Practical Analyses of Exploitation
The contrasting forms of signifying practice in the workplace did not only support contrasts in the formal ideologies of exploitation; they correlated as
[170] Eric Dorn Brose, Christian Labor and the Politics of Frustration in Imperial Germany (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1985), Chapter One and pp. 146, 148; Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 296–297.
[171] "Through the labor contract the entrepreneur receives likewise a certain sway over the person of the worker . .. over the expenditure of his physical and intellectual powers." Heinrich Brauns, "Die Notwendigkeit der Gewerkschaften," in his Katholische Sozialpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert: Ausgewählte Aufsätze und Reden von Heinrich Brauns , edited by Hubert Mockenhaupt (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1976), p. 12.
well with differences in workers' impromptu articulation of complaints about exploitation on the shop floor. Contrasts in the workers' immediate apperception of exploitation appeared in weavers' responses to fines imposed for fabric that the employers alleged to be defective, one of the problems about which workers complained most frequently. The British workers analyzed the amounts of the fines assessed in terms of the market cost of repairing the defect in the finished product. "3d per yard is deducted for ends down," the Yorkshire Factory Times reported of one mill. By the newspaper's reckoning, this totaled "three times more than it costs to sew them in."[172] In its account of a fine imposed on a woman weaver from Batley, the newspaper claimed that the cloth checker "had fined her 4s 6d for a damage that could be mended in three hours, and that would not cause the piece to be sold for any less in the market."[173]
The British weavers viewed fining as a violation of the rules of fair exchange of finished products in the market. "I think it is a burning shame," wrote a correspondent for the Yorkshire Factory Times , "that employers cannot be satisfied with the profit they make at market out of the goods they manufacture without taking a portion of an employee's hard-earned money from him to further swell their coffers."[174] Comments such as this rested on the idea that exchanges in the market, not labor alone, generated ordinary profits. The fine constituted a separate, unusual means of making a profit from labor. The Yorkshire Factory Times expressed a female weaver's view that fining comprised a kind of additional profit for the employer this way: "The masters smoke a tremendous lot of four-penny cigars, and the two piece wages [fines] last week were for cigars."[175]
Given the British weavers' treatment of fining as a deviation from the rules of fair market exchange, the solutions they proposed ought not to occasion surprise. First, they insisted that textile workers on piece rates be treated as contractors who delivered a product. "They are piece workers," the Yorkshire Factory Times claimed, and therefore "by law" could not be
[172] Yorkshire Factory Times , October 31, 1890, Shipley.
[173] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 2, 1891, Batley. For other examples of such comparisons, see January 17, 1890, Halifax, and July 10, 1891.
[174] This writer contended that fining was "nothing better than second-hand pocket picking." Yorkshire Factory Times , April 29, 1892, Bingley. This reliance on reasoning about the sale of finished products in the market became evident in other contexts as well. British workers articulated the right of women workers to equal pay with men on the ground that the finished products were indistinguishable: "When a manufacturer sells a piece he does not tell the merchant that it has been woven by a woman." Yorkshire Factory Times , September 25, 1891, p. 4.
[175] Yorkshire Factory Times , April 4, 1890, Bingley.
fined simply for violating the mill's standards for cloth.[176] By the workers' reasoning, if the employer wanted to fine them for bad cloth he had to prosecute them as he would a contractor who delivered a defective product. The British weavers' opposition to any form of fining for spoiled work led them to resist institutions that would regulate the fining system. For example, Parliament in 1896 passed a factory act that required employers to post a notice about all forms of fines to which employees at the site were subject. This legislation would have protected weavers by requiring employers to standardize the penalties imposed for each kind of defect. Yet the weavers' unions lobbied to have Parliament exempt textiles from the act's provisions—they preferred to suffer fining without safeguards than to recognize the legitimacy of the practice.[177]
In contrast to the British weavers, who held up an ideal of the exchange of products in the market as a way of assessing the injustice of fines, German weavers included fines for purportedly flawed cloth in a list of more general abuses. They saw the imposition of fines as another expression of the owners' disposition over their labor. "Fines are always the order of the day," declared a union speaker at a shop meeting in Württemberg. "The workers at this firm are fined twice, for actually it is already a punishment if someone has to work at a plant with this kind of poor ventilation."[178] This complainant drew a parallel between two grievances: just as submission to unhealthy air represented a kind of exploitation that resulted from the employers' domination of the production process, so did the payment of a fine. That is, German workers treated fines as just another strategy by which the owner could use his authority over the workplace to extract unpaid labor. They called the fines "pay deductions" (Lohnabzüge) , the phrase that referred to any lowering in the pay scale or in the amount workers actually earned.[179]
[176] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 13, 1893.
[177] Cotton Factory Times , April 8, 1904, "'Reasonable' Fines." The M. P. from Darwen, speaking in 1896 for the textile workers, said, "The operatives wished to do away with fines altogether; and they objected to this Bill which recognises and regulated fines." See speech by John Rutherford in United Kingdom, Parliamentary Debates , Series Four, Volume 43, 1896, July 17—August 6, pp. 767–770.
[178] This is the union's report of the address. Der Textil-Arbeiter , August 4, 1911.
[179] See almost any issue of Der Textil-Arbeiter —for example, May 2, 1902, Ostritz; May 9, 1902, Rendsburg; May 16, 1902, Elsterberg. The widespread practice of offering workers a bonus for cloth of perfect quality, which could be withheld in its entirety for any faults, also discouraged German workers from adopting market-based criticisms like those of their British counterparts. Under the German bonus system, whether the piece had one fault or many, the worker suffered the same loss. The withholding of the gratuity, which represented a substan-tial loss, departed from the idea that the cloth had a determinant "market value" from which the fine constituted a deduction. Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 30, 1909, Bocholt; July 6, 1909, Oelsnitz; March 6, 1914, p. 79.
In contrast to the British workers' refusal to bargain over fines for allegedly spoiled work, German workers at some mills formed committees to negotiate with the owners on this issue.[180] They also composed lists specifying how much weavers ought to be fined for each defect and included such charts among their strike demands. This difference between German and British reactions to fining cannot be dismissed by assuming that German textile workers were invariably more cooperative than their British counterparts. As we have seen, the German workers pressed ambitious demands concerning many facets of mill life.[181] The example of fining shows that the contrasting "theories" of the labor transaction hidden in the disciplinary regime of German and British factories generated their counterpoints in
[180] Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 31, 1911, Peilau-Eulengebirges; February 27, 1914, Langenbielau.
[181] British workers' attention to the sale of their labor as product in a market exchange showed up in another complaint as well. Table 2, above, Chapter 4, which compares the distribution of complaints from weavers, shows that British weavers distinguished themselves from their German counterparts by focusing on mispayments for delivered pieces. Nearly 5 percent of complaints (42) from the British sample for weavers concerned the deceptive measuring of fabric, making it the fourth most frequent complaint. This grievance arose under two conditions: when company clerks paid the weaver for a shorter length of cloth than the weaver actually manufactured, and when the weaver received credit for fewer picks per inch than he or she had executed. Under 2 percent of complaints (16) from the German sample concerned the mismeasurement of pieces, making it only the eleventh most frequent complaint. Yet the deception in those cases that came to light in Germany was egregious (Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1116, January 19, 1904, Rheine; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25029, p. 2, for 1906; Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 30, 1902, Elsterberg). Academic writers described the mismeasurement of cloth as a fact of life in Germany; they arrived at averages for the rate at which owners shortchanged weavers in whole districts. Karl Schmid, Die Entwicklung der Hofer Baumwoll-Industrie 1432–1913 (Leipzig: A. Deichertsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1923), p. 76.
Whether this difference in the salience of mismeasuring resulted purely from workers' interpretations of similar settings or whether it was determined partly by the honesty of German employers, I am unable to say. The outcome, however, was consistent with the difference in the ways workers defined the commodity of labor in the two countries. Complaints about the false measurement of pieces originated in the era when handloom weavers sold their goods to putters-out. This grievance centered on whether the employer, as a kind of merchant, was obeying the rules of fair market exchange for finished goods. The Yorkshire Factory Times , in its appeals for workers to change factory conditions, placed a fair market at the center of its vision. It declared in 1891, "The textile industry in Yorkshire can be raised from commercial depravity, as at present, to commercial honesty." Yorkshire Factory Times , March 27, 1891, Pudsey. As with the theme of fining, so with measuring: the British textile workers formulated their responses by focusing on deviations from the ideal of equitable trades of products in the market.
workers' formulation of grievances: in each country, workers relied upon a corresponding theory of exploitation to criticize capitalist practice. When the concrete procedures of everyday manufacture "directly possess the naked and abstract form of the commodity," then workers are in immediate possession of economic theory.[182]
The pervasive effect of the contrasting theories of the hiring of labor also emerged when German and British textile workers attempted to reach industrial bargains with their employers. In Lancashire representatives of the spinners' unions proposed that workers be paid according to piece-rate scales that would fluctuate to allow employers a stipulated percentage of return on their invested capital. For example, at a meeting in 1900 with the Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations, the operatives said they preferred that "wages be adjusted on a net margin allowing for the fluctuations in the prices of cotton, coal, etc."[183] The workers suggested that negotiators agree on the average capital invested in a spinning factory per spindle, figure the cost of depreciation, grant the owners a shifting allowance for working capital, and then assign a rate of return. The "net margin" between all these sums and the proceeds from disposing of the finished product in the market would provide workers with their wages fund. The representatives of the employers acceded to the workers' idea, provided that owners receive at least a 5 percent rate of return. According to the workers' research, for yarn of standard fineness mill owners needed a profit on average of one farthing per pound of cotton spun in order to realize an annual return of over 5 percent on investment.[184]
More important than the figures, perhaps, are the principles they illustrate. The conduct of the negotiations shows that both the workers and the employers conceived of the factory proprietor as an investor in the marketplace rather than as a manager of labor power.[185] For if the selling prices of the finished product were far above the cost of production, the owners were not entitled to reap the benefit of efficiently converting the raw materials
[182] Georg Lukács, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," in his History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1971), p. 172.
[183] Goldsmiths' Library, University of London, Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations, Report of Negotiations 1899–1900 , p. 16.
[184] The Leader , March 22, 1901, "Textile Tattle."
[185] Language itself could betray the understanding of profit as the reward of trade: "The manufacturer feels that if he lays out capital on improved machinery, or supplies extra good material, and thus enables his workpeople to produce more in a given time, he ought to get a trading profit." John Watts, "Essay on Strikes," British Association for the Advancement of Science: The Workman's Bane and Antidote (Manchester: A. Ireland, 1861), p. 7.
and labor power into a completed ware. Like bankers, they received only interest on investment. The workers, conversely, were not selling a resource, labor power, which had a fixed market value prior to being converted to a product. Rather, the operatives handed their labor over as if they were traders in products, who paid a rent on the mill, purchased supplies, and then delivered yarn at its current market appraisal. In the event, workers and employers could not reach agreement on the average capital invested per spindle and on the grade of yarn to take as a standard, but they did not fail for lack of effort. The spinning employers and their operatives sought for more than a dozen years to reach an accord on the "net margin" principle.[186] To certify actual expenditures, mill owners offered to open their accounting books to the workers' inspection.[187] Weavers, too, negotiated for piece rates by "net margin."[188] The complications of putting the workers' "net margin" proposal into effect were so daunting that only well-established assumptions about the nature of the labor transaction could have kept employers and spinning operatives engaged with the idea for so long.
Although the "net margin" proposal legitimated the mill owners' rates of return, British workers in many industries were ready to let their wages fluctuate according to the selling price of their product because this index seemed to eliminate the most odious form of profit-taking, that appropriated by the "middleman" in the market for finished wares.[189] In the coal trade, the miners at Newcastle declared as early as 1831 that they wanted to peg their earnings to product markets. "The Men and Boys are willing to abide the Risk of Fluctuations of the Coal Trade," their handbill declared.[190] The miners' response showed, of course, that they saw their labor as a commodity and imagined the organization of work as a market relation. But their reaction did not entirely accept the commercial system, for it resisted
[186] Textile Mercury , January 15, 1910, p. 43. Card room workers were included in the plans. Burnley Gazette , Nov. 14, 1908, p. 3.
[187] Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations, op. cit., p. 18. The negotiations failed in part because the employers themselves still lacked an adequate method for determining the cost of depreciation. M. W. Kirby, "The Lancashire Cotton Industry in the Inter-War Years," Business History (July 1974), p. 153.
[188] Nelson Chronicle , March 29, 1901, p. 4; Burnley Gazette , Nov. 14, 1908, p. 3.
[189] Sometimes the operative spinners seemed to view speculators in the product markets, not the employers, as the real exploiters. Mawdsley, the Lancashire spinners' leader, attacked the "middlemen bloodsuckers" who took the profit out of the cotton industry. Joyce, Visions of the People , op. cit., p. 120. Likewise, weavers sometimes blamed merchants, not employers, for low wages. Bradford Observer , January 25, 1894, Shipley.
[190] James Jaffe, The Struggle for Market Power: Industrial Relations in the British Coal Industry, 1800–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 115. The miners believed that unmanipulated trade in products would break the power of their employers.
the middleman predator. Near the turn of the century, the president of the miners' federation in Leicester endorsed sliding scales with a similar line of reasoning: "The giving away of value to middlemen," he said, "should not determine the rate of wages."[191] In Germany the initiative for pegging wages to the selling prices of products came only after the First World War, and then not from workers but from employers, who adopted it to cope with the country's runaway inflation.[192]