Time Jurisdiction

British managers marked the beginning and close of the daily cycle of production by subjecting their workers to exceedingly rigid controls on entry into and exit from the factory. The most common, though not universal, practice at mills in Yorkshire and Lancashire was to latch the doors at the start of the workday, compelling latecomers to return home.^[38] Only at the

[36] The Lancashire director Dilks suggested,"Perhaps the figure which the weaving mill manager is most interested in is that representing the average weekly earnings per loom." Dilks, op. cit., p. 171.

[37] Weber, op. cit., pp. 188 ff.

[38] Calderdale Oral History Collection, from the heavy woolen district: Maria Shaw, born 1893, mill in Batley; Mrs. Dransfield, born 1896, on Taylor's Cheapside mill; Mr. Robinson, report from year 1916 on a mill in Birkenshaw; Mrs. Hanley, reporting on mother's experience at Mark Oldroyd's mill. Joanna Bornat's interview transcripts from Colne Valley: Mrs. T., born 1896, about first job; Mr. B., born 1901, on John Edward's mill, Marsden; Miss A., born 1897, on "Bruce's mill," Marsden; Mrs. W., born 1900, on Crowther's mill, Marsden; Mrs. B., born 1900, on Robinson's mill, Marsden; Mrs. O., born 1888, on Dewhirst's mill, Elland. My interview with Mrs. E. Brook, weaver at Newsome Mills, Almondbury. My interview with Arthur Murgatroyd, born 1902, halftimer at Crossley's Mill, Halifax. My interview with Mrs. May Broadbent, born 1896, Midgley. Dr. A. H. Clegg, a former half-time worker in Halifax, wrote down his memories of getting locked out: manuscript, Calderdale Archives, MISC 482. For an account by a dialect poet, see James Burnley, Phases of Bradford Life (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1889), p. 45. Newspaper reports include Yorkshire Factory Times , December 16, Apperley Bridge; January 28, 1898, Bradford; February 18, 1898, April 25, 1890, Slaith-waite; July 28, 1893, Batley; January 18, 1901, Greetland; December 13, 1901, Elland; August 28, 1903, Dewsbury; January 13, 1905, Batley; July 21, 1905, Shipley and Saltaire; April 25, 1890, Slaithwaite. The Minutes of the Halifax Overlookers' Society, Calderdale Archives, TU 102/2/1, Mssrs. Martin and Son, February 13, 1897. For the Northwest, Cotton Factory Times , February 5, 1897, Darwen; February 12, Stalybridge; March 19, 1897, p. 1. Dermot Healey's interview 628, female weaver, started mill work 1916; Paul Thompson and Thea Thompson, family and work history interviews, Respondent 122, male spinner, born 1895, Bolton, Lancashire; Respondent 140, male worker, Salford, born 1901; Cotton Factory Times , February 5, 1897, Darwen; February 12, 1897, Stalybridge; March 19, 1897, p. 1. LRO, DDX 1089, November 4, 1904, p. 194. Sometimes the company books tell the story; Bolton Oral History Collection, Tape 121, mule piecer, born 1899. At Strutt's Belper mill, the grounds for fines logged from 1805 to 1813 do not include tardiness. R. S. Fitton and A. P. Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights 1758–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), pp. 234–236. For examples of employers bolting latecomers outside hosiery establishments in Nottingham, see Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1893–1894 XXXVII, Part I, pp. 163–170.

breakfast or lunch break several hours after, when the factory as a whole made a ritual of stopping and resuming activity, could latecomers pass through the factory portal and commence work.^[39] Interviews with former workers and the complaints published in the union newspapers provide dramatic accounts of workers having the mill door literally shut in their face as they dashed to enter exactly at starting time. Many employers in Britain instructed their porters to secure the gate forcefully even if workers running to it were within sight. "At six o'clock, bang, that's it, shut the gate," remembered a spinner from Halifax. "The man there, his job was to pull it through a yard at once."^[40] A female winder in Preston, Lancashire, reported to her union in 1915 that the manager apprehended her entering the mill just as the door began to close. He "mangled and bruised" her arms:

On Monday morning when I went to work I had just got my foot on the threshold of the door when the door was slammed to and my foot was caught between the door and the door jamb. I pushed the door open with my hand and as I entered the manager was standing there who said to me "Outside—you are not coming through."^[41]

To be sure, some textile mills, especially in Lancashire, imposed fines for tardiness, generally standard amounts that served as a disciplinary tool

[39] One female weaver claimed that latecomers were excluded for the entire day. Her report, probably exaggerated in remembrance, indicates all the better her internal experience of the custom. Bornat's interview with Mrs. W., op. cit.

[40] My interview with Murgatroyd, op. cit. For an example in which workers were stopped from working for being less than a minute late, see LRO, DDX 1089/8/1, July 1906, p. 106. A female weaver from a village near Halifax recalled as one of the highlights of her working life the day she climbed a wall and clambered through a mill window to get into the mill after starting time. My interview with Mrs. May Broadbent, op. cit.

[41] LRO, DDX 1089/8/3, Preston, June 19, 1915.

rather than as a carefully graduated form of recompense for the employer.^[42] Yet oral testimony and workers' newspapers show that locking out represented the expected and predominant routine.^[43] Mills also combined fines with locking out; workers less than, say, fifteen minutes overdue could pay a penny for admittance, before other latecomers were excluded for good.^[44]

[42] John Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750–1850 (London: Longman, 1986), p. 136. For examples of fining in Yorkshire, see Calderdale Archives, Stansfield Mill, "Rules for Piecers and Scavengers," 1833; Leeds District Archives, Springfield & Broom Mills, Factory Committee Minutes, November 11, 1909. For Lancashire, see Manchester Library Archives, F1851/31, Haslingden, 1851. At Marshall's of Leeds, the monetary sanction departed from a time metric because managers retaliated by reducing the overdue workers' official rates of pay for the next weeks. W. G. Rimmer, Marshalls of Leeds: Flax-Spinners 1788–1889 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 120. Sometimes the latecomers were automatically fined "a quarter"—that is, the fine was not calculated according to minutes lost but was defined as the portion of the daily wage normally earned up to the breakfast break, when the bolted doors opened. Yorkshire Factory Times , May 1, 1908, Radcliffe. Analogously, in the carpentry trade workers who arrived five minutes or more overdue lost one hour's pay, as if they had been excluded. Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXVI, Part 4, p. viii.

[43] In Kapital , Marx delights in citing British factory rules setting out excessive fines for late arrival. His selection of anecdotes suited his rhetorical purpose by illustrating the monetarization of human relations. By relying only on the most readily available printed documents, however, he drew a skewed picture of realized practice. Das Kapital (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1980), Volume 1, pp. 447–448. Few of the mills that administered fines by a time metric kept time-books of hours worked by employees, as one would have expected if they had treated tardiness as a loss from the purchase of time itself. Sidney Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), p. 228. Curiously, the Oldknow papers show that outdoor workers had their labor time recorded to the hour, whereas workers locked inside the mill had their attendance recorded only in approximate quarters of the day—as if their impoundment made superfluous the reckoning of labor time with an accurate metric. Manchester Library Archives, Eng MS 817, 1796–1797.

[44] For Yorkshire, Yorkshire Factory Times , July 21, 1905, Shipley and Saltaire, and Manningham Mills, July 28, 1905; Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 309. In the early industrial revolution, too, fining appears to have been combined with locking out: Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1892 [1845]), p. 179; United Kingdom, Factories Inquiry Commission, Supp. Rep. Part II, Volume 20 (1834), p. 93; and Jean Lindsay, "An Early Factory Community: The Evans' Cotton Mill at Darley Abbey Derbyshire, 1783–1810," Business History Review Volume 34, Number 3 (1960), p. 299. The Royal Commission on Labour's log of fines shows that 10 percent of its sample of Yorkshire mills imposed some kind of fine for lateness, but of these, half appear to have combined fines with locking out. PP 1893–1894 XXXVII, Part I, pp. 103 ff. A union representative testified before the commission that fining for lateness was an exception in Lancashire (PP 1892 XXXV, p. 5). The commission's listing shows that many Lancashire mills claimed the right to fine unpunctual workers, but the maximum equaled only a disciplinary sum for arriving anywhere in the interval from five to fifteen minutes or from fifteen minutes to one-half hour late (PP 1892 XXXV, p. 6). As in Yorkshire (Yorkshire Factory Times , Sept. 23, 1892, Apperley Bridge), the penalty could be combined with exclusion after fifteen minutes, a separate matter which the commission did not investigate as a worrisome "fine." For oral testimony to this effect, see Bolton Oral History Collection, interview 121, born 1899; Elizabeth Roberts's interview with Mr. B8P, male spinner from Preston, born 1896, p. 4.

In some instances textile firms carried the practice of locking out to such an extreme that latecomers were prohibited from entering the mill for the day. "This morning I was about five minutes late," a Lancashire weaver complained to the union in 1912. "The watchman would not let me through."^[45] Some mills prohibited latecomers from waiting near the mill entrance for access and instead sent them all the way home.^[46] In Lancashire the union received several complaints from weavers who were denied entrance to the mill for several days or even a week because of inconsequential tardiness.^[47] For example, in Preston a female weaver complained to the union in 1908 that when she arrived late one day the manager spied her as she was "going through the watch-house" and told her to stay home for the week.^[48] These severe penalties applied to the Lancashire mule spinners as well, the masculine "barefoot aristocrats" of the mills.^[49]

It would be tempting to explain the practice of bolting the gate as an historical residual, a carryover of primitive management technique from the early industrial age. Stories about locked gates abound in the folklore about the days of violent industrial change at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.^[50] When a Marsden woolen spinner, born in 1901, complained that the mill gateway resembled "a gaol—with spikes on top," his words echoed the exact comparison that cotton workers in Lancashire had voiced about the gates more than a century earlier.^[51] Could the legacy of this earlier transition in England at large have left its traces even in regions such as Yorkshire, which mechanized much later? The historical record does not support such a hypothesis.

So far as the textile unions could tell, during the two decades before the war the practice of locking the gate became more widespread. The Yorkshire Factory Times at the beginning of the twentieth century followed the exten-

[45] LRO, DDX 1089/9/2, Preston, February 23, 1912, p. 104.

[46] LRO, DDX 1089/8/1, Preston, November 4, 1904, p. 194.

[47] LRO, DDX 1089/8/1, March 24, 1906, p. 149.

[48] LRO, DDX 1089/8/1, June 22, 1908, p. 246. For a similar story in the same source, see Sept. 11, 1905, p. 66.

[49] One tardy worker denied entry for a week joined the army out of desperation. Elizabeth Roberts's interview with Mr. B8P. See also Dermot Healey's interview tape 850, born 1907; Calderdale Archives, TU 102/2/1, Mssrs. Martin and Son, February 13, 1897.

[50] John Doherty, editor, The Poor Man's Advocate; Or, a Full and Fearless Exposure of the Horrors and Abominations of the Factory System in England, in the Year 1832 (Manchester: J. Doherty, 1833), p. vii; Pollard, op. cit., p. 183.

[51] Joanna Bornat's interview with Mr. B., spinner, born 1901, describing John Edward's mill in Marsden, Colne Valley.

sion of the practice to several mills previously free from its rigidities.^[52] One of Yorkshire's most popular dialect poets, James Burnley, in his tour of Bradford textile plants in the late 1880s found one instance in which a firm then shut tardy workers out but in earlier years had fined them.^[53] What is more, in these years the new generation of managers who had formal business education sometimes initiated the practice as they took over the reins of directorship.^[54] They did so even in neighborhoods where firms suffered from competition for scarce supplies of labor.^[55] Locking workers out in Britain thus by no means represented a survival from a previous era.

Could the heads of the British mills have imposed the practice to inculcate time discipline that would pay off in the long run by inducing prompt attendance? In contrast to their predecessors at the dawn of the factory age, mill directors in the late nineteenth century no longer thought it necessary to break an unruly work force to the novel stringency of indoor factory work. The businessmen's forum, the Textile Mercury , concluded that over the long term, the "diligence and punctuality of textile workers may be said certainly to have improved, and it is to their credit that their current lapses from perfection still shew favorably against those recorded in some trades."^[56] Even so, mill directors might have reasoned that bolting latecomers out would deter workers from arriving even the slightest bit late.^[57] It was not unusual for a mill to have a tardy worker every day.^[58] Many workers lacked the time-keeping devices necessary for precise adjustment of conduct to the employers' sanctions.

Had mill proprietors in Britain sought only a display of authority or a demonstration of their power to deny wages, they could have used more apt means. They could, for example, have imposed exceptionally severe fines for tardiness, but also have let latecomers onto the premises. This technique

[52] Yorkshire Factory Times , March 29, 1901, Ravensthorpe; September 28, 1905, p. 5; January 13, 1905, Batley; September 29, 1910, p. 5.

[53] Op. cit., p. 45.

[54] Oral report from Edward Mercer, weaver, Rawdon. See also the example cited in D. C. Coleman, Coutraulds: An Economic and Social History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), Volume One, p. 251.

[55] Huddersfield Daily Examiner , September 21, 1910; Textile Mercury , March 29, 1913, p. 257, and June 28, 1913, p. 526.

[56] Textile Mercury , March 21, 1914, p. 230.

[57] "The 'pennying process'—that is, the levying of a fine upon all who are five minutes behind time—has been abandoned, punishment now inflicted being to send the delinquents back 'for a quarter,' and thus deprive them of a quarter day's wages, a system which is, I am informed, far more efficient than that formerly in use." Burnley, op. cit., p. 45.

[58] For exact records, see, illustratively, Robert Clough company records, Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds.

might have encouraged punctuality without loss of labor power. British mill owners sacrificed some of the labor time available to them, even as they complained of labor shortages.^[59] Sometimes the services they cast away remained invisible. If workers were not sure they could get to the mill on time, they might not bother going at all until after the morning break.^[60] Shutting workers out also made it more difficult for managers to tell in the morning whether an absent worker had no intention of showing up or had simply met a latched door and might return at lunch time. But the "waste" of labor would have been palpable when, as was sometimes permitted, latecomers waited near the mill for the gates to open rather than make the journey home and back again before breakfast.^[61] The excluded labor could reach substantial levels. In Burnley, Lancashire, when the porter at one mill in 1897 allegedly shut the gate two minutes early, sixty-seven weavers who found themselves outside could not work until after the breakfast break.^[62] Since employers excluded tardy supervisory workers as well, they denied themselves the vital services of loom tuners who were not instantly replaceable.^[63] For example, the minutes of the Halifax Overlookers' Society indicate that in 1897 an overlooker was locked out for arriving a single minute late.^[64]

It is conceivable, but undemonstrable, that locking out conferred economic advantages upon British mill employers. If the humiliating experience of total exclusion at the gate stimulated punctuality much better than payment of any fine, locking out may have more than made up for the incidental loss of labor. Whatever the case, the influence of culture cannot be identified automatically in any departure from utilitarian ploys, only in the consistent symbolic forms through which agents strategize.

Could the practice of sending workers home have indicated nothing more than that the British employers did not want the bother of keeping records of fines for lateness or that they did not want to bear the expense of employing a porter to staff the front gate all day long? Oral testimony as well as the tips published in the Textile Manufacturer indicate that the porter at-

[59] Especially in the last decade before the First World War, employers in Yorkshire and Lancashire complained of a general shortage of labor and did all in their means to attract new recruits. "Work and Wages in the Cotton Trade," Blackburn Times , March 2, 1907; Textile Manufacturer , May 15, 1906, p. 161; Yorkshire Factory Times , November 28, 1912, p. 8; Textile Mercury , January 11, 1914, p. 24.

[60] LRO, DDX 1274/6/1, Burnley, July 1, 1899.

[61] Thompson and Thompson, Respondent 122, op. cit.

[62] Cotton Factory Times , March 19, 1897, Burnley.

[63] Yorkshire Factory Times , April 25, 1890, Slaithwaite; August 28, 1903, Dewsbury; July 28, 1893, Batley.

[64] Calderdale Archives, TU 102/2/1, Mssrs. Martin and Son, February 13, 1897.

tended the entrance at all hours anyway, to receive salesmen and other visitors. During his free moments he did basic paperwork or small craft jobs such as covering rollers. In sum, a system that monitored workers' exact moment of arrival would have added no significant enforcement costs. Most telling of all, when tramways became a means of commuting to the mill for some workers at the beginning of the twentieth century, factory owners exempted workers from the lock-out rule if they arrived late through no fault of their own but because of transit breakdowns.^[65] In view of the administrative complications this exception introduced, it becomes clear that the practice of bolting workers out rested on an ideal standard rather than on a strategy of convenience.

British directors, as well as the workers themselves, viewed the technique of bolting latecomers out as part of the logic of running a factory.^[66] One manager from Marsden, who had worked his way up from the position of a simple weaver, formulated an explanation for shutting workers out. "If they're not here on time," he was fond of repeating, "they don't deserve to work."^[67] This Marsden manager became known for sending latecomers home even if they were his friends and neighbors. The British technique supposed that the worker had a responsibility to deliver products to the firm in prompt fashion. By locking workers out the British employers did not treat the workers' time itself as a form of property for whose loss they claimed restitution.^[68] Shutting workers out did not lay claim to the labor power lodged in the person of the offenders but treated them as though they were contractors who had not taken due care to meet delivery deadlines and therefore deserved suspension of the contract. The struggle was over the acquisition of the product. "Discipline," an early employer declared, "was to produce the goods on time."^[69] The ritual of locking workers out diverged

[65] Bolton Oral History Collection, Tape 122, female spinner, born 1905; LRO, DDX 1089/8/1, March 24, 1906, p. 149; Yorkshire Factory Times , September 29, 1910; Bornat's interview with Mrs. W., op. cit., p. 23.

[66] In Rochdale, a union secretary himself intercepted workers arriving more than three minutes overdue and sent them home. Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1893–1894 XXXVII, Part I, p. 115.

[67] Interview tape with Joe France, born 1882, courtesy of the France family, Marsden.

[68] The Leicester factory owner John Baines testified in 1855, "I have never been able to enforce regular attendance." Rather than impose fines upon workers for their periodic absences, he instituted a mandatory weekly fee for use of the machinery. Thus the workers wasted their machinery "rent" if they did not show up to earn piece rates. United Kingdom, Report on the Select Committee on Stoppage of Wages (Hosiery) , op. cit., p. 149.

[69] Cited by Sidney Pollard, "Factory Discipline in the Industrial Revolution," The Economic History Review second series, Volume XVI, No. 2 (1963), p. 258.

from the artisanal ideal of freedom to choose one's hours of work. Industrial practice did not develop from the habitual carryover of routines from the era of domestic and independent artisanal production but was shaped by the form labor assumed as a commodity in the industrial present.

The British workers themselves may have preferred being locked out to being fined, because the lock-out at least maintained the fiction that workers sold the product of their labor. In the earliest days of the factory system, workers reasoned that since they sold merely their output, the employer had no grounds to impose a penalty for lateness. For example, a writer for The Poor Man's Advocate complained in 1832 about the fines for tardiness at a cotton spinning mill: "The machines may not work while the workman is absent; but how can the employer lose, when he only pays for the work that is done?"^[70] This reasoning viewed the employment transaction as the delivery of output, not the guarantee of a capacity. At the end of the century, the editorial columns and correspondents' reports of the textile workers' newspaper still maintained that employers had no right to fine workers for lost labor time. The newspapers of the textile unions depicted the hardships imposed by the alternative technique of locking out but did not articulate any objection in principle to the custom. If workers failed to arrive promptly, they lost merely the right to continue the delivery transaction. Fining, by contrast, implied to the workers that the employer controlled the disposition over their labor power and could demand compensation for the loss of the owned time.^[71]

On occasion, workers' own actions expressed their acceptance of locking out more clearly than the exclamations of their newspapers did. Workers at a mill in the Colne Valley went on strike in 1910 to demand that latecomers who had been delayed by breakdowns in the public transport system on which they relied be exempted from the shut-out rule. Although the majority of workers there commuted to the mill by foot, they turned out on strike in solidarity with the tram riders until the factory owner granted the riders' demand. The workers never pressed for elimination of lock-outs altogether or for their liberalization by, say, having the employer introduce a grace period for all workers.^[72]

[70] The Poor Man's Advocate , March 3, 1832, p. 51. The reasoning did not depend upon the immaturity of the factory system, for it continued to be voiced through the end of the century. Yorkshire Factory Times , July 28, 1893, p. 1, Batley.

[71] Yorkshire Factory Times , May 8, 1891, Huddersfield; January 13, 1893; July 28, 1893; March 4, 1898. As late as 1901, weavers on piece rates in Saddleworth objected to employers' calculations of their hours of attendance. Yorkshire Factory Times , March 1, 1901.

[72] Yorkshire Factory Times , September 29, 1910.

Whether locking out represented a spontaneous reflex by managers or a calculated policy, its principle did reach formal exposition. A popular Yorkshire handbook of the era, How to Make a Woollen Mill Pay , argued that the "enforcement of punctuality at work" represented the first and essential prerequisite for the enactment of a "mill routine."^[73] Discipline seemed not to rest on workers' mere presence at work, but on their ceremonial entering and exiting of the premises. In Germany, where the workday was conceived as the elapse of continuous time, not just a temporal succession, time discipline placed more emphasis upon the duration of production than on its beginning and end points.

The German approach could lead to anomalous time accounting. When the introduction of a stricter commercial code in Germany required that manufacturers issue factory rules in 1891 listing exact hours of work, German factory inspectors found that almost all mills already had definite starting and stopping hours. Yet many textile factories did not.^[74] They had been content until then with specifying that production would begin "in the morning" or "after sunrise" and last for a certain period. These cases revealed that the organization of a meaningful production process had not required a rigid starting point as an anchor for the passage of time.^[75]

German employers treated unpunctual attendance as a denial of labor power whose loss could be calibrated and precisely counterbalanced. Many textile factories applied a sliding scale of fines which either adjusted the penalty to the worker's average earnings or specified percentages of aver-

[73] Mackie, op. cit. Mackie's book was reprinted, and it appeared as a serialization in the journal Textile Manufacturer.

[74] Stadtarchiv Borken, A 539, 1894; Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 25c, Nr. 1754, Greeven & Co. Weberei, 1892. For smaller-scale weaving workshops, see F. Hermann Voigt, Die Weberei in ihrer sozialen und technischen Entwicklung und Fortbildung (Weimar: Bernhard Friedrich Voigt, 1882), p. 385. On the maintenance of flexible hours, see Peter Burscheid, Textilarbeiterschaft in der Industrialisierung: Soziale Lage und Mobilität in Württemberg (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), pp. 368–369, and Christoph Deutschmann, Der Weg zum Normalarbeitstag (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1985), p. 150. In Aachen, workers in needlemaking and spinning could go to the factory when they wished, with no fixed hours: Aachen, Feb. 4, 1817, Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, 120 B V 33, Nr. 4, Vol. 1, p. 54.

[75] Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, after the official posting of factory hours, some German weaving mills in advanced textile towns such as Mönchengladbach did not enforce a particular starting hour. See Der Textil-Arbeiter , September 8, 1905, Mönchengladbach, Weberei Pelzer & Droste; November 17, 1905, Eckirch; Mitteilungen des Arbeitgeberverbandes der Textilindustrie zu Aachen , April 1903, Stadtarchiv Aachen, 125-451, p. 6. Some firms offered alternative start times for commuters. Stadtarchiv Krefeld, F1446, C. G. Maurenbrecher, 1909.

age earnings to be levied as fines for various periods of tardiness.^[76] This not only graduated the fine to the worker's ability to pay, but it also gauged the value of the lost time.^[77] Other mills in Germany applied a standard fine for each fraction of an hour lost.^[78] Rather than fixing the penalty at nominal amounts for gross intervals of tardiness—that is, rather than using the fine as a simple tool of discipline—the Germans thereby monetized the lost time itself and froze it with a metric. Due perhaps to their greater interest in minute-by-minute accounting, rather than in marking only gross intervals, textile mills in Germany introduced punch-in clocks on a wide scale at the turn of the century.^[79] German managers did not see punctual arrival as an unconditional preliminary for

[76] Textilmuseum Apolda, 1857 Factory Rules of Zimmermann firm; Staatsarchiv Detmold, M2 Bielefeld Nr. 760, p. 68, Weberei Elmendorff, 1893; Staatsarchiv Osnabrück, Rep. 610 Lingen, Nr. 124, G. v. Delden & Co., 1901.

[77] The model comes from a spinning mill in the Wuppertal in 1838: "Each worker who comes late to work or stays home without permission will receive a fine in the amount of double the value of the time of absence." Reproduced in Karl Emsbach, Die soziale Betriebsverfassung der rheinischen Baumwollindustrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1982), p. 674. For the lower Rhine woolen industry, see Franz Decker, Die betriebliche Sozialordnung der Dürener Industrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Köln: Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, 1965), p. 216. Stadtarchiv Bielefeld, Ravensberger Spinnerei 54, Fabrikreglement 1856; Stadtarchiv Bocholt, Arbeitsordnung for Franz Beckmann & Co. Spinnerei, 1898; Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, Arbeitsordnung for Joh. Friedrich Klauser, 1892. Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, B46–391, Allgemeine Fabrik-Ordnung für die Baumwollspinnerei L. Hartmann Söhne, 1846. The fine at G. Matthes in Leubsdorf was severe: workers paid four times the earnings they would have earned during their minutes of absence. See Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Flöha 2825, Baumwollspinnerei G. Matthes in Leubsdorf, ca. 1846. The ordinance at one firm in Plauen threatened to deduct an hour's pay for each minute of absence. Stadtarchiv Plauen, Rep. I, Kap. VI, Sect. I, Nr. 64, 1863, Weisswaaren-Fabrik.

[78] The Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie considered one pfennig per minute appropriate (1909, Nr. 3, p. 80), although employers charged three pfennigs per minute or more (Stadtarchiv Plauen, Rep. I, Kap. VI, Sect. I, Nr. 64, July 20, 1863, Stickerei, March 17, 1866, Weberei). Textile firms in Greiz applied an invariate fine per quarter-hour: Stadtarchiv Greiz, B 5973, Rep. C, Kap. IV, Nr. 45, companies of Schilbach & Heine, W. Heller, F. Timmel; Stadtarchiv Greiz, B 5975, Kap. IV, Nr. 65, L. Fischer, ca. 1880, and F. Müller, ca. 1867. Likewise, for Aachen, Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 120 BB VII, Fach. 3, Nr. 32, Lequis, Aachen, 1892. Progressively increasing fines per minute were recommended for mills in Sächsische Industrie-Zeitung , November 29, 1861. To the workers' chagrin, fining per minute overdue could begin instantly on the hour: HSTAD, Regierung Aachen 1634, February 16, 1899. For women, factories sometimes halved all fines with the exception of those levied for tardiness, suggesting that employers treated fines for lateness as a separate kind of indemnity for stolen time. HSTAD, Landratsamt Grevenbroich 271, 1897 edition of rules for Herrath firm, p. 184.

[79] Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , December 19, 1908, Rheydt; August 26, 1911, Bornefeld & Jansen; November 25, 1911, Mönchengladbach. For the installation of minute-by-minute check-in clocks as early as 1812 in the wool industry of the lower Rhine, see Decker, op. cit., p. 96.

undertaking work in the factory.^[80] The time of living labor became a form of property for whose loss employers exacted a refined compensation.

Whereas British textile workers who worked in the textile mills before the First World War drew spontaneously in interviews upon many emotional memories about the lock-outs, former German textile workers described the controls of the threshold in the same period as relatively incidental.^[81] One woman's response from the Wuppertal was echoed by others: "Fines? Of course you got fined if you came late. That was not so terrible."^[82] Like the first generation of factory workers in Britain, the German home weavers who rebelled against the newly emergent factories labeled the mills "prisons."^[83] The derisory term for undertaking factory labor was "going to Spandau." In cultural comparisons, the form in which a grievance is articulated may prove more revealing than the simple occurrence of a complaint. In their indictment of the unprecedented indignities of centralized manufacture, the German workers focused on the state of internment rather than, as the British did, on appurtenances such as the locked doors

[80] In the area of the lower Rhine, in the far north, and in Saxony, companies offered small prizes to workers who consistently arrived on time. Contribution by Dr. Moeller, in Otto Dammer, editor, Handbuch der Arbeiterwohlfahrt , Volume II (Stuttgart: Enke Verlag, 1903), pp. 351–352; Victor Brants, Tisserand d'usine de Gladbach , in Société d'Economique Sociale, ed., Les Ouvriers de deux mondes , 3. Série, 6. fascicule (Paris: Au Siège de la Société Internationale, 1902), p. 355; Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Protokoll der Verhandlungen der 6. ordentlichen General-Versammlung des Verbandes aller in der Textilindustrie beschäftigten Arbeiter und Arbeiterinnen Deutschlands (Chemnitz: Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, 1902), pp. 41–42; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf 25022, p. 21. For a parallel example from an industry outside textiles, see the article about a metal plant in Barmer Zeitung , October 28, 1887.

[81] My interviews with Frau Schäfer, weaver, born 1899, Elberfeld; Franz Reidegeld, spinner, born 1900, Rheine; Frau Putz, weaver, born 1900, Elberfeld; Maria Pollman, born 1897, Barmen; Ewald Sirrenberg, born 1897, Barmen; Hans Penz, born 1895, Barmen. Herr Reidegeld reported that the gate was locked beginning a half-hour after starting time but was opened for latecomers, who were fined. This custom also appears in one of the earliest factory codes in Germany, that for the August Jung firm in Hammerstein, 1838, reproduced in Emsbach, op. cit., p. 674.

[82] My interview with Maria Pollman, op. cit. Fining may have reduced undelivered labor minutes to a simple exchange of currencies, but in the district of Löbau a strike broke out, not just over wages, but over the size of fines for lateness. Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Löbau, Nr. 3055, p. 9.

[83] Willy Brendgens, Die wirtschaftliche, soziale und communale Entwicklung von Viersen (Viersen: Gesellschaft für Druck und Verlag, 1929), p. 107. Many of the early manufactories were, of course, actually located in prison houses. Curt Bökelmann, Das Aufkommen der Grossindustrie im sächsischen Wollgewerbe (Heidelberg: J. Hörning, 1905), pp. 34, 59; Joachim Kermann, Die Manufakturen im Rheinland 1750–1833 (Bonn: Ludwig Röhrscheid, 1972), pp. 86–102; Germany, Enquete-Kommission, Reichs-Enquete für die Baumwollen- und Leinen-Industrie: Stenographische Protokolle über die mündliche Vernehmung der Sachverständigen (Berlin: Julius Sittenfeld, 1878), p. 663.

and spiked gates encountered in passing across the border.^[84] For the German workers, unlike the British, the procedure of entering the mill did not comprise a charged ritual that exemplified the industrial wage-labor transaction.^[85]

Can we discern statutory interdictions which prevented German directors from adopting the same practice of locking out as their British counterparts? Employers' work rules offer an answer from the domain of practice. The archives of many German cities safeguard a complete set of the factory rules submitted to the police for obligatory inspection. Of the several hundred work codes available from textile companies before World War One, only a handful exclude latecomers.^[86] In one of these rare instances, from a

[84] Adolf Levenstein, Die Arbeiterfrage (München: Ernst Reinhardt, 1912), pp. 133, 143. Hans Michel, Die hausindustrielle Weberei (Jena, 1921), p. 58, and Heinrich Brauns, Katholische Sozialpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert: Ausgewählte Aufsätze und Reden von Heinrich Brauns , ed. Hubert Mockenhaupt (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1976), p. 123.

[85] It seems doubtful that the contrasting methods of time control can be attributed to national differences in workers' punctuality and self-discipline. German workers were every bit as resistant to the time regime of the factory as were their British counterparts, especially in view of the long survival of "blue Monday" and of unofficial communal festivals in Germany. For the wool industry of the lower Rhine, see Decker. op. cit., pp. 96, 97. Elsewhere, Friedrich Lenger, Zwischen Kleinbürgertum und Proletariat (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), p. 174; HSTAD, Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf 24677, May 1887, pp. 99 ff.; HSTAD, Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf 25016, 1894, p. 34; HSTAD, Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf 24684, January 12, 1894; Germany, Jahres-Berichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe, 1904 (Berlin: R. v. Decker, 1905), p. 308; Emsbach, op. cit., p. 170. For German textile managers' testimony about workers' early resistance to time discipline, see Germany, Enquete-Kommission Reichs-Enquete , op. cit., p. 67; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf 24677, October 26, 1885, pp. 3–5.

[86] Seven exceptional cases among them are: Staatsarchiv Weimar, Reuss älterer Linie, Reuss Landratsamt Greiz, Nr. 4596, mechanische Weberei, Zeulenroda, 1868, shuts latecomers out for a quarter-day; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Aachen 13886, N. Scheins & Reiss, May 25, 1892, and Arnold & Schüll, Tuchfabrik, Aachen, 1892, where latecomers had no claims to work for the rest of the day (although in practice they were admitted—Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 120 BB VII 3, Nr. 32, March 18, 1895, p. 8); Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 23, 1900, Aachen: "Wer ohne Entschuldigung zu spät zur Arbeit kommt, hat erst eine Stunde später Anspruch auf Einlass"; Staatsarchiv Detmold, Regierung Minden I.U., Nr. 425, C. A. Delius & Söhne, 1892, p. 94; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, BR 1015, Nr. 169 II, weaving mill Wilhelm Schroeder & Co, Moers, locks latecomers out until following shift, p. 214. I also found a morning lockout in Augsburg with fines during the first ten minutes, Bernd Flohr, Arbeiter nach Mass (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1981), p. 106, and in the Aachen area, which the factory inspector viewed as an extraordinary occurrence, HSTAD, Regierung Aachen 1633, 1895 memo, p. 308. Another possible exception comes from Greiz, where the Eduard Brösel factory rules say that latecomers must wait until the doors open again but does not say how frequently the doors are in fact opened. Stadtarchiv Greiz, B 5975, Kap. IV, Nr. 65, Eduard Brösel, November 1, 1882.

For a sample of factory codes that include fines for lateness, see Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 25c, Nr. 1754, which lists fifty-four companies that issued fines for lateness; the collection in HSTAD, Reg. Düsseldorf, BR 1015 169, for examples of factory ordinances issuedbefore they became obligatory and somewhat standardized; HSTAD, Landratsamt Geilenkirchen 88, pp. 1898 ff.; HSTAD, Landratsamt Grevenbroich, Nr. 271, for the following fourteen firms: Emil Quack & Co., 1909; Isaac Falkenstein & Söhne, April, 1909; Adam Breiden, August, 1909; Spinnerei F. Lühl, Wickrath, 1907; Mechanische Weberei Carl Rente, Wickrath, 1892; Peter Sieben, Weberei, 1909; J. A. Lindgens Erben, 1892; Bandfabrik H. G. Schniewind, 1910; Goertz, Kempken & Pongs, 1905; F. W. Barten Weaving, 1892; Weberei Bovenschen, Heerath, 1897; Erckens & Co., 1910; Schwartz & Klein, Jüchen, 1906; Anton Walraf Söhne, 1910; Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, Die Fabrikordnung der Firma F. Brandts zu Mönchengladbach. Ausgabe von 1885 (Mönchengladbach: Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 1974); Klaus Tidow, Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Aachen 13886, C. Lequis Weberei. Oct., 1892; Staatsarchiv Detmold, M2 Bielefeld, Nr. 760, Bertelsmann & Niemann, 1892, p. 60. The city archives in Forst, Zwickau, and Plauen also have extensive collections of ordinances: Stadtarchiv Forst, Nr. 2382/1 through Nr. 2382/18; Stadtarchiv Zwickau, e.g., Rep. V, Lit. A, Nr. 32; Rep. V, Lit. F, Nr. 22; Rep. V, Lit. G, Nr. 61; EL 4884b 1865; Stadtarchiv Plauen, Rep. I, Kap. VI, Sect. I, Nr. 64, e.g., June 30, 1862, Spinnerei, August 15, 1867, Spindler & Erbert, March, 1867, C. A. Jahn. See also Günter Loose, "Betriebs-Chronik VEB Baumwollspinnerei Zschopautal," in Landesarchiv Potsdam, May, 1956, p. 106 with rules of the cotton spinning mill George Bodemer, 1862; Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, 120 B V 33, Nr. 4, Volume 2, J. A. Meyer, Brandenburg, 1838; Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, 120 B II 1 78, Kempten, 1853, Mechanische Baumwoll-spinn- und Weberei Kempten; Klaus Tidow, Neumünsters Textil- und Lederindustrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz, 1984), ordinance from 1888, pp. 70–71; Staatsarchiv Weimar, Reuss älterer Linie, Reuss Landratsamt Greiz, Nr. 3861, Mohlsdorf, April 19, 1892; Staatsarchiv Weimar, Reuss älterer Linie, Reuss Landratsamt Greiz, Nr. 4596, mechanische Strumpfwirkerei, Zeulenroda, March 15, 1869; Staatsarchiv Weimar, Reuss älterer Linie, Reuss Landratsamt Greiz, Nr. 4596, mechanische Weberei, Zeulenroda, March 1, 1869, and H. Schopper, May 15, 1869; Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Aachen, August 1892, Schwamborn & Classen, 120 BB VII 3 32; Archiv des Volkseigenen Betriebs Palla, 575 Strafbuch, Gebrüder Bachmann, Meerane, fines for lateness, 1901–1918; Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, B46–391, Allgemeine Fabrik-Ordnung für die Baumwollspinnerei L. Hartmann Söhne, 1846; Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, B25–316, Arbeitsordnung der Tuchfabrik Lörrach, 1902; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Flöha, Nr. 2825, Spinnerei G. Matthes in Leubsdorf; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Flöha, Nr. 2881, Auerswalde Spinnerei, 1862; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Flöha, Nr. 2925, March 31, 1892, Fuchss Zwirnerei; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Chemnitz, Nr. 16, "Fabrikordnung," ca. 1858, p. 20; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Kreishauptmannschaft Zwickau, Nr. 1999, Limbach, pp. 156 ff.; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Löbau, Nr. 3375, C. F. Neumann in Eibau; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Chemnitz, Nr. 18, K. A. Löhse, 1862; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Chemnitz, Nr. 10, Thalheim, June, 1889 and August, 1889, p. 20; Stadtarchiv Crimmitschau, Rep. II, Kap. VI, Nr. 61, E. Müller & Renzsch, 1862; Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 30, 1902, Kettwig; Sächsische Industrie-Zeitung , Sept. 14, 1860, pp. 155–156, Werdau; Seidenzwirnereien der Firma C. U. Springer, 1852, reprinted in Walter Steitz, editor, Quellen zur deutschen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Reichsgründung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), p. 287. See also sources cited in footnote 77, above.

silk mill near Bielefeld, the employer revised the ordinance from locking out in 1892 to fining latecomers in 1894.^[87] An exception such as this one, studied and approved by inspectors, demonstrates the absence of state constraints upon employers wishing to shut workers out. Legal experts and industrial

[87] Staatsarchiv Detmold, Regierung Minden I.U., Nr. 425, pp. 94 ff.

courts agreed that German employers, so long as they included this provision in their work code, had the right to block entry.^[88] In contrast with their British counterparts, however, they generally chose not to do so.^[89]

An investigator determined to find a utilitarian explanation for the difference in entrance customs between Germany and Britain might try to explain them by the balance of power between workers and employers. If, say, German textile employers suffered from a relative shortage of labor, this might have discouraged them from locking workers out or from stringently marking the start of the day for fear of provoking workers to transfer to other firms. We can reject this hypothesis by relying on comparisons within Germany itself. A comparison of regions that had surpluses of highly skilled workers, such as Krefeld, with areas such as the Münsterland, where directors complained of shortages, reveals no difference in the entrance customs.^[90] Conversely, as was noted above, British mill directors locked workers out even during periods when workers were scarce.

The German directors' rejection of shutting workers out becomes all the more significant when placed in its legal context. After 1891, German law forbade employers from holding in their general till the monies collected through fines. Factory directors in Germany had to put such withholdings into special funds devoted to the welfare of workers, such as factory health insurance funds or welfare committees.^[91] The German reliance on fining and the British reliance on locking out are the very reverse of the outcomes that would be expected if the employers had obeyed only the crude monetary incentives of the environment. In truth, the legislation in Germany merely affirmed from above what had already been settled from below: since the era of small shop production under subcontracting systems, German textile employers had deposited workers' fines into insurance and support funds,^[92]

[88] Philipp Lotmar, Der Arbeitsvertrag nach dem Privatrecht des Deutschen Reiches , Volume II (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1908), pp. 79, 243. Germany, Die Gewerbe-Ordnung (Berlin: J. Guttentag, 1878), pp. 108 ff.

[89] German textile journals assumed that the only methods possible for influencing punctuality were fining or offering bonuses. Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie , No. 3, 1909, p. 80.

[90] For Krefeld, see Stadtarchiv Krefeld, F1446, C. G. Maurenbrecher, 1909; HSTAD Regierung Düsseldorf, Nr. 24660. Krefelder Seidenfärberei, 1900; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , August 3, 1899, Krefeld. For the Münsterland, see, illustratively, Stadtarchiv Bocholt, Arbeitsordnung Franz Beckmann & Co., 1898, and testimony of Herr Reidegeld, cited in footnote 81, above.

[91] Carl Koehne, Arbeitsordnungen im deutschen Gewerberecht (Berlin: Siemenroth und Troschel, 1901), pp. 219–220.

[92] For an example of an agreement from the era of handweaving that allocated fines for bad cloth to a special welfare fund, see Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, Rep. 120 B I 1 59,April 11, 1848, Chemnitz, p. 44. For the wool industry of the lower Rhine, see Artur Peltzer, "Die Arbeiterbewegung in der Aachener Textilindustrie von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ausbruch des Weltkrieges," Ph.D. diss., Universität Marburg, 1924, p. 6; Decker, op. cit., p. 99. Elsewhere, Germany, Enquete-Kommission, Reichs-Enquete , op. cit., p. 444; Alphons Thun, Die Industrie am Niederrhein und ihre Arbeiter (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1879), Erster Theil, "Die linksrheinische Textilindustrie," p. 21. For illustrations of early ordinances from textile factories that allocated all fines to a welfare fund, see Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, 120 B II 1 78, Köcklin & Söhne, Lörrach, 1837, and Mechanische Spinnerei und Weberei Kempten, 1853; Zentrales Staatsarchiv Merseburg, 120 B V 33, Nr. 4, Volume 2, J. A. Meyer, Brandenburg, 1838; "Fabrik-Reglement," 1839, reproduced in Rainer Wirtz, "Die Ordnung der Fabrik ist nicht die Fabrikordnung," in Heiko Haumann, editor, Arbeiteralltag in Stadt und Land (Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1982), p. 63; Stadtarchiv Crimmitschau, Rep. II, Kap. VI, Nr. 61, E. Müller & Renzsch, 1862.

although they knew perfectly well they were not required to do so.^[93] German practice ostensibly hearkened back to the guild ideal of depositing fines for infractions of artisanal rules into the association's treasury.^[94] British mill owners, under the same circumstances, could pocket disciplinary and restitutive fines as they pleased.^[95]

Since employers and workers in Germany conceived of work time as a continuous process of converting labor power into an output, they treated it as something that could be abstracted from its context and transferred. In the earliest days of the factory system, German workers themselves had proposed that tardy arrivals be allowed to make up lost minutes by working late.^[96] Many factory directors gave their work force the option of taking off early from work during unofficial religious or communal holidays under the condition that the lost hours be made up by working an hour of over-

[93] Before the revised law was introduced in 1891, business journals informed employers that they were not required to hand over to welfare committees fines for lateness. Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , February 22, 1878, p. 171. No wonder Günther Schulz found that in the industry of the Rhineland before the First World War, "the Prussian state was never the motor for the formation of company work relations." Günther Schulz, "Die betriebliche Lage der Arbeiter im Rheinland vom 19. bis zum beginnenden 20. Jahrhundert," Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter Jahrgang 50 (1986), p. 175.

[94] Der Arbeiterfreund , Sept. 2, 1848; Clemens Wischermann, "An der Schwelle der Industrialisierung 1800–1850," in Wilhelm Kohl, editor, Westfälische Geschichte , Volume 3 (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1984), p. 158. Yet the British employers had institutional precedents similar to those of the Germans for allocating fines to welfare committees. For instance, the Worsted Committee responsible for enforcing cloth specifications at the close of the eighteenth century donated its fines to hospitals and local Sunday schools. Herbert Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries (second edition Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 434.

[95] The practice of depositing the receipts from punishments into welfare committees was not unheard of in Britain but was rare indeed. Large paternalist firms were most likely to adopt the idea. Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 138. Whatever they ultimately arranged, the British mill employers had an incentive to impose fines which German employers lacked after 1891.

[96] Zeitung des Arbeiter-Vereins zu Köln , April 30, 1848.

time during the following days.^[97] There was nothing surreptitious about this practice, no attempt by managers in this fashion, at least, to gain hours for the week in excess of those allowed by law. Textile directors had specified in early factory ordinances that they could shift hours among the days of the week, so long as the total remained unchanged.^[98] In Britain, production time was anchored in discrete beginning and ending points and remained bound to this concrete setting.^[99]

The German managers' floating starting points for the measurement of the workday and their reliance on efficiency ratios both rested on their premise that time was transferable and unfastened. The efficiency ratios attempted an "objective" comparison between the use of time on different days, in different years, or in industrial eras that lay decades apart. Rather than comparing technological progress in terms of the length of the cloth manufactured per loom in the course of a day or of a year, as the English did, the Germans looked at progress in terms of the utilization of time. "If the old weaving mills used to get along with 50 percent efficiency," one journal contributor commented in 1914, "that does not come close to yielding a profit at the end nowadays."^[100] A German mill director judged the success of his tenure by looking for improvements in efficiency ratios rather than seeking only an increase in the value of output per loom, as

[97] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25021, 1899, p. 25; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24677, May 12, 1887, letter from the Handelskammer in Mönchengladbach; HSTAD, Landratsamt Grevenbroich 271, 1909, J. A. Lindgens Erben; Der Arbeiterfreund , Vol. 22 (1884), p. 331; Peltzer, op. cit., p. 29; and the manager's diary from the Schoeller firm in Düren, for example, July 2, 1878. Courtesy Firmenarchiv Schoeller, Düren.

[98] Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, "Fabrik-Ordnung für die mechanische Weberei, Färberei, Schlichterei und Appretur von Böhmer, Ercklentz und Prinzen in Mönchengladbach," November 1, 1862. Not until the 1890s did German factory inspectors, concerned that the shifting of hours between one day and the next made the true total of hours for the week unverifiable by outsiders, consistently intervene to suppress the practice. Germany, Jahres-Berichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe, 1897 (Berlin: R. v. Decker, 1898), p. 473; Landesarchiv Potsdam, Rep. 75, Nr. 849, 1893, p. 116. But some years state officials without ado issued permission to extend hours for busy seasons. Landesarchiv Potsdam, company records of Tannenbaum, Pariser & Co., "Zuschriften von Behoerden," 1888–1893, pp. 115–116; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24684, April 15, 1893, Klauser firm; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25015, 1893, p. 18; Germany, Jahres-Berichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe und Bergbehörden für 1898 (Berlin: R. v. Decker, 1899), p. 352; Jahres-Berichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe und Bergbehörden für 1900 (Berlin: R. v. Decker, 1901), pp. 154, 169, Magdeburg, Merseburg.

[99] Hours of labor lost due to stoppages in production were recoverable in Britain under the Factory Acts only in the event of drought, flooding, or other extraordinary disasters at the mill. United Kingdom, Reports of the Inspectors of Factories , PP 1836 (78) XLV, half-year ending December 31, 1836, p. 35.

[100] Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie , 1914, Nr. 3, p. 65.

his British counterpart did.^[101] In truth, the physical characteristics of the weaving process did not permit any valid comparison of efficiency ratios for looms running at different speeds. The decision to contrast past and present in terms of this ratio therefore derived from an a priori assumption that change ought to be conceived as the differential utilization of abstract time.

The systems for controlling workers' entrances and exits in the textile industry can be generalized to other trades with large work premises. In Germany tardy metal workers and engineers were simply fined,^[102] whereas the custom of shutting late workers outside the factory gate emerged in many enterprises in Britain. In the metal-working industry a British manager judged in 1899 that "the usual practice" across the land was to shut latecomers out until breakfast.^[103] "The best timekeepers," he added, "are usually retired soldiers, who are accustomed to strict discipline."^[104] Likewise, a guide to the "commercial management of engineering works" recommended in 1899 that employers pare their disciplinary rules to keep them simple and memorable. But its author insisted upon the draconian exclusion of latecomers from the premises until the start of the next shift.^[105] The adoption of the custom in diverse circumstances—whether the work force consisted predominantly of men or women, whether labor was centralized under one roof early or late in the industrial revolution—implies that the practice embodied a fundamental premise.^[106]

[101] Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , 1913, Nr. 36, pp. 827–828; Textile Manufacturer , October 15, 1908, p. 336.

[102] Bernd Flohr, op. cit., pp. 105, 110.

[103] Arthur Barker, The Management of Small Engineering Workshops (Manchester: John Heywood, 1899), p. 79. Stories about workers shut out in the metal trade can be gleaned from the Dermot Healey interviews of the Regional Studies Department, Oral History Project, Manchester Polytechnic.

[104] Barker, op. cit., p. 78.

[105] Francis G. Burton, The Commercial Management of Engineering Works (Manchester: Scientific Publishing Co., 1899), p. 182. Dyke Wilkinson, a metal worker in Birmingham, reported that when he found he was excluded for arriving one minute late, he took the whole day off. Rough Roads: Reminiscences of a Wasted Life (London: Sampson Low, Marston, & Co., 1912), p. 18.

[106] In the shoemaking industry, employers locked the doors to deal with workers on piece rates who imagined they could come and go as they pleased. Keith Brooker, "The Northhampton Shoemakers' Reaction to Industrialization: Some Thoughts," Northhamptonshire Past and Present Volume VI, No. 3 (1980), p. 154. For locking out unpunctual workers in tailoring and mantle-making, see PP 1893–1894 XXXVII, Part 1, pp. 71, 76; for rope-making, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 331. Tardy workers at slate quarries were regularly excluded from the labor site for one week. PP 1892 XXXIV, p. 369. At a candy factory, an unpunctual female worker was excluded for two weeks. PP 1892 XXXV, p. 344.