Frontiers of Discipline
The entrance to the textile mill served not just as a regulator of the passage of time but as a marker of territory, the boundary of the employer's domain. In each country the walls of the factory furnished an empty slate on which contrasting messages were inscribed. British mill owners manipulated the doorways of the mill to emphasize their jurisdiction over the borderline of the domain. If workers threatened to strike, the employers impounded them by locking the gate.[107] When an amendment to the Factory Acts in 1902 shortened the legal working hours on Saturdays, an employer in Leeds ordered that the workroom doors, previously locked only from the inside, henceforth be locked from the outside as well.[108] Since only top supervisors had keys to unlock the doors from the inside anyway,[109] his action may have been intended more as a signal than as a real safeguard: if this mill director could not choose the duration of labor as he pleased, he could in this fashion display his claim to prohibit movement across the frontier of the labor space during the workday. Other proprietors responded to the forced reduction in hours with the same tactic of heightened border controls.[110] "Some say it is like being locked in York Castle," the textile union newspaper reported from Ravensthorpe.[111] Command over the entry points represented the critical point of confrontation.
Since the factory proprietors rarely had contact with workers in the course of the daily cycle of production, the entryway itself remained as their primary zone of contact, at once symbolic and material. Both employers and workers viewed the threshold this way.[112] Sir Titus Salt positioned his guests by the mill gate so that they could watch the ceremony
[107] Dermot Healey's interview tape 628, op. cit., p. 17.
[108] Yorkshire Factory Times , February 21, 1902.
[109] Yorkshire Factory Times , November 6, 1903, p. 4.
[110] See Yorkshire Factory Times , January 17, 1902, for a similar incident in Elland.
[111] April 3, 1903, Ravensthorpe. See also April 7, 1893, Shipley, and April 19, 1901, Elland. For Marsden, Bradford, and Eccleshill see the January 10, 1902, issue. Joanna Bornat's interview with Mr. B., op. cit.: "Oh, it were like a gaol." For examples of shutting employees within workrooms in Lancashire, see Mary Brigg, editor, "Journals of a Lancashire Weaver," The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire , Volume CXXII (1982), p. 3; The Power Loom (September 1916), p. 4; LRO, DDX 1628, Nelson and District Power-Loom Weavers' Association, June 10, 1896; Bolton Oral History Collection, Interview 121, mule piecer, born 1899; and Dermot Healey's interview tape 703, male weaver from Burnley, born 1895, line 880.
[112] See H. S. G., Autobiography of a Manchester Cotton Manufacturer (Manchester: John Heywood, 1887), p. 32; Yorkshire Factory Times , February 18, 1898, Dudley Hill, "Scored One"; Dermot Healey's interview tape 664, p. 2.
of the workers leaving.[113] Salt's factory must be counted among the largest in Britain, offering less chance for exchanges between the employer and ordinary workers. For this reason, the ritual of entering Salt's mill took on added importance: if workers arrived late to his mill in the morning, they "knew they dealt not with delegated authority, but with the master himself."[114] Isaac Holden, an owner in Bradford, listed as one of his key management principles for a mill he owned that "the hands going in and coming out must go tranquilly."[115] Among workers at Crossley's Dean Clough Mill in Halifax, the legend persisted that the elderly mother of the owner had had a mirror installed in her room so that she could inspect the crowds of workers daily as they entered and exited the mill. From their countenances, the story maintained, she could deduce their current attitudes.[116] This tale indicates, all the more so if untrue, the way workers at this mill saw entering as a ritual moment of contact with employers and point of exposure to scrutiny.
The everyday experience of the entry controls made the doorway a potent vehicle in popular thought for condensing relations between employers and workers.[117] A tale circulated in the heavy woolen district of Yorkshire illustrates the displacement in folk culture of the mill owner's exercise of authority onto the entranceway:
A Queensbury mill-owner always stood at the mill gate each morning, watch in hand. One morning the carter, who had been at school with the mill-owner forty years before, and had worked at the mill since then, was late. The very next morning the carter was late again, and the mill-owner duly sacked him.
[113] Robert Balgarnie, Sir Titus Salt (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1878), p. 251.
[114] Op. cit., p. 81. Capital and Labour , December 5, 1877, p. 666. "If any of them were late, it was the master's rebuke they feared." Cited by Andrew Yarmie, "Captains of Industry in Mid-Victorian Britain," diss., King's College, 1975, p. 100. Consult also Bolton Oral History Collection, tape 122, female spinner, born 1905, for a description of the inquiries that management made regarding the reasons for lateness.
[115] Elizabeth Jennings, "Sir Isaac Holden," diss., University of Bradford, 1982, pp. 53–54. See also Textile Manufacturer , March 15, 1883, p. 90. Sometimes overlookers' houses were situated opposite the entrance gate, perhaps to create an effect of unremitting surveillance.
[116] Halifax Antiquary Society (1950), p. 7.
[117] Yorkshire Factory Times , February 28, 1908, p. 2. See pp. 338 ff. in D. McKelvie, "Some Aspects of Oral and Material Tradition in an Industrial Urban Area," Ph.D. diss., University of Leeds, 1963. See also the "Socialist Song Sheet," in the Colne Valley Labour Party Archives, Huddersfield Polytechnic, for a comment about entering beneath the eye of the porter: "In his box he sits in state / like a monarch ruling fate."
—"What? Sacking me for being five minutes late—after forty years?"
—"Ah'm not sacking thi for being late, Ah'm sacking thi for defying me!"
—"In that case Ah suppose Ah can go wheer Ah like for a job?"
—"Tha can go just wheer tha likes!"
—"Right," said the Carter, "Ah'm starting here again!"[118]
Former textile workers recalled in their interview that one boss or another always stood at the office window peering out over the mill gate.[119] When workers quit their job in anger or rejected an employer's authority, they cried out, "I'll not be passing through your gateway again!"[120] "The gate" did not just become a familiar turn of phrase but came to signify an opening into the life of the textile worker. A periodical about life in the north of England, which began publication in Manchester in 1905, chose the image of the entryway for its title: The Millgate. The editors' column of observations in each issue of this journal bore the heading "From the Mill Window." A magazine edited by a Huddersfield socialist contrasting the factory of the present with the society of the future called itself The Gateway.
By comparison with Britain, the form in which labor was commodified in Germany depreciated the importance of the doorway as a zone of contact with employers. At many German mills the managers relinquished central responsibility for recording entry and shifted the onus of keeping track of workers' attendance and punctuality to the individual overlookers.[121] Was
[118] Cited in D. McKelvie, op. cit., pp. 338 ff. For another example, see Dermot Healey's interview tape 664, p. 2: "The manager . . . always had his watch in hand standing at the mill door."
[119] Joanna Bornat's interview with Mrs. H., born 1895; Yorkshire Dialect Society, Transactions , Volume 8 (1950), p. 42; Elizabeth Roberts's interview with Mr. B8P, born 1896, Preston.
[120] From my interview with Edward Mercer, weaver, Rawdon. See also Dermot Healey's interview tape 850, male worker from Nelson, born 1907.
[121] Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, B46-391, "Fabrik-Ordnung für L. Hartmann," 1846, and B25-316, 1902; Der Textil-Arbeiter , July 19, 1901, Eupen; Stadtarchiv Rheine, 183, "Arbeitsordnung" for Dyckhoff & Stoeveken, 1915; Voigt, op. cit., p. 387; Arbeiterwohl , 1881, Nr.1, p. 48; my interview with Franz Reidegeld, born 1900, Rheine; Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, "Fabrik-Ordnung der Weberei von Ferdinand Waldau," Chemnitz, 1865; Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, Rep. II, Kap. IIIa, Nr. 13 Vol. II, excerpt from Sächsisches Volksblatt with dateline March 12, 1910; Textilmuseum Apolda, Fabrikordnung der Firma Zimmermann 1857; Der Textil-Arbeiter , August 27, 1909, Burgstädt; Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Landratsamt Grevenbroich, Nr. 271, Emil Quack & Co., 1909; Tidow, op. cit., p. 70; Alf Lüdtke, "Arbeitsbeginn, Arbeitspausen, Arbeitsende," in Gerhard Huck, editor, Sozial -geschichte der Freizeit (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1980), pp. 100–101. For the wool industry of the lower Rhine, see Decker, op. cit., p. 96; Sächsisches Volksblatt , March 12, 1910. For a contrast with Britain, where managers came round to inquire why workers were late, consult Bolton Oral History Collection, tape 122, female spinner, born 1905. The overlookers in Germany were relieved of responsibility for calculating tardiness if punch-in time clocks were installed.
not the heart of the matter control of the workers' labor power, not of their crossing a line?[122] In some instances the company rules for conduct in Germany defined late arrival as failure to set one's machinery in motion by the specified minute.[123] The overlookers' prospects for keeping their jobs depended on their ability to make sure that the workers in their charge appeared at their machines on time.[124]
The Factory Acts restricting the length of workdays in Britain defined the workers' period of labor by their presence in the factory, defined as including any area within the confines of the mill gates. Space marked the boundaries of employment. In Germany, by contrast, the laws regulating the length of employment in the factory referred to attendance at machines or in manual production. Accordingly, the courts determined that the period of work was determined by use of the employees' labor in the manufacturing process.[125] They reasoned that workers could remain on the premises of the mill for any period if they were not engaged in material production.[126] The courts naturally feared that employers might coerce workers to undertake miscellaneous tasks at all hours, so they were reluctant to exempt all categories of workers from time limits if they were not engaged in manufacture. In contrast to the unambiguous classification in Britain based on the
[122] Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 10, 1911, p. 44, Nordhorn; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , November 30, 1901, Hückeswagen; Elisabeth Plössl, Weibliche Arbeit in Familie und Betrieb: Bayerische Arbeiterfrauen 1870–1914 (München: Schriftenreihe des Stadtarchivs, 1983), p. 243. In the Wupper Valley, for example, a ribbon weaver at a medium-sized firm before the First World War remembered that the lowest overlooker kept track of attendance (my interview with Hans Penz, born 1895; cf. Ewald Sirrenberg, op. cit.). At a large corporation for spinning and weaving in Viersen on the lower Rhine, workers complained in 1905 that whether a worker received a fine for lateness, and the amount of the penalty, varied "according to which overlooker you stood under." Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 10, 1905.
[123] Staatsarchiv Detmold, Regierung Minden, I.U.Nr. 425, C. A. Delius, Bielefeld, p. 106; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Flöha 2825, Baumwollspinnerei Matthes in Leubsdorf.
[124] HSTAD, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach 710, 1874, pp. 102–103.
[125] Meeraner Tageblatt , July 21, 1897.
[126] Sächsische Industrie , October 3, 1905, p. 297. For an example of factory inspectors reporting on the extension of the hours of female workers who were not in buildings with mechanical machinery, see Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IXa, Nr. 303, 1896–1900, p. 16; for a justification of this policy, see Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IXa, Nr. 303, p. 46.
position of the worker in space, however, the German limits on time focused on the use of the labor capacity.
In regulating border crossings, British employers made more of a claim to the workers' presence in the confines of the factory than to their time at the loom. The most popular treatise on "scientific" management published before the war, Edward Elbourne's Factory Administration and Accounts , took care to define the worker's arrival as his standing on company property, not as being positioned at the machine.[127] The Textile Manufacturer reported in 1901 in a matter-of-fact tone that directors did not force workers to begin work promptly after they were inside the gate. "Most men weavers consider it a disgrace to be in their places waiting for the engines to start," the journal claimed. "They knock the ashes out of their pipes just as the gates are being closed, and then saunter leisurely to their work."[128] In this instance, crossing the border zone between the inside and outside of the mill carried more significance than beginning to produce.
In each country the workers' clothing on factory premises complemented the border controls. In Germany textile workers typically arrived at the mill in their street clothes and changed into work clothes before they reported to their machines.[129] Sometimes the firm designed, procured, and washed the work clothing.[130] The alteration in German workers' exterior signaled
[127] Factory Administration and Accounts (London: Green & Co., 1914), pp. 31, 92. In emphasizing the importance of the gatekeeper's duties, Elbourne advised that the gatekeeper report directly to the owner, not to any intermediary foreman. Elbourne did not say whether tardy workers should be locked out, however. Using arrival at the perimeter of the factory as the criterion for deciding when an employee was "late," rather than expenditure of labor power, was consistent with the Factory Acts but not determined by them. The acts defined the workers' attendance by presence within the space of the factory, including the grounds if enclosed by a gate. But the Factory Acts allowed several minutes before the start of machinery for workers to arrive at the mill yard and make their way to the work station. Robert Baker, The Factory Acts Made Easy: Or, How to Work the Law Without the Risk of Penalties (Leeds: H. W. Walker, 1854), pp. 23, 36.
[128] Textile Manufacturer , February 15, 1901, p. 38.
[129] Minna Wettstein-Adelt, 3 1/2 Monate Fabrik-Arbeiterin (Berlin: J. Leiser, 1893), p. 16; Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , August 15, 1903, Rheydt; Germany, Jahres-Berichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe und Bergbehörden für 1900 (Berlin: R. v. Decker, 1901), p. 34, Potsdam. Workers in some departments, such as cloth mending, which was usually conducted in an office apart from the main production process, kept street garments on.
[130] For an example from the woolen industry of the lower Rhine, see Decker, op. cit., p. 87. Elsewhere: Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsseldorf, BR1015, Nr. 170, March 10, 1878, M. Lamberts & May, Mönchengladbach; Germany, Jahres-Berichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe und Bergbehörden für 1891 (Berlin: W. T. Bruer, 1892), p. 187, Minden. At a firm in Plauen, the time required for changing out of work clothes was considered part of the workday. Stadtarchiv Plauen, Rep. I, Kap. VI, Sect, I, Nr. 64, July 20, 1863, Schnorr & Steinhäuser.
the consignment of their labor power to the factory owner's dominion. British workers, who transferred labor time in products but not the labor power in their person, rarely changed their pants, skirts, or blouses when they entered and exited the mill.[131] Even if work inside the mill coated them with waste, they wore the same clothes home.[132] No wonder the lack of changing rooms was never debated in Britain as it was in Germany, where having to remove clothing in the mill became an important grievance among female workers where facilities for changing in private were lacking.[133] Female textile workers in Britain, like their male co-workers, of course removed their outerwear, such as shawls or vests, but as a rule did not change to a company outfit. In Britain employers emphasized the momentary regulation of workers' bodies as workers stepped over the factory threshold. In Germany the dressing ritual used workers' bodies as a marker of the continuous alienation of the labor power lodged in the person of the worker.
The emphasis on the control of border points that characterized British textile factories prevailed in other trades. The general manager of the Salford Rolling Mills, in an 1896 guide to the administration of iron mills, devoted an
[131] Textile Recorder , August 15, 1906; E. Blackburn, op. cit., p. 32; Macclesfield Oral History Project, Interview 110a; Yorkshire Factory Times , July 26, 1889, p. 4, Elland. Some mule spinners who wanted to put on airs wore bowler hats and top coats on the street, then switched to overalls inside, but this was exceptional. Thompson and Thompson, family and work history interviews, No. 122, Bolton, born 1895; Dermot Healey's interview tape 652, male spinner from Astley Bridge, born 1895, line 400.
[132] Dermot Healey's interview tape 702, workers from Oldham, born 1897, p. 12; J. Worthington, "One Day in My Early Working Life," 1918, Bolton Library; Textile Recorder , August 15, 1906, reported that the Lancashire operative never has "the chance of cleaning himself before leaving work." For northern Ireland, Betty Messenger, Picking Up the Linen Threads: A Study in Industrial Folklore (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), p. 62. British managers found the German emphasis on cleaning facilities remarkable: Textile Manufacturer , August 15, 1882, p. 280. Ben Turner commented upon the workers' change of clothing in Switzerland, compared with Britain, in About Myself 1863–1930 (London: Cayme Press, 1930), p. 189. Lancashire weavers might change their clothes when mills artificially raised the humidity of the workrooms by injecting steam into the air. PP 1892 XXXV, p. 76.
[133] Like other questions involving the treatment of women, that of dressing rooms depended on more than the intersection of gender and class identities. It took shape through a culturally specific definition of labor as a commodity that is discernible only in a cross-national perspective. German textile-union officials who visited Britain were surprised at the absence of rooms for workers to change clothing. Stadtarchiv Cottbus, A II 4.7i, Nr. 11, July 11, 1906, p. 264. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , February 24, 1900, Dülken; for examples of German workers expecting dressing rooms, see HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25022, report for 1900, pp. 13–14; Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 25, 1902, Auerbach; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , March 13, 1909. On rare occasions male workers, too, presented strike demands for dressing rooms. Gladbacher Merkur , May 18, 1899.
entire chapter to the layout and use of "The Entrance Gates." His depiction of the factory perimeter employed the military analogy of a citadel:
the gates of a factory should be as rigidly watched as those of a fortress, and for this purposes an official, viz. The Gatekeeper, should be appointed. . . . The gates must be absolutely closed at the prescribed time, such, for instance, as when the whistle has ceased blowing. No relaxation whatever must be tolerated.[134]
The ideal of a walled fortress to which this writer referred influenced not only the use of factory buildings but the ponderable design of the structures themselves.