The Formulation of Strike Demands
In both the German and the British textile industry, the decade of the 1890s began an upsurge in labor disputes that was sustained until the First World War. Karl Emsbach, in his sample of reports from the textile industry in the Rheinland, found a threefold increase in strikes during the decade 1890–1899 over the averages for the three preceding decades. The trend accelerated in the decade after the turn of the century.[62] In Britain the years from 1888 to 1892, the critical years of development for the New Unionism, also initiated an extended increase in textile strikes.[63] Despite this shared trajectory, however, strike demands at the textile factories of each country reached toward different ends, based on the workers' definition of labor as a commodity. In Germany, textile strikers transcended requests concerning wages and hiring to propose changes of their own in the conditions under which workers carried out the labor activity.
[60] "Economically you are a commodity, not a human." Allgemeine deutsche Arbeiter-Zeitung , Coburg, Nr. 22, May 31, 1863, p. 130.
[61] Dieter Schneider et al., op. cit., p. 26.
[62] Emsbach, op. cit., pp. 562–565. Due to the lack of summaries for the decades before the 1890s, however, investigators cannot offer a pithy national measure of the extent to which textile strikes became more frequent. The broad lines of development, however, as laid out in local police reports, are unmistakable.
[63] Joseph White, "Lancashire Cotton Textiles," in Chris Wrigley, editor, A History of British Industrial Relations 1874–1914 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 220.
The German workers went beyond their British counterparts in requesting changes to protect the labor power they entrusted to the employer. They lodged strike demands for technical improvements to prevent accidents at work. In Borghorst, for example, striking weavers requested the introduction of "arrangements for the transport of warps according to the accident prevention regulations" of their company.[64] German strikers also requested the installation of shuttle guards to prevent shuttles from flying off the loom and injuring nearby workers. According to the Imperial Bureau of Statistics in Berlin, demands for safer or healthier working conditions contributed to the outbreak of eleven strikes in textiles from 1901 through 1906 (these are the years for which the official figures can be disaggregated into precise demands).[65]
Unfortunately, the average frequency with which German strikers presented such demands for changes in the organization of work will never be ascertained. Local authorities who submitted strike reports to the Imperial Bureau of Statistics often omitted reference to the demands workers submitted that did not relate to wages or the length of the workday. The officials forwarded only those demands that seemed palpably understandable and that fit into their conventional view of industrial conflict, but the researcher who sifts through police notes or newspaper accounts will find a veritable underground of grievances which the workers themselves incorporated into strike negotiations. Historians who rely on the published government statistics in Germany to enumerate the instigating causes of work stoppages merely recirculate the crass assumptions of German officialdom. In Gummersbach, for example, textile workers in 1900 submitted demands for more light and air in the workplace, for a better canteen, and for cleaner toilets. City officials submitted reports to higher-ups only about the wage demands, however, so only the wage demands entered the published tabulations. Similar misreporting occurred for textile strikes in Saxony, in Luckenwalde, and in the district of Lingen.[66] "The official overview of the results of the
[64] Stadtarchiv Steinfurt-Borghorst, Akt. B 378.
[65] The towns in which these demands originated included Leitelshain, Reichenbach, Krefeld, Crimmitschau, Schwaig, Mesum, Lörrach, Bramsche, and Barmen. They embraced the linen, wool, and cotton industries. Germany, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs , Volume 157 (Berlin: Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, various years), pp. II 103 ff.; Volume 164, pp. II 127 ff.; Volume 188, pp. I 58 ff.
[66] Stadtarchiv Gummersbach, 4479, report of May 17, 1900. Compare Germany, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs , Volume 141, pp. 62–63; Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 20, 1902, Wittgensdorf, with Germany, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs , Volume 157, Streiks und Aussperrungen im Jahre 1902, p. II 58; Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 14, 1904, Luckenwalde, with Germany, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs , Volume 188, Streiks und Aussperrungen imJahre 1904; and Staatsarchiv Osnabrück, Rep. 610, Lingen, Nr. 125, September 16, 1902, with Germany, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs , Vol. 157, pp. II 104–105.
strike statistics," the Social Democratic Volkszeitung concluded in 1892, "is absolutely worthless."[67]
The significant point from a comparative perspective is that German textile workers often formulated such demands in strikes, whereas British workers rarely did. No evidence that British textile workers voiced strike demands for protection against accidents appears in British workers' textile newspapers or in the parliamentary listings.[68] Does the inclusion of demands for workplace safety in German strikes, but their absence in Britain, mean that this issue was of concern only to workers in Germany?
The comments of British workers in the Yorkshire Factory Times indicate that they certainly harbored dissatisfaction with unsafe machinery. In my sample of stories from this journal for the years from 1890 through 1893, twenty-seven complaints about unhealthy or dangerous working conditions appeared. Most frequently the workers mentioned the lack of guards to prevent the shuttles from flying out of the loom;[69] they also cited the lack of mesh fencing around some equipment.[70] Yet proposals to correct these problems, in particular the installation of loom guards, were not apt to enter into strike negotiations as they did in Germany. This seems even more curious in view of the British textile workers' legendary obstinacy and readiness to strike over minor arrangements in the workplace that concerned pay.
German textile workers, again unlike British workers, included among their strike demands the building of factory canteens and the cleaning of toilet facilities.[71] At Düren in the Rhineland, for example, the workers at a
[67] Volkszeitung , May 2, 1892, p. 1.
[68] The format of British government reports during the 1890s would have suited the listing of idiosyncratic demands, for officials published concrete descriptions of the points at issue and not merely standardized causes. The lack of appropriate shuttle guards in Britain led weavers in Bradford to improvise: they draped sheets around their looms to deflect the injurious projectiles. Yorkshire Factory Times , December 29, 1893, p. 4.
[69] Yorkshire Factory Times , April 17, 1891, Yeadon; October 2, 1891, Horsforth; November 13, Horsforth; March 17, 1893; April 28, 1893, Bradford; May 19, 1893, Bradford; June 9, 1893, Queensbury.
[70] Yorkshire Factory Times , October 14, 1892, Bradford; February 24, 1893.
[71] Stadtarchiv Gummersbach, 4479, report of May 17, 1900; HSTAD, Regierung Aachen, 1634, February 6, 1899, Düren; Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 20, 1902, Wittgensdorf; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , February 24, 1900, Dülken; Historisches Archiv des Erzbistums Köln, 23.2, 2 (2), report from Mönchengladbach, 1900, p. 47. For other instances of demands for canteens, dressing rooms, and bathrooms, see Christlicher Textilarbeiter Deutschlands, Geschäftsbericht, July 1910 to July 1912 , p. 155, Düren. For an example of extensive negotiations over the condition of toilets, see Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, B25-319, June 15, 1906. For a demand for better washing facilities submitted along with wage requests, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 11, 1901. Factory inspectors reported frequent complaints about toilet facilities. HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25022, report for 1900, pp. 15 ff. At Gera, the workers had a provision incorporated into the piece-rate agreement of 1905 that guaranteed that the workrooms themselves would be cleaned daily. Stadtarchiv Gera, "Vereinbarungen zu den Akkordlohn-Tarifen," October, 1905.
mill for weaving metal sheets bargained in 1899 for better eating facilities as part of the strike settlement.[72] The male dyers who went on strike in 1899 around the district of Krefeld included among their demands a request that the owner provide dressing rooms in which they could change clothes.[73] In Thüringen, workers pressed for free soap and towels from employers.[74] In Mönchengladbach, striking textile workers in 1900 bargained not only for higher wages but for unsoiled toilets.[75] German workers treated the condition of water closets as a topic meriting separate discussion at their union meetings. At Coesfeld, for example, thirty-seven weavers at a meeting in 1910 signed a petition whose sole object was cleaner toilets.[76]
The circumstance that in strikes only German workers advanced demands for better factory facilities does not imply that only German workers concerned themselves with these amenities. The great majority of British textile workers felt the lack of cloakrooms, cafeterias, and undefiled restrooms, but they did not make this an issue of contestation with employers.[77] Instead, they submitted letters to their newspapers express-
[72] HSTAD, Regierung Aachen, 1634, February 16, 1899.
[73] Gladbacher Merkur , September 18, 1899.
[74] Over eighty firms in the district of the German Textile Workers' Union in Thüringen provided the soap and towels. Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, Gau Thüringen, Tariferläuterungen und Statistisches: Bearbeitet nach Aufzeichnungen der Tarif-Kommission im sächsisch-thüringischen Textilbezirk (Gera: Alban Bretschneider, 1909), p. 32.
[75] Historisches Archiv des Erzbistums Köln, 23.2, 2 (2), July, 1900, report, p. 47.
[76] Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , January 14, 1911, Coesfeld. For other examples of discussions of toilets at union meetings, see Forster Tageblatt , August 13, 1899; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , July 23, 1910, Bocholt; Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 21, 1902, Meerane. The German workers' press adopted a writing style that was all too vivid when it came to the toilets. See, for example, Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 18, 1904; April 14, 1905, Dölau. The "free" textile workers' union in Germany developed rating systems of toilet cleanliness and executed statistical surveys of toilet conditions at various mills. See Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 15, 1904, Gera, and April 22, 1904, Chemnitz. In Saxony, workers extracted an agreement that employers would clean toilets weekly. Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, Gau Thüringen, Lohnbewegungen der Weber und Weberinnen 1902–1909 (Gera: Alban Bretschneider, 1909), p. 29. But then workers struggled to ensure that the toilets were not merely swept but also scrubbed. Vorwärts , Sept. 4, 1909.
[77] For an example of a worker's discontent with the lack of a cloakroom but absence of any expectation that the owner should provide one, see Elizabeth Roberts's interview with Mr. C1P, born 1894, Preston, p. 42. An overlooker testified in 1892 that the workpeople grumbled to him, but not to the employer, about dirty, primitive toilets. Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXVI, Part II, p. 10.
ing their discontent about toilet and eating facilities. In my Yorkshire Factory Times sample for 1890 through 1893, for example, ten complaints about sanitation and two about the absence of canteens appeared.[78] (Remarks about canteens appeared only under unusual circumstances, however: in one case the air in the workroom itself was so noxious people felt they could not safely eat there; in another, the owner punished someone for eating near their loom and spilling crumbs on the cloth.) Thus, the British workers complained informally about toilets, but they did not introduce the state of these facilities into strike negotiations as the Germans did. Nor did the discussion of toilets become a topic for public meetings in Britain, as it was in Germany.
The German strikes and complaints concerning toilet facilities, canteens, and safety all took for granted the owner's responsibility for providing for workers' needs on the shop floor. These strikes assumed that the small rituals of life in the factory—eating, cleaning oneself, going to the toilet—could be treated as confrontations with the owner's authority over the production process.[79] When seen in those terms, apparent details grew into suitable issues to introduce into strike negotiations. Speakers at German union meetings turned them into symbols of the owners' command over the worker.[80] The union secretary in Gera declared it "scandalous" in 1906 that female workers at a mill could clean themselves only by putting water in their mouths and spraying it over their bodies.[81] British workers, by contrast, lacking the notion of the owner's embrace of the expenditure of their labor power, did not dramatize those parts of their vie intime that
[78] Cf. Bradford Library Archives, Mary Brown Barrett, "In Her Clogs and Her Shawl:. A Working Class Childhood, 1902–1914," p. 56: "We hated having to go to the toilet and were glad to get out again." At a Bradford weaving shed, workers brought camphor with them to avoid nausea from the toilet odors. Yorkshire Factory Times , September 20, 1889.
[79] Factory inspectors reported that German workers rarely used any facilities, such as bath facilities, that were not required for the labor process, even when the services were free. Jahresberichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe, 1898 (Berlin: R. v. Decker, 1899), p. 257. In Barmen the inspector reported that workers said outright that such facilities "served a policing function." Jahresberichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe, 1892 (Berlin: T. Burer, 1893), p. 354.
[80] Owners in Germany fined workers for dirtying the toilets and for dallying around them. At the C. A. Delius factory near Bielefeld, fines of workers for toilet behavior amounted to fifteen marks a year. Staatsarchiv Detmold, Regierung Minden, I.U. Nr. 425, pp. 106 ff. British textile employers, unlike those in Germany, did not establish fines for dirtying the toilet seats.
[81] Arbeiter-Sekretariat, Gera, Fünfter Geschäfts-Bericht des Arbeiter-Sekretariats Gera (Gera: Selbstverlag, 1906), p. 17.
transpired within the factory walls as points of contact with their employer.[82]
German textile workers also displayed a tendency to broaden the issues in strike movements to cover many seemingly unrelated points of contention. They extended the conflict to consider the employers' authority over the manufacturing process in multiple ways. According to the reports of the Imperial Bureau of Statistics in Berlin, 44 percent of the strikes that German textile workers launched from 1899 through 1906 included multiple demands (these are the only years for which strikes with more than one ultimatum are distinguishable in published reports). The surviving copies of workers' original demands indicate that strikers sometimes compiled long lists. For example, workers at Schiefbahn in 1905 submitted eleven separate demands, including hourly pay for waiting time, restraints on abusive language, and regular consultation between representatives of management and workers.[83] In Britain, by contrast, in a count of the Board of Trade's strike reports for textiles whose format permits a comparison (the years 1894 through 1900), only 5 percent of strikes included more than one demand.[84]
[82] Indeed, at some British mills the owner relinquished responsibility for toilet conditions by letting overlookers collect fees from workpeople to hire persons to clean the stalls. Yorkshire Factory Times , January 29, 1892, p. 5. Of course, the "contact" with employers through the care of one's body in the factory could become all too literal. Workers at a mill in Thüringen complained that the water they received to wash themselves had already been used by people in the factory's supervisory office. Verband Deutscher Textilarbeiter, Gau Thüringen, op. cit., p. 32.
[83] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24699, May 1, 1905, p. 286. For examples of workers presenting nine or ten strike demands, see Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, B25-319 May 11, 1906; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Kreishauptmannschaft Zwickau, Nr. 1999, March 12, 1887, p. 134. For examples of five or more demands, see HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24701, 1906, Rheydt, p. 223; HSTAD, Regierung Aachen, 1634, Jan. 27, 1900, Düren; HSTAD, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach, 70, April 4, 1906, p. 109; Staatsarchiv Münster, Kreis Steinfurt, 1311, Sept. 12, 1906, Mesum; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , Nov. 4, 1899, Grefrath; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Glauchau, Nr. 341, July 12, 1910; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amtshauptmannschaft Chemnitz, Nr. 10, October 27, 1889, p. 112; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Kreishauptmannschaft Zwickau, Nr. 1999, August 5, 1884, p. 121, and Oct. 20, 1889, p. 157; Stadtarchiv Greiz, B Nr. 5977, Kap. IV, Nr. 97, Sept. 13, 1905, pp. 39–42. Even in the course of districtwide strikes over wages, weavers submitted many supplementary demands on a firm-by-firm basis regarding coffee water, repair of cloth defects, payment for reeling, etc. Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 120 BB VII 3, Nr. 32, Aachen, pp. 3–19, 1895.
[84] Cross-checks of official British reports with the accounts of strikes in the Yorkshire Factory Times reveal no instances in which the Board of Trade omitted subsidiary demands in strike movements.
It is possible, of course, that the greater incidence of multiple demands in Germany meant only that German workers planned their strikes more carefully or conducted them in a more organized fashion.[85] Were this explanation accurate, strikes in Germany that were initiated with the two weeks' advance notice legally required to terminate the employment relation would revolve around multiple demands more frequently than would more spontaneous strikes begun without sufficient notice. Government statistics are not the last word on the matter, but they lend no support to this hypothesis. For the years 1899 through 1906, the period for which the official German data can be cross-tabulated, textile workers issued multiple demands in 43 percent of the abrupt, illegal strikes. There was no statistically significant difference in Germany between the rate at which textile workers in well-organized, lawful strikes presented multiple demands and the rate at which workers in illegal strikes lodged them.[86]
The variation between Germany and Britain in number of demands lodged probably did not derive from the institutions that factories had in place for mediating workplace conflicts. In both countries, conflict usually broke out in individual mills without turning into district-wide confrontations between the unions and the employers' associations. In Germany, if negotiations at a mill preceded the launching of a strike, workers usually conducted them without assistance from trade union officials. The lack of close union guidance in German textile strikes can be gauged from the circumstance that most of them began without the legal notice necessary to end employment.[87] The so-called worker committees some German mills formed to administer health insurance funds hardly became known for representing the workers' interests in disputes.[88] And in Yorkshire most
[85] In her study of strikes in France from 1871 to 1890, Michelle Perrot found that more spontaneous strikers were more likely to lodge only a single demand. Les Ouvriers en grève (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1974), p. 344.
[86] Of the 313 strikes textile workers initiated in the years 1899 to 1906 with the two weeks' notice necessary to terminate the employment contract, 139 (44 percent) had multiple demands. Of the 362 strikes textile workers undertook in this period without proper notice, 155, or virtually the same portion (43 percent), had multiple demands. Germany, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs (Berlin: Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, 1899–1906). For an autobiographical account of an impromptu strike in which workers articulated more than one demand, see Gewerkschaft Textil-Bekleidung, Dokumente zu 150 Jahren Frauenarbeit in der Textil- und Bekleidungsindustrie (Düsseldorf: Courier-Druck, 1981), p. 23: "What we should demand, no one of us knew better than any other, but we knew we wanted to strike!"
[87] Ibid. Of 675 strikes in the German textile industry between 1899 and 1906, 362 (54 percent) involved workers who had not legally terminated the employment contract.
[88] For the lower Rhine, see HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25014, Mönchengladbach Fabrikinspektor, 1892; Christliche Arbeiterin , June 16, 1906, Mönchengladbach; GladbacherMerkur , August 1, 1899, Fabrik Von Kaubes. For the Wuppertal, see Elisabeth Gottheiner, Studien über die Wuppertaler Textilindustrie und ihre Arbeiter in den letzten zwanzig Jahren (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1903), p. 87; for the Bergisches Land, HSTAD, Landratsamt Gummersbach, 487, May 4, 1890, Bergneustadt. For the Münsterland, see Herbert Erdelen, "Die Textilindustrie in zwei Kreisen (Ahaus und Steinfurt) des Münsterlandes," diss., Freiburg i. Br., 1921, p. 152. Since the committees were often dominated by supervisors, social democratic organizers in some regions discouraged their formation. Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IXa, Nr. 207, factory inspector reports, 1885–1895, p. 152, and Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IXa, Nr. 303, 1896, p. 87, and 1897, p. 159.
strikes broke out before the unions had received word of the dispute.[89] The Socialist Review reported in 1910 that in one woolen district, workers launched or threatened half a dozen strikes within three months "without a single Union member being concerned or official intervening."[90]
Still another possible explanation for the greater incidence of multiple demands in Germany is that the German textile workers struck less frequently. By this hypothetical line of argument, fewer strikes would build up a backlog of demands that would then be expressed in a single strike. But in terms of the size of the textile work forces, strikes were actually slightly less frequent during the period from 1899 through 1913 in Britain than in Germany. The annual ratio of strikes to workers was about one to seven hundred in Britain and one to six hundred in Germany.[91]
The tendency of textile workers in Germany to formulate an extensive list of demands rather than to strike over a single issue coincided with another trend: German textile workers included among their strike demands requests that employers reform their governance of the work activity. Strikers at a Chemnitz mill told their employer in 1889 he had to make a "better arrangement of the production techniques" and allow workers to monitor the run-
[89] Ben Turner said, "We seldom heard of the disputes until a day or two had elapsed." About Myself 1863–1930 (London: Cayme Press, 1930), pp. 116, 125. Turner said the weavers' union approved of only four strikes in more than eight years. Turner's Scrapbook, Kirklees Archives, Sept., 1894, Yorkshire Factory Times , September 13, 1889, Morley; June 20, 1890, Kirkheaton; August 15, 1890, Bradford; September 5, 1890, Bradford; September 26, 1890, Shipley; October 2, 1890, Keighley; June 2, 1893, Leeds, p. 1; June 9, 1893, Bradford; August 4, 1893, Luddenden.
If the institutional environment were responsible for differences in the lodging of multiple demands, an analyst might expect significant differences to have arisen in the frequency of multiple demands between Yorkshire and highly unionized Lancashire. Yet in both provinces fewer than 5 percent of strikes involved multiple demands.
[90] Henry Wilmott, "The 'Labour Unrest' and the Woollen Trades," Socialist Review (November 1910), p. 214.
[91] Textile workforces computed from Germany, Die Deutsche Volkswirtschaft am Schlusse des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Puttkammer und Mühlbrecht, 1900), p. 25 and United Kingdom, Census of England and Wales 1891 , PP 1893–1894 CVI, pp. vii ff.
ning of the engine.[92] In Aachen the weavers demanded that the company create a new job, that of carrying warp beams, to relieve weavers of this burden.[93] Challenges such as this were not simply defensive responses to employers' efforts to introduce new machinery or heavier workloads. At a spinning mill in Viersen, on the lower Rhine, for example, the striking spinners in 1899 listed several demands for the maintenance of machinery. They gave the manager a schedule that stipulated how often he was to carry out preventive maintenance and replace frayed parts on various types of spinning frames.[94] In both Germany and Britain, weavers considered it proper that overlookers dispense warps among the looms in the order in which weavers had finished their previous jobs.[95] At a mill in Eupen, Germany, the weavers even demanded that the overlooker himself, who tended a loom of his own in his spare moments, receive warps in the same order as the ordinary weavers. When the owner disapproved the request, the weavers went on strike.[96] They wanted to override the overlookers' and employers' authority to determine the distribution of work on the shop floor.
How dissimilar are these demands from those of the British? British weavers, like those in Germany, resisted changes in the labor process, such as the change to the two-loom system. Like the German weavers, they struck over the poor quality of raw materials, especially in the cotton industry, because defective materials reduced their piece-rate earnings or caused them to work harder for the same wage. They also struck over the arbitrary sacking of co-workers and, in the spinning departments, over the owners' failure to promote workers in order of seniority from the apprenticeship position of a piecer to the full position of a mule minder. British workers were no less concerned with authority than their German counterparts, but they focused on defending against encroachment rather than challenging
[92] Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Chemnitz, Nr. 10, October 30, 1889, pp. 116–117, and Protokoll of Nov. 15, 1889.
[93] Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 120 BB VII, Fach. 3, Nr. 32, Feb. 2, 1895.
[94] Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 8, 1899. Textile strikers in the region of Greiz demanded not just fresh air at work but the installation of a new system of ventilation. Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landratsamt Greiz, Nr. 2550, 1895, p. 10. At Anrath striking weavers extracted a promise from the firm in 1902 that overlookers would be on hand to attend broken looms more promptly. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , February 1, 1902, Anrath.
[95] For an example of a strike over this issue, see Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 77 2525, Volume 1, Nr. 3, pp. 6 ff., January 1899.
[96] Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 2, 1900, Eupen. In the district of Löbau, weavers also demanded changes in the "arrangement and regulation" of production to reduce waiting time for materials. Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Löbau, Nr. 3055, March 30, 1890.
the governance of production. British textile-factory workers did not propose changes to control the manager's methods of administering production, as did their German counterparts.[97]
British contemporaries believed that some of the strikes over wages disguised textile workers' wishes to change aspects of the manufacturing process. For example, at the Alston wool combing works in Bradford, the director found in 1892 that men who had gone out on strike were glad to come in once he agreed to changes in the organization of work. He concluded that the wages had not been the overriding issue at all; rather, it was "a problem of work operations concerning the disposal of suds and potash."[98] William Drew, an executive of the Yorkshire textile workers' union, testified in 1891 that many strikes over wages were an "excuse," a pretext. Wage demands concealed other concerns, he said, in particular, mismanagement of the looms.[99] Even when British textile workers were both dissatisfied with the technical methods of production and willing to strike, they did not focus on the governance of work as a contestable issue.
Each of these differences between the goals of British and German strikers parallels the differences between their cultural definitions of the commodity of labor. The German concept of the delivery of labor in the form of labor power accentuated the employer's exercise of authority at the point of production to convert this labor capacity into labor.[100] The distinguishing
[97] To be sure, British textile workers proposed changes related to the calculation or verification of pay. At a mill in Lockwood, for example, the female weavers in 1902 left the premises and refused to return until the owner agreed to place marks on the warps at ten-foot intervals. By these marks the weavers would be able to check whether the warp spanned a greater distance than the weavers had been told it would. But this demand related to the exchange of products for pay, not to the execution of the labor activity. Yorkshire Factory Times , May 30, 1902, p. 5, Lockwood. In the cotton branch, British cotton workers also protested when managers put excessive steam into the air. They suggested limits to the discomforts of work, not improvements in the technique of manufacture proper. See Joseph White, The Limits of Trade Union Militancy (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978), Appendix One, pp. 186–201; Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1890–1891 LXXVII, p. 483, Kirkham and Blackburn.
[98] Quoted in Jennings, op. cit., pp. 159 ff.
[99] Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 223. A striking weaver at Sunnyside Mills in Bolton said in 1905 that the wage complaint only cloaked "the real want," which was less specialization in the work process. Zoe Munby, "The Sunnyside Women's Strike," Bolton People's History , Volume 1 (March 1984), p. 8. Tom Mann's autobiography provides an interesting parallel case for the dock workers, with wage demands again disguising concern about the organization of the labor process. Tom Mann's Memoirs (London: Labour Publishing Company, 1923), p. 110.
[100] Thus employers defined a worker (Arbeiter ) as someone "whose activity is controlled by supervisors." Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Löbau, Nr. 3375, factory ordinance, Weberei Gebrüder Hoffmann.
features of German textile workers' strike goals—the greater focus on safety conditions and on hygienic care of the worker's person, the multiplication of grievances in a single strike about the employer's administration of the mill, and the advancement of proposals for changes in the governance of production—all focused on the employer's domination of workers by the exercise of authority at the point of production. British textile strikers did not focus on the small rituals of daily life inside the mill as a point of contact with the employer's authority. Rather, they converted disputes that might have addressed the organization of production into an issue of receiving adequate compensation for products delivered.[101]
German workers' understanding of the labor transaction did not always lead them to reject the owner's authority on the shop floor; sometimes they embraced it. The union of workers employed at home in the sewing industry demanded the erection of central workshops for themselves, though not to boost productivity. Instead, they sought to make employers responsible for providing better working conditions and wanted union and state inspectors to certify and monitor the wages and hours of labor, which would be possible only if workers labored under the employer's supervision.[102] British sewers, by contrast, were far from preferring centralized work.[103] As the example of the home sewers in Germany shows, the specification of labor as a commodity did not inevitably make workers in Germany more rebellious against the capitalist labor transaction or against authority on the shop floor. Factory workers contested employers' authority while home workers embraced it, yet the struggle in both situations started with the presumption that the renter of labor power, entrusted with the disposition over the person of the worker, also bore responsibility for the care of that labor power.[104] Depending on the tactical advantages to be secured, German workers used the prevailing specification of the labor transaction in different ways, but always in a
[101] For a brief discussion of why workers in the nineteenth century based their demands upon their identities as producers, see Bernard Mottez, Systèmes de salaire et politiques patronales (Paris: Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, 1966), p. 232.
[102] Herbert Cohen, "Heimarbeit und Heimarbeiterbewegung in der deutschen Herrenkonfektion," Ph.D. diss., Erlangen, 1926, pp. 78–79.
[103] Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXVI, Part II, p. 117.
[104] "Labor power is the only capital of the worker. . . . It is therefore his first duty to prevent its premature deterioration or even destruction. This is no less the responsibility of the employer, who out of self-interest watches over the health of his subordinates." Walter Höttemann, Die Göttinger Tuchindustrie der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Göttingen: Göttinger Handelsdruckerei, 1931), p. 105.
manner that reveals consistent differences from the cultural paradigm for conflict in Britain.