2—
Concepts and Practices of Labor

The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Classical political economy, that garrulous companion to the development of capitalism in the two centuries that preceded our own, poses a riddle that anyone would have recognized had they held the means of answering it. On the eve of the industrial revolution, the British Isles provided a home for the development of a vigorous economic theory that treated the labor embodied in products as the determinant of their relative prices. The most notable contributors to this body of thought in Britain, from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, conceived the purchase of labor from workers as a process equivalent to the acquisition of labor incorporated in a tangible product. Adam Smith revealed this assumption in the Wealth of Nations when he theorized the exchange of labor in an "opulent" society, where the division of labor was far advanced. In this setting, Smith reasoned, "every workman has a great quantity of his own work to dispose of beyond what he himself has occasion for; and every other workman being in exactly the same situation, he is enabled to exchange a great quantity of his own goods for a great quantity, or, what comes to the same thing, for the price of a great quantity of theirs."^[1] Even when Smith, as well as the British economists who followed him, took stock of the sale of labor by subordinate wage-earners rather than by independent craftspeople, they continued to imagine the transfer of labor as if it were handed over embodied in a product.

[1] An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 15. Robert Torrens, who was preoccupied with the consequences of mechanization in the age of the factory, replicated exactly Smith's depiction of the exchange of materialized labor among autonomous producers. An Essay on the Production of Wealth (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orne, and Brown, 1821), p. 15.

According to influential chroniclers of economic theory, the British economists' understanding of the labor transaction was not definitively exposed and overturned until a foreign initiate, Karl Marx, completed his analysis of the capitalist labor process.^[2] Marx himself believed that his greatest contribution to economic analysis lay in his elucidation of the sale of that singular asset he called Arbeitskraft , "labor power."^[3] The locution indicated that workers transferred not just "labor" to their employer, but the use of their labor capacity. As is well known, Marx claimed that the distinctions attached to his application of the term labor power unlocked the secret of the extraction of surplus value under capitalism. By what process of logic and imagination did Marx arrive at his discovery? This is the unsighted riddle. Neither laudators nor detractors have noticed, let alone pursued, the question.^[4]

Stranger still, Marx himself never pondered the sources of his revelation. But, in ways never intended, he deposited many clues. To pursue his trail, we must leave the noisy sphere of intellectual exchange and descend into "the hidden abode of production,"^[5] where labor is actually set into motion. Marx's expression Arbeitskraft , it turns out, was adopted from colloquial German speech, although its equivalent in English, labor power , sounds stilted and bookish even to the academician's ear. In Germany the term functioned in the language of the streets as a description of wage labor long before Marx penned it in an economic treatise.^[6] In contrast to the British reliance on the indistinct word labor , the term Arbeitskraft lingers today in German popular usage in descriptions of the employment transaction. Could this timeworn difference in vocabulary mark the appearance of a distinctive concept of labor as a commodity in Germany that remained absent in Britain? More important, is it possible that such differences in

[2] Louis Althusser, "Marx et ses découvertes," in Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, and Roger Establet, Lire le capital (Paris: François Maspero, 1967), Volume Two, p. 19; Ernest Mandel, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 82–84.

[3] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx-Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974), Volume 32, p. 11. Louis Althusser clarifies Marx's own emphasis upon the intellectual revolution inaugurated by the concept of "labor power" in Althusser, Balibar, and Establet, Lire le capital , op. cit., pp. 17–18, 122.

[4] Engels said only that Marx's discovery of the mechanism by which employers extracted surplus value from labor power represented "a thunderbolt that struck out of a clear blue sky." Introduction to Das Kapital (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1980), Volume Two, p. 21.

[5] Karl Marx, Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1967), Volume One, p. 176.

[6] See Chapter Six below, p. 273, and Chapter Nine, p. 412.

concepts of labor accompanied an enduring contrast between the countries in the form of practice down in "the hidden abode of production"?

These high-flying queries can be anchored in the secure ground of material practice by examining procedures on the factory shop floor. A comparison of German and late-developing British textile mills during the nineteenth century shows that the specifications of labor as a commodity did not reflect the labor process, but comprised a constitutive part of its execution. Despite compelling similarities in the settings in which matching German and British textile mills developed, economic agents in the two countries applied different concepts of labor as a commodity to carry out the process of production. German employers and workers indeed acted as if the employment relation comprised the purchase of labor effort and of the disposition over workers' labor activity or, as they termed it, over Arbeitskraft. Through quotidian practice British employers and workers defined the factory employment relation as the appropriation of workers' labor concretized in products. By deciphering the hidden language of factory practice we take the first step in a descent to the underground path by which Marx received his remarkable insights into the means by which workers transmitted their labor in the capitalist labor process.

The Logic of the Weavers' Piece-Rate Scales

The occupation of weaving during the second half of the nineteenth century comprised the single largest job category not only in textiles but in the entire manufacturing sector of the British and German economies.^[7] The construction of the piece-rate schedules for weavers provides a neglected but

[7] Germany, Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft am Schlusse des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Puttkammer und Mühlbrecht, 1900), pp. 27–32; United Kingdom, Census of England and Wales 1891 (London: H.M.S.O., 1893), Volume III, pp. ix, xix, xx. Contemporaries were well aware of the numerical weight of the occupation of weaving. "The weaving sector is far and away the most widespread branch of work," August Bebel said, "and this holds not only for Germany but specifically for England as well." Deutsches Weber-Central-Komitee, Ausführlicher Bericht über die Verhandlungen des ersten deutschen Webertages abgehalten zu Glauchau in Sachsen vom 28. bis 30. Mai 1871 , transcription in Stadtarchiv Glauchau. In 1895, for instance, the weaving process engaged the majority of German workers in textiles, whereas spinning employed only 18 percent of workers in that business. See summary statistics in Karin Zachmann, "Der Mechanisierungsprozess in der deutschen Textilindustrie im Zeitraum von 1870 bis 1914," Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte , Number One (Dresden: Technische Universität Dresden, 1988), p. 29.

singularly revealing piece of evidence about the inscription of contrasting suppositions in utilitarian practices. As a tool for extracting labor from weavers, the design of the scales would seem to depend only upon questions of force and pragmatism: How much were employers ready to pay workers for various types of cloth? To what extent could the resistance of weavers lead to modifications in the system's provisions? The physical dimensions of the weaving process and of its products did not provide natural or automatic measures of "how much" a worker produced or of "how much" the employer appropriated. Instead, cultural categories intervened to create contrasting forms of measurement in Germany and Britain. To isolate culture's arbitration, we must first construct a picture of the technical essentials of weaving, for the characteristics of weaving made the design of piece rates in this trade a kind of Rorschach test for industrial culture.

The weaver's job consisted of seeing to it that the weft thread in the loom's shuttle or shuttles moved horizontally back and forth across the vertical threads of the warp.^[8] As the shuttles laid their threads, a rotating beam underneath or out to the side of the loom unfolded more of the warp. The speed at which this beam let out the warp largely determined how tightly the weft threads would be woven: the slower the warp moved forward, the denser the weave.

From almost the earliest days of power loom weaving, mill owners in both Germany and Britain preferred to pay weavers by the piece.^[9] They maintained that this method of reward gave weavers an incentive to work without close supervision and thereby minimized the costs of superintendence.^[10] To be sure, employers in both countries granted time wages for

[8] Although there were supplementary tasks, such as refilling the weft supply, weavers themselves quite rightly viewed the insertion of the weft threads as the essence of their occupation, even if the machine itself powered the motion of the shuttles. See Adolf Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage (München: Ernst Reinhardt, 1912), p. 45; Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Hauptvorstand/Arbeiterinnensekretariat, Mein Arbeitstag—mein Wochenende (Berlin: Textilpraxis, 1931), p. 24.

[9] An employer at a spinning and weaving mill testified, "We always pay by the piece where we can; where it is absolutely impossible to pay by the day." Parliamentary Papers XXXV 1892, Royal Commission on Labour, Nov. 13, 1891, p. 281. The testimony of textile employers in Germany contradicts the assumption of Schmiede and Schudlich that employers preferred payment by time wages until the end of the 1870s. Germany, Enquete-Kommission, Reichs-Enquete für die Baumwollen- und Leinen-Industrie: Stenographische Protokolle über die mündliche Vernehmung der Sachverständigen (Berlin: Julius Sittenfeld, 1878), pp. 251, 404–405, 664. Cf. Rudi Schmiede and Edwin Schudlich, Die Entwicklung der Leistungsentlohnung in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Aspekte Verlag, 1976), p. 92.

[10] For an example of a mill that switched over to piece rates to reduce costs, see Yorkshire Factory Times , February 5, 1897. For an example of a manager who converted to piece rates assoon as the weavers were competent, consult taped interview with Will Bruce, born 1879, of Bentham Village. (My thanks to E. and J. H. P. Pafford for their willingness to share this recording with me.) See, too, Sydney J. Chapman, The Lancashire Cotton Industry: A Study in Economic Development (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1904), p. 262; Textile Manufacturer , October 15, 1910, p. 325. For parallel cases in Germany, see Johannes Victor Bredt, Die Lohnindustrie dargestellt an der Garn- und Textilindustrie von Barmen (Berlin: von Bruer & Co., 1905), p. 174; Germany, Enquete-Kommission, Reichs-Enquete , op. cit., p. 247; Ludwig Bernhard, Die Akkordarbeit in Deutschland (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1903), p. 125. Benjamin Gott, founder of the first large wool mill in Yorkshire, extended piece payments from overlookers to all operatives and found that "the men consequently feel that they are as much interested as he and cease to look upon him as their master." Cited in Sidney Pollard, "Factory Discipline in the Industrial Revolution," The Economic History Review second series, Volume XVI, Number 2 (1963), p. 264.

weavers if the machinery was untested or if weavers were so unaccustomed to the work that a production norm could not be estimated. But they reverted to remuneration by piece once these conditions passed.^[11] "If we did not pay them by piece and by results," a spokesman for Lancashire mill owners claimed in 1891, "the manufacturing concerns would not be able to keep above water twelve months."^[12] The economic environment limited the mode of payment, but cultural assumptions precipitated its form.

The mechanics of the weaving activity precluded the application of a unidimensional register of the labor spent on an output. If length of cloth alone were the index of output and criterion of pay, workers on cloth with a dense weave, which required the insertion of many weft threads, would earn no more per yard, and probably less per hour, than workers on looser cloth. Weavers on dense fabric in this hypothetical setting would be underpaid and would have an interest in advancing the warp rapidly to produce a looser weave than ordered. But if the number of weft threads inserted by the weaver were measured, weavers on dense fabric would be likely to be overpaid. The reason is clear enough: weavers producing loose cloth use up the warp more quickly than weavers on dense cloth. The removal of a finished warp and installation of a new one in the loom creates a major, uncompensated delay.

[11] Textile Recorder , June 15, 1883, p. 26. Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , Volume 18 (1886), p. 32; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , Viersen, October 21, 1899; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , Krefeld, December 9, 1899; Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, 120 B V 33, Nr. 4, Vol. 1, February 4, 1817, p. 53.

[12] William Noble, United Cotton Manufacturers' Association, Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, June 15, 1891, p. 162. The weavers themselves preferred payment by piece as the only method feasible in their trade for establishing uniform remuneration. Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1965), p. 289.

The predicaments in these two simplified ways of gauging output—length of cloth or number of weft threads inserted—disclose the unique characteristics of the weaving activity and of its product. Production required multi-dimensional gauges. In contrast to other manufacturing processes in which subvarieties of the product differ by gross size or shape, varieties of cloth differ by the mathematical functions that govern their density and pattern. The product is uniform and continuous, and it has a naturally inscribed metric along precisely measurable and equipollent dimensions: length, width, and number of weft threads. The labor activity itself consists of the regulated linkage of actions which have natural metrics as well: the number of times the shuttle crosses the warp, the number of times the beam rotates to let out the warp, the size and number of teeth on the gears that let out the warp, and so forth. Weaving offered the participants multiple and easily coded axes which could be picked out to define units of output and apportion pay, and it required them to combine these dimensions somehow to avoid the problems illustrated with the unidimensional measures. This natural indeterminacy makes weaving an ideal context in which historical analysts can discern the application of the schema by which factory owners and workers decided how they would measure output and outline the otherwise shapeless stuff called labor.

The model of labor in Britain was concretized in the Yorkshire piece-rate system, as illustrated in the schedule introduced in 1883 in Huddersfield and the Colne Valley (Figure 1). As the figure's vertical axis indicates, weavers were remunerated by length of fabric woven, with the standard interval equaling 180 feet of the warp. But the more weft threads woven into each inch of this standard length of warp, the higher the payment. The chart's horizontal axis specifies the requisite weft threads inserted per inch, which in the trade were called the "picks" or, more precisely, the "picks per inch." For basic weaving, with one shuttle and one beam, remuneration for a fixed length of cloth rose linearly as picks per inch rose. For more complicated weaves, with bonuses for extra shuttles, remuneration for a fixed length always rose with increases in density, but not at a constant rate (Figure 2). To calculate weavers' pay, the taker-in of the cloth from the weavers sampled the picks per inch or weighed the total piece to ensure that enough picks had been woven into the warp. (In the discussion which follows, bear in mind that "picks per inch" always refers to cloth density, not to its length. Density, a geometric concept, varies independently of the thickness of the weft yarn.) The Huddersfield

Figure 1.
British Data on British Axes, Huddersfield, Simple Weaves, 1883

scale, the best-known in Yorkshire, served as a benchmark for many others in the woolen trade.^[13] Until the First World War, weavers judged the fairness of their pay by this scale's standards.^[14]

[13] In truth, it represented the maximum renumeration to which owners in the region would consent. Prescriptive its rates were not—only the principles by which it operated. Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 211.

[14] Yorkshire Factory Times , September 13, 1889. For examples of strikes to keep the scale's rates in all their particulars, see Yorkshire Factory Times , October 25, 1889, and August 21, 1891. For the percentaging of modifications in the Huddersfield scale up to 1892, see Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, Appendix XII, pp. 501–502. Even in the closing months of the First World War the Huddersfield schedule served as the basis for attempts to negotiate an industrywide price list. Joanna Bornat, "An Examination of the General Union of Textile Workers 1883–1922," Ph.D. diss., University of Essex, 1981, p. 200.

Figure 2.
British Data on British Axes, Huddersfield, Fancy Weaves,
Two Beams, Four Shuttles, 1883

To compare basic principles, a German pay table of 1911 from a wool firm in Euskirchen on the lower Rhine is shown in Figure 3.^[15] Rather than taking adjacent correlates of the weaver's activity—length and density of cloth—for the criteria of pay, as in Britain, the German system centered its categories directly on the weaver's primary activity of having the shuttle move back and forth. The weavers earned a sum for every thousand times their shuttle shot across the warp—that is, per thousand weft threads woven. The Germans called this system pay by the number of Schüsse , literally, pay by the number of "shots" of the shuttle. German managers said they preferred pay by shot over pay by length because it offered a more direct measure of the labor input.^[16] As Figure 3 shows, the

[15] The scale held only for the regular wool products in which the firm, C. Lückenrath, specialized. Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Jahrbuch des deutschen Textilarbeiterverbandes, 1911 (Berlin: Karl Hübsch, 1912), p. 75. For other comments on pay per shot in this town, see Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , May 18, 1912.

[16] "The calculation of weaving wages by the number of shot threads, for example, ten pfennigs per thousand shots, is the simplest method of labor remuneration," said one Germandirector, "since it permits payment of the weaver according to the quantity of executed labor." Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , Volume 14, Number 65 (1910–1911), p. 1126.

Figure 3.
German Data on German Axes, Euskirchen, 1911

remuneration per thousand shots rose linearly with decreases in the shots woven per centimeter. This feature of the scales compensated weavers for more frequent changes of the warp when producing low-density fabrics. On the Huddersfield schedule, one can also identify a linear increase, of course: for basic weaving, remuneration for a fixed length rose linearly as picks per inch rose.

Since the two pay systems manifested their linearity on different axes, they did not "say" the same thing with alternative vocabularies, but concretized fundamentally different statements about the remuneration of labor. On the horizontal axis, Figures 1 and 3 share a common metric, the density of the weave.^[17] On the vertical axis, however, the Euskirchen and

[17] Notice that on the horizontal axis I have reversed the direction of the metric between the British Figure 1 and the German Figure 3. I did this because the essential point of interest at this stage is the fact that people in both countries used the simplifying assumption that alinear relation of some kind ought to obtain between pay and changes in cloth density. I did not want to confuse this issue with a contrast in the direction of the lines' slopes. Once I have converted the British data to the German dimensions of thought, I will verify that in both countries, pay per weft thread inserted rises as the density of the cloth declines, although, translated to German axes, the British rise is not linear.

Huddersfield scales operated on different dimensions: pay by shot versus pay by length. In both German and English, the referents of ordinary language marked the immediacy of the association between the weft threads and the labor activity, since the words picks and Schüsse could pertain either to the shuttles' motion or to the product, the woven weft.^[18] When practice itself became a concrete form of language in the operation of the piece-rate scales, the choice of referent became unmistakable. Verbal utterances were multivocal, the silent language of production—the piece-rate mechanism—invariable. In comparing types of labor, the German and British systems designated distinct objects. The German piece-rate system centered its comparisons of different ways of weaving on the motion of inserting a pick, without respect to the visible length of the complete product. The British pattern compared the picks in different kinds of finished products rather than in motions.

The dimensions of linearity reveal the core axes of thought inscribed in the techniques of remuneration. It is impossible to translate the data from British weaving price lists onto the German dimensions of thought without altering the intelligibility of the distribution. To demonstrate this, in Figure 4 are shown the values for three types of English cloth on the Huddersfield scale but replotted on the German axes of thought, in pence per one thousand picks or Schüsse. Placing the British information on the German dimensions of thought yields two findings. First, the British data lose the shape of a line, in contrast with the German data in Figure 3; instead, as picks per inch decline, the points arrange themselves in a strange curve.^[19] The deformation of the line in Figure 1 to the curve in Figure 4 confirms that the British system of measurement embodied a concept of remuneration that began with the length of the materialized

[18] In English, the original referent of pick , dating back to the time of the handloom, was the throw of the shuttle rather than the inserted weft. F. W. Moody, "Some Textile Terms from Addingham in the West Riding," Transactions, Yorkshire Dialect Society Volume 8 (1950), p. 41.

[19] The algorithm which explains the new form of the British data is derived as follows: in the British system, pay per length = m (density) + b , or, rephrased in inches, pay per inch = m (picks per inch) + b. To convert to the German system, we need to isolate pay per pick: starting from the initial British equation, pay per pick = m + b (inch per pick), or, rephrased in terms of cloth density, pay per pick = m + b /density.

Figure 4
British Data on German Axes, Huddersfield Scale, Woolens

product as an indicator of labor. The linearity on the native British axes would not have obtained if the producers had reflected upon the exchange of labor for a wage with another combination of axes.

The translation of the British data onto the German dimensions of thought also enables us to understand how the unpretentious language of practice—the concepts incarnated in the weavers' daily labor for a wage—guided the weavers' independent reflections upon the appropriation of labor. When British weavers had more than one shuttle or one warp beam in operation—which was very often the case—their payment per shot did not necessarily increase as the number of shots per inch declined on various

weaving jobs. Given a fixed length of cloth, although the net pay rose as the number of shots per inch rose, the pay per shot inserted—the measure of pay per effective motion—followed an erratic course. Figure 4 indicates that the more complex the weave, the more irregular and "irrational" the British method appears from a "German" point of view; that is, the more complex the weave, the more the graph deviates from the ideal pattern of higher earnings per shot as the number of shots per inch decreases.^[20] For example, on some types of fabric, the British weaver earned less per shot for weaving 56 weft threads per inch than for 62, although 56 weft threads per inch would take longer, per shot , to weave (because the warp would have to be changed more often). The difference in the cloth produced was slight; the difference in earnings significant and inequitable.^[21] What do these anomalies tell us about the producers' apperceptions?

It would seem that such an "obvious" source of inconsistent earnings in payment per weft thread inserted under the Huddersfield system could not have escaped the notice of the workers themselves. But somehow it did. Weavers in the Colne Valley alleged that the 1883 pay table lowered their wages, especially on the loosely woven cloth. They wrote dozens of letters to newspapers explaining their dissatisfaction with it. These workers astutely analyzed its rates and criticized the slope of the straight line on the British axes of thought.^[22] They made an effort to analyze the scale mathematically. But since they did not conceive the system in terms of pay per weft thread, they could not identify these inequities or frame them as "irregularities." They looked straight at the problem but did not see it, a remarkable demonstration of how their perception began with the length of the cloth as the basis for pay. Truly, their senses had "become directly in their practice theoreticians."

The weavers were not simpletons who self-effacingly obeyed the dictates of culture:^[23] as strategizing actors they knew that their net earnings

[20] The irregularities are far too large to be explained by the need to calculate total pay in terms of units of pence or halfpence. If this were the origin, furthermore, the more complicated weaves, in which net pay per piece was higher, would show a more regular curve than the simpler weaves, whereas the data reveal exactly the opposite. The scales in effect in the Huddersfield district before 1883 show this tendency to an even greater degree.

[21] George S. Wood, "The Theory and Practice of Piecework," Huddersfield Textile Society Session 1910–1911 (Huddersfield: Huddersfield Textile Society, 1911), p. 11.

[22] See, illustratively, Northern Pioneer , April 14, 1883; Huddersfield Daily Examiner , March 13, March 27, and April 13, 1883.

[23] Dennis Wrong, "The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology," American Sociological Review Volume 26, Number 2 (April 1961), pp. 183–193.

were higher if they put more picks into cloth of a fixed length (not taking pay per weft thread into account!). The workers' recognition of inequity and their resistance to exploitation were not given automatically by their resolve to pursue their interests. Rather, the weavers' very understanding of their interests depended on the cultural suppositions they called upon to interpret their predicament. The assumptions about labor through which they defined their situation derived from the signifying process embedded in the very operation of the piece-rate mechanism. Through the form of their everyday practice, the workers identified their human activity only as it appeared to them in the fantastic shape of the fabric's own properties.^[24]

The British weavers could not have perceived the anomalies in their payment per weft thread from the experience of work. The earnings of most British and German weavers fluctuated greatly from week to week. The amount of their weekly pay depended on whether they wove their piece on the warp all the way to the end exactly on pay day or, alternatively, had a small swatch left to do on a large piece which could therefore not be finished and credited until the next pay period.^[25] The speed at which a worker finished a piece of cloth depended upon numerous shifting factors which combined in unpredictable ways: the dressing of the warp, the quality of the yarn, how well the warp was wound, the weather, and trouble-shooting by the overlooker. Then, too, weavers turned out a rapidly changing mix of product types.^[26] These conditions made it difficult for weavers to move from the phenomenal world of work to expected weekly wages for products of a specific number of picks per inch.

[24] Marx, op. cit., Volume One, "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof," p. 86. For an example of the ways in which the types of weaving labor in the putting-out system were distinguished and revalued over the decades by a linear scale corresponding only to the dimensions of the cloth, see testimony of John Kingan, United Kingdom, Report from Select Committee on Hand-Loom Weavers' Petitions , 1834, PP 1834 (556) X, p. 16. The proportionate increase in pay as cloth density increased varied to an extraordinary degree, depending upon the absolute pay for cloth of medium density in a given year.

[25] According to the Royal Commission on Labour, the weekly wages of an able worsted weaver might fluctuate between two shillings and sixteen shillings. PP 1892 XXXV, p. 222. An experienced woman weaver told the Yorkshire Factory Times that her wages lay between five shillings and one pound a week, depending on how many cuts she completed. Yorkshire Factory Times , November 14, 1912. Miss W., born 1901, interviewed by Joanna Bornat, said that when she did not finish a whole cut, she took no pay home that week. See also Yorkshire Factory Times , March 27, 1891, p. 4.

[26] Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 230; Calderdale Archives, Murgatroyd piece books. A large factory could work on sixty to eighty types of cloth in a day. Die Textil-Zeitung , January 19, 1897.

Weavers labored with approximate estimates of what they ought to earn and with only a tacit understanding of how it ought to be reckoned. "Wherever a scale, no matter what its base and no matter how the shuttling was arranged, ran to a good day's wage for a good day's work," said Ben Turner, the union secretary, "the weavers were content with it."^[27] Yet when weavers at mills that lacked comprehensive piece-rate charts had an opportunity to devise completely original schedules of their own, their choices revealed their assumptions. They proposed, as a matter of course, that earnings rise linearly for extra picks per inch, and they took pay by length as the unquestioned basis for remuneration. They did so even in regions lacking prior districtwide wage agreements to which they could refer.^[28]

The length of cloth operated as the basis for remuneration in nearly all Yorkshire and Lancashire scales, both for the base rates with the simplest weaving and after the addition of more shuttles, beams, and healds to the job.^[29] The system of pay by length did not necessarily entail inconsistency in the rates of payment per weft thread inserted; but since British producers did not consciously guard against this defect, their system generated it. On the eve of the First World War, the most capable researcher in Yorkshire, George S. Wood, delivered a lecture to the Huddersfield Textile Society on "The Theory and Practice of Piecework." After finishing an extensive survey of pay systems' consistency, he told the Textile Society that "perhaps the best scale in the woollen trade is the famous Huddersfield Weaving Scale."^[30] Wood, in a strange illustration of history's vagaries, worked both as a representative for the employers' association and as an adviser to the textile workers' union. His testimony confirms that the Huddersfield table was no less sound than others in Britain.^[31]

[27] Ben Turner, Short History of the General Union of Textile Workers (Heckmondwike: Labour Pioneer, 1920), p. 46.

[28] Yorkshire Factory Times , August 16, 1889.

[29] For other linear pay scales, see the Standard List issued in the Saddleworth woolen industry in March, 1911, Kirklees Archives; the wage lists preserved for the Bairstow firm, Leeds District Archives; the linear rise in the picks per inch in various Yorkshire towns described in the Yorkshire Factory Times , November 22, 1889; the Leeds pay scale reproduced in the Yorkshire Factory Times , October 11, 1889. For a truly encyclopaedic collection of piece-rate scales in the Lancashire cotton trade, see British Association for the Advancement of Science, Manchester Meeting of 1887, On the Regulation of Wages by Means of Lists in the Cotton Industry , Manchester Meeting of 1887 (Manchester: John Heywood, 1887).

[30] Wood, op. cit., p. 11.

[31] In addition to the Huddersfield scale, the Yeadon and Guiseley table for woolens, drawn up in 1893, also featured aberrant rates per weft thread woven. Data calculated from scales in the Archive of the General Union of Dyers, Bleachers, and Textile Workers, Bradford. See PP 1909 LXXX, op. cit., p. xl.

The method of comparing types of labor via the linear properties of the product also prevailed in Britain during a formal inquiry by the Bradford Chamber of Commerce into new methods for comparing weaving scales in Yorkshire. The chamber's conclusions reveal that even when British managers, overlookers, and weavers started afresh and reconsidered the principles behind their piece-rate scales, they took pay by length as an unquestioned given. The chamber, with committee representatives from the overlookers' and weavers' unions, considered in 1895 the feasibility of establishing average weaving scales for the various classes of goods in the city.^[32] A local journal in Bradford observed that the chamber had set itself a difficult task, because the city's numerous worsted mills produced an "infinite" number of fabric types which could hardly be grouped on a comprehensive schedule.^[33] To cope with this challenge, the chamber "set about the classification of the boundless variety of fabrics, from the point of view of the weaving labour involved.  . . . It ascertained, availing itself of all obtainable information, the average price per pick actually paid for weaving this kind of fabric."^[34] The dimensions of the printed scale which the Chamber of Commerce developed as a basis for comparison among firms reveal that it actually took "price per pick" to mean "price per pick per inch" for a fixed length of cloth.^[35] When the chamber set out to measure cloth in terms of labor, it ended up measuring labor in terms of cloth (or, more exactly, differences in labor in terms of differences in cloth).^[36] The Germans, by contrast, gauged cloth by labor motions. They called a group of one thousand Schüsse "the unit of labor," analyzing the product with this unit of activity.^[37]

Anomalies in the rates of earnings per weft thread appeared in schedules from Lancashire as well.^[38] Shortly after the First World War, a British manufacturers' commission investigated the precision of pay scales in relation to

[32] Bradford Chamber of Commerce, Bradford Chamber of Commerce 45th Annual Report (Bradford, 1895), p. 55.

[33] Bradford , November 9, 1895.

[34] Ibid. Emphasis in original.

[35] Textile Mercury , November 11, 1896, p. 404; Bradford Chamber of Commerce 46th Annual Report (Bradford, 1896), pp. 57–60. Likewise, in Lancashire the piece-rate scales were eventually formulated in terms of the price of one pick, given a standard length of warp. See Uniform List of Prices for Weavers, 1906, LRO, DDHs 83.

[36] The attempt to put into effect the general lists of average prices in Bradford failed. See PP 1909 LXXX, Report of an Enquiry by the Board of Trade into the Earnings and Labor of the Workpeople of the United Kingdom in 1906, p. xl.

[37] E. Jung, Die Berechnung des Selbstkostenpreises der Gewebe (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1917).

[38] British Association for the Advancement of Science, On the Regulation of Wages.

labor effort. A member of the committee on costs declared that "hardly one single weaving scale in existence is drawn up mathematically correctly in its relation to picks"—that is, in the effective payment per weft thread woven.^[39] These discrepancies occurred because the British method of classification captured the labor activity at a remove.^[40] Does this mean that the British point of view was backward or primitive? Before we rush to a conclusion, we must consider the disadvantages of pay by shot as the Germans practiced it. Any framework for viewing production also entails its own forms of blindness. The German way of defining the transfer of labor to employers carried distinctive inaccuracies of its own, which, from the British framework, would have seemed intolerable indeed.

Although German weavers received a higher reward per thousand shots if they wove less dense fabrics, their pay scales evaluated the looseness of the fabric only in approximate terms. If an analyst converts the German measure of fabric density—shots per centimeter—to English units, it turns out that the German scales graduated the increase in pay at intervals that were always larger than five picks per inch.^[41] Some German scales registered changes in fabric density only at intervals of eight picks to the inch, or by a few bifurcations of yarn types. (This feature represented a specific way of treating labor rather than an incidental feature which resulted from the specifications by which products were sold in the market. The commercial orders German manufacturers filled permitted no leeway in the number of picks per inch.)^[42]

[39] This retrospective comment appears in D. H. Williams, Costing in the Wool Textile and Other Industries (Manchester: Emmott & Co., 1946), p. 5.

[40] In the days of handweaving, embodied labor was paid according to linear scales that customarily rose by about one penny for each type of cloth. When the base rates for simple cloth rose or declined over the years but the one-penny increments for progressively more complex cloth remained fixed, a curious artifact arose: the payment for one variety of cloth as a portion of another could vary substantially. In 1810 a standard scale for muslin fabric allotted eightpence per standard length of the simplest weave and a supplement of an additional penny per length of the next most simple weave. In 1819 this scale granted threepence for the same, most basic, weave, but the differential for the next grade was still fixed at one penny. Between these dates, then, the original 12.5 percent addition for slightly more complex work increased to 33 percent, whereas no change occurred in the relative labor time embodied in each type of fabric. These unjustified and undiscussed divergences arose from the calculation of labor by the linear comparison of fabrics. See the chart of prices 1805–1834, Report from Select Committee on Handloom Weavers , PP 1834 X, testimony of William Buchanan, p. 156.

[41] Some scales endorsed by the workers considered only the type of yarn inserted: Stadtarchiv Cottbus, AII 3.3 b 33, pp. 39–42, December 12, 1895.

[42] Centralblatt für die Textil-Industrie , 1876, Nr. 48, p. 763. See the government specifications for cloth on which it accepted bids, which appeared as a regular feature in textile journals. An example: the cloth needed by a prison that advertised in the Centralblatt für die Textil-Industrie , 1876, Nr. 45, p. 808.

In contrast to German methods, British piece-rate scales adjusted the levels of remuneration to the fabric densities by intervals no larger than four picks to the inch, and normally they gauged the rates at intervals of one or two picks to the inch.

Proceedings in the court rolls indicate that English factory inspectors prosecuted mill owners who had their overlookers set the looms to insert two weft threads per inch more than the weavers knew of or were being paid for.^[43] A disparity of this magnitude, an issue of legal concern in Britain, made no difference at all in the rate of pay on most German charts. In fact, the odd irregularities in the Huddersfield scale, which turn up after calculating the rates of payment per thousand weft threads woven, fall in between the grosser intervals of German pay tables. The British focus on the product allowed them to make fine distinctions in the product to decide upon an appropriate price for it, but did not provide the categories for capturing the labor activity itself. In this affair the Germans were consistent but imprecise, the British the other way around. This contrast originated in the German focus on decomposing the labor activity versus the British focus on decomposing the cloth.

In some instances, the reason that the Germans gave less attention in their pay scales to alterations in picks per inch is that weavers received a small sum for helping to install a new warp. This meant they had less claim on compensation via measurement of looser densities of cloth, because some of the time devoted to more frequent changes of the warp on these orders was taken into account directly.^[44] Leaving aside the changing of the warp, there was no readily identifiable difference, on loose versus dense cloth, in the labor exercised to weave a thousand shots, apart from differences in the frequencies of yarn breakages due to the diameters of the yarn used to weave loose versus dense cloth. Thus, from the German view, there was less motivation to register the difference in cloth densities carefully; it was only necessary to capture the time lost in changing the warp and the gross differences in yarn types.^[45]

[43] Wakefield Library Headquarters, Court Records of July 22, 1891. Yorkshire Factory Times , August 3, 1894, p. 8, and April 5, 1901, p. 8.

[44] At a firm in Viersen, on the lower Rhine, weavers paid by shot objected in 1908 when a shift to production of cloth of lower densities meant that more frequent changes of the warp were required and thus their pay was reduced. Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf (henceforth HSTAD), Landratsamt Mönchengladbach 99, pp. 420 ff. Their complaint reveals a drawback of the German system when weavers received no compensation for changing the warps.

[45] Of course, under the pure logic of mathematics, payment for installation of the warp would explain only a slower rise in the rates of pay per thousand shot as the density of the pattern declined, not the size of the intervals at which the pay scale recognized changes in thedensity. But under the practical logic of everyday manufacture, if the slope was lower, payment for changes in picks per inch constituted a smaller proportion of net pay and precision therefore held less significance for the agents.

How are we to account for the emergence of contrasts in the principles used to calculate weavers' earnings in Germany and Britain? The brute, physical fact that workers receive their compensation via piece rates does not reveal what it is about the products that makes them a suitable index for remuneration, or how the products are interpreted to serve as a measure of work. Workers in less commercialized societies, from ancient Greece to prerevolutionary France, received payment by piece rates, but they did not by any means imagine that they sold their labor as a commodity.^[46] The mechanism of payment by output does not entail a particular commodity form of labor. To ascertain the definition of labor as a commodity, one must expose the agents' own concepts as embedded in the symbolic form of the piece-rate schedules. A "Statement of Wages" was indeed a statement: the weavers' pay scales in the two countries attempted to combine two elements—the labor activity and the product of labor—in a relation not of mere correlation but of significance. In Germany the relation was conceived metaphorically and the activity of weaving taken as a model or paradigm for identifying and measuring the product. The scale classified the product as a mirror of the activity; cloth comprised the unit of observation, the insertion of the shots the true subject of analysis. As industrial sociologists from Germany have long taken care to emphasize, a piece-rate scale can use the product as a convenient surrogate for measuring the workers' action and need not accept the product as the object of payment itself.^[47] Or, as one student of wage forms in the German textile industry expressed it in 1924, the visible output could be

[46] For Greece, see the introduction to Chapter Five below; for France, see Albert Soboul, Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l'an II (Paris: Clauvreuil, 1958), pp. 453–454.

[47] Herbert Maucher, Zeitlohn Akkordlohn Prämienlohn (Darmstadt: Darmstadt Druckund Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1965), p. 62. Theodor Brauer, Produktionsfactor Arbeit (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1925), pp. 170–179. German sociologists of the time who discussed the piece rate-system still assumed that it was simply an alternate way of valorizing Arbeitskraft , not a way of redefining labor as a commodity. "With the modern labor contract the full commitment of the labor power of an individual for a certain time through the employment relation ensues, even if the measurement of compensation proceeds according to labor output." Otto von Zwiedineck-Südenhorst, Beiträge zur Lehre von den Lohnformen (Tübingen: H. Laupp, 1904), p. 18. August Löhr, in a study of the metal industry, asked how limits on piece rates were set. The answer, he believed, was "the basic attempt on the part of the factory not to pay the worker substantially more in general for the activation of his labor power than was required at any moment for the relevant category of labor power belonging to the worker." August Löhr, Beiträge zur Würdigung der Akkordlohnmethode im rheinisch-westfälischen Maschinenbau (Mönchengladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1912), p. 63.

adopted for the sake of making an "empirical" reading, as distinguished from the actual labor for which the worker was in truth remunerated.^[48] If the Germans themselves interpreted the product as a "sign," not as the true object of remuneration, surely we are obligated to take their lead seriously.^[49]

In Britain the relation between labor as a concrete activity and its product was conceived metonymically. The British pay scales codified the product as the result of labor but did not identify the value of the product by modeling it on the performance of the weaving. Instead, the product itself became the vessel by which labor was transferred; the materialized labor itself comprised the object of remuneration. The British quantified abstract labor by the substantial dimensions of the complete piece of cloth.^[50] As in Germany, workers delivered abstract labor, but in Britain the concrete product functioned as its sign.^[51]

[48] Alfred Müller, "Die Lohnbemessungsmethoden in der Chemnitzer Textilindustrie," diss., Marburg, 1924, p. 65. If the empirical reading of the product in Germany merely served as an index for the execution of motions, could the reverse situation arise, in which the motions are used to conceive a reading of the product? This was the case with the British spinning scales in Oldham, which were expressed in terms of "draws" of the mule. When this scale was sanctioned in 1876, the "draws" of the machine were a proxy for the length of the product, since the hypothetical length of a draw (63 inches) was chosen to yield easily one hank of yarn. Textile Mercury , Nov. 12, 1910, p. 401. Despite the emphasis on the tangible length, the real process of labor consisted in giving the yarn "twists."

[49] For references to nineteenth-century German commentators who viewed piece rates as an index of the expenditure of labor power, not as a payment for output, see Schmiede and Schudlich, op. cit., pp. 202–203.

[50] Therefore I break with William Reddy's simple opposition between payment for "labor" versus its "outcome." The Rise of Market Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 124. His distinction is richly suggestive but ultimately insensitive to the new meaning that the conveyance of a product may take on in a capitalist order.

[51] Of course, not all British workers were paid by piece rates. But their product could still serve as the sign for abstract labor. In fact, in many trades customary quotas for the amount of work to turn in per day meant that there was no functional difference between piece rates and a timed wage. John Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750–1850 (London: Longman, 1986), p. 121; James Jaffe, The Struggle for Market Power: Industrial Relations in the British Coal Industry, 1800–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 2 and sources cited there; David F. Schloss, Methods of Industrial Remuneration (London: Williams and Norgate, 1892), pp. 14–16, 20; J. E. Prosser, Piece-Rate, Premium and Bonus (London: Williams & Norgate, 1919), p. 1. Overtime, too, could be equated with the delivery of an extra quota of products: Select Committee on Master and Servant , PP 1865 (370) VIII, testimony of Alexander Campbell, p. 16. Even the dockworkers could view their employers as purchasers of a kind of tangible "product." When dockworkers began a "go-slow" movement in protest against low wages, they justified their poor work by saying, "If the employers of labor or purchasers of goods refuse to pay for the genuine article, they must be content with shoddy and veneer." Report of the National Union of Dock Laborers in Great Britain and Ireland , 1891, cited in Webb and Webb, op. cit., p. 307.

Both ways of conceiving the relation between labor and its product interpret a paradox in the employment relation. The worker's labor may generate the value of the finished product, but this labor, since it consists of an ongoing activity, is not a thing and has itself no exchange value. The weaver's action at the loom, because it does not exist before or after its appearance in the world, cannot as such be either sold or appropriated—although the products of this activity can be. "Labor," Marx wrote, "is the substance and immanent measure of value, but has itself no value."^[52] Labor as a visible activity produces but lacks value; labor as a commodity in the moment of exchange has value but does not produce it.^[53] To order the disparity between an action without exchange value and its sterling product, the Germans and the British drew upon different fictions. The British, with pay by length, first drew systematic (linear) relations between types of whole cloth and then projected these distinctions onto the weaving activity. The Germans took the use of the labor power, or the execution of the activity, as the basis for defining the relative values of fabrics. They did things the other way around from the British: they drew systematic (linear) differences between types of labor and then projected them onto the cloth.

If this interpretation of the contrasting structures of the German and British scales seems incautious, we need only consult the spontaneous evidence offered by the specimens' labels. As early as the 1830s, the tables posted in Germany for remunerating weavers bore the heading "Wage Tariff" or "Wage Table," even when the employees were hand weavers.^[54] In 1849, German textile workers called their proposal for a piece-rate system a "Table of Values for Labor Power."^[55] The scales for weavers in Britain were entitled "Statement of Prices" or "Weavers' Prices." The phrases hid nothing: the term price could just as well have designated the requisition of a product.

To explain the divergence in the structures of the weaving scales, let us start with solutions that treat the methods as naturally prompted adaptations to the immediate circumstances of production. We do not thereby privilege utili-

[52] Marx, Kapital , op. cit., pp. 65, 559.

[53] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963 [1847]), p. 58. See also Allen Oakley, Marx's Critique of Political Economy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), Volume I, p. 118.

[54] Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, Protokoll, Verein der arbeitnehmenden Webermeister, August 11, 1848; Eugen Hecking, 100 Jahre J. Hecking (Neuenkirchen: self-published, 1958); Staatsarchiv Dresden, company records of Nottroth Textilfabrik.

[55] Die Verbrüderung , February 9, 1849, pp. 151–152. The list in question was for the spinning branch.

tarian reasoning and assign the symbolic a residual explanatory burden. Hypotheses that reduce social practice to a "rational" adjustment to the economic environment are neither more fundamental nor more parsimonious than arguments that accept the constitutive role of culture. But their inadequacies throw into relief the advantages of a cultural explanation.

The simplest conjecture, perhaps, is that the differences in the concepts used to construct the scales derived from the implements used to measure cloth. By the turn of the century, it had become a common technique in German firms to install on each loom a so-called Schussuhr , or "pick clock," which registered the number of shuttle "shots" as the weavers carried them out.^[56] The weavers then received their pay based upon readings of this device rather than upon an examination of their product.^[57] Pick clocks were virtually absent in Britain before the First World War.^[58] Could the difference between the countries in principles of remuneration have arisen due to the greater readiness or ability of German mill proprietors to install this newfangled gadget? No, because the adoption of pay by shot in the textile factories preceded the experimental introduction of the pick clock in the 1880s.^[59] Despite general reliance on pay by shot in Aachen, for example, the Free Textile Workers' Union reported in 1902 that only one company there had installed pick clocks.^[60] Of the ninety weaving mills which paid by shot that were represented at a national conference of German stuff weavers in 1910, only thirty-five had mounted these gadgets.^[61] The German system of pay was not, therefore, originally adopted to take advantage of this mechanical innovation.

Pay by shot did not simplify the determination or recording of wages. Before the introduction of the pick clock, calculating the number of shots in

[56] Der Textil-Arbeiter , Number 28, 1898, later quoted in the September 1, 1905, edition of this journal.

[57] Centralblatt für die Textil-Industrie , 1894, Nr. 13, p. 157, and Nr. 43, p. 499; Die Textil-Zeitung , September 23, 1907.

[58] See below, Chapter Eleven, pp. 492–93.

[59] Mill owners concerned about demonstrating to workers that the cloth was measured correctly had their gauges for length certified by authorities for their accuracy, although weavers were paid per thousand shots. See Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , June 1, 1877, p. 493; Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , Volume 18, 1886, pp. 31–32; Anton Gruner, Mechanische Webereipraxis sowie Garnnumerierungen und Garnumrechnungen (Leipzig: A. Hartleben, 1898).

[60] Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 13, 1902.

[61] Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , August 6, 1910. For the Rhineland, see HSTAD Landratsamt Mönchengladbach 70, p. 204; Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 7, 1910, p. 3; my interview with Herr Noisten, Euskirchen, born 1898.

the manufactured cloth was complicated. The German takers-in or production accountants did not measure individually the tens of thousands of shots woven across the warp. They began with only the length or weight of the cloth and a sample of the density, in shots per centimeter. Then they reckoned backwards to arrive at the true object of analysis, the number of shots the weaver had cranked out.^[62] Less often, the shots put in were measured by the weft yarn used up, and weavers' pay tables were based on the length of this weft yarn consumed.^[63] In any case, the German system did not reduce the requisite calculations.^[64] To the contrary, one factory manager who said that pay by thousand shots was conceptually superior also complained that

[62] Landesarchiv Potsdam, Company Records of F. F. Koswig, notebook "Weberei-Löhne"; Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , June 1, 1877, p. 493; Centralblatt für die Textil-Industrie , 1878, Nr. 21, p. 241; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , May 11, 1901, Eupen; Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 7, 1910, Aachen, p. 3; Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, Rep. V, Cap. II, Nr. 109, March 28, 1848; Nicolas Reiser, Die Betriebs- und Warenkalkulation für Textilstoffe (Leipzig: A. Felix, 1903), p. 79. It is critical to remember that this practice of reckoning backwards means that some piece-rate scales are described in the sources as pay by meter or pay per piece, whereas the conceptual basis for the allocation of payment was pay per shot. For examples of this, see Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, Gau Brandenburg, Die Lohn- und Arbeitsbedingungen in der Niederlausitzer Tuchindustrie 1908–1909 (Berlin: Franz Kotzke, 1909), p. 29; Otto Löbner, Praktische Erfahrungen aus der Tuch- und Buckskin-Fabrikation (Grünberg, Schl.: Das Deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe, 1892), pp. 659–661; Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , 1910/1911, Nr. 65, p. 1126, and 1912, Nr. 43, p. 955; Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 26, 1911, p. 166, Sommerfeld; Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie , 1910, Nr. 2, "Lohntarife für die Buntweberei," Der Textil-Arbeiter , August 9, 1901, p. 1; Der Textil-Arbeiter , December 30, 1904; Der Textil-Arbeiter , September 1, 1905. Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz n, Rep. A, Kapitel IXa, Nr. 165, p. 97, 1905: "Die Ausrechnung des eingewebten Schusses geschieht nach Massgabe der Kettenlänge"; Der Textil-Arbeiter , Plauen, June 21, 1901, Firma Meinhold und Sohn cites pay by meter, then reckons by pay per shot; likewise, Der Textil-Arbeiter , November 15, 1901, Hohenstein-Ernstthal; Der Textil-Arbeiter , Elsterberg, April 25, 1902, citing pay per meter, and May 9 issue, showing pay per shot system in effect; Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 14, 1902, pay per shot getting converted to pay per piece; Stadtarchiv Augsburg, File 1670, firm of Nagler & Sohn. German weavers who were remunerated per Stück sometimes calculated changes in the work executed by thousand shots inserted in the piece: Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , November 19, 1910, Coesfeld.

[63] Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz n, Rep. A, Kap. IXa, Nr. 165, 1903–1905, p. 82; Staatsarchiv Weimar, Reuss älterer Linie, Reuss Landratsamt Greiz Nr. 2524, September, 1882. Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 22, 1907, Zwickau; Der Textil-Arbeiter , November 17, 1905; Der Textil-Arbeiter , July 14, 1911, pp. 219–220, Reichenbach.

[64] Nor did pay by shot make it easier for the Germans than for the British to calculate remuneration for short or "odd cuts" of fabric. Although the British scales were formulated on the basis of a fixed length of cloth, they graduated pay or prorated it for lengths that were shorter or longer than standard. (See Calderdale Archives, JM646, and pay scales listed above.) Therefore an analyst could not seek an explanation for the difference in pay systems by arguing that the German system represented a better method for handling variation in the lengths of the warps assigned to weavers.

it required more intricate computations.^[65] Yet the adoption of the method even among small woolen firms in Aachen and elsewhere which had negligible clerical staffs shows that company investments in accounting do not clarify the reasons for the diffusion of pay by shot in Germany.

Might it have been easier for the weavers to verify the calculation of their receipts under one system or the other? Weavers in both countries complained that they could not easily verify the length of the cloth they wove. The Germans' adoption of pay by shot could not have been intended to alleviate this problem, since they reckoned backwards to the shots after measuring the fabric's length. Often employers and workers even cited wages per meter of cloth turned in, when the evaluation of the value of a meter depended on the analysis of the shots. What is more, many German firms continued to invest in apparatuses which their takers-in used for measuring the length of the cloth, just like the gadgets used in Britain, even after these German companies had converted to pay by shot.^[66] The new system of pay did not result from technical convenience or forced adaptation to the physical instruments of calibration.

The divergent principles of the piece-rate systems could not have influenced the weavers' incentive to work. In both countries, once a weaver had a warp in the loom, the ratio of earnings to the cloth turned out remained constant whether the weaver completed the warp quickly or slowly. The marginal returns to effort in a given time period could diverge in the two countries between densities of cloth, not on a given piece of cloth mounted in the loom. Nor did the divergent construction of the German and British schedules lead to differences in the distribution of earnings among weavers in the two countries. True, when one converts the British piece rates to the German dimension of thought, one finds that British weavers earned less on the middle ranges of cloth density in comparison with either endpoint of the British scale than did German weavers on the middle ranges of cloth density in comparison with either endpoint of the German scale. That this formal incongruity created real differences between Germany and Britain in the distribution of earnings among weavers seems unlikely, however, for the range of fabric densities encompassed by the tables varied by company and by town. In other words, German weavers on middle densities of cloth did not always earn more than

[65] Löbner, op. cit., pp. 658–662. For Grünberg, Silesia, Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , 1892, pp. 659–661.

[66] Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 3, 1905; September 1, 1905, Euskirchen; November 17, 1905, Sommerfeld.

those on middle densities in Britain, because the range of fabrics covered by each scale, and therefore what counted as the "middle," varied from scale to scale. Within the same town, the endpoint of one piece-rate chart might be the midpoint of the next. In the aggregate, the design of the schedules did not have an appreciable effect upon the distribution of earnings.

In a word, the difference between the principles adopted in Germany and in Britain cannot be explained by the ease or efficiency with which the piece-rate structures served the function of appropriating labor for a wage. The two systems served this purpose equally well; they differed, not in their material function, but in their intelligible form. If there were no concrete obstacles in the immediate environment of the labor process that prevented the British from paying weavers per shot of the shuttle like the Germans, could the difference in pay systems reflect nothing more than the lingering effect of business factors that had operated in the past? The utilitarian arguments considered so far attend only to contemporaneous settings. Suppose institutional inertia had frozen into place pay methods that conformed to the necessities of an earlier period?

Before the rise of the factory system, German weavers who worked at home had their remuneration calculated by a variety of payment systems, including the fabric's weight and, in some instances, its length, just as did their counterparts in Britain.^[67] The principle of pay by shot prevailed in Germany contemporaneously with the transition from the putting-out system to factory production.^[68] Could this endorsement of pay by shot have reflected the economic conditions under which the German factories initially emerged? By this kind of diachronic reasoning, the British might have transplanted the format of the handweaving scales into the newborn factories, where they took permanent root in collective understandings between employers' and workers' unions; whereas the Germans, who founded their factories later, could have started off with more "modern" thinking, shorn of the legacy of mercantile capitalism. This speculative reasoning merits consideration but collides with the evidentiary record.

[67] See also Rolf Paas, "Die Beeinflussung der sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Lage der Weber durch die Mechanisierung der deutschen Textilindustrie," diss., Universität Köln, 1961, pp. 56–57; Karl Emsbach, Die soziale Betriebsverfassung der rheinischen Baumwollindustrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1982), pp. 178–180; Reiser, op. cit., p. 78.

[68] For an early example of a factory scale, entitled "Machine Labor," that illustrates the characteristic German logic of linearity per thousand shots and cloth density, see Chemnitzer Freie Presse , June 1, 1872. For reference to another pay system established during the 1870s based on the total shots, see Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie , 1914, Nr. 11, p. 273.

To begin, comparative logic can rule out conjectures based on the timing of development. The Yorkshire woolen trade, unlike the precocious cotton districts of Lancashire, mechanized production no earlier than did many firms in regions of Germany such as the Wuppertal.^[69] When the Germans did mechanize, they passed through the same sequence of development as the British, moving from an extensive network of small manufactories and of home weaving under the putting-out system to a full-fledged factory system.^[70] The Germans adopted pay by shot whether they set up factories in regions such as Aachen, where small manufactories with handlooms preceded the factory system, or in regions such as urban Mönchengladbach or rural Silesia, where the path of development usually led directly from home weaving to factories.^[71] Therefore an analyst cannot explain the national differences in pay systems either by the timing of development or by the forms of the textile labor process that preceded mechanized production. In some areas the shift to pay by shot preceded the development of factories. In the areas around Aachen and in Berlin, for example, it appeared in artisanal workshops for handweavers during the 1860s, before these shops gave way to large factories with power looms.^[72] The change in methods of pay did not simply mirror changes on the shop floor itself. The close resemblance in the products and markets of firms in Aachen and Huddersfield assures us that no technical factor in Germany, which was absent in Yorkshire, spurred the factories in Aachen to move to pay by shot at an early date.

Nor can one attribute the difference in pay systems to the social origins or acquired business knowledge of the pioneering textile entrepreneurs who founded the earliest factories. As in Britain, so in Germany the largest portion of early mill owners had played a role as middlemen in the putting-

[69] See Chapter One, at footnote 8, above.

[70] Maxine Berg et al., Manufacture in Town and Country Before the Factory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jürgen Schlumbohm, Industrialisierung vor der Industrialisierung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1977).

[71] Herbert Kisch, "The Textile Industries in Silesia and the Rhineland: A Comparative Study in Industrialization," Journal of Economic History Volume 19, No. 4 (December 1959), pp. 541–564.

[72] Reiser, op. cit., p. 78. In 1857 the weavers in Greiz, although they were not wage workers, calculated the thousands of shots of the loom executed daily in order to justify a certain fee. Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, a Rep. A, Kap. XXI/2c, Nr. 400, Petition of the Guild of Linen and Stuff Weavers of Greiz, May 20, 1857. Workers' remuneration was calculated by thousand shots in the small, cut-rate weaving shops that lived by contracts for quick orders when larger factories were swamped. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , May 26, 1900, Eupen.

out system or had operated workshops for the dyeing, finishing, or fulling of cloth. They had gained an understanding of the organization of trade as mediators between home workers and merchants.^[73] The assiduous research of François Crouzet, among others, shows that few of the heads of leading merchant concerns in Britain became factory employers, compared to the preponderance of small workshop owners and of putters-out who had organized the day-to-day operations of domestic production.^[74] Such findings make it implausible to surmise that British factory practices based on the appropriation of materialized labor were handed down from the conceptions of employers who had started out as mere traders in finished goods and remained attached to this outlook.^[75] The factory pioneers in Britain had the experience of operating small manufactories or of acting as "manufactur-

[73] Pat Hudson, The Genesis of Industrial Capital (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 75–76; Anthony Howe, The Cotton Masters, 1830–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 8; H. Wutzmer, "Die Herkunft der industriellen Bourgeoisie Preussens in den vierziger Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Hans Mottek et al., editors, Studien zur Geschichte der industriellen Revolution in Deutschland (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1960), pp. 146 ff.; Emsbach, op. cit., pp. 343 ff.; Horst Blumberg, Die deutsche Textilindustrie in der industriellen Revolution (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1965), pp. 133 ff.; Gerhard Adelmann, "Die wirtschaftlichen Führungsschichten der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Baumwoll- und Leinenindustrie von 1850 bis zum ersten Weltkrieg," in Herbert Helbig, Führungskräfte der Wirtschaft im 19. Jahrhundert , Teil II, 1790–1914 (Limburg: C. A. Starke, 1977); Horst Beau, Das Leistungswissen des frühindustriellen Unternehmertums in Rheinland und Westfalen (Köln: Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, 1959), pp. 61–62; Friedrich Zunkel, Der Rheinisch-Westfälische Unternehmer 1834–1879 (Köln: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1962), p. 26; Erich Dittrich, "Zur sozialen Herkunft des sächsischen Unternehmertums," in H. Kretzschmar, editor, Neues Archiv für sächsische Geschichte und Altertumskunde , Volume 63 (Dresden: Baensch-Druckerei, 1943), pp. 147 ff.; Wolfgang Uhlmann, "Die Konstituierung der Chemnitzer Bourgeoisie während der Zeit der bürgerlichen Umwälzung von 1800 bis 1871," Ph.D. diss., Pädagogische Hochschule Dresden, 1988, pp. 26, 55.

With the exception of those in upper Silesia, the landowners in Germany who were compensated for the loss of feudal rights invested their receipts in agriculture, not in private factories. Harald Winkel, Die Ablösungskapitalien aus der Bauernbefreiung in West- und Süddeutschland (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1968), pp. 151–152, 160–161.

[74] "I was brought up as a merchant," said Benjamin Gott, the founder of the first large woolen factory in Yorkshire, "and became a manufacturer." Cited in Sidney Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), p. 30. As a man of commerce who had branched out from a very large merchant house, however, Gott was atypical. François Crouzet, The First Industrialists: The Problem of Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 106–107, 109–110; Katrina Honeyman, Origins of Enterprise (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), p. 81.

[75] As mechanized production became widespread, Yorkshire manufacturers rarely occupied themselves with merchanting. Gerald Hurst, Closed Chapters (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1942), p. 3. In Bradford, worsted marketing was dominated by foreign, especially German, agents. Eric M. Sigsworth, Black Dyke Mills (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1958), p. 65.

ers," as the directors of the networks of domestic production were called in their day. Conversely, in the German setting both contemporaries and modern historians have emphasized the contributions of small traders and merchants to the founding of textile mills.^[76] The industrial commentator Alphons Thun complained in 1879 that German factory managers on the lower Rhine had commercial skills but less knowledge of production technology than their British counterparts.^[77] We need not swallow Thun's judgment whole, but the accumulated evidence casts doubt on the hypothesis that the social origins of German businessmen led to a greater focus on production than on relations of exchange.

Still another problem arises with an argument based on the original setting of development. An explanation based on the retention of assumptions about piece-rate schedules from the putting-out system into the late factory age takes it for granted that the principles of the schedules were immutable. What prevented the alteration of the lists? At many Yorkshire mills the weavers were so unorganized that employers could choose their own rules for defining the product and for establishing remuneration.^[78] Indeed, some owners chose not to release a pay table at all, but announced the value of a particular piece, as they fancied, after the weaver had completed the job.^[79] In these cases, obviously, there were no barriers to change in the reckoning of pay. In most regions of Yorkshire, the piece-rate tables

[76] For the wool industry of the lower Rhine, see Franz Decker, Die betriebliche Sozialordnung der Dürener Industrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Köln: Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, 1965), pp. 107, 109–110. Elsewhere: Jürgen Kocka, "Entrepreneurs and Managers in German Industrialization," in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe , Volume VII, Part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 517–518, 521; Jürgen Kocka, Die Angestellten in der deutschen Geschichte, 1850–1980 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981), p. 45.

[77] Alphons Thun, Die Industrie am Niederrhein und ihre Arbeiter (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1879), Erster Theil, p. 39, and Zweiter Theil, pp. 198, 249–250. For a parallel opinion, Erich Thal, Die Entstehung und Entwicklung der Halbwoll- und Wollindustrie im M.-Gladbacher Bezirk bis zum Jahre 1914 (Mönchengladbach: W. Hütter, 1926), p. 116.

[78] In the Huddersfield woolen district, the weavers' union founded to conduct the 1883 strike could count only 700 members by 1888. James Hinton, Labour and Socialism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), p. 56. By 1891 enrollment had risen to 2,000 members, still less than a quarter of the weavers. PP 1892 XXXV, p. 199. In the Bradford district, only one-sixteenth of the weavers were in the union on the eve of the great Manningham Mills strike. PP 1892 XXXV, pp. 222, 225. On the dismal history of unionization in worsted textiles, see J. Reynolds and K. Laybourn, "The Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford," International Review of Social History Volume 20, Part 3 (1975), p. 316.

[79] Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 230; Yorkshire Factory Times , November 1, 1889, Marsh, p. 4; January 10, 1890, Huddersfield; Sept. 18, 1891, Worth Valley, p. 5; May 20, 1892, Mirfield; April 21, 1905, Dudley Hill; and November 22, 1901, p. 4.

were negotiated separately in each factory. In Lancashire, to be sure, the power of a well-organized union movement which regulated the piece rates for weavers made it cumbersome to introduce modifications. But the Lancashire weavers declared their readiness to accept new means of calculating pay, so long as the "aggregate wage fund should not be lowered."^[80] The absence of insuperable institutional obstacles to changes in the derivation of rates suggests the operation of another principle: namely, the effect of the lived enactment of the tenet that labor was conveyed as it was embodied in a visible product.

The assumptions about labor that were implicit in the scales were reproduced endogenously by the scales' quotidian use. Not all workers were educated enough to compute exactly the pence or pfennigs owed them for cloth of a given design. No matter: through the scales' material operation they received the ideal definition of the sale of labor. Facta non verba : the principles were communicated in action by signifying practice, not by fine phrases. But in ordinary conversation, when British weavers from different factories described their pay scales to one another, they cited the pay for a density at a fixed length, called the "basis," and then stated by how much the pay rose or fell for each increase or decrease in picks per inch.^[81] When the British weavers suffered a reduction in rates, they said the factory employer was "pulling pence off" the picks, as if the remuneration inhered in the cloth.^[82] Whereas British workers thought in terms of exchanging the length of cloth for payment, the German workers could assert that pay by length was "categorically erroneous."^[83] Workers in

[80] Cotton Factory Times , January 29, 1904, p. 1. See also Chapter Eleven, footnotes 41–43.

[81] Yorkshire Factory Times , October 11, 1889, and November 22, 1889. In Yeadon the weavers used a "Ready Reckoner" device, 500 copies of which were distributed by the union, to verify their piece rates. Archive of General Union of Dyers, Bleachers, and Textile Workers, Bradford, Minutes, Factory Workers' Union, March 14, 1894. When workers and owners used the phrase, for example, "six pence per pick" to calculate pay, this referred not to each of the picks the weaver wove in but to earnings for so many picks per inch, given a fixed length of cloth. Their language shows that they took the principle of pay by length as a given that regulated their comparisons. See, for example, the wage notes of Bairstow firm, Leeds District Archives, in which listing of picks means picks per inch; Yorkshire Factory Times , November 22, 1889; and testimony of Herbert Foster, partner of Fosters of Queensbury, regarding payment "for the picks," Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 270.

[82] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 31, 1890, Bingley.

[83] Der Textil-Arbeiter , July 14, 1911, pp. 219–220. In the Mönchengladbach region weavers asserted that piece rates for the same fabric at various firms could be compared and standardized only on the basis of pay per thousand shots, overlooking the alternative used in British districtwide lists. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , May 16, 1903.

Germany sometimes calculated their output in terms of the number of shuttle motions completed per day, without reference to the length of fabric.^[84] They complained about the intensification of work quotas not in terms of cloth delivered, but in terms of the additional shots executed.^[85] The secret code embedded in practice became the workers' language of debate and deliberation.

The responses of German weavers to the transition to the principle of earnings per shot in the earliest days of the factory have left no traces. But the discussions of commercial experts, preserved in business newspapers, show that employers preferred this mode of piece rates because it captured the process of carrying out the work. Textile periodicals in the 1870s took pay by shot as a commonplace or described the abandonment of pay by length as a routine occurrence.^[86] They spun words around that which practice had already conceived.^[87] These journal articles did not mention any instrumental advantage from the shift, but they emphasized that the system seemed logical. Spokespersons for pay by shot considered this method more appropriate once producers had adopted the idea that weavers in the factory sold the disposition over the conversion of labor to labor power. As one proponent summed up his case, only remuneration by shots really paid the weaver "for the quantity of executed labor."^[88] When the Chamber of Commerce for the area of Aachen officially rejected pay by length in 1884, it reasoned that pay by shot offered the only "rational" system of measuring labor.^[89] Only with this new method, the chairman reported, "is the weaver paid for what he has really carried out."^[90] After the turn of the century, a factory owner from Gera, Saxony,

[84] Christlicher Arbeiterfreund , March 17, 1899. See also Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Hauptvorstand/Arbeiterinnensekretariat, op. cit., p. 25.

[85] Stadtarchiv Cottbus, AII 3.3 b, 34, meeting of February 8, 1903. For instance, weavers in Coesfeld complained that a new pattern required five thousand shots per piece more than the old. Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , Nov. 19, 1910.

[86] Centralblatt für die Textil-Industrie , 1876, Nr. 48, p. 863, Nr. 20, p. 226, and 1878, Nr. 21, p. 241. For an example of an owner mentioning his conversion during the 1870s to pay per thousand shots in plain weaving, see Centralblatt für die Textilindustrie , 1879, p. 226.

[87] In Chemnitz, weavers received payment by the length of weft thread inserted—a measure of the shots—as early as 1848. Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, Tarif of June 1, 1848.

[88] Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie Vol. 14, Nr. 65 (1910/11), p. 1126.

[89] 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. 10.

[90] Reiser, op. cit., pp. 78–79. By 1909, pay by length was derided in Aachen as an "antiquated system." Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , July 24, 1909. See the factory ordinance of the firm Joseph Kaltenbach, dating from before 1890, HSTAD, Regierung Aachen 1633, and DerTextil-Arbeiter , January 7, 1910, p. 3. For neighboring Eupen, see Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 77, 2525, Nr. 3, Band 1, pp. 6 ff., 1899, and Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , February 4, 1905. For neighboring Würselen, see Christliche Arbeiterin , December 7, 1907.

reiterated the causes for the triumph of pay by shot. He said in 1905 that among the city's factories, only one continued to pay weavers by cloth length. "The [length of] filled-in warp cannot be taken for the performance of labor by the worker," he explained.^[91] In sum, earnings by shot seemed to the employers more coherent, not necessarily more profitable.

By no means did pay by shot become a universal custom in Germany before the First World War. A great many instances can be found of German mills continuing to pay weavers by the piece or by weight. In borderlands such as the Münsterland, where many factory owners before the First World War were of Dutch origin, pay by shot emerged less frequently.^[92] Elsewhere, employers whose mills manufactured only coarse, undyed varieties of cloth sometimes did not specify picks per inch to the weaver or measure the total picks, but simply weighed the product and paid the weaver for putting a minimum weight of weft into the warp. Yet to varying degrees, pay by shot encompassed the major types of weaves and materials: wool, linen, cotton, and silk.^[93] Even if payment by shot was not universal in

[91] Der Textil-Arbeiter , September 1, 1905.

[92] Germany, Jahres-Berichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe und Bergbehörden, 1905 (Berlin: R. v. Deckers Verlag, 1906), p. 265. For an instance of an important citywide pay scale that paid weavers by length in Meerane as the British did, see Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Glauchau, Nr. 393, 1902, Meerane, pp. 2 ff. (Yet this district converted to pay for the insertion of weft by 1919: Archiv des Volkseigenen Betriebs Palla, Firma Klemm & Co., Nr. 295, "Kalkulationen und Lohntarife.") Pay per shot was also less likely to prevail in German towns that lacked a guild tradition during the eighteenth century, for reasons that in Chapter Six will become obvious. In the silk capital of Krefeld, for instance, where weavers' guilds were not a fixture of the eighteenth century, piece payments based on length per se predominated. Stadtarchiv Krefeld, Bestand 4, Nr. 1117, Königsberger & Co., circa 1906. On the absence of guilds in Krefeld, Franz Wischer, "Die Organisationsbestrebungen der Arbeiter in der Krefelder Seiden- und Samtindustrie," Ph.D. diss., Universität Köln, 1920, p. 13.

[93] By way of illustration, cotton: Stadtarchiv Gera, "Mindest-Akkordlohn-Tarif," 1905; Deutscher Textilarbeiter-Verband, Fiale Neumünster, Jahresbericht für das Geschäftsjahr 1912 (Hamburg: Verlagsgesellschaft deutscher Konsumvereine, 1913), p. 10; Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband; Jahrbuch des deutschen Textilarbeiterverbandes, 1911 (Berlin: Karl Hübsch, 1912), p. 79; Der Textil-Arbeiter , July 14, 1911, Reichenbach and October 27, 1911, Mönchengladbach; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , March 18, 1905, Schneiders & Irmen; Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , 1910/1911, Nr. 65, p. 1126 and Hermann Hölters, "Die Arbeiterverhältnisse in der niederrheinischen Baumwollindustrie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der männlichen Arbeiter," diss. Heidelberg, 1911, p. 24. Cotton mixtures: HSTAD Regierung Düsseldorf 24706, 1910, pp. 254–255; Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, 30 Jahre Kampf der Textilarbeiter von Greiz und Umgegend um bessere Arbeits- und Lohnbedingungen (Greiz: Verlag des Deutschen Textilarbeiterverbandes, n.d.), p. 28; Deutscher Textilar-beiterverband, Jahrbuch des deutschen Textilarbeiterverbandes, 1911 (Berlin: Karl Hübsch, 1912), p. 79; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , June 6, 1914. For silk: Der Textil-Arbeiter Nov. 15, 1901, Hohenstein-Ernsthal; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , August 5, 1911, Süchteln. For pay by shot in linen, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , September 6, 1905.

Germany, it was predominant there, while it was unknown in Britain.^[94] In national surveys of German stuff and wool firms in 1910, 75 to 85 percent were found to pay weavers per thousand shots or by a correlatethe length of weft used to insert the shots.^[95] The prevalence of payment by shot in Germany marked the outstanding difference between the philosophies of

[94] For Aachen, Merseburg Rep 120 BB VII Fach 3 Nr. 32, pp. 119–125, 1895; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , September 25, 1909. For Hämmern, Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 16, 1900. For Aggertal, Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , April 8, 1911. For northern Germany, Der Textil-Arbeiter , Neumünster, June 13, 1902. For firms in Euskirchen, HSTAD Landratsamt Euskirchen 139, 1899, pp. 152 ff; HSTAD Landratsamt Euskirchen 270, July 9, 1906; Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 17, 1912; Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , May 4, 1912. For firms in Mönchengladbach, see: HSTAD Landratsamt Mönchengladbach 70, p. 204; Landratsamt Mönchengladbach 99, pp. 420 ff.; Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 1c 913, July 2, 1912 report and Bestand 5/660 Schippers & Daniels, October 26, 1910 and Gebrüder Brandts, August 29, 1910; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , March 18, 1905, Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , May 11, 1907, April 1, 1905, and May 22, 1909; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter for Reuter und Paas, May 16, 1903; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , January 23, 1909, Busch & Florenz; August 5, 1911, Joest & Pauen; Der Textil-Arbeiter , November 25, 1904. For Eupen, Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , December 9, 1899; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , February 4, 1905; Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 77, 2525, No. 3, Band 1, January, 1899, pp. 6 ff. For eastern Germany, see Stadtarchiv Cottbus, All 3. 3 b, 33, December 12, 1895; Stadtarchiv Cottbus, All 3. 3 b, Nr. 34, February 22, 1903, and January 20, 1904; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , March 20, 1909, July 10, 1909, and November 20, 1909, Forst (Lausitz); Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 16, 1902, and June 13, 1902, Muskau (Oberlausitz); Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 20, 1905, Chemnitz; Stadtarchiv Crimmitschau, Rep. III, Kap. IX, Lit. B, Nr. 23, 1901, p. 106; Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 7, 1902, and February 10, 1905, Spremberg; Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 18, 1902, Görlitz; Der Textil-Arbeiter , September 8, 1905, Luckenwalde; Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 24, 1902, Nowawes; Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 24, 1902, Cottbus; Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 21, 1901, Plauen; Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 7, 1901, Falkenstein (Voigtland); Der Textil-Arbeiter , Grossenhain, May 24, 1901; Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 24, 1901, Elsterberg; Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 19, 1909, Sommerfeld; Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, Tariferläuterungen und Statistisches: Bearbeitet nach Aufzeichnungen der Tarifkommission im Sächsisch-Thüringischen Textilbezirk (Gera: Alban Bretschneider, 1909), p. 15; Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz n, Rep. A, Kap. IXa, Nr. 165, 1905, p. 95; Stadtarchiv Crimmitshau, Rep. III, Kap. IX, Lit. B, Nr. 23, Nov. 16, 1901; Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , June 1, 1877, p. 122, Forst; Stadtarchiv Werdau, Rep. II, Kap. 4, Nr. 77, Band 2, 1907, p. 13; Märkische Volksstimme , Dec. 3, 1905, Neumünster. For southern Germany, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 16, 1902, Nagold (Württemberg); Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 23, 1905, Lambrecht, dating to at least 1900; Der Textil-Arbeiter , December 30, 1904, Schiltach (Baden).

[95] Of 115 stuff and wool mills polled at a national union conference in 1910, 98 paid by shot. Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , August 6, 1910. Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Die Tuch-Konferenz in Crimmitschau 26. und 27. Februar 1910: Unterhandlungs-Bericht (Berlin: Carl Hübsch, 1910), p. 13. A regional survey of 122 weaving mills in the Niederlausitz during 1908 found that 87 percent paid weavers per thousand shots. Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, Gau Brandenburg, op. cit., p. 30.

paying weavers presented in the two countries' business press.^[96] "Under any circumstances," concluded a German textile journal in 1910, "the wage calculation for fabric by a certain number of weft threads is more proper than by a piece of fabric or by a certain number of pieces."^[97]

If the contrasting principles embedded in the operation of German and British piece-rate scales can be explained neither by the mute exigencies of the labor process nor by the legacy of earlier changes at the point of production, where are we to turn for an understanding of their development and significance? To construct weavers' piece-rate scales, managers in both Germany and Britain could not just measure the effort or time taken to weave a single type of cloth. They had to come up with a way of equating the different kinds of labor that went into different kinds of cloth. They could not accomplish this by empirical tests, because weaving was neither a simple process of tending a machine nor a matter of applying one's skill and energy directly as an artisan would, without the interposition of an unmastered technology. Either of these ideal types of production facilitates the empirical measurement of labor in terms of time or, what may amount to the same thing, in terms of the goods it takes a certain amount of time to produce. Weaving, by contrast, consisted of an interaction between the worker, unreliable tools, quirky raw materials, and weather, to turn out a large and changing array of patterns. In a single day a large mill could have over sixty types of cloth in its looms.^[98] The enormous variety of patterns and the interaction of such shifting and unmeas-

[96] See supporting comments in Die Textil-Zeitung , September 23, 1907, and February 27, 1905. For other examples of managers taking pay by shot as the natural method, see Die Textil-Zeitung , 1904, Nr. 28, p. 948; Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , 1910/1911, Nr. 65, p. 1126; Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1924), p. 185; Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , 1912, Nr. 2, p. 31, and 1912, Nr. 3, p. 52 and 1913, Nr. 13, p. 312; Friedrich Leitner, Die Selbstkosten-berechnung industrieller Betriebe (3d ed. Frankfurt am Main: J. D. Sauerländer, 1908), p. 179. The Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie (1914, Nr. 3, p. 82), Centralblatt für die Textil-Industrie (1893, Nr. 10, p. 147), and Christlicher Arbeiterfreund (March 17, 1899) measured the output of a weaver per day in terms of shots instead of length of product. See also Rolf Paas, op. cit., p. 57.

[97] Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , 1910/1911, Nr. 65, p. 1126. The Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie also recommended pay by shot as "best," without reference to pick clocks: 1910, Nr. 2.

[98] Richard Marsden, Cotton Weaving: Its Development, Principles, and Practice (London: George Bell & Sons, 1895), p. 471; N. K. Scott, "The Architectural Development of Cotton Mills in Preston and District," Master's thesis, University of Liverpool, 1952, note volume, p. 16. A mill of medium size might turn out three to four hundred types of cloth in the course of a year, Max Weber found. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze , p. 156. Also Die Textil-Zeitung , January 19, 1897, "Sprechsaal."

urable factors caused managers in both countries to declare it impossible to gauge from experience or trials the time taken to weave each type of fabric.^[99] The weavers themselves scarcely considered such an empirical procedure.^[100] British weavers sometimes learned to regret the imprecision: some of them who struck work and succeeded in obtaining a piece-rate schedule of their own design found that the scales they had expected to offer an improvement in rewards led instead to an appreciable decline in compensation.^[101] In short, the environment was so chaotic that it could not be mirrored in a coherent scale.

Neither lack of attention to the problem nor a naive wish for simplicity led economic agents to deploy a linear scheme for equating different kinds of weaving whose execution had never been individually timed, but a preference for quantifying labor on a linear scale did. The piece-rate tables incorporated a striking difference between specifications of labor as a commodity: in Germany, workers were remunerated for the conversion of labor power into a product; in Britain, they sold their labor as it was concretized in a product. This explanation not only suits the immediate evidence, but it also explains a whole constellation of differences between the institutions of German and British textile mills. By proceeding to show that other forms of practice, such as fines imposed on workers for defective cloth, the categories for wage records, and the transfer of jobs between workers in a single factory incarnated disparate views of labor as a commodity, we may enhance the plausibility and plenitude of a cultural explanation.

[99] Centralblatt für die Textilindustrie , 1893, Nr. 12, p. 176. In weaving, managers could not build pay scales by reckoning backwards from the comparative selling prices of the goods in the market, for the patterns of cloth were often produced as unique batch jobs. On the impracticality of pegging piece rates to the market prices of cloth, see J. de L. Mann, "Clothiers and Weavers in Wiltshire During the Eighteenth Century," in L. S. Pressnell, editor, Studies in the Industrial Revolution (London: Athlone Press, University of London, 1960), p. 75.

[100] The variation in weaving time due to circumstances of the moment was "enormous." Victor Böhmert, "Die Methode der Lohnstatistik," Der Arbeiterfreund: Zeitschrift des Central-Vereins in Preussen für das Wohl der arbeitenden Klassen (Berlin: Otto Janke, 1877), pp. 424–46. In 1856 a representative from the board that designed the Macclesfield piece-rate schedules testified that the question of how much time it would take an average weaver to complete a piece of each kind of fabric was never considered. "The question was, what should be paid for a particular article." Report from the Select Committee on Masters and Operatives , PP 1856 (343) XIII, p. 167.

[101] Andrew Bullen, "Pragmatism Versus Principle: Cotton Employers and the Origins of an Industrial Relations System," in J. A. Jowitt and A. J. McIvor, editors, Employers and Labour in the English Textile Industries, 1850–1914 (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 32.

Defining Fines

Remuneration by piece rates confronted managers with a challenge: how could they ensure that weavers driven to increase the quantity of their output also took care to manufacture cloth of adequate quality? Owners in textiles, as in many nineteenth-century enterprises, found it expedient to impose fines for defective goods—or to hold this sanction in reserve—as a deterrent against workers who might otherwise maximize their earnings by focusing on product quantity alone. But the technology of production made this issue more salient in textiles.^[102] The power loom, one of the earliest and inherently clumsiest of mechanical technologies, remained so primitive up to the First World War that under the best conditions it regularly produced defects in the fabric. Managers believed that even well-run machines produced cloth with defects in one out of every ten pieces.^[103] Contemporaries therefore agreed that weavers did not have a responsibility to hand in perfect cloth, only to avoid creating severe irregularities or a greater than usual number of errors. Indeed, German and British employers sometimes introduced tolerance limits for the number of flaws that could appear in a run of cloth before fining began.^[104]

In both countries, the norms for what factory owners might sell to merchants as premier quality and what they had to sell at a discount as "damaged" fluctuated with the business cycle. Since nearly all cloth was to some extent imperfect, the strength of consumer demand at a given moment influenced the stringency of merchants' standards. A merchant could find after making a purchase from the factory owner that a particular piece was too damaged to satisfy customers and would return the piece to the factory for a refund.^[105] Given the indeterminacy of what constituted "bad cloth" in the market, the standard for acceptable quality on the shop floor was estab-

[102] See the inspectors' results in Der Textil-Arbeiter , July 10, 1914, p. 221.

[103] Textile Mercury , August 8, 1908, p. 106. The proportion of defects varied with the complexity of the pattern, the quality of materials, and the stringency of the firm's standards. At the Epe factory of the firm Gebrüder Laurenz, managers declared fewer than 0.5 percent of pieces defective. Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv Dortmund, F61, Nr. 222.

[104] Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Jahrbuch des deutschen Textilarbeiterverbandes, 1913 (Berlin: Karl Hübsch, 1914), p. 113, Aachen; Der Textil-Arbeiter , September 1, 1911, Aachen; Yorkshire Factory Times , January 17, 1890, Halifax; Textile Manufacturer , April 15, 1911, p. 138.

[105] Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , Volume 12, Nr. 6, p. 67. In Britain a large number of "job-merchants" specialized in trading slightly defective goods. Textile Mercury , 1909, p. 64.

lished through never-ending conflict and negotiation between employers and workers. Fining for bad output ranked as one of the concerns uppermost in textile workers' minds.^[106]

The British managers distinguished themselves by sometimes delaying the imposition of a fine for faulty cloth until the effect of the damage had been assessed on the market. They routinely levied a retroactive charge upon the responsible weaver when it finally turned out that a damaged piece fetched a substandard price on the market (in addition to any fines the managers may have levied for faults detected at the moment the weaver handed in the piece). Where the company's cloth examiner was uncertain whether a piece with marginal damage would clear the market, however, he withheld the weaver's wage pending the merchants' inspections. The final deduction might occur many weeks after the weaver had been paid for the piece.^[107] A correspondent from Yorkshire, in an exasperated report on the uncertainty weavers experienced over whether they would receive the full price of a piece of fabric, testified, "I have known weavers wait six months for a piece wage."^[108] Workers at a firm in Brierfeld reported that their employer followed the market rationale to its conclusion. He notified weavers that they had to cover whatever deductions the merchant buyers in Manchester imposed:" One employer has commenced to give up fining workers for faulty cloth," the Cotton Factory Times reported in 1897, "but should anything be deducted from the piece at Manchester, the weaver has to bear the cost."^[109]

Did the British system of delayed penalties for defective output arise to provide a special cloak for arbitrary and irregular exactions? This seems unlikely, since it obviously complicated record-keeping and since employers could raise fines even without demonstrating corresponding losses in the

[106] See the catalog of major grievances, as reported in textile workers' newspapers, in Table 1, Chapter Four below.

[107] Yorkshire Factory Times , July 31, 1891; April 8, 1892, Huddersfield; July 7, 1893, Batley. For Lancashire, see LRO, DDX 1274/6/1, Burnley, September 1, 1900, and November 1, 1900; LRO, DDX 1089/8/1, Preston, April 6, 1907, p. 154, and April 22, 1907, p. 158; Cotton Factory Times , April 1, 1904, Ramsbottom.

[108] Yorkshire Factory Times , November 13, 1891. If a piece was to be mended before going to market, the weaver might receive nothing for it until the repairer completed the job and the cost of the remedy was known. Yorkshire Factory Times , March 21, 1890, Lindley and Marsh. The wage of the mender often came straight out of that of the weaver.

[109] Cotton Factory Times , January 29, 1897, Brierfeld. British fining methods did not sit comfortably with all employers. A manager wrote in the businessmen's forum, the Textile Manufacturer of Manchester, that "the best of workpeople require a certain amount of restraint, but the fining system is a slovenly and careless method of administering it." September 15, 1905, p. 290.

market. If the system arose because the agents believed that the market functioned as the true arbiter of the value of the weaver's labor product in Britain, might weavers have benefited from the system? Did refunds accrue retroactively to weavers for cloth which, contrary to earlier expectations, managed to clear the market? This would indicate that the system followed an impartial logic that was not uniformly disadvantageous to workers. Refunds of punishments were not unheard of, but they seem to have been rare, as one might imagine. The Yorkshire Factory Times reported in 1889 that a weaver in Halifax had received a refund of a cloth fine. The in-house examiner had judged the piece defective, but it later passed muster with the firm's outside distributor.^[110]

In contrast to their British counterparts, German owners made their deductions immediately inside the factory, based on their own judgment and, in some cases, on a posted scale of their invention (Stopf-Tarif ) that codified the withholdings for each variety of damage.^[111] Whereas the British employers set fines by the market evaluation of the product, the German employers set fines by in-house assessment of activity at the point of production. Even when German owners complained that customers had sent cloth back as defective, they did not make retroactive deductions.^[112] The German fining practices may have been influenced by the concepts of German civil law. The civil law book made a distinction between business contracts for the delivery of a product and employment contracts for the offering of a labor service (Dienstvertrag ). Jurists in Germany classified textile workers who received piece rates as persons who offered a "service," even if the remuneration system paid workers by the quantity of output.^[113] This status as an "employee" established the principles for imposing fines: a textile worker "could not be made responsible for defects in the delivered products, only for such, which he committed by reason of gross negligence or malicious intent."^[114] The immediate issue was not

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

[111] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, Regierung Aachen 1634, firm Draemann und Peill, Birkesdorf; Der Textil-Arbeiter , September 1, 1911, Aachen, and July 3, 1914, Dresden. The fine was usually levied before the finishing department of the mill received the piece. Stadtarchiv Werdau, Rep. i, Nr. 72, Feb. 21, 1891. German weavers thought the fine should be levied before the piece had even been processed by the mending department, which undertook small corrections on even the best pieces. Reussische Volkszeitung , February 18, 1902.

[112] Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , March 15, 1902; Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 23, 1909, p. 131.

[113] Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , 1911, p. 1457.

[114] Ibid.

whether the finished product was less than perfect or had less than the full market value; the issue was whether the work had been executed negligently or recklessly.

British courts never drew a principled distinction in the nineteenth century between the offering of a service by an employee and the delivery of a product by a trader. Accordingly, some employers required weavers to purchase and dispose of damaged cloth themselves.^[115] Textile employers in Britain who imposed fines for defects used the same expression as would be applied to contractors who delivered a product and had to make good the errors in workmanship. The employers announced, "All bad work must be paid for."^[116]

Yet another aspect of some fining systems in Germany diverged from the principle of the exchange of a labor product in the market. German management journals in textiles declared that the fines levied on workers for flaws could not accurately measure the loss the owner would suffer in the market.^[117] The surviving fine books show how this assumption worked itself out in practice. They show that some mills standardized the amount withheld for damaged cloth at fifty pfennigs for every piece, as if the punishment functioned as a signal to workers rather than as a means for assessing the actual value of the damage.^[118] Since German owners treated the fines principally as a deterrent to poor-quality production rather than as compensation for a loss suffered in the market, they often chose an alternative method for giving weavers an incentive to maintain high standards of work: they paid a bonus for each unobjectionable piece.^[119] In the way they utilized the fines collected, too, German owners showed that they viewed the fine as a disciplinary measure rather than as a means of market compensation. Many German firms voluntarily altered their factory ordinances to give the money collected in dockages for faulty cloth to workers' welfare committees. In the Mönchengladbach factory district, forty-seven companies donated such fines to committees at the

[115] Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1893–1894 [c.6894-XXIII] XXXVII, Part I, p. 115.

[116] Yorkshire Factory Times , November 15, 1889, Bingley.

[117] Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie , Nr. 8, 1910, p. 233.

[118] Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv Dortmund, F11, Conrad Wilhelm Delius & Co., near Gütersloh; Textilmuseum Apolda, Zimmermann, Verzeichnis über verhängte Geldstrafen , 1892 to 1906. For the knitting trade, see Wilfrid Greif, Studien über die Wirkwarenindustrie in Limbach in Sachsen (Karlsruhe: G. Braunsche Hofbuchdruckerei, 1907), p. 87.

[119] Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie Volume 11, Nr. 40 (1907–1908), p. 500; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , August 15, 1898, p. 3; Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Protokoll der 10. Generalversammlung, 1910 (Berlin: Karl Hübsch, n.d.), pp. 300 ff.

turn of the century, although they could perfectly well have pocketed this type of fine.^[120]

In sum, the fine for damages in Britain compensated the owner for market losses suffered upon disposing of the workers' labor product. In Germany, the fine disciplined the workers for the careless expenditure of their labor power. In Germany, the practice of assessing fines at the point of production reproduced the belief that workers sold the disposition over "labor power" in the production process; in Britain, the practice of delayed, market-based fining maintained the belief that workers transferred a quantity of labor as it was embodied in finished products. The British method of determining the appropriate fine asked what the product was worth, not how the product came to be.^[121]

The implementation of adjustments in some piece-rate lists in Britain tallied with this view that workers were paid for bringing materialized labor to market. At most mills in Lancashire, the prices weavers received for each type of cloth were fixed by districtwide rather than firm-specific schedules. When a new list went into effect, it became valid on fabric delivered to the company warehouse after a specified date. The criterion was not when the labor power was expended, but when the product was brought into the sphere of circulation.^[122]

The Circulation of Labor

The divergent German and British specifications of the transfer of labor under the wage contract guided the employers' bookkeeping systems for weavers' earnings. Since British factory proprietors thought of themselves as buying labor as it was embodied in the product, their accounting techniques credited funds only to the loom from which the product was delivered, not to the weaver who executed the labor activity. In both Lancashire and Yorkshire, the employers numbered their looms consecutively by row. Usually the wages books indicated only the number of the loom to which the pay went, not the weaver's name.^[123] If a weaver left the mill before

[120] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf 25017, p. 31, for 1895, and HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf 25027, pp. 19 ff., for 1904.

[121] Herbert Maucher distinguishes between "causal remuneration," compensation based on the process of creating products, and "final remuneration," based on the products' market value (op. cit., p. 3).

[122] LRO, DDX 1123/B/438, Amalgamated Weavers' Association, 1937.

[123] For examples, see Robert Clough, Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds; Taylor and Littlewood, Kirklees Archives; West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakefield, C149/490; W. P. Crankshaw, "The Internal Books of a Weaving Mill," Journal of the British Association of Managers of Textile Works Volume 4 (1912–1913), p. 114; Elizabeth Roberts's interviews,Preston, Mrs. B1P, born 1900. When the weavers' union in Preston recorded individual members' requests for intervention in dealing with personal grievances, it took down the weavers' loom numbers. See, illustratively, LRO, DDX 1089/8/1, 1904, p. 2. For the 1840s, see H. S. G., Autobiography of a Manchester Cotton Manufacturer (Manchester: John Heywood, 1887), p. 32. British pottery works did not register wages paid to each employee name, either. Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1893–1894 XXXVII, Part I, p. 63.

finishing a long piece, the company gave the full amount for the piece to the next weaver who came along and had the loom at the moment of completion.^[124] Even if the original weaver and the successor did not know each other, the company left it to the weavers to allocate the pay between themselves.^[125] When British employers levied fines for defective fabric, they deducted the penalty from the loom, not necessarily from the weaver who had been in charge of the machine when the work was executed.^[126] In the Colne Valley, women on the same looms as men worked at disadvantageous piecerate scales, allegedly because the men could do more tuning of the loom on their own and could carry away the finished pieces.^[127] But a man who took the loom of an ill woman as a temporary replacement received only the women's rate, because the loom number remained on the company books as a woman's.^[128] Each of these procedures treated the weavers as if they were connected to the mill not by a relation of servitorship but by their occupancy of a machine from which the mill received its deliveries.^[129]

Like British employers, the Germans identified each loom by cipher and kept track of each loom's output by code in what they called the "weavers' book." In addition, however, they kept records by which they could ascertain the earnings of each weaver as an employee.^[130] In German weaving mills, if

[124] Whether the worker was obligated to finish the piece before leaving or needed only to give notice of his leaving formed a point of legal dispute in Britain. Yorkshire Factory Times , May 16, 1890, Marsh and Lindley.

[125] Yorkshire Factory Times , May 23, 1902, p. 5; LRO, DDX 1274/6/1, Burnley, November 1, 1899, and DDX 1089/8/1, pp. 191–192, Oct. 28, 1907; Cotton Factory Times , April 2, 1897, Oldham.

[126] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 7, 1898, p. 4; LRO, DDC 1274/6/1, Burnley, May 1, 1899. Yorkshire Factory Times , September 1, 1893, Batley.

[127] Some female weavers working on certain types of looms said that they lacked the strength needed to lift the adjusting weights. Elizabeth Roberts's interviews, Mrs. P1P, born 1898, p. 87. The reduced piece rates for women probably exceeded the actual difference in productivity between men and women.

[128] Yorkshire Factory Times , July 24, 1891, and September 1, 1893, p. 4. The women's scale had the same structure as the men's scale, but lower rates.

[129] For a reference to manufacturers employing "looms" rather than weavers in the putting-out trade, see Minutes of Evidence, John Niblett, Committee on Woollen Bill, PP 1802–1803 (95) VII, p. 38.

[130] Barmen, Beiträge zur Statistik der Stadt Barmen , Volume 2 (1906), pp. 2–3. Seide , July 25, 1900, p. 467. Emil Bittner, Die Fabriks-Buchführung für Webereien (Leipzig: Hartle-ben, 1902), p. 27. Since German mill owners in practice were not required to scale their payroll deductions to the weekly earnings of each worker, the difference between German and British accounting methods cannot be attributed to the legal environment. Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , June 5, 1909, Emsdetten; accounting procedures described in Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 3, 1911, Friedland.

one weaver took another's place as a temporary replacement, the firm gave the weavers the choice of allocating the wages themselves or of having the firm do it for them.^[131] The German mills directed the compensation to the executor of labor, not merely to the immediate supplier of a good.

The British textile mill owners' bookkeeping faced an unanticipated challenge after Parliament passed the Insurance Act of 1911. Under this law, employers had to transfer weekly deductions from workers' pay to the friendly societies and companies administering the insurance plan. In an address to the Batley Chamber of Commerce in 1912, one manufacturer said that "there was a difficulty arising out of the fact that many manufacturers did not pay the weaver but the loom."^[132] How could they know how much to deduct from each weaver's pay when they did not keep track of individual weavers' earnings? To meet the requirements of the act without changing their record system, employers improvised. They subtracted a standard amount regardless of how much the weaver actually earned, "leaving a few odd weavers to claim their penny or two" when the deductions overshot the mark.^[133] Despite this unintended intrusion from the state, British employers preserved the integrity of their method of appropriating materialized labor all the way up to the First World War.

The same principles governing the arrangement of numbers on the company ledgers regulated the assignment of workers to machinery. British weavers in charge of a set of looms were responsible for delivering products from the machines, but they did not have to offer their personal labor effort to do so. At many mills weavers escaped punishment for absence from the loom without permission so long as they sent a representative, possibly a family member, to take their place that day.^[134] Weaving "sick" became an

[131] Stadtarchiv Bielefeld, XII 75, November 13, 1894; Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz n, Rep. A, Kap. IX, Nr. 207, 1893, p. 282.

[132] Textile Mercury , September 7, 1912, p. 182. To fill out the forms for the government's employment censuses, managers sometimes had to ask the individual tuners for information on the current size and composition of the workforce. Yorkshire Factory Times , January 18, 1895, and September 12, 1912, p. 6. For Lancashire, see Yorkshire Factory Times , April 3, 1908, p. 2, Burnley.

[133] Employers could not make insurance deductions from workers who earned under one shilling and sixpence per day.

[134] PP 1890–1891 LXXVIII, p. 220. Yorkshire Factory Times , November 8, 1889, July 14, 1893, and December 1, 1893. The weavers might also go on vacation if they dispatched substi-tutes. Yorkshire Factory Times , October 2, 1891, Bradford; December 27, 1889, Kirkstall. For Lancashire: Paul Thompson and Thea Thompson, family and work history interviews, Respondent 336, Keighley, born 1890; LRO, DDX 1274/6/1, December 1, 1900; Burnley Gazette , April 14, 1894, p. 8. At some mills, if a weaver became ill the firm gave the loom to someone else unless the weaver sent in a substitute. Yorkshire Factory Times , April 7, 1893, Shipley; Cotton Factory Times , January 22, 1897, Manchester. For examples of firms waiting only one hour before permanently reassigning an absent worker's loom, see LRO, DDX 1089/8/2, Preston, December 5, 1912, p. 176, and Royal Commission on Labour, Burnley, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 45.

established occupation in Britain; that is, one might not have a permanent loom of one's own, but filled in for friends and neighbors who became ill.^[135] In Germany, the firms themselves sometimes kept spare hands around, called "springers"—to "spring in" for ill weavers.^[136] It was not unknown in Germany for weavers to dispatch their own substitutes, although the sources mention this much less frequently than in Britain.^[137] The meaningful difference, however, is this: the British weavers, unlike their German counterparts, sometimes did not need permission beforehand from the overlooker or manager to send a particular person in their stead.^[138] In fact, at mills in the Colne Valley, Yorkshire, the weavers reached arrangements with the factory owners to fetch substitutes of their choosing after the supper break if the machinery had to run overtime.^[139]

The British weavers' retention of the disposition over their work capacity, so long as their machines delivered sufficient output, influenced the ordinary assignment of looms to their operators. A single set of looms could regularly be shared among several persons. For example, at a mill in the Buttershaw area of Yorkshire, two women in 1894 who needed only part-time work made a compact to alternate on a single set of looms in the course of the week.^[140] They could balance the demands of work with their domestic schedules. In Lancashire, a family as a whole could take on the management of a large group of looms and divide attendance among

[135] Joanna Bornat's interview with Miss V., born 1901; Bradford Heritage Recording Unit, A0087, respondent, born 1903, describes her mother's job of "weaving sick." Also Yorkshire Factory Times , December 6, 1889, p. 4; March 4, 1892; March 27, 1903, p. 4.

[136] Die Textil-Zeitung , March 9, 1897, "Krebsschaden."

[137] Factory ordinance of Joseph Kaltenbach, HSTAD, Regierung Aachen, 1633.

[138] Yorkshire Factory Times , April 25, 1890, Dewsbury and Ravensthorpe. Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, June 26, 1891, p. 45.

[139] Yorkshire Factory Times , October 7, 1892, Marsden. Employers denied responsibility for ensuring that the regular weavers paid the substitutes honestly. Cotton Factory Times , April 2, 1897, Oldham.

[140] Yorkshire Factory Times , October 26, 1894. For Lancashire, see Elizabeth Roberts's interview with Ms. L1P, born 1900.

themselves as they wished.^[141] At mills where weavers usually operated two looms each, they typically went down to one loom each when business slackened. They believed that under such conditions they had the right to opt instead for a buddy system with a friend. Each weaver doubled up with a partner and worked alternate days for the duration of the depression, each serving two looms during their turn in the mill.^[142] These arrangements ensured the provision of finished products to the factory owner without the commitment of the labor capacity lodged in the person of the weaver.^[143]

As in weaving, so in spinning. An incident from the spinning department of a mill in Yeadon, Yorkshire, illuminates the British treatment of workers as the deliverers of the output from a machine. When the employer at a Yeadon factory restored in 1908 to night overtime, he did not require that the daytime mule spinners extend their own hours; instead, he authorized them to "engage the night men" on their own. The daytime spinners received piece rates for the entire output of their machine and themselves decided how to pay the men who tended it during the night shift. When the night-time workers went on strike in 1908, the Conciliation Board defined the day spinners, not the factory owner, as the strikers' "employers."^[144] In other situations, when mule spinners hired young assistants known as piecers, the courts recognized the mule spinners, not the mill proprietors, as the piecers' legal employers.^[145] The

[141] Elizabeth Roberts's interview with Mr. G1P of Preston, born 1903, p. 44. For a similar case in Burnley, see LRO, DDX 1274/6/1, December 1, 1899. For two sisters sharing a set of looms, see Blackburn Library Archives, Minutes, Blackburn Weavers' Association, July 19, 1865. Mrs. E. Brook of Almondbury, Yorkshire, discussed father-daughter sharing in my own interview with her. Weavers on six looms could divide them among assistants as they pleased. See Dermot Healey's interview tape 628, female weaver, Colne, p. 17.

[142] Yorkshire Factory Times , April 18, 1890, and November 6, 1903, p. 5. In an incident at Great Horton in 1898, the owner said workers could use a buddy system if the manager did not object—but the manager did object. Yorkshire Factory Times , February 25, 1898, p. 5.

[143] Employers sometimes accepted for a period of months an alternate sent by an ill weaver. See Elizabeth Roberts's interview with Mrs. P1P, born 1898, Preston. For an exception, see Dermot Healey's interview tape 850, male worker from Nelson, born 1907.

[144] Yorkshire Factory Times , April 3, 1908, p. 1.

[145] Textile Manufacturer , August 15, 1881, p. 304; Yorkshire Factory Times , May 15, 1913, p. 5. When questioned about their attitude toward their "boss," piecers described, not the factory owner, but the spinner. Paul Thompson and Thea Thompson, family and work history interviews, Respondent 122, Bolton, born 1895. Employers thought it was not their business to "interfere" in the supervision of employees' assistants. Yorkshire Factory Times , February 28, 1908, p. 6. Mill proprietors had no claim to the piecers' attendance. If piecers rebelliously left the mill "in a body" and shut down production, the owners had no recourse. Report from the Oldham Master Cotton Spinners' Association, Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXVI Part IV, p. xxv.

factory spinners became middlemen who contracted to deliver materialized labor to the factory owner. In Germany, by contrast, mule spinners and other workers who directed the use of machinery or even selected their own underlings were generally viewed as employees who did not have the authority to assume the legal position of an employer.^[146] What differed was not the reliance on subcontracting per se but its cultural significance. Workers who selected their assistants in Germany could not assume the status of an employer, because they remained "in a dependent relation to the factory owner."^[147]

Is it possible that the contrasts between the countries in the rules for staffing looms can be attributed to differences in the supply of labor? Perhaps British textile firms allowed weavers to send substitutes as a means of attracting workers when labor was scarce. Female workers in particular might have been more willing to undertake mill work if they had some flexibility to attend to family matters on occasion. This explanation does not accord with the economic conditions, however. In Bradford, for instance, companies accepted substitutes of the weavers' choosing even when they enjoyed the benefits of an overwhelming surplus of labor.^[148] The availability of labor fluctuated region by region, decade by decade in Britain, whereas the institutions for staffing machinery remained stable. In Germany, companies confronted with labor shortages attempted to recruit female workers by another means. They allowed women to leave the mill a half-hour early (and on the eve of some holidays) to manage the household meals.^[149] German employers thereby shortened the expenditure of labor in time but maintained a claim to the labor power lodged in the person of the worker during the worker's hours on duty.

The textile workers' idioms for employment in the two countries betrayed divergent understandings of the process by which they entered into the wage contract. In the narratives of the textile union newspapers in Germany, weavers who sought employment at a mill asked for "a position." In Britain, however, the weavers asked if the employer "had any looms to let."^[150] "Looking for a new pair of looms" stood for going on the job market;

[146] See Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Flöha, Fabrikordnung Baumwoll-Spinnerei G. Matthes in Leubsdorf.

[147] Stadtarchiv Plauen, Rep. I, Kap. VI, Sekt. I, Nr. 90B, March 18, 1873, pp. 123–127. Apart from this difference in their legal positions, subcontractors in Germany had less unqualified authority over underlings than did subcontractors in Britain.

[148] Yorkshire Factory Times , February 26, 1892, and June 4, 1897.

[149] Kathleen Canning, "Gender and the Politics of Class Formation," American Historical Review Volume 97, Number 3 (June 1992) p. 749; and below, p. 481.

[150] Yorkshire Factory Times , April 17, 1908, Burnley.

"being given a loom" meant getting hired.^[151] British mule spinners who received a job said that they "had taken wheels."^[152] To get hired, weavers and spinners in both countries followed the same channels through overlookers and foremen. Yet the expressions of British workers connected them to the company primarily by their use of a machine, as if they were independent operators of equipment for whose output they were paid,^[153] whereas the language of the German workers emphasized the occupancy of a social "position" in a relation of servitorship.

The British appreciation of the sale of labor through the delivery of products influenced the language not only of hiring but of joblessness. After British weavers were dismissed from a stint, they said they lacked a loom, not that they were "unemployed." The term unemployment acquired wide currency only after the turn of the century, when political analysts launched the expression.^[154] To discharge a worker, gestures sometimes proved more powerful in Britain than speech. When a British overlooker or manager fired a weaver, he did not have to utter a word. In a movement which became a standard symbol, understood immediately by the weaver, upon completion of the piece the boss simply yanked the shuttles from the loom.^[155] Disabling the machine indicated the end of the weaver's tenure at the machine; nothing need be spoken to the person.

Traders and Capitalists

Did the differences between the exchange of "labor" in German and British textiles appear in other industries as well? In the mining industry of Britain, which employed more persons than any branch of manufacturing in the country, the understanding of labor delivered as it was materialized in a

[151] Interview tape with H. Jennings, by Bob Turner, at Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language, University of Sheffield; Yorkshire Factory Times , December 26, 1902; November 1, 1889, pp. 4, 7.

[152] Operative Spinners of England, Ireland, and Scotland, A Report of the Proceedings of a Delegate Meeting of the Operative Spinners of England, Ireland and Scotland, Assembled at Ramsey, Isle of Man (Manchester: M. Wardle, 1829), p. 44; broadsheet from Henry Wood's Mill, Wigan, Oldham City Archives, TUI 23i.

[153] The connection to the firm via title to a machine is illustrated in the reinstatement of workers after strikes. Upon settlement of the extended Huddersfield dispute of 1883, the weavers themselves claimed that if their employers had in the meantime transported some looms out of the shed, those weavers whose machines were missing should seek work elsewhere. Huddersfield Daily Examiner , May 8, 1883.

[154] Samuel G. Hobson, Pilgrim to the Left (London: E. Arnold & Co., 1938), p. 47. For use of the phrase "out-of-work" benefits, see Yorkshire Factory Times , January 24, 1908.

[155] Yorkshire Factory Times , March 4, 1898, and July 4, 1902.

product led to the creation during the nineteenth century of so-called sliding scales. Industrial experts of the time recognized this means of compensating workers as a distinctively British invention.^[156] Wage agreements under this system pegged the piece rates that miners received to the price of coal in the raw materials markets. In Cumberland, for example, piece rates in the 1880s rose 1.25 percent for every 1.5 percent rise in the price of coal. In keeping with the logic of transferring materialized labor, the valid selling price was registered at the moment the coal came on board ship or into storage at the colliery, not necessarily when the labor was executed.^[157] Calculation of wages as a proportion of the market value of the product had a long tradition in districts where miners and employers could come to agreements.^[158] In Germany miners argued that higher coal prices justified an increase in their wage, but no one supposed that a wage should be cast in the form of a standard portion of the selling price realized in the market.^[159]

The British iron and steel industry, which employed almost as many persons as the textile trade, used scales that automatically adjusted piece rates to vending prices when circumscribed markets developed for standardized products such as nails and iron bars.^[160] Experts have despaired of dating with precision the origin of this institution, but they have concluded that by the 1830s, at the latest, puddlers' remuneration was indexed to the iron's selling price.^[161] The endurance of piece-rate scales pegged to the finished article's selling price did not depend on formal collective bargaining or

[156] PP 1892 XXXVI, Part 1, February 12, 1892, pp. 259 ff.; C. Colson, Cours d'économie politique (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1901), Volume 2, p. 68; Bernhard, op. cit., p. 167.

[157] J. E. Crawford Munro, Sliding Scales in the Coal Industry (London: John Heywood, 1885), p. 6.

[158] At the beginning of the nineteenth century, piece rates were determined by the market price of the coal in various cities. Jaffe, op. cit., p. 61. Jaffe shows (pp. 48–49) that employers in the coal industry concerned themselves with the terms of trade in the product markets, not with the conversion of labor power. Cornish miners received a percentage of the value of ore delivered aboveground: see Rule, Labouring Classes , pp. 124–125. The challenge of arriving at equitable sliding formulas bedeviled employers and workers. Many scales were canceled and renegotiated. Although coal workers in some regions oscillated on and off the system, they and their employers continued to recommend it as the ideal form of remuneration. Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXIV, e.g., pp. 12, 156, 161, 225.

[159] Die Westdeutsche Arbeiter-Zeitung , January 26, 1901. Prior to the First World War, the factory inspectors could not find instances of the implementation of sliding scales in Germany: see, for example, the report of Bernhard, op. cit., p. 170.

[160] J. E. C. Munro, "Sliding Scales in the Iron Industry," Address to the Manchester Statistical Society, December 9, 1885, Manchester Library Archives. PP 1892 XXXVI, Part 1, March 1, 1892, p. 312.

[161] Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1894), p. 484.

craft workers' power, since the system remained in place even in periods when the iron workers' unions were nearly extinguished, as in the late 1860s. For members of the steel smelters' union, these sliding scales, based on the selling prices of steel plates, were eventually "extended to practically every class of labour which could directly affect production."^[162] Workers supposed that under an adjustable scale they became suppliers of products rather than mere employees. The Association of Iron and Steel Workers, for example, advocated the indexing of piece rates on this ground. The president of this association testified in 1892 that he supported the use of sliding scales for pay because "it has been our custom in the North of England under our board, where it was possible, for every skilled man to be the contractor for his own work."^[163] In this respect, the aristocracy of skill did not remain privileged. By the beginning of the twentieth century, less qualified underhand workers, too, received their compensation as a percentage of the shifting contract rates for iron and steel.^[164]

Both workers and employers believed that the indexing of piece rates was founded on the principles by which agents exchanged labor as a commodity. The practice did not represent a form of profit-sharing, for the prosperity of industries did not conform to the selling prices of their products.^[165] Workers saw that under the arrangement they sacrificed control over the price at which they disposed of their labor. "In the sliding scale principle," the secretary of the Association of Blast-Furnacemen said in 1891, "when the wages are regulated by the selling price per ton, in a sense a man gives up his right of sale of labor and puts it into his employers' power to sell it at what price he likes."^[166] Employers in the iron trade considered the sliding scales a logical means of assessing the value of the labor they purchased.

[162] Arthur Pugh, Men of Steel, by One of Them (London: Iron and Steel Trades Confederation, 1951), p. 136. German iron workers typically were paid by the amount of raw material they processed as a group. Walter Timmermann, Entlöhnungsmethoden in der Hannoverschen Eisenindustrie (Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1906), p. 25.

[163] Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXVI, Part 1, March 2, 1892, p. 339. On the use of sliding scales in shipbuilding, see Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1893–1894 [c.6894-VII] XXXII, p. 75.

[164] Bernard Elbaum and Frank Wilkinson, "Industrial Relations and Uneven Development: A Comparative Study of the American and British Steel Industries," Cambridge Journal of Economics Volume 3, Number 3 (September 1979), p. 292.

[165] Robert S. Spicer, British Engineering Wages (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1928), pp. 133–134.

[166] Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXVI, Part 1, Feb 12, 1892, p. 263. Even when sliding scales lapsed due to disagreement over the rates, they remained the model for selling labor. PP1892 XXXVI, Part 1, pp. 259, 309–310.

They claimed that "no better standard existed of the value of labour in the market than the price of the article produced."^[167] The system put employers in the role of merchants who resold finished products at a guaranteed margin rather than that of entrepreneurs who sought a profit by combining labor power with other resources.^[168] The British system of sliding scales astounded observes in Germany, where workers received wages for the expenditure of their labor power itself. Indeed, to economic agents in Germany, the fluctuating scales in Britain abolished such a thing as a "labor market," given the German understanding of labor as a commodity. "This type of pay agreement," the organ for Christian unions in Germany declared, "is not based on the supply and demand of labor power  . . . but on market relations of the product."^[169]

Culture does not function as a steel curtain that bends practices into shape. The humble instrumentalities of manufacture result from the intersection of a cultural logic with the tangible materials of production. Accordingly, the assumption in Britain that abstract labor is exchanged as it is objectified in a product appeared under different guises among the country's industries, depending upon the concrete setting of the labor process. Textiles offers a sector of enterprise which, though not representative of industry as a whole, expresses its essential principles. The systems for remunerating workers in mining and iron-making enterprises indicate that the intervention of culture led not to uniformity but to isomorphisms in practice across different sectors of the British economy.

An employer who purchases labor power, rather than materialized labor, will have first claim to the profit that accrues from improvements in the efficient combination and use of the factors of production. But the sliding-scale system in Britain treated labor not as a raw input into a "value-added process" dependent on management and organization but as something purchased as a finished component. Even in British enterprises that did not use sliding scales, the employers could carry this premise into their procedures for keeping the production process in order. Some manuals for cost accounting show that British manufacturers believed their profits came from buying the

[167] Report of arbitrator for Middlesbrough award of 1882, cited by Munro, "Sliding Scales in the Iron Industry," op. cit.

[168] For the application of the sliding-scale tenet in British textiles, see Chapter Nine, below, at footnotes 183 ff. A representative of the jute workers' union endorsed the principle before the Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 472.

[169] Mitteilungen des Gesamtverbandes der christlichen Gewerkschaften Deutschlands , November 11, 1901, p. 146.

separate components of a product cheaply and then selling at least one of them dearly. Edward J. C. Swaysland, in an insider's book of advice for commercial success in the boot and shoe trade, claimed in 1905 that manufacturers could turn a profit on an order even if they accidentally purchased labor at a higher price than they could receive by reselling the same labor. Swaysland's guide showed manufacturers how to keep a card for each worker that debited the material and labor costs for each shoe order and credited the worker for the good's selling price: "His credit would be the result of his work, and may be divided into the results from the use of material and the value of his labour. It might happen that a loss on his labour would be more than counterbalanced by the gain on his use of material."^[170] Here the labor enters the equation already embodied in the shoe, so that the buying and selling price of that element can immediately be assessed. "The source of profit is too abstruse to be fully considered here," the author explained. "There may be no profit on the estimate of prime cost, but considerable profit on the purchase of material."^[171] In this depiction, the manufacturer survives like a mercantile trader who profiteers in the sphere of exchange.

When British textile employers reflected upon the hiring of auxiliary workers with time wages, they conceived this arrangement, too, as the appropriation of the labor materialized in goods, not as the purchase of labor power. From their standpoint, the time wage was only a different measure of the product to be acquired. As the business counsel George Wood put it, "We may define Time-Work as 'A Contract to sell all the produce of labour in a certain time.' "^[172] A leading organ for British managers, the Textile Mercury , emphasized in 1891 that the employment transaction comprised the renting out of a factory in return for products: "The unexpressed terms of this contract are that the employer shall provide a mill, machinery, motive power, materials to work up into fabrics, and orders for such fabrics; the weaver on his or her side, promising to attend the regulation time for working, and to perform the work given to him or her at the stipulated price."^[173]

[170] Edward J. C. Swaysland, Boot and Shoe Design and Manufacture (Northhampton: Joseph Tebbutt, 1905), pp. 236–237.

[171] Ibid., p. 233. "The method of employing labour is also analogous to the purchase of material." Ibid.

[172] Wood, op. cit., p. 5. For parallel reasoning in other British industries, see the sources cited above in footnote 51.

[173] Textile Mercury , September 19, 1891, p. 186. William Marcroft proposed in 1878 that operatives should be able to organize as a group to manage the mill and deliver products to the owner. "If adult operatives by their growing experience show an ability to manage workpeople, and have a desire to contract to do the whole of the practical labour in the mill," he said, "thecotton mill operatives, through a committee elected by the adult operatives might undertake to engage those mill operatives whom they thought best calculated to do the work." William Marcroft, Management of a Company's Cotton Mill (Oldham: Tetlow, Stubbs & Co., 1878), pp. 7–8.

The journal's summary cast the employers as investors who get a return by furnishing the means of production, not as innovative organizers and controllers of the use of living labor.

British textile workers acquired a corresponding view of their employers. They expressed this in their response to the problems mill owners encountered at the start of the twentieth century when factories switched production to goods slightly different from those for which the machines had been designed. The owners of these factories in Lancashire requested that weavers accept piece rates lower than the official district wages. Employers in certain neighborhoods said they needed the reduction to cope with their "disadvantages" in the market, since the output on the machines was less than that of competitors. "But why in the world weavers should be expected to pay for local disadvantages is beyond me," a correspondent wrote in 1916 for The Power Loom , the journal of the Nelson Lancashire Weavers' Association. "If I own property with certain disadvantages attached to it, I must make allowances for these disadvantages before I can hope to get a tenant."^[174] In rejecting the employers' claims, the weavers treated the factory as property that the owner leased to the workers. They could have blamed the owners for poor command of management. Instead they reasoned as if the employers were landlords who rented out a run-down facility, not entrepreneurs who gathered and integrated resources.

The explications of the labor transaction in Britain contrast with the emphasis in the German commercial press upon the employer's purchase of the disposition over the work capacity.^[175] The organ of the association of Saxon businessmen, Sächsische Industrie , analyzed the transfer of labor in the employment relation in an essay from 1907 entitled, literally, "Labor-'Giver' and Labor-'Taker,' " a play on the German root words for the terms employer and employee (Arbeitgeber and Arbeitnehmer ). The article took care to define "the modern concept of labor" as " 'labor power' or 'labor execution.' " Nowadays, the article explained, "the concept of 'labor' in the modern economy has received another meaning in some contexts than pre-

[174] The Power Loom (January 1916), p. 4.

[175] German employers referred to the workers' labor as a potential that could be valorized. "We do not hold it against any worker if he gives up his service to us," the owners of the Mechanized Weaving Mill of Linden said in 1906, "in order better to valorize his labor power elsewhere." Volkswille , Hannover, April 3, 1906.

viously. Labor is the expenditure of power which is supposed to lead to useful results."^[176] Given this more exact usage, it said, the German words for employer and employee were not to be taken literally. This journal's sophisticated emphasis on the "modern" definition of labor echoed that of German business economists. Hans Mangoldt, a pioneer in the development of the "theory of the firm," gave a succinct definition of the wage that highlighted the disposition over a potential. "The wage," he explained in his survey of economics, published in 1871, "is the compensation for the use of one's own labor power which has been entrusted to another person."^[177] Karl Marx exercised his wit upon the British employers' supposedly crude appreciation of the acquisition of labor. Had Marx turned back to his land of origin and investigated the understanding of labor as a commodity among employers in Germany, he might have experienced the shock of recognition.

The Strategy for Specifying Culture's Effect

This inquiry did not presuppose that textile factory practices ought to be analyzed as facts of culture. Instead, it used strategic comparisons to rule out alternative explanations that would attribute the shape of factory practices to the survival of customs from earlier stages of development or to forced adaptation to the business environment. The commodity of labor, a fiction of comparatively recent invention, did not assume a natural or generic form in economic exchange with the development of wage labor. It was fabricated out of historically specific concepts that shaped different practices in similar settings. The principle of pay by shot, for example, was rooted in utilitarian practice, but it did not derive from the functional requirements of practice. As a condition for carrying out the "material" exchange of labor for a wage, employers and workers construed the meaning of the transaction with a priori assumptions about what comprised the "labor" transfer.

Social theorists in general and anthropologists in particular have long recognized that agents call upon a symbolic order to organize the material processes of production and exchange. Yet to reaffirm the importance of a

[176] Sächsische Industrie , October 8, 1907, p. 337.

[177] Hans Mangoldt, Grundriss der volkswirtschaftlichen Lehre (2d ed. Stuttgart: Julius Maier, 1871), p. 149. Carl Friedrich Roesler wrote in 1861, "The wage is the compensation for the use of the productive capacity lodged in the worker, which is directed into the product through the labor process." Carl Friedrich Hermann Roesler, Zur Kritik der Lehre vom Arbeitslohn: Ein volkswirtschaftlicher Versuch (Erlangen: Ferdinand Enke, 1861), p. 57.

cultural pattern, some analysts are content to argue that it is a necessary component for the realization of social institutions and for their investigation.^[178] The premise that culture provides the indispensable coordinates of conduct, if accepted, by itself reveals nothing about the causal significance of culture. It could well be the case that culture represents a necessary ingredient for the construction of institutions but that it is closely shaped by the demands of economic forces. In this instance, culture need not arise as a "reflection" of economic institutions—for, as a pool of symbolic resources, of ever reconstruable signs, it is not produced by those institutions—yet it is neither directive nor formative in its own right. By comparing factories that developed in similar environments, this study shows not only that culture was necessary for building the regimes of the factory but also that it was independent of the immediate economic environment and was constitutive of the form of practice. Only a controlled comparison can advance this more decisive point.

Let us be clear about the way in which this study attributes a causal significance to culture. It does not claim that culture set limits to organizational innovation—the business manager's view of culture as an irrational drag upon change.^[179] This approach to culture's effect lends it the force of dumb inertia and resistance, not that of a selective social logic. At illuminating junctures, such as the late creation de novo of piece-rate scales in Yorkshire or during the breakdown of labor-management institutions in diverse industries, we saw that "institutional inertia" alone cannot be invoked for the reproduction of forms of practice. Nor did this chapter unfold by showing that separate cultural beliefs attached to different domains of conduct fit together to form a consistent world view.^[180] This approach, like the structuralist understanding of culture, makes culture in the first instance a way of interpreting the capitalist production process rather than a principle composing it. Finally, we have not treated culture as a means of legitimating

[178] Without the concept of culture, Clifford Geertz informs us, we cannot render the agents' conduct intelligible. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

[179] For an example of the commercial world's understanding of culture as an ingrained "corporate mentality," see Michael Dertouzos, Richard Lester, and Robert Solow, Made in America:Regaining the Productive Edge (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T.Press,1989), p. 274.

[180] For examples of recent works that critically review the tradition of searching for consistencies across beliefs within a culture, see David Laitin, Hegemony and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 17, 19; Robert Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 45–46.

institutions. Unlike Reinhard Bendix's landmark Work and Authority in Industry , this comparative inquiry does not show that ideas justified practices that originated this way or that. It does not show that culture upheld the survival of industrial systems from without; rather, the commodity form of labor constituted from within the form of industrial procedure. In the textile industry the operation of the weavers' piece-rate scales, the assignment of looms, the replacement of absent workers, the recording of earnings—all these instrumentalities assumed their shape and were reproduced by virtue of the definition of labor as a commodity they sustained. In a capitalist order which fragments culture and undermines the coherence of collective belief, we may not be able to show that numerous concepts fit together in the "minds" of the "subjects" to form a consistent world view. But we can examine one concept to see how it composes a consistent province of practice.

The discovery that factory techniques were arranged by cultural definitions of labor as a commodity places several questions on the agenda. How did the specifications of labor influence workers' relations with supervisors in the factory? How did these principles configure the techniques of time discipline and the employers' surveillance of the shop floor? The remainder of Part One resolves these issues. If German producers defined the employment transaction as the sale of the disposition over the expenditure of labor, and British producers defined it as the transfer of materialized labor, what were the historical origins of these opposing assumptions? Part Two, the middle portion of this work, presents the genesis of the cultural differences and advances a model of the creation of labor as a commodity of labor that applies to other European settings as well. Did the contrasting ways of commodifying labor influence the pattern of struggle between textile workers and their employers? Part Three, the study's last segment, shows how the workers' concepts of the sale of labor shaped the formulation of demands, the execution of strikes, and the ideological horizons of the trade unions. We will see that the divergent stipulations of labor organized the most fundamental dimensions of life at the site of production: time and space themselves.