Scripts on Stage and on Paper
The workers used their definition of labor as a commodity to orchestrate the unfolding of a work stoppage in space. When British workers had a grievance they wanted corrected, they typically filed out of their workrooms into the central mill yard, which served as a theater for their demonstration. The tactic was habitual, as the documentary sources as well as oral history collections in Britain show. Textile workers from both Yorkshire and Lancashire, asked in interviews what they did to correct a workplace problem, responded, "We went out to the mill yard."[3] The workers in some instances transformed this action into a raucous assembly, singing and shouting slogans in the yard.[4] For example, at Glossop, just southeast of Lancashire, the
[2] Ibid., p. 129. French urban journeymen of the time attached multiple meanings to the term faire grève , which eventually came to signal "strike" but as yet could include looking for new employment in general, apart from a campaign against a master employer. William Reddy, "Skeins, Scales, Discounts, Steam, and Other Objects of Crowd Justice in Early French Textile Mills," Comparative Studies in Society and History Volume 21, Number 1 (January 1979), pp. 205–206.
[3] Bradford Heritage Recording Unit; Dermot Healey's interview tape 667, pp. 11–12, Lancashire. Yorkshire Factory Times , November 22, 1889, Birstall; May 2, 1902, Dewsbury, p. 5; June 27, 1902, Broadfield mill; Sept. 25, 1903, Birstall, p. 5; February 8, 1912, M. Oldroyd & Sons; February 8, 1912, Dewsbury district, p. 4. Even youngsters knew the tactic: Yorkshire Factory Times , April 29, 1898, Dudley Hill. Blackburn Library Archives, M31, Nr. 5403, Blackburn Weavers' Minutes, August 16, 1865. An employer narrating the course of a strike told the Royal Commission on Labour that he had received no prior notice: "The first I was aware of was seeing all the workpeople out in the yard." PP 1892 XXXV, p. 93.
[4] Yorkshire Factory Times , January 10, 1902, Marsden.
weavers at one mill who filed into their yard delivered a message that merged rebellion and patriotic conformity when they commenced singing "Rule Britannia" as loudly as possible.[5]
The British textile workers also imported community traditions of demonstration into the factory. At the end of the nineteenth century, textile workers in urban areas, especially women, still subjected miscreant supervisors to the proverbial ceremony of "rough music." At a mill in Bradford, for example, the female workers in 1893 condemned the advances of their overlooker by preparing an effigy of him. They banged on cans and shouted.[6] In 1891 at Great Horton, near Bradford, weavers who were "members of the weaker sex" jeered and hissed on the shop floor at a team of new overlookers with whom they were supposed to work. When the overlookers informed the employer of the rude distractions, he locked the women out and closed the mill.[7] To put an unpopular overlooker in his place, workers at another mill in Bradford in 1890 formed a procession on the factory grounds, playing on tin kettles and a ram's horn.[8] In these instances, workers drew upon repertoires of protest that had traditionally been used to censure those who transgressed community norms.
Textile strikes had long drawn upon community repertoires of mockery. In the Preston strikes of the 1850s, strikers who had turned out called upon itinerant musicians to stand opposite the mill and accompany their dances, which employers interpreted as a form of "ridicule and defiance."[9] Even after the turn of the century, work boycotts could become an occasion for carnival merrymaking. At a village near Burnley, strikers in 1908 lent their
[5] Cotton Factory Times , December 3, 1886, Glossop. The very concept of a strike was imparted, not given automatically: one worker, after spending time in the mill, naively asked colleagues to explain what a strike was. Maggie Newberry, Reminiscences of a Bradford Mill Girl (Bradford: Local Studies Department, 1980), p. 49.
[6] Yorkshire Factory Times , December 15, 1893, p. 5. During the weavers' strike of 1912 in Blackburn, the female workers taunted strike breakers by carrying fireplace blowers on which they beat with pokers. Geoffrey Trodd, "Political Change and the Working Class in Blackburn and Burnley 1880–1914," Ph.D. diss., University of Lancaster, 1978, pp. 306–307.
[7] Yorkshire Factory Times , May 15, 1891, Great Horton, p. 8.
[8] Yorkshire Factory Times , June 27, 1890. At a mill in Halifax, the workers formed a circle around an unpopular overlooker at the mill gate and "hooted and hustled him." Yorkshire Factory Times , September 30, 1892, Halifax, p. 7. For an instance of rough music at an overlooker's house in Saltaire, see the Bradford Observer , June 29, 1894, Saltaire.
[9] Henry Ashworth, The Preston Strike: An Enquiry into Its Causes and Consequences (Manchester: George Simms, 1854), p. 13. For an example of a handloom weavers' strike during 1823 that drew upon the repertoire of festival wagons, see Frederick James Kaijage, "Labouring Barnsley, 1816–1856: A Social and Economic History," Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 1975, p. 320.
stoppage a festival atmosphere when a female participant "masqueraded in man's attire."[10] In mockery of their owner, these revelers also paraded a pig in a cart through the town streets. With such opportunities for entertainment, an incident such as occurred at a Bradford mill in 1893 could only have been expected: officials of the textile workers' union, called to investigate the cause of the stoppage, claimed that many of the merrymakers demonstrating at the mill gate could not cite a grievance. The workers said they had "come out to have 'a little fun.'" The union officials said that "upon inquiry it turned out that few of the women really understood why they were on strike, many of them coming out as sympathizers with the first malcontents."[11]
The British workers thought of their assemblies as a means of signaling their insistence upon bargaining, not just as a means of withdrawing labor. A newspaper account of a stoppage in the Colne Valley during 1891 makes plain the importance workers attached to turning the cessation of work into a visible gesture of disobedience. "The workmen were seen to be making their way to an open space close by their mill," the report stated," and when anything of this kind takes place all eyes are upon them in wonderment."[12] At a mill in Apperley Bridge in 1893, the weavers were delighted to see that the head of the company "stood stock still when he saw all the weavers outside the mill gates."[13]
The physical arrangement of the British mills often created a stage for workers' demonstrations. The central location of the yard in many mills ensured that a congregation there would be visible to workers and supervisors in every department of the factory. When not used as a site for protest, the mill yard was used by employers and public figures as a platform for addresses. In the Colne Valley, for example, politicians campaigning for
[10] Yorkshire Factory Times , February 21, 1908.
[11] Yorkshire Factory Times , June 9, 1893, p. 5. A winder from Bradford who began work during the First World War said of her first experience of a strike, "We had a nice bit of fun." Bradford Heritage Recording Unit, A0067, born 1904.
[12] Yorkshire Factory Times , July 10, 1891, Milnsbridge and Longwood. Then too, for workers who lacked the courage or know-how to initiate negotiations, assembling in the mill yard at the end of a morning or lunch break forced the owner or manager to inquire into the workers' complaints. At the town of Keighley in 1889, the spinners and doffers at one firm stayed out in the courtyard until the owner, not knowing what the matter was, went out to ask: "None of the older hands daring to say what they wanted, the least girl (a half-timer) spoke as follows: 'We want more wage.' 'Oh, that is it.' 'Aye, it is.' 'But tha' gets enough, doesn't ta.' 'I don't know, but mi' mother doesn't think so.'" Yorkshire Factory Times , September 20, 1889.
[13] Yorkshire Factory Times , June 9, 1893.
office used yards inside the mills as sites for public addresses to workers.[14] A weaver from Yeadon, born in 1861, chose the mill yard as the setting in his autobiography in which to portray the turning point of his spiritual development. There he rejected a job offer from a shady music agent from London and threatened to heave a rock at the man.[15] Well could the central yard, encircled by buildings as if by grandstands, serve as a stage for dramatic confrontation.
The surviving record of evidence in Germany does not easily yield instances before 1914 in which workers turned the mill yard into a theatrical arena for their protests.[16] Yet many examples of conduct come forth that draw on an alternative symbolism: German workers stopped work at their looms and refused to continue until their grievances were corrected. At a weaving mill in Rheydt, for example, weavers stopped work for two days in 1909, but stayed in their shop rooms, to protest against what they viewed as a reduction in piece rates.[17] The workers employed this tactic in Saxony, Bavaria, the Vogtland, the Rhineland, the Münsterland, and the Osnabrück district.[18] Since the workers left whenever owners requested it, this conduct cannot be taken to represent an attempt to occupy the factory by means of a sit-down strike. A police report from the district of Burgsteinfurt said the
[14] Robert Brian Perks, "The New Liberalism and the Challenge of Labour in the West Riding of Yorkshire 1885–1914," Ph.D. diss., Huddersfield Polytechnic, 1985, p. 46.
[15] Raymond Preston, Life Story and Personal Reminiscences (London: Epworth Press, 1930), p. 27.
[16] One instance appears in which the workers moved to the mill yard to negotiate for a more liberal interpretation of the piece-rate categories after having stopped work in the workrooms the previous day. Staatsarchiv Osnabrück, Rep. 610, Lingen, Nr. 124, August 20, 1902, report on Neuenhaus, Lingen district. Similarly, an employer's journal complained about a congregation of strikers at a weaving yard in Zittau. Die Deutsche Arbeitgeber-Zeitung , Dec. 11, 1910. Such gatherings were not only uncommon in Germany but unrecognized among textile workers as a strategy of significance.
[17] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24702, October 10, 1909, p. 40. At one mill in Jöllenbeck, at the beginning of a strike in 1907 the female workers spent a day in the mill without working. They entered the workroom on the second day and sat at their machines until managers finally ordered them to leave. Staatsarchiv Detmold, I.U. Nr. 430, May 22, 1907.
[18] Der deutsche Leinenindustrielle , March 28, 1896, pp. 643–44; Stadtarchiv Steinfurt-Borghorst, B378, July 14, 1892 report; Staatsarchiv Osnabrück, Rep. 610, Lingen, Nr. 125, August 20, 1902; Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt 1311, February 7, 1891, Werner & Cie; Staatsarchiv Detmold, I.U. Nr. 430, May 3, 1907; Gladbacher Merkur , March 21, 1899, Gebrüder Peltzer; Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 5, 1901, Chemnitz, workers called trespassers; April 25, 1902, Crimmitschau; January 29, 1909, Mittweida; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , June 6, 1908, Lampertsmühle; February 3, 1900, Düren. Leipziger Volkszeitung , May 28, 1909, Plauen; Augsburger Abendzeitung , July 24, 1912; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , March 10, 1900, Bocholt. For a temporary work stoppage of the same kind, see HSTAD, Regierung Aachen, 1633, p. 302.
inoperative workers had even left "obligingly."[19] Workers sometimes used the sit-down technique after telling the owner that they did not intend to work. Therefore it was not a silent way of striking without verbal communication, nor a way of denying to authorities that a strike was in fact underway.[20] Like their colleagues in Britain, many German workers remained skeptical of employers' claim to authority and were ready to mock it by pranks on the shop floor, such as falsely pulling emergency alarms.[21] Starting a strike by sitting at the machine was not a sign of greater subordination to managerial directives. It simply exemplified the German workers' conception in this period of the stoppage of work.
The tactic of merely sitting at the machine did not represent a less active response than demonstrating in the yard, or one that required less coordination than marching in a body out of the factory. German workers who adopted the tactic of the "passive strike" showed a high degree of discipline. According to police records from Emsdetten, for example, the weavers who initiated a passive strike in 1904 stopped work at their looms "suddenly, according to an arranged signal."[22] These protesters then sat in the workroom all day. A decade later, at another mill in the same town, the weavers repeated this tactic during the morning shift to protest against weft yarn of substandard quality. The owner eventually shut off the steam power and asked the weavers to leave the premises. When the weavers complied, they did not scatter. Having made their point, they had the discipline to return "punctually" to work in a body at the beginning of the afternoon shift.[23] Details such as these indicate that German workers conducted well-orchestrated stoppages. But they hardly drew upon established techniques such as rough music, nor did they regularly mount protests that depended upon a visual display of disobedience in the yard. The German strikes emphasized the precise, timed withdrawal of labor. At some citywide work stoppages, all
[19] Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1311, February 7, 1891.
[20] Leipziger Volkszeitung , May 28, 1909, Plauen.
[21] Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IX a, Nr. 207, 1885–1895, factory inspector reports, p. 108. Female workers ridiculed elections to the employer-organized factory committees by writing in votes for fictitious or mentally handicapped persons. Christliche Arbeiterin , June 16, 1906, Mönchengladbach. See Alf Lüdtke, "Cash, Coffee Breaks, Horseplay: Eigensinn and Politics Among Factory Workers in Germany Circa 1900," in Michael Hanagan and Charles Stephenson, editors, Confrontation, Class Consciousness, and the Labor Process (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986).
[22] Stadtarchiv Emsdetten, Nr. 737, February 6, 1904. In some instances the initiators of such a strike agreed among themselves before they entered the workroom that they would file in but not work. HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24691, January 20, 1899.
[23] Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1452, January 2, 1914, Emsdetten.
workers in town stopped their work at the same instant. "On May 10th, at nine o'clock in the morning," a factory inspector from Greiz reported, "the strike broke out as if on command in all mechanical weaving mills and in the dyeing and finishing branches."[24] Since workers often began work in the morning with the intention of stopping shortly thereafter, their conduct seemed to affirm the symbolic importance of the act of collectively ceasing the motion of production, rather than merely preventing that motion from starting at all.
The absence of visible workplace demonstrations in the enactment of German strikes made it awkward for some to distinguish between a strike and the contractual withdrawal of labor. Legal-minded German bureaucrats of the time found it so. In the Rhineland, local officials thought that if a large group of workers canceled their employment contract by giving prior notice, they were legally withdrawing their labor and therefore not launching a strike. The Imperial Bureau of Statistics in Berlin had to keep the provincial authorities informed that a mass labor dispute which transpired according to orderly procedures of terminating a labor contract still constituted an event that the officials should report as a strike.[25] The district record keepers in Thüringen may have reflected the prevailing uncertainty about the sighting of a strike in the title of a volume of handwritten enumerations for the period 1882–1906: they called their compilation "Supposed Strikes."[26] In contrast with the British stoppages at the workplace, German protests in the quarter-century before the First World War seem elementary and austere.
[24] Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IXa, Nr. 207, factory inspector reports 1885–1895, p. 150. The Reussische Volkszeitung reported on a strike in Kirchberg in 1907: "At exactly ten o'clock the Knacken of the looms and the Gebrumm of the other machines was silenced." But the workers did not leave the premises. March 20, 1907.
[25] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24692, July 7, 1899. For a parallel case from eastern Germany, see Stadtarchiv Werdau, Rep. II, 2, Nr. 90, Nov.7, 1899. In reponse to inquiries from authorities in the district of Düsseldorf, the Imperial Bureau of Statistics informed the local authorities that" the workers must have decided in the moment they lay down their work that if their requests are rejected, they will refrain from any further activity for their current employer. . . . Violation of the labor contract and damages suffered by the employer or workers is of course often an accompanying event, but in no way a conceptual prerequisite for a labor dispute to be treated as a 'strike.'" HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24692, October 12, 1899. For an example of a work stoppage that local authorities did not consider a "veritable strike," see HSTAD, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach, 99, March 6, 1899, Rheydt.
[26] Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IXa, Nr. 165, "Angebliche Arbeitseinstellungen," 1882–1906. When a larger than usual number of workers happened to give notice to quit at a textile firm in Rheydt, the employer inferred—mistakenly—that a strike was underway. Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 12, 1907.
How are we to explain the difference between the German and the British forms of protest? Certainly the German workers did not adopt this particular style of action because they lacked acquaintance with forms of crowd action. In the early days of factory development at midcentury, workers also employed rough music (Katzenmusik ) against their employers, though not in the workplace.[27] A minister reported in this era that the workers in the Wuppertal district treated their employers to this ceremony whenever "it became known that a moral lapse had occurred in an eminent family."[28] The tradition of rough music still enjoyed a rich life in industrial towns of imperial Germany. At a village in the Lausitz in 1886, weavers suffering from a wage reduction subjected the mayor's house to these raucous sounds.[29] Protesters used this repertoire for issues unrelated to the workplace. At a textile town near Mönchengladbach, one hundred people, including workers from the local mills, joined a rough music demonstration in 1902. They banged pot tops and clanged bells for several nights around the home of a carpenter whom they accused of carrying on an indecent sexual liaison.[30] German textile strikers also organized street processions after the cessation of work.[31] Striking weavers at a firm in the Löbau district in 1886 paraded through the streets with their colorful fabrics mounted on poles.[32] German workers had the repertoires for collective demonstrations at hand in the community, but seldom imported them into the workplace.[33]
[27] Der unbefangene Beobachter , Crimmitschau, August 11, 1848, p. 22.
[28] "People especially liked to use this tactic if the sinner belonged to a family who paid its workers poorly and exploited their time and labor capacity, and who were called 'sweaters.' " August Witteborg, Geschichte der evang.-lutherischen Gemeinde Barmen-Wupperfeld von 1777 bis 1927 (Barmen: Selbstverlag der evang.-lutherischen Gemeinde, 1927), p. 237.
[29] Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , May 5, 1886, p. 588.
[30] The participants called it a Klatschet-Tierjagen. HSTAD, Landgericht Mönchengladbach, 10/8. For evidence of the number of residents in Giesenkirchen who worked in textile mills, see the employment listings at Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 1c 3550.
[31] One of the earliest references to "factory workers" organizing street demonstrations for higher pay comes from Elberfeld: Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 51E, Nr. 62, Rheinprovinz, Sept. 3, 1830, pp. 47 ff. Also, Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IXa, Nr. 207, factory inspector reports 1885–1895, p. 151; Stadtarchiv Greiz, B 5972, May 22, 1873, report on strike processions, pp. 5–8; Staatsarchiv Detmold, M2 Bielefeld, Nr. 291, pp. 563–564; Klaus Tidow, Neumünsters Textil- und Lederindustrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz, 1984), p. 68, regarding 1888 strike; for Borghorst, Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 120 BB, VII 1, Nr. 3, Band 3, pp. 134 ff., Dec. 31, 1875, and pp. 137 ff., report of January 4, 1876.
[32] Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Löbau, Nr. 3055, May 14, 1886, p. 16. For a demonstration of weavers with flags and chimes, see Landesarchiv Potsdam, Rep. 3B, Regierung Frankfurt I Präs. 327, Guben, 1851.
[33] For a commemorative parade organized by textile workers, see Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , August 20, 1910, Emsdetten.
Nor did the divergence in British and German repertoires of action originate in the legal statutes that applied to protest. To be sure, the laws regarding public assembly in Prussia, and in most other German states, required workers to give local police forty-eight hours' notice of a meeting. Yet the courts ruled that the laws that prevented public meetings of associations without prior announcement did not apply to gatherings of employees at work. The courts reasoned that the participants at meetings on shop property discussed workplace matters, not "public affairs." Therefore the law did not require German workers to give police notice of meetings or assemblies on the mill grounds.[34] On this score the laws governing assembly at work in Germany were no different from those in Britain.
If the difference in the repertoires of action at the workplace cannot be explained by the legal environment, where can we turn to discover their significance? One of the terms workers used to describe their actions provides an initial clue, though not a monolithic response. British textile workers who went on strike often said they had "turned out," a figure of speech which highlighted the crossing of a boundary between inside and outside the mill rather than focusing on the stoppage of labor per se.[35]
A confrontation between workers and employers at a Blackburn weaving mill in 1865 implemented this principle. The insurgent weavers assembled in the mill yard before leaving, but they defined the start of the strike as the moment at which they passed through the main gate and left the premises.[36]
[34] Stadtarchiv Emsdetten, Nr. 734, Kammergericht judgments of September 5, 1903, and July 26, 1904. Provincial authorities unsuccessfully sought to override this ruling. Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , January 17, 1904, p. 68. For an example of a meeting held in a German factory without the owner's permission, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 3, 1902, Crimmitschau. Workers sometimes did not register their meetings at public locales if employers from only one firm were admitted. Stadtarchiv Werdau, Rep. II, Kap. 4, Nr. 7, Bd. 2, March 14, 1904, pp. 139 ff. On workplace meetings, see also Wilhelm Gewehr, Praktischer Rathgeber für Vereins- und Versammlungsleiter sowie Versammlungsbesucher (Elberfeld, 1897), p. 34, and Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Leitfaden bei Führung der Geschäfte, in der Agitaton, bei Streiks und Lohnbewegungen (Berlin: Maurer & Dimmick, 1908), p. 65. For a discussion of the evolution of German laws regarding assembly and association, see Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 30–31.
[35] Yorkshire Factory Times , November 15, 1889, Manningham and Shipley; September 13, 1889, Kirkstall. Striking could also be called "going out." Leeds District Archives, T & M Bairstow, 72, negotiations of July 26, 1913. The term strike was not associated only with the defiant stoppage of work, but with individual absence from work for any reason. See Bradford Heritage Recording Unit, A0087, born 1903.
[36] Blackburn Library Archives, M31, Nr. 5403, Blackburn Weavers' Minutes, August 16, 1865.
Managers, too, framed the cessation and resumption of work in spatial terms. The director of a factory in Bradford described the readiness of strikers to begin work again with the expression "They were glad to come in."[37] To "come out" became synonymous with going on strike. In their own accounts of work stoppages, workers described the start of a strike with the standard phrase that they "came out" together or "in a body."[38] The phrase "in a body" connoted a highly patterned form of group conduct. Both the middle-class and the working-class press took care to distinguish between actions committed by a "crowd" and those that workers committed "in a body." A crowd, The Dewsbury Reporter noted in 1875, moved "without arrangement," even when it seemed a peaceable assemblage, whereas workers organized and coordinated their movements when they acted "in a body."[39] In a word, the spatial form assumed by many strikes was purposeful and methodical.
German workers who struck said they had "ceased their labor" (die Arbeit eingestellt ). A similar phrase appeared in German dialect speech. The memoirs of Friedrich Storck, a German poet from the Wuppertal who worked in textile mills as a teenager, document the evolution of workers' language. Storck said that in the Wuppertal, a region known as a pioneer in the development of factory workers' movements, the word strike (Streik) did not acquire currency until after the 1860s.[40] The popular expression of that era was de Brocken hennschmieten ("throw down the work"), a colloquialism which survived into the early twentieth century.[41] Modern histori-
[37] Cited by Elizabeth Jennings, Sir Isaac Holden (Bradford: University of Bradford, 1982), pp. 159 ff.
[38] Centre for English Cultural Traditions and Language, University of Sheffield, interview tape A72 with Benny Laughlin, describing his participation in the 1912 warpers' strike; B. Riley, Handbook , Town Hall, Huddersfield, 1908, p. 18; Archive of General Union of Dyers, Bleachers, and Textile Workers, Yeadon and Guiseley Factory Workers' Union, Minutes, January 19, 1891; Yorkshire Factory Times , May 30, 1902, Lockwood, p. 5. For stereotyped use of the term come out as a synonym for strikes, see the company records of T & M Bairstow Limited, Leeds District Archives, book 72, workers' speech recorded July 26, 1913; Operative Spinners' Provincial Association, Fourth Annual Report, 1883 (Bolton: Thomas Abbatt), p. 45; Cotton Factory Times , January 22, 1897, Darwen; Yorkshire Factory Times , November 22, 1889, Birstall and Oxenthorpe.
[39] The Dewsbury Reporter , March 13, 1875. The phrase "in a body" reflects a refinement of terms indicating nonriotous groupings. For the earlier distinction between "crowds" and "mobs," see Mark Harrison, Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns, 1790–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 170.
[40] Storck said "The word 'strike' was not known in our valley." Friedrich Storck, Aus der Schule des Lebens (Elberfeld: G. Lucas, 1910), Part One, p. 178.
[41] Ibid., pp. 178–179. This was the same phrase striking weavers used in 1899 in Mönchengladbach when they sat at their looms inside the mill. HSTAD, Regierung Düssel-dorf, 24691, January, 1899. No doubt British workers, too, could refer to the beginning of a strike as "downing tools," but in addition they deployed the customary metaphor of "turning out," absent in Germany.
cal research confirms that in other regions of Germany, the phrase "cessation of labor" (Arbeitsniederlegung ) was employed before use of the word strike became commonplace.[42]
The German workers' tactic of sitting at the machine indicates that the withdrawal of the owners' command of the conversion of labor power comprised a symbolic statement of its own. The only "language" the employer knew how to interpret, the Social Democratic textile union said, was "the language of the work stoppage."[43] In Britain, by comparison, the exchange of labor as it was embodied in finished products meant that the withdrawal of the conversion of labor power per se at the point of production did not constitute a symbolic end to the employment relation. Instead, workers supplemented this with the crossing of the boundary of the workroom, combined with a visible demonstration of protest in the mill yard, to express their flouting of the owners' authority. British textile workers enacted their protests by responding to the employers' own emphasis on the surveillance of traffic at border zones rather than on the control of the transformation of labor power into labor. They took hold of the employers' use of space as a handle by which they could turn the employers' authority upside down in the theater of the central mill yard.
In both Germany and Britain, the workers' tactics of collective action represented the appropriate counter-symbols to use against the employers' own ways of asserting their authority over the factory. British textile workers did not as a rule sign contracts or other documents when they entered into an employment relation.[44] Custom and implicit agreement, to which the courts referred if called upon, governed workers' association with their employers.[45] Only a few mills posted notices in the workroom about the
[42] Dieter Schneider et al., Zur Theorie und Praxis des Streiks (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), p. 7.
[43] Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 27, 1905, Mönchengladbach.
[44] Yorkshire Factory Times , March 28, 1902, p. 4; May 30, 1902, Huddersfield; September 18, 1903, Marsden, p. 5; June 3, 1892, p. 5. The Yorkshire Factory Times treated the introduction of written agreements as a news event in itself. According to the written contracts in Britain, the owner or the worker had to provide fourteen days' notice if either wanted to end the employment relation. The Yorkshire weavers considered the contracts pointless, however, because the firm might officially keep the weaver on while placing no warp in the loom. Yorkshire Factory Times , July 3, 1891, p. 4; May 6, 1898, Ravensthorpe.
[45] Yorkshire Factory Times , July 26, 1889. The reliance on custom could in some instances provide workers with greater protection. For example, I found instances in which female textile workers left their jobs without notice. Formally they had broken their employ-ment agreement. Yet the courts let them off when the women quoted the obscene language of their overlookers that had provoked their departure—a safeguard difficult to insert into contracts or legislation. See Textile Mercury , March 8, 1913, p. 192.
terms of employment or about the conduct of the hired hands on the shop floor itself.[46] No wonder, then, that British textile workers did not break the employment relation merely by withdrawing the use of their labor power, for there was no official code giving the owner control on the shop floor over the workers' labor time. Instead, workers reacted by crossing the factories' physical boundaries.[47]
Unlike their British counterparts, German workers signed written contracts when they began employment. As early as midcentury, most German mills had printed rules posted in the shop.[48] After 1891 such posting became obligatory. Workers usually received a personal copy of the factory rules.[49] These ordinances typically told workers how to carry out their work effectively, banned political or religious conversations on the shop floor, and specified the fines that would be levied for misbehavior. According to the provisions of the factory ordinances posted in the mills, stopping work at the loom indicated that workers had "deliberately disobeyed" the factory
[46] United Kingdom, Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, pp. 250, 265, 270; Yorkshire Factory Times , October 18, 1889, Keigley; March 18, 1892, Deighton & Dalton, p. 7; February 5, 1897, Elland; December 20, 1889, J. Skelsey & Sons. Even after 1897, when revisions in the factory acts required owners to provide written warning of the fines to which workers were subject, many mills failed to post notices. Yorkshire Factory Times , May 6, 1898, p. 1. For Lancashire, see LRO, Skipton Power-Loom Weavers' Association, DDX 1407, August 5, 1908. Mills lacked such notices in part because workers rejected them. In Bingley, Lockwood, and Leeds, for example, workers objected to the owners posting notices in their workroom. In Bingley, the workpeople struck for the removal of a sign that listed fines for spoiled work—but not against the fines per se. Once the owner removed the notice, they agreed to the fines and returned to work. "Strikes and Lockouts in 1899," PP 1900 LXXXIII, p. 529, strike number 88. For other examples of British workers objecting to the posting of written rules, see Yorkshire Factory Times , May 30, 1902, Lockwood.
[47] PP 1892 XXXV, p. 160. No doubt instances could be found in which British textile workers stopped their labor and created a disturbance inside their workroom, but this did not comprise a widely enacted, recognized model for strikes.
[48] Edward Beyer, Die Fabrik-Industrie des Regierungsbezirkes Düsseldorf vom Standpunkt der Gesundheitpflege , p. 134; Germany, Amtliche Mitteilungen aus den Jahres-Berichten der mit Beaufsichtigung der Fabriken betrauten Beamten (Berlin: Kortkampf, 1884), p. 381; Karl Emsbach, Die soziale Betriebsverfassung der rheinischen Baumwollindustrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1982), p. 303.
[49] Workers paid a fine of ten pfennigs if they failed to return their copy of the ordinance when they quit. HSTAD, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach, 703, Kloeters & Lamerz, 1897. For other factories that gave workers a copy of the ordinance, see Kreisarchiv Kempen, Gemeinde-archiv Breyell, F. Beckmann, 1892, and Esters & Co., 1905; Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, Gemeinde-archiv Neersen, 814, Rheinische Velvetfabrik, 1912; HSTAD, Landratsamt Grevenbroich, 271, Peter Sieben, pp. 76 ff., 184.
managers.[50] Such defiance provided grounds for immediate dismissal, according to the provisions of the state industrial labor code.[51] The importance German employers attached to the posting of written rules as a means of enforcing their authority over the labor process can be judged from the composition of the rules. Before 1891, factory owners frequently entitled the factory regulations "laws" (Gesetze ). On their own initiative, employers had the local police stamp the rules before posting them.[52] In some instances, they entitled their rules "police regulations."[53] Through these tactics German employers could give the impression that conduct on the shop floor was subject to legal scrutiny and punishment.
It seems clear that German workers took a more legalistic view of the employment relation than did their British counterparts—when it was to their immediate advantage. In both Germany and Britain, the workers' newspapers reported that managers typically responded to workers' grievances with the comment, "If you don't like it, you can leave."[54] But workers responded to these taunts in a different way in each country. German workers took such casual challenges as grounds for departing, for they had, literally, been told they could go home if they wanted to do so. In each of the principal textile districts of Germany, the work force left without notice on the grounds that by saying anyone could return home if things did not suit them, factory officials had terminated the employment relation.[55] Individual workers used the same reasoning before the business courts. A bobbin winder told the court in Elberfeld in 1899 that she had left without offering notice because a supervisor had told her, "If you don't want to work
[50] The factory rules that owners posted in their mills forbade workers from congregating in the entryways or in the yard of the factory. For example, Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv Dortmund, S 8/41, Arbeitsordnung, 1892, and HSTAD, Landratsamt Grevenbroich, 271, Weberei Carl Rente, 1892, pp. 53 ff.
[51] Germany, Gewerbeordnung für das Deutsche Reich (München: C. H. Beck, 1909), section 123, Nr. 3.
[52] Emsbach, op. cit., p. 303. Before 1891 the employers were not obligated to get police approval of the provisions of their rules.
[53] Das Handels-Museum , May 12, 1892, p. 245.
[54] Cotton Factory Times , March 19, 1897; Yorkshire Factory Times , June 3, 1892, p. 5; Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 19, 1909, Lunzenau.
[55] Staatsarchiv Detmold, I.U. 430, May 3, 1907; HSTAD, Regierung Aachen, 1635, May 30, 1900, Düren (Mariaweiler); Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 1c 913, March 7, 1913; Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1311, August 3, 1892; Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten , July 25, 1912; Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, Kap. XI, Sect. I, Nr. 16, April 23, 1866; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amtshauptmannschaft Chemnitz, Nr. 10, 1889, p. 9; Arbeiter-Sekretariat Luckenwalde, 5. Geschäftsbericht für die Zeit vom 1. Januar bis zum 31. Dezember 1908 (Luckenwalde: Selbstverlag, 1909), p. 11.
for the pay, you should get out of here."[56] In response, she left her machine, never to return.
The legal savvy of German workers can be detected in their treatment of written contracts as well. A spinning mill owner in Rheine complained to a district official in 1908 that workers were acutely aware of their legal situation in the factory during the first hour of their hire, before they had been handed their personal copy of the factory ordinance. During these few minutes, the owner said, the workers believed they were "justified" in committing "the worst kinds of mischief" because they knew they did not yet stand under the legal provisions of a labor contract.[57] Not surprisingly, the "people's bureau" (Volksbüro ) in that town, set up by Catholic organizations to inform workers of their legal rights in housing and employment, reported frequent inquiries from workers about the terms for concluding labor contracts.[58] In Rheine, weavers in 1891 stopped work instantly when a clerk took down the sign that listed their piece rates. The workers did not ask why the sign had been removed, but they refused to continue until the clerk replaced it—in the absence of a posted agreement about rates, the workers believed that they had no contract.[59]
The German strikers treated a halt to the process of converting labor power into labor as an essential and dramatic challenge to the owner's authority. They oriented their action to the technical violation of the printed factory rules, which specified the employer's authority over conduct on the shop floor. British textile workers, by contrast, considered a visual demonstration of defiance, "coming out" of the mill into an open theater, to be one of the hallmarks of a strike. In each country the workers' actions represented the appropriate counterstatement to daily practices on the shop floor. In German mills, where the rituals for entering the mill and the timing of workers' entry focused on the appropriation of workers' labor power, strikers acted out the withdrawal of labor power as such. In British mills, where owners focused on the appropriation of products and the assertion of control over border spaces, strikers, too, thought in terms of "coming out" and staging visible protests in the mill yard.
For many Germans who reflected on their economy in the middle of the nineteenth century, the treatment of labor as a commodity still appeared
[56] HSTAD, Gewerbegericht Elberfeld, Nr. 80/48, March 22, 1899.
[57] Stadtarchiv Rheine, 183, January 20, 1908, letter to Regierungspräsident.
[58] Bistumsarchiv Münster, A38, report for 1913, Rheine.
[59] Staatsarchiv Münster, Regierung Münster, 718, February 10, 1891.
monstrous and perverse.[60] Ferdinand Lassalle pointed to industrial conflict in Britain as evidence that the complete objectification of human labor was unrealizable. The melancholy course of strikes in Britain, Lassalle claimed, represented the vain attempt of human beings "to disguise themselves as commodities."[61] In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, the specification of labor as a commodity was taken so thoroughly for granted that it guided not only the humdrum enactment of production but the small insurrections workers improvised on the shop floor against the system's indignities. In all likelihood, only a minority of workers could have offered a detailed verbal exposition of their understanding of labor's commodity form. But the eloquent patterning of work stoppages shows, as philosophers and social historians alike have remarked, that although people may not be able to put their knowledge into words, they can put it into action.