by, say, extending a

[101] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25025, August 8, 1892. Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, B25-319, June 15, 1906. When German workers began to voice demands for the ten-hour day, they characteristically attached this to a scheme specifying long breakfast and lunch breaks. For an example from the metal industry in 1872, see Lothar Machtan, "'Es war ein wundervolles Gefühl, dass man nicht allein war': Streik als Hoffnung und Erfahrung," in Wolfgang Ruppert, editor, Die Arbeiter (München: C. H. Beck, 1986), p. 264.

[102] Klaus Tidow, Neumünsters Textil-und Lederindustrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz, 1984), p. 32.

[103] Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 14, 1904, Luckenwalde. Analogously, for negotiations over a five-minute wash break, see Stadtarchiv Crimmitschau, Rep. III, Kap. IX, Lit. B, Nr. 23, Jan. 4, 1904, pp. 298–300. For other accounts of strikes over the timing of brief pauses, Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, 120 BB VII 1, Nr. 3, Volume 12, 1906, Sommerfeld; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , April 1, 1905, Mönchengladbach. Textile workers in Thalheim struck in 1889 for ten-minute extensions of the lunch and late-afternoon breaks and for receipt of pay earlier on Saturday afternoons. Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amtshauptmannschaft Chemnitz, Nr. 10, June 29, 1889, pp. 4–5.

cleaning break from five to ten minutes comprised in their eyes a significant victory.^[104] Not surprisingly, when the textile union in Saxony surveyed the arrangement of workdays in its district, it found some byzantine schedules. The conflict over the apportionment of tiny intervals led to some markedly irregular lunch periods, such as one hour and twenty-five minutes, or to rotating fifteen-and twenty-minute early and afternoon breaks.^[105]

Apart from disputing the allocation of work time over the day, textile workers in Germany distinguished themselves by contesting the days of the week when they would deliver their labor power, given a fixed number of hours. For instance, textile workers struck at a mill in Augsburg in 1914 when the employer responded to a downturn by eliminating work on Mondays. The workers demanded that Saturday be free instead. In this instance the struggle was in no way confused with commercial issues of profit and loss, but related solely to authority over time: the employer denied workers their long-held dream of enjoying Saturday off even when the low volume of production could have fulfilled it.^[106] When German workers contested the regulation of working hours, they emphasized the delivery of time as an abstract potential that employers consumed. For example, when German workers complained about having to work so many days, they said they "had to put their meager day of rest at the disposal of their employer."^[107]

German workers and employers who saw time itself as a kind of property fought at innumerable points, not just over the total amount of time whose ownership would change hands, but when it would do so. In Britain, by contrast, the partitioning of the workday, given a fixed duration, almost never became the touchstone for workers' collective action. The Board of Trade provided a complete enumeration of the strike demands lodged in textiles for the years from 1889 to 1900. In only a single instance did British textile workers request a change in the distribution, given a fixed sum of hours. And even the circumstances surrounding this case seem deviant. It

[104] In Werdau, the women workers succeeded in having wash-up time extended from five to ten minutes. Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, op. cit., p. 41.

[105] Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, Gau Thüringen, Tariferläuterungen und Statistisches: Bearbeitet nach Aufzeichnungen der Tarif-Kommission im sächsisch-thüringischen Textilbezirk , p. 59. It appears that the only British equivalent to this fragmented scheduling was the partial shifts assigned to juveniles in Britain under pressure of the Factory Acts. In this instance, however, employers designed the partitioning of the workday on their own, sometimes with a view to evading the acts. United Kingdom, "Reports of the Inspectors of Factories," PP 1837–1838 XLV, quarter ending June 30, 1838, p. 7.

[106] Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 27, 1914, p. 66.

[107] Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 27, 1902, Elberfeld.

occurred at a mill in Dundee whose weavers had been placed on a shortened work week in 1894 due to a business slowdown. They insisted on reducing the number of days they worked each week rather than continuing on brief shifts six days a week.^[108] British workers were ready, of course, to protest long workdays. But as a rule, the time sense of British workers paralleled that of the employers: the passage of the workday was not divided into minute increments, with the appropriation of singular moments being contested. Rather, the workday was a block of time during which workers created the products that were to be transferred to employers.

Would it have been more advantageous for British textile workers to have pursued the same demands as did their German counterparts? This question is unanswerable, for the focus among British workers on improving piece rates for cloth delivered may well have given them a higher return for their labor than they would otherwise have enjoyed. Culture guided but in no way blocked workers' struggles for improvements.^[109]

Real Abstractions

This chapter calls attention to a new method for attaching workers' articulation of discontent to the structure of the production process and, ultimately, offers a way of linking the domains of social experience and discourse. Cultural historians of labor have recently emphasized that the development of workers' grievances does not parallel the evolution of the conditions of work. These critics have contended that workers' grievances, instead of reflecting the material circumstances or institutional structure of production, depend principally upon discursive resources and the organization of the public sphere in which complaints can be lodged and debated.^[110] For instance, in Work and Wages , his exemplary study of prerevolutionary artisanal conflicts in France, Michael Sonenscher detaches (changing) discursive practices from the (unvarying) organization of work itself.^[111]

[108] "Strikes and Lockouts in 1894," PP 1895 XCII, Dundee.

[109] For a discussion of the distinction between analyses that treat culture as a set of norms and those, such as that of this study, that view culture as a set of assumptions that facilitate agents' pursuit of interests, see Paul DiMaggio, "Interest and Agency in Institutional Theory," in Lynne Zucker, editor, Institutional Patterns and Organizations: Culture and Environment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1988), p. 5.

[110] Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 27, 102–103, 112.

[111] Sonenscher suggests that artisans' unprecedented complaints about competitive individualism in France during the early nineteenth century represented a new rhetorical strategyto justify allegiance to voluntary business associations. To his mind, the criticism of cut-throat self-aggrandizement after the revolution did not reflect the breakdown of intimate and customary paternal relations in the workshop, for these had corroded under the ancien régime. Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 371.

The present chapter shows instead that the signifying processes incorporated into the concrete procedures of work configured the concepts to which workers would have ready access for verbal analyses of the employment relation. Through their experience of the symbolic instrumentalities of production, such as the piece-rate scales, workers acquired their understanding of labor as a commodity and their expectations for its use in the same way that Pascal allegedly would have advised them to acquire religious conviction: "Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe."^[112] They derived the categories of the discourse of complaint from their lived experience at the point of production, as is confirmed by the very manner in which weavers conceptualized their output. For example, German weavers who worked with piece-rate scales that centered the categories of payment on the execution of the labor activity could judge changes in output by the number of shots inserted in the course of a time interval rather than by the length of cloth delivered. At a meeting of textile workers in Cottbus in 1903, a discussant described in this manner the exploitation of weavers' labor: "Whereas a loom used to give forty-five shots per minute, the new looms have raised this to 105 shots per minute and now three hundred thousand shots are demanded each week from a worker on a new loom."^[113] This speaker expressed the additional work extracted in terms of the movements executed in a day—that is, in terms of the metered expenditure of labor power rather than the dimensions of requisitioned fabric.^[114] Verbal analysis followed the culturally variable ideas embedded in the execution of work for a wage.

To affirm the symbolic constitution of experience, historians influenced by post-structuralist philosophy, including Joan Scott, have emphasized the

[112] Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 168.

[113] Stadtarchiv Cottbus, A II 33 b, Nr. 34, February 8, 1903. Likewise, the linen weavers of Greiz in 1857 said that they were able to insert nine thousand units of yarn in the course of a year if they had no interruptions, but only eight thousand units if they had responsibility for supervising journeymen. Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, a Rep. A, Kap. XXI/2c, Nr. 400, Petition of May 20, 1857.

[114] The conflict of interest between workers and employers was cast in an illusory form, as if the expenditure of labor power could be calibrated as a thing with a value imposed by an objective force. Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1980), Volume One, pp. 91–92.

linguistic mediation of social experience. In so doing they have come perilously close to severing the nondiscursive from the domain of experience.^[115] A focus upon the cultural construction of material practices allows us to reconnect language and social experience without reducing one to the other. Practice is not composed of arbitrary signifiers and does not follow a scripted logic to advance its propositions. This comparative inquiry suggests, however, that as the fixtures of production are employed as signs, they create a shared conceptual experience of the ongoing execution of material practice and thereby supply the constituents—although not the syntax—of formal discourse. Important national differences in workers' experience developed from the immediate execution of practice, apart from the intervention of language—that is, from a symbolically constituted order of reality that is distinct from the mere representation of the world via the divisions of language.

If workers brought into the realm of collective action and trade union struggle that specification of labor as a commodity which is embodied in the material performance of production, this reinforces the importance of the labor process for the formation of workers' discourse about labor, but it does not compel a return to the older view that this discourse reflects the material conditions of production. For if symbolic instrumentalities at the point of production—such as the operation of the piece-rate systems—guided the formation of discourse about exploitation, these instrumentalities are not the outgrowth of adaptation to the actual conditions of the environment. Production is not another order of reality more veracious than discursive practice. If I dare cite the words of Althusser, who has more to contribute to cultural history than most would nowadays admit, what workers' complaints express is not "the real conditions which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live."^[116]

In both Britain and Germany, the cultural specification of labor's commodity form rested on preposterous assumptions. British employers and workers supposed that labor could literally be embodied in a product that served as a vessel to transfer it—as if human activity could become a substance. As a matter of principle, the textile workers' labor no more resides

[115] Joan Wallach Scott insists that language does not reflect a reality external to it but is "constitutive of that reality." "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History," in her Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 57.

[116] Althusser, op. cit., p. 165.

in the output than do the other elements that contribute to the creation of the fabric, such as the factory's land.^[117] The labor said to be incorporated in the ware reflects a social relation between producers, namely, the relative expenditures of labor time socially necessary for them to create the product—not something materialized in a discrete product. The German specification of labor's commodity form supposed that the employer could purchase time itself and that the expenditure of concrete labor power actually created value. In truth, of course, the use of labor as a factor of production does not create value: the value is conferred by the social relations structuring the activity, not by, say, the observable motions of the shuttle. Likewise, it is absurd to suppose that one can purchase the disposition over workers' time as a thing; time is the medium through which the disposition over human relations is expressed, not an item with a price.^[118] Karl Polanyi perspicaciously referred to labor power as an "alleged commodity."^[119] But what could only be claimed metaphorically in theory was in the practice of production affirmed as a fact in reality.

[117] Marx, op. cit., Volume Three, p. 831.

[118] "As far as labor assumes the specifically social character of wage labor, it is not wertbildend. " Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx-Engels Werke , Volume 25 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1964), p. 831.

[119] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 73.