Defining Fines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[114] Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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