4—
The Cultural Location of Overlookers

[Persons] performing the same motions side by side, might be said to be performing different acts, in proportion as they differed in their attitudes toward their work.
Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives

Investigators who conduct cross-national studies of the labor process take the "organization" of production as their object of analysis. They assume that cultural differences are revealed in organizational structures. Marc Maurice and his colleagues, in their classic studies of contemporary French, German, and British factories in the 1970s, compared such organizational features as the chain of command, the proportion of blue collar "works" employees, and the distribution of workers among maintenance and production departments.^[1] The team of Gary Hamilton, Nicole Woolsey Biggart, and Marco Orrù is bringing this same focus up to date. They have identified national differences within East Asia in the "organizational characteristics" of economic undertakings such as the patterns of subcontracting relations and of social networks for financing.^[2] The inquiry at hand diverges from these prior efforts because it finds national differences not in organizational structures but in the humble instrumentalities of production, in the micro-procedures by which workers and employers treated labor as a commodity that could be registered, manipulated, and accounted for. Consider our initial exemplar, the construction of the piece-rate scales, which specified the terms by which weavers' labor was valorized. The piece schedules anchored the essential terms of the labor transaction. Yet obviously the functioning of the piece-rate scales—or of the indicators for output, or of accounting for the

[1] Marc Maurice, François Sellier, and Jean-Jacques Silvestre, The Social Foundations of Industrial Power (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1986), Chapter Two, pp. 59 ff. Michel Crozier, in The Bureaucratic Phenomenon , compared the institutions of collective bargaining. The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 244–251.

[2] "Organizational Isomorphism in East Asia," in Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio, editors, The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 386.

costs of weaving—did not comprise part of the organizational structure of the factory, insofar as they did not by themselves constitute significant differences in job responsibilities or in social interaction among the agents of production in the workplace. They point to a dimension of production separate from face-to-face interaction and distinct from social structure. They mark the formation of inconspicuous but vital micro-procedures for conceiving the valorization of labor.

The constraints of the manufacturing process in nineteenth-century textile mills provide uniquely favorable terrain for illustrating the analytic difference between organizational structure and the instrumentalities of discipline and production on the shop floor. The historian Sidney Pollard, in his distinguished essays on the development of industrial supervision, offered a remarkable comment about the textile business: although this trade included some of the most dynamic enterprises of the first phase of industrialization, it seemed to Pollard that even for the early, "heroic" stage of textile development there was less to be said about administration in this branch of enterprise than in many others. He reasoned that the labor process in the mills was so circumscribed by its essential machinery (in comparison with mining or metal-working) that little scope remained for originality in the layout or design of production.^[3] By the latest evidence of the day, some may question Pollard's logic, but we have faint reason to revise his judgment as a statement of historical fact, at least for a comparison of weaving mills.^[4] Yet the relative uniformity of industrial organization in this branch of production, far from closing it off to cultural examination, provides a privileged site for highlighting the lodgement of different cultural practices in similar social organizations.

The separability of social organization and micro-procedures becomes evident in the ensemble of practices that defined the activity and the labor contribution of textile factory supervisors. In the weaving branch, overlookers in Germany and Britain had similar training, the same position in the chain of command, and parallel job responsibilities. Yet contrasting procedures were used to conceptualize their wage and to account for its cost to the firm, and the concepts used to compare and distinguish overlookers from workers were different indeed. In other words, although the overlookers had

[3] Sidney Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), p. 90.

[4] For spinning, however, see William Lazonik, "Production Relations, Labor Productivity, and Choice of Technique," The Journal of Economic History Volume XLI, Number 3 (September 1981), pp. 491–516.

the same productive functions in each country, these functions received divergent cultural inscriptions.

In the movement of production, weaving supervisors stood in a structurally ambiguous position: they were paid for their labor, in some form, like any other employee; yet in the name of the capitalist they also supervised underlings' performance.^[5] Given the overlookers' equivocal status, the definition of the employment transaction in Britain as the delivery of materialized labor could highlight the aspect of the overlookers' activity which corresponded to that of productive agents who incorporated their labor into the product of their subordinates. In Germany, given the same job functions and responsibilities of overlookers, the cultural understanding of employment as the transfer of a service potential framed the overlookers' activity as the execution of the owner's authority over subordinates. The definition of the textile overlookers' role depended upon the template by which labor was commodified, rather than upon differences in the distribution of responsibilities, technology, markets, or societal differences in the style of command in private and public organizations.

Imagining the Overlookers' Contribution

The purchase of labor in the capitalist enterprise confronts social agents with a paradox when they analyze expenses and earnings. The moment workers expend their efforts, their labor no longer belongs to them and cannot be sold. Therefore as a visibly constructive activity, labor lacks an exchange value. It exists as a commodity in the marketplace as a projected activity or as it is materialized in another good—in effect it is brought to market before it is created and remunerated as it disappears into another object.^[6]

Yet textile directors had to quantify this apparition. To establish the receipt of labor at a cost, textile employers in Britain and Germany confronted a challenge more difficult than the one they encountered in draw-

[5] Erik Wright musters an elaborate set of concepts to capture this ambiguity in managers' positions in Class Structure and Income Determination (New York: Academic Press, 1979), pp. 39 ff.

[6] We prisoners of the twentieth century have lost a sense of the queerness of labor's commodification. But in the nineteenth century, ordinary weavers still pondered at length the baffling process by which labor, which "has not the essentials of any other commodities," was exchanged as a ware. United Kingdom, Select Committee on Hand-Loom Weavers' Petitions , PP 1834 (556) X, testimony of William Longson, p. 518.

ing up scales for the weavers. To establish the price of weavers' labor, owners resorted to measuring the product, either as an index of activity or as a vessel for materialized labor, and on either basis compared the value of fabrics that differed only in their formal properties. For the overlookers' pay scales, however, it was not immediately evident to employers and workers whether there was in fact any "product" of the overlookers' activity to take as an emblem for labor. Overlookers assisted in manufacturing but did not accomplish the weaving themselves. Employers relied upon fictive concepts of labor as a commodity to identify the contribution of the overlookers' activity to the company's overall production effort. To isolate the independent effect of these shared concepts on owners' decisions, we must appreciate the overlookers' visible functions in the weaving process.

In contrast with such enterprises as mining or steel, where an owner needed the overlookers to guide and coordinate the labor of work teams, the role of overlookers in weaving rested more exclusively on an immediate technical demand: namely, the need of prewar power looms for frequent repair, for replacement of worn parts, and for adjustment to each change in fabric pattern. Certainly up to the time of the First World War, looms required constant repair. Even for the most experienced weavers, the loom's output in experimental trials varied considerably with the attention given by the overlooker to the instrument's ongoing adjustment.^[7] Textile directors in both Germany and Britain assigned each overlooker responsibility for maintaining a number of looms grouped together in a section of the weaving room. Having a team of overlookers take collective responsibility for all the looms in a room proved impossible, for each machine in the mill had its quirks and idiosyncratic history of repairs. Overlookers worked most efficiently on machines they knew individually.^[8] At mills that manufactured short runs of different kinds of fabric the overlookers might also take responsibility for assigning warps to particular weavers.^[9]

[7] "A certain mechanical skill is of great advantage to a weaver," the English Board of Trade found, "so that any slight adjustment of the loom can be done immediately, without calling the help of the tuner." United Kingdom, Textile Trades, Huddersfield (London: H.M.S.O., 1914). For Germany, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 14, 1909, p. 155. Weavers, including the women, did their own adjusting of loom chains and tightening of nuts. See Joanna Bornat's interview with Mrs. T., born 1903, pp. 7–8; Hebden Bridge Oral History Project, OH 85/58.

[8] Seide , January 7, 1914.

[9] HSTAD, Regierung Aachen 1634, Birkesdorf, January, 1900.

The weaving overlookers in Germany and Britain also shared the same position in the factory hierarchy. Above them stood the foremen, usually assigned one to a department. Below stood only the weavers themselves. Depending on the difficulty of the pattern and the fragility of the materials, a weaver served from one to four looms: in cotton, four represented the norm; in worsteds, two; and in woolens, one. Any attempt to formulate these averages in a straightforward manner brings out a host of exceptions. Yet in both countries these assignments were the typical ones.

Just as the ratios of looms to weavers corresponded in Germany and Britain, so did the ratios of looms to overlookers. Although employers in both countries saw the overlookers as the key agents responsible for the maintenance of discipline in the mill, the need for adjusting the machinery rather than the need for oversight set the major boundaries for the hiring and allocation of overlookers within the factory. Hardly any manager considered hiring more overlookers than necessary for servicing the looms, although additional superintendents might have offered tighter surveillance over the weavers and greater opportunity to catch faults before weavers ruined a run of cloth. One director of a Yorkshire woolen mill said, "It is far better that the [overlooking] staff should be inadequate rather than too numerous, for men are never so discontented as when they have too little work to do."^[10] The precise ratio of overlookers to looms depended primarily on the design of the machine.^[11] In both countries, according to oral reports and technical journals, an overlooker for, say, narrow, plain cotton cloth had in his section eighty to one hundred looms and, for checked cotton cloth, fifty to seventy.^[12] Due perhaps to relative stagnation in mechanical design in the decades near the turn of the century, these ratios remained stable from at least the 1880s until the

[10] John Mackie, How to Make a Woollen Mill Pay (London: Scott Greenwood & Co., 1904), p. 43.

[11] Wide looms and ones with a complicated mechanism for weaving patterns demanded a great deal more maintenance. Textile Manufacturer , January 15, 1913, p. 29. A survey by the Bradford overlookers' union in 1913 found that members on box looms (which changed the color of the weft for pattern effects) served only half as many machines as those on plain looms. Bradford District Archives, 1913 survey.

[12] Der Textil-Arbeiter , September 6, 1907; Cotton Factory Times , February 26, 1897, Norden; Henry Brougham Heylin, The Cotton Weaver's Handbook: A Practical Guide to the Construction and Costing of Cotton Fabrics (London: Charles Griffen & Co., 1908), p. 207; LRO, DDX 1115/1/2, February 17, 1897; Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , 1912, p. 210, and oral testimony, Herr Schnieders, Rheine. The wage books for the cotton firm Gebrüder Laurenz, in Ochtrup, show that in April of 1912, at nearly full production capacity, when 92 percent of the machines were filled with orders, each overlooker serviced only sixty looms. Their exact model is unascertainable. Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv Dortmund, F61, Nr. 222.

First World War.^[13] In silk mills, both German and British businessmen considered fifty looms per overlooker the maximum.^[14] In the woolen trade, an overlooker might have charge of fewer than twenty-five looms.^[15] The matched numbers of looms per German and English overlooker across the wool, cotton, and silk branches suggests that the actual division of labor in weaving followed down-to-earth technical imperatives in the two countries.

Contemporaries believed that the supply of capable overlookers by far exceeded the demand.^[16] Until the First World War, weaving overlookers seldom received specialized technical training, apart from optional attendance at night school.^[17] The earliest German investigations into the availability of overlookers, undertaken by the factory inspectorate in 1887, concluded that in Germany as a whole employers very seldom complained of shortages of skilled overlooking applicants.^[18] Overlookers' associations in Germany had members on call to fill in or to take up permanent positions.^[19]

[13] Textile Manufacturer , March 15, 1887, and Jubilee Number, December, 1925.

[14] Seide , January 7, 1914. Bradford Daily Telegraph , July 6, 1899.

[15] Bradford District Archives, 1913 survey; my interview with Edward Mercer, Rawdon, Yorkshire; Hugo Ephraim, "Organisation und Betrieb einer Tuchfabrik," Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft Volume 61 (1905), p. 607; Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 31, 1902, Crimmitschau. Johann Junkers, 100 Jahre 1852–1952 (Rheydt: n.p., 1952), commemorative book, data for 1895. Usually an overlooker had a variegated mix of loom models in his section, which makes comparisons of assignments between mills, not to mention between nations, merely approximate. In fact, since owners themselves could not compare the burdens of different kinds of looms, they made an effort to give each overlooker in the mill the same mix of loom types.

[16] Herbert Kisch, "The Crafts and Their Role in the Industrial Revolution: The Case of the German Textile Industry," Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1958, p. 298. For the Wuppertal, see Der deutsche Meister , December 21, 1904. For Yorkshire, Minutes of the Overlookers' Union, Calderdale Archives, and Keith Laybourn, "The Attitude of the Yorkshire Trade Unions to the Economic and Social Problems of the Great Depression, 1873–1896," Ph.D. diss., Lancaster University, 1973, p. 314. For information on the employment of Lancashire overlookers, see Cotton Factory Times , March 19, 1897, p. 1.

[17] Ernst Dietel, Die Greizer Wollindustrie (Berlin: Wilhelm Pilz, 1915), p. 89; Franz Decker, Die betriebliche Sozialordnung der Dürener Industrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Köln: Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, 1963), p. 101. See the enrollment schedules for textile schools in HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf 11641, 11652, 21809. In the event of a strike, skilled weavers could immediately fill in for the overlooker. Textile Mercury , July 8, 1899, p. 23; United Kingdom, Textile Trades, Huddersfield , op. cit., p. 12.

[18] Germany, Jahres-Berichte der mit Beaufsichtigung der Fabriken betrauten Beamten, 1887 (Berlin: Kortkampf, 1888), p. 102. Employers' occasional laments over the lack of qualified supervisors could represent part of a general deficit of labor. Staatsarchiv Detmold, I.U. Nr. 566, Minden, March 26, 1897.

[19] For the years 1910–1913, "Stellenvermittlung nach den einzelnen Gewerbegruppen," Reichs-Arbeitsblatt Volume 10, 1912, Nr. 4, p. 273; Volume 10, 1912, Nr. 7, p. 516; Volume 10, 1912, Nr. 10, p. 756; Volume 11, 1913, Nr. 1, p. 42; Volume 11, 1913, Nr. 4, p. 280; Volume11, 1913, Nr. 7, p. 518; Volume 11, 1913, Nr. 10, p. 760; Volume 12, 1914, Nr. 1, p. 43; Volume 12, 1914, Nr. 4, p. 302; Volume 12, 1914, Nr. 7, p. 552. A representative to a national convention of foremen in Germany at the turn of the century said younger overlookers joined the union "mainly" because it offered unemployment insurance. Archiv des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, Deutscher Werkmeister-Verband, "Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Delegiertentages des Deutschen Werkmeister-Verbandes," 1913, p. 201. The German foremen's union reported that in 1908 it paid fifty-five of its members in the textile industry unemployment payments; in 1907, it gave thirty-two members such support. Archiv des Freien Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, Berlin, Deutscher Werkmeister-Verband, "Geschäfts-Berichte des Zentralvorstandes des Deutschen Werkmeister-Verbandes." I cannot say what percentage of the total members in textiles this represented. For Britain, see Yorkshire Factory Times , June 12, 1903.

In Bradford, Yorkshire, the weaving overlookers' union considered the surplus of overlookers so serious that after the turn of the century it periodically prohibited its members from taking on apprentices, even their own sons.^[20] The abundance of qualified overlookers in Yorkshire can also be assessed from the circumstance that some owners there, to take advantage of the competition for overlooking jobs, opened bids from candidates for a position and hired the person making the lowest offer.^[21] The overlookers may have dominated their underlings, but above the overlookers there towered a forbidding market.

In view of the parallels in weaving overlookers' technical responsibilities and market predicaments in the two countries, it ought not to occasion surprise that German and British weaving overlookers also shared about the same levels of pay, reckoned as a proportion of that received by an average weaver under them. The Board of Trade in the United Kingdom found in its survey of 1906 that overlookers in the north of England earned 50 to 75 percent more than an average weaver.^[22] Local surveys and company wage books in Germany reveal about the same differential.^[23]

[20] Bradford District Archives, Overlookers' Society Minutes 3D86, e.g., February, 1891, June, 1892, July, 1914. On the surplus, see also Kirklees Archives S-PLT, 1912.

[21] Yorkshire Factory Times , December 12, 1902, Elland. For an example of an unemployed weaving overlooker in Germany being hired at a low salary, see Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , January 8, 1914, p. 2. For an overlooker working as a weaver, see Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 8, 1901, "Sonderorganisationen."

[22] G. H. Wood, "The Statistics of Wages in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Volume 73 (1910). "Earnings and Hours of Labour of the Workpeople of the United Kingdom," PP 1909 LXXX, p. 83. However, in keeping with the locally segregated labor markets, founded on idiosyncratic types of weaving, the ratios of overlookers' to weavers' pay varied greatly by locality. United Kingdom, Returns of Wages Published Between 1830 and 1886 , PP 1887 LXXXIX, pp. 91–122; United Kingdom, Return of Rates of Wages in the Principal Textile Trades of the United Kingdom , PP 1889 LXX, pp. 69–130.

[23] Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. IX a, Nr. 326, 1905, p. 330; Barmen, Beiträge zur Statistik der Stadt Barmen Volume 2 (1906), p. 7; Klaus Tidow, Neumünsters Textil- und Lederindustrie im 19. Jahrhundert (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz,1984), p. 81; Victor Böhmert, "Weberlöhne einer Fabrik in Meerane," Zeitschrift des königlich sächsischen statistischen Bureaus Volume XXIII (1877), p. 64; Marie Bernays, "Auslese und Anpassung der Arbeiterschaft der geschlossenen Grossindustrie: Dargestellt an den Verhältnissen der 'Gladbacher Spinnerei und Weberei' A.G. zu Mönchengladbach," Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik Volume 133 (1910), p. 15; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , September 25, 1909, Bocholt; Seide , February 3, 1904; also Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 1141, Nachweisung.

If the level of compensation for overlookers was proportionately equal between the two countries, the business procedures for conceiving it followed contrasting principles. In Lancashire, by "universal custom,"^[24] an overlooker received the whole of his pay in the form of a commission. It was reckoned as a fraction of all the pay received by the weavers in his section. An overlooker earned a certain amount—from a shilling and twopence up to a shilling and fourpence—on each pound sterling of the weavers' take-home pay. This equaled a commission of 5 to 7 percent.^[25] The participants called this the "poundage" system (referring to the unit of currency, of course, not that of weight). Elsewhere in the north of England the methods by which overlookers received their pay varied. In Yorkshire, only 8 percent of overlookers received their wage exclusively in the form of a commission.^[26] More often, each received a minimum weekly sum, supplemented by a bonus determined by the earnings of their subordinate weavers.^[27]

A variety of payment conventions for textile overlookers also arose in Germany, but remuneration purely by commission was extremely rare.^[28] German weaving overlookers, including the lowest loom fixers, generally

[24] Textile Manufacturer , March 15, 1887.

[25] This rate yielded the overlooker between 45 and 65 percent more pay than that of an average weaver, assuming a complement of twenty-five weavers per overlooker.

[26] "Earnings and Hours of Labour of the Workpeople of the United Kingdom," PP 1909 LXXX, pp. 43 ff. See also Yorkshire Factory Times , September 27, 1889, January 23, 1891, Bradford, February 5, 1892, p. 4; July 28, 1893, Batley, p. 1, and June 20, 1912, p. 1. At Dudley Hill in Yorkshire, the firm of J. Cawthra and Co. posted the average earnings of the weavers under each overlooker. Yorkshire Factory Times , March 21, 1890.

[27] Yorkshire Factory Times , May 9, 1890, p. 1; January 22, 1892, p. 4; April 1, 1898, Oakworth; March 11, 1898, Great Horton; December 6, 1901, p. 5. Calderdale Archives, wagebooks of Stott and Ingham, STO 12, 1892–1901, for fluctuations in overlookers' pay. Bradford Daily Telegraph , January 1, 1891. Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, Vol. 1, pp. 223, 303. Respondents to the survey of loom assignments and pay taken by the Bradford tuners' union in 1913 sometimes volunteered information about bonuses. Bradford District Archives, Bradford Overlookers' Society survey of looms, 1913. Mackie, op. cit., p. 45.

[28] For weaving I found several exceptions where German overlookers received a bonus for the output of their underlings. H. Mattutat, "Das Prämiensystem in der Augsburger Textil-Industrie," Soziale Praxis , Volume 5 (1895–1896), pp. 210–211. See also Böhmert, op. cit., p. 64. Some firms gave bonuses to overlookers if production exceeded the standard quota. An example: the company records of F. F. Koswig, in Landesarchiv Potsdam, Rep. 75, Nr. 399, Akkordlohnsätze 1907.

worked for a fixed weekly wage.^[29] They also received year-end salary bonuses.^[30] In contrast to arrangements in Britain, a major portion of the German textile overlookers' compensation seldom fluctuated with the productivity of the immediate underlings they assisted.

How did German and British employers imagine they received the commodity of labor from overlookers? In the case of the overlookers, unlike the weavers, the product could not be decomposed to serve as a model for the activity put into it. For the overlookers we must look beyond the form of remuneration to consider how employers apportioned the cost of overlooking wages in their company books. Since each textile enterprise manufactured a spectrum of products, companies had to estimate the expense of producing each type of fabric. With the maturing of the industry and the consequent crowding of the yarn and cloth markets, cost accounting became increasingly important for the survival of the enterprises in both Germany and Britain. "Many mill men will say with pride that they can tell what it costs to produce a pound of yarn, or a yard of cloth, to a small fraction of a penny," the Textile Manufacturer reported in 1907. Although directors and

[29] Staatsarchiv Weimar, Landesregierung Greiz, n Rep. A, Kap. VII a, Nr. 90 a, June 26, 1873, pp. 1–2; Stadtarchiv Bocholt, K2/276, September 24, 1896; Gewerbe- und Kaufmannsgericht , May 1, 1908, p. 179; Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie Volume 13, Nr. 47 (1909–1910), "Wer ist Werkmeister!"; Bocholter Volksblatt , January 9, 1901; Decker, op. cit., p. 94. For workers' insights: Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 21, 1901, Elsterberg; Jan. 10, 1902, Sonthofen i. Allgäu; Freie Presse , July 9, 1873, Lunzenau. Want ads for tuners (Untermeister and Stuhlmeister ) in the professional journals offered both weekly and monthly salaries.

[30] The annual supplements usually were not adjusted to the output of individual overlookers. For the woolen industry of the lower Rhine, see Decker, op. cit., p. 88. Elsewhere: Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, B47-452, Württembergische Leinenindustrie A.G., 1882 ff.; Der Textil-Arbeiter , September 1, 1905, Politz, and June 2, 1905, Köpenick; Karl Schmid seems to refer to annual bonuses for overlookers in Die Entwicklung der Hofer Baumwoll-Industrie 1432–1913 (Leipzig: A. Deichertsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1923), p. 76; 2. Beilage zur Volkswacht , Bielefeld, Volume 18, Number 255, October 10, 1907. On the prevalence of salary systems for overlookers in other industries, see Jürgen Kocka, Die Angestellten in der deutschen Geschichte, 1850–1980 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981), p. 37, and Ernst Günther, Die Entlöhnungsmethoden in der bayrischen Eisen- und Maschinen-Industrie (Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1908); Archiv des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, Deutscher Werkmeister-Verband, "Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Delegiertentages des Deutschen Werkmeister-Verbandes," 1909, p. 225. Yet the methods for paying supervisors varied across German industry. In iron-making and metal-work, for instance, foremen depended more heavily on bonuses for output. See, illustratively, Michael Mende, "Männer des Feuers und der eisernen Kraft," in Wolfgang Ruppert, editor, Die Arbeiter (München: C. H. Beck, 1986), p. 232, and Otto Bosselmann, Die Entlöhnungsmethoden in der südwestdeutsch-luxemburgischen Eisenindustrie (Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1906), pp. 44, 51. The method of payment serves as a cultural indicator only in conjunction with the costing system employed for distributing overlooking expenses.

their scriveners tallied labor expenses with great precision, they used contrasting reasoning in Germany and England when they conjectured about the expense of overlooking for different fabrics.

Managers in Yorkshire who cared to reckon their expenses with precision used different methods than in Lancashire, yet in both districts they followed a logic that was generically different from that used in Germany. In Lancashire, the system of pay directly reveals the accounting method in use: owners automatically lumped the overlooker's wage together with the weaver's wage in the cost of each piece. If the employer wanted to handle not only the weaver's labor but also the supervisory and technical contribution of the overlooker as a commodity embodied in the finished product, this method was the most suitable. It offered a formal advantage in the event of a downturn: not only did overlookers' wages decline automatically, but they did so exactly proportionately to weavers' wages, as if to buy exactly so much "labor" from the overlookers as was necessary for the productive tasks at hand. In terms of Weber's criterion of formal calculability, this system of pay ranks as the most rational: it makes supervisory "labor" a totally flexible production factor.^[31] The employer remained free to buy only so much "labor" as he needed at the moment and could shift all the uncertainties of the demand for labor onto the overlookers themselves.

Although the Lancashire system had a high degree of formal rationality, its measure of the "labor" purchased had little to do with the substantive realities of production. Because it piggybacked an overlooker's wages onto those of the weavers, the Lancashire procedure gave an overlooker a bonus when the weavers in his section wove cloth with complicated patterns, which required more skill and thus commanded higher wages. But the overlooker might not be called upon to do proportionately more tuning for the weavers in this case; he received a bonus for their skill unrelated to his own input of time or effort.^[32] (Furthermore, an overlooker might let the machinery fall into a poor state of repair and then move to another shop, reaping the pay in the short term for the completed fabric and avoiding the long-term investment in equipment maintenance.)^[33] No matter what the conse-

[31] Weber discusses the significance of freely disposable labor for calculability in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1924), p. 18, and in Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 162 ff.

[32] Since Yorkshire mills had a greater variety of patterns demanding extreme weaving skill, a pure "poundage" system there would have multiplied the effects of this defect several times over.

[33] For a warning about this possibility, see Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie Number 44 (1913), "Der Webmeister."

quences, the Lancashire system looked at the value of the labor embodied in the product and reckoned backwards to surmise the overlookers' contribution embodied in the product.

The Yorkshire costing method shared the premise of the Lancashire system that the overlookers' wages ought to be figured as if their labor were embodied in the fabric like other workers'. In Yorkshire, the textile book-keepers costed the production expenses of a particular run of cloth by adding the overlooking wages onto the cloth in the same manner as finishing and burling wages: by length of the fabric. The firm took its total cloth production for a year, in yards, and divided this by the overlookers' wage bill for the year. (Less often, the average costs were tallied separately for several major varieties of fabric.)^[34] For purposes of costing a particular fabric, Yorkshire mill accountants treated overlookers' salaries as "Productive Wages," together with those of the finishers and burlers and with those of the weavers.^[35] Company records show that the overlookers' costs were distributed per piece of fabric, adjusted for length.^[36]

In Germany, standard accounting procedures separated the overlookers' wages from those of the subordinate workers. The clerks merged the costs of overlookers' salaries with the costs of machinery, insurance, property taxes, energy, and so forth into a category called Regiekosten. A modern accountant might translate this as "administrative overhead," but the term also connotes something like "costs of directing production." Having created this general classification, German factory owners relied upon two different methods to distribute the costs of supervision onto a weaving mill's product. With the first method, German accountants calculated how long it took a loom to turn out a particular length of cloth, based on the average efficiency ratio for the firm as a whole or for that particular kind of cloth; then the annual overhead, including the overlookers' salaries, was added to the cloth based on how much of the loom's time, including the changing of the warp, the piece would have been expected to claim.^[37] The

[34] George Pepler Norton, Textile Manufacturers' Book-keeping (Bradford: Brear & Co., 1894), p. 254; A. R. Foster, Weaving Mill Management (Manchester: John Heywood, ca. 1908), p. 92.

[35] Woollen and Worsted Trades' Federation, Systems of Cost Finding for the Textile Trade (Bradford, 1921), p. 24. The issue in question is not how the mills tallied net expenses but how they allocated the costs to particular pieces. British and German managers may well have tracked their operating expenses in the same fashion.

[36] Calderdale Archives, WAL 3/2–4.

[37] Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie , Nr. 8 (1902), p. 549, "Stimmen der Praxis"; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , November 19, 1910. E. Jung testifies about the practice of his company in Die Berechnung des Selbstkostenpreises der Gewebe (Berlin: Julius Springer,1917), p. 131.

German accountants apportioned the wage costs of the ordinary weavers by a different means than they used for the overlookers; they simply read off the amount specified on the piece-rate scales for fabric of a certain grade. But they did not merge overlooking outlays with these expenses, because they did not regard the costs of overlooking as a form of wages (Arbeitslöhne ).^[38]

German accountants also used another system for distributing overlooking costs. This second method distributed weaving overlookers' wages, like other overhead costs, as a percentage of material costs and ordinary workers' wages. The firm recorded its total annual expenditure for ordinary wages and materials and then calculated the ratio of this total expenditure to the yearly overhead expenses, including overlooking. For each piece of cloth, then, the company first considered the cost of the materials that went into it, plus the piece-rate wages for the weaving and warping and the average per meter for burling and finishing. Then the firm assumed that for this particular length and type of cloth, the ratio of these primary costs to overhead costs should be the same as for the mill's output in general, so the firm added on this standard percentage to arrive at the cost of that cloth.^[39]

Both German methods merged funds expended on overlooking with general overhead, processing overlooking expenses as part of the underlying cost of maintaining the firm, not, as in England, as an ingredient, like weavers' labor, that was used up and embodied in a length of cloth. Neither German method distributed overlooking outlays as a separate component per length of the cloth, as the Yorkshire and Lancashire systems did. In particular, the first of the German methods considered only the time required to turn out a number of shots with a given efficiency ratio rather than the length, that is, rather than the product.^[40] This German method

[38] Germany, Enquete-Kommission, Reichs-Enquete für die Baumwollen- und Leinen-Industrie: Stenographische Protokolle über die mündliche Vernehmung der Sachverständigen (Berlin: Julius Sittenfeld, 1878), pp. 403, 453; Landesarchiv Potsdam, uncataloged company records of F. F. Koswig, "Calculation" papers. In comparison with Lancashire, the denominator for calculating overlooking costs was time rather than the labor costs of a piece of cloth.

[39] Die Textil-Zeitung , Nr. 23 (1904), p. 573. Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie , Nr. 8 (1902), p. 549, and Nr. 9 (1910), p. 261. Nicolas Reiser, Die Betriebs- und Warenkalkulation für Textilstoffe (Leipzig: A. Felix, 1903), pp. 133 ff.; Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , July 27, 1877, p. 688; Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, B25-198, Tuchfabrik Lörrach, 1904.

[40] Jung, op. cit., p. 131. Friedrich Leitner, Die Selbstkostenberechnung industrieller Betriebe (3d ed. Frankfurt am Main: J. D. Sauerländer, 1908), p. 190.

operated more accurately at a given juncture in the business cycle than the Yorkshire method, in that its focus on the activity also properly measured the time taken up by producing the various densities of cloth, whereas the British either proceeded by length alone or by only a few benchmark densities for which separate yearly tallies could be kept. The Yorkshire method, however, ran with greater accuracy than the German over long time periods, in that overlooking outlays were distributed per length as a separate component rather than as capital investments, which might not behave like overlooking costs through the business cycle.

What, then, were the practical implications of the methods of allocating overlooking expenses? British costing rested on the assumption that overlooking represented a cost that fluctuated with output: under the Lancashire procedure, if a mill turned out more fabric than the previous year and improved its efficiency, overlooking expenses in costing procedures for the following year remained constant per cloth length.^[41] This also meant that overlooking costs rose both absolutely and, since capital overhead for machinery would decline per length, as a proportion of total manufacturing costs per length as well. The system treated the overlooker's contribution as an ingredient embedded in the product. Cloth had the same "amount" of this input even if efficiency improved.^[42] The Yorkshire costing procedure assumed that overlookers' pay would behave like the pay of other ordinary workers, that is, would remain stable per length of cloth.^[43]

[41] Or, more exactly, overlooking costs as a ratio of the wages put into the cloth length remained constant.

[42] In truth, when the firm was especially busy the weavers themselves had to do more of the loom repairs and adjustments on their own, since the tuner had more warps to install and looms broke more often due to constant operation.

[43] Is it possible that the British, in contrast to the Germans, did not add the overlooking costs into their calculations as overhead simply because of the mechanics of the paperwork? It might have been simpler for the British to consider overlooking compensation like other wages since their overlookers received their pay based on those wages. But this hypothesis collides with the evidence, since British accounting manuals and model ledgers also added foremen's salaries onto the cloth with a per-yard average, although foremen received monthly salaries (Woollen and Worsted Trades' Federation, op. cit.). What is more, some of the German overlookers received weekly wages (Der deutsche Meister , March 15, 1913), yet this expense counted as overhead, even in the case of overlookers for small departments such as mending. Reiser, op. cit., p. 146. Since in both countries the distribution of costs on particular pieces followed methods based on yearly averages anyway, the form of the overlookers' payment in this respect did not determine cost accounting methods; instead of one element determining the other, both the mode of remuneration and the costing procedure rested on assumptions about the exchange of the overlookers' labor as a commodity.

Under the German accounting system, if the factory improved its efficiency after the course of a year, then for costing purposes in the following year the expenses of overlooking, like other overhead, would decline as a proportion of total manufacturing costs per length. Companies treated overlookers' supervision as a precondition for production, part of the "base" for manufacturing, rather than as a quantity which was incorporated into the product. This procedure incarnated a cultural procedure more than it corresponded to the actual conditions of production; in practice, the Germans dismissed overlookers in the event of a business downturn, so overlookers' pay did not represent a fixed cost like that of a standing loom or like the company's key clerical staff.

Can we derive the difference in these procedures from the demands of the business environment? Is it plausible that the German costing procedures in textiles, which fused overlooking costs with general fixed expenses, resulted from a greater tolerance for high or invariable outlays on supervision? German business manuals argued that if a firm confronted a need to reduce manufacturing costs, it caused less turmoil in the factory to cut the salaries of the overlookers than the piece rates of the workers.^[44] German business magazines stressed the need to cap outlays for overlooking.^[45] Want ads in German professional journals sometimes specified a preference for unmarried applicants among candidates for overlooking positions, presumably so that the applicant could accept a lower salary or undertake repair work during the evenings as needed.^[46] The contrast in accounting logic for overlooking outlays did not mirror thrifty administration in Britain and prodigal management in Germany.

To attribute the difference in modes of payment to Britain's "earlier" industrial development would be fashionable but unduly facile. The British arrangement resembles systems of management which have been called "subcontracting" or "indirect control." In many branches of industry, the pioneering factory owners, unable or unwilling to take direct command of production on the shop floor, started by delegating authority to their foremen, whom they paid by the turn-out of goods (and who in turn hired and

[44] Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie (1906), p. 11. For the metal industry, see Georg Erlacher, Briefe eines Betriebsleiters über Organisation technischer Betriebe (Hannover: Gebrüder Jänecke, 1903), p. 36. German weavers believed that if they organized and succeeded in receiving higher wages, managers would respond by cutting the salaries of loom tuners and overseers. Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , July 24, 1909, Windelsbleiche.

[45] Die Textil-Zeitung , January 5, 1897.

[46] Seide , November 14, 1906.

controlled their own workers). Research in a range of historical settings, from Europe to Japan, has found that in the early industrial era, systems which paid overlookers as subcontractors predominated in many trades.^[47] At a time when manufacturing still depended on craft knowledge or on the secret know-how of the overlookers and foremen, graded monetary sanctions gave owners the only feasible check on, and evaluation of, the overlookers' loyalty and efficiency. An explanation of the British method of paying weaving overlookers based on this ground seems especially plausible since Lancashire, the earliest center of the textile industry, also offered the practice's clearest expression.^[48]

Yet such an argument based on the timing of development does not apply to the question at hand. The Wuppertal, a forerunner for the rest of Germany, moved only a few decades behind Lancashire in mechanizing its weaving mills; indeed, in wool weaving it kept pace with Yorkshire.^[49] But the Wuppertal had a pure salary system for overlookers and allocated overlooking costs as a fixed expense.^[50] Even if payment by results first arose in an earlier stage of development, its survival depended on active propagation, not institutional inertia. Management experts contended that the commissions graded by weavers' wages "stimulated" overlookers' interest in efficient production and encouraged them to be punctual.^[51] At J. T. and T. Taylor's mill at Batley, Yorkshire, in 1912 managers shifted the overlook-

[47] Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 40; W. Garside and H. F. Gospel, "Employers and Managers: Their Organizational Structure and Changing Industrial Strategies," in C. Wrigley, editor, A History of British Industrial Relations (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 102; for Italy, Carlo Poni, "Mass gegen Mass: Wie der Seidenfaden rund und dünn wurde," in Robert Berdahl et al., editors, Klassen und Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1982), p. 25; Sanford Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 15.

[48] In Yorkshire, too, the earliest weaving mills relied on subcontracting. Benjamin Gott did not hire the weavers as employees at the mill he built in 1792, but relied upon overlookers to fill the looms. Adrian Randall, Before the Luddites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 209.

[49] Wolfgang Hoth, Die Industrialisierung einer rheinischen Gewerbestadt, dargestellt am Beispiel Wuppertal (Köln: Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, 1975), p. 200. By 1861, 30 percent of the looms for lining in Elberfeld were mechanized. Leon Mirus, "Die Futterstoffweberei in Elberfeld und Barmen," diss., Leipzig, 1909, p. 18. See footnote 8, Chapter One, above.

[50] My interviews with Ewald Sirrenberg, born 1897, and Hans Penz, born 1895; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , May 21, 1910.

[51] Journal of the Department of Textile Industries , City of Bradford Technical College (September 1918), p. 26; "The Bonus System in Textile Mills," Textile Manufacturer , May 15, 1914, pp. 174–175. Edward Elbourne's respected work on "scientific" management, published in 1914, said that "foremen ought to be judged by results only." Factory Administration and Accounts (London: Green & Co., 1914), p. 85.

ers to pay based solely on output.^[52] The methods British owners used to remunerate overlookers resulted from contemporaneous reasoning rather than unexamined tradition inherited from an earlier phase of development.

A final utilitarian approach to the difference between Germany and England might dissect the consequences of the payment methods for production costs. The textile industry was exposed to price fluctuations on both the input and the output side. On the input side, since the trade's raw materials consisted of vegetable and animal products, their prices varied with the weather and growing conditions. Raw cotton prices could change by as much as 50 percent in a few months, and prices for wool yarn fluctuated even more severely.^[53] Merchants and manufacturers alike speculated in the market for these raw commodities.^[54] On the output side, the fortunes of many firms and of whole branches depended, season to season, on unforeseeable shifts in clothing fashions.

If a company cut back on production, the Lancashire and Yorkshire systems, by basing the overlookers' wages on those of the weavers, automatically reduced overlooking expenses.^[55] At first blush, the German technique would seem to rigidify overlookers' salaries; but in the event of a downturn owners simply laid overlookers off.^[56] In 1893 and 1894, members of the German overlookers' and foremen's union (which, to be sure, included non-textile overlookers) reported nearly eight hundred cases of changes of employers; of these, 60 percent were due to the employer having given notice.^[57]

[52] Yorkshire Factory Times , June 20, 1912, p. 1.

[53] HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 25041, Jahresbericht der Fabrikinspektoren Mönchengladbach, 1911, p. 5; Ernst Meyknecht, "Die Krisen in der deutschen Woll- und Baumwollindustrie," diss., München, 1928. For wool, see R. Isenburg, Untersuchungen über die Entwicklung der bergischen Wollenindustrie , Heidelberg, 1906, p. 53; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , June 25, 1910, and "Arme Aktionäre," January 12, 1901, as well as J. H. Clapham, The Woollen and Worsted Industries (London: Methuen & Co., 1907), p. 182.

[54] B. A. Dobson, Some Difficulties in Cotton Spinning (Bolton: G. S. Heaton, 1893), p. 62.

[55] "Their [the overlookers'] earnings have risen and fallen automatically as a result of the advances or reductions of the weaving rates, or as a consequence of other causes affecting the volume of weavers' earnings." Textile Mercury , July 8, 1899, p. 23.

[56] Stadtarchiv Gummersbach, Akt 4842, September 14, 1891; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , January 29, 1910, Gronau; Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 16, 1905, Crimmitschau.

[57] This figure unfortunately included overlookers in all industries, but after the metal industry, the largest portion of members came from the textile branch. Archiv des Freien Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, "Geschäfts-Berichte des Zentralvorstandes des Deutschen Werkmeister-Verbandes für 1893 und 1894," p. 12. Textile owners in Krefeld said that laid-off overlookers became weavers for lack of other openings. Seide , June 17, 1914, p. 311. See as well the case of a weaving overlooker from Viersen before the Mönchengladbach business court, in Der deutsche Meister , January 1, 1911.

Alternatively, mill directors could reduce the days of work and pay of those German overlookers on weekly wages.^[58] In short, the German procedure featured a degree of elasticity. The two systems did not diverge greatly in their ability to conform to the business cycle.

Finally, mills in both countries specializing in long runs of fabric for which demand was relatively stable did not deviate from the standards set by firms with fluctuating orders. The same accounting logic prevailed regardless of the market niche in which the firm operated, from simple towel makers to fancy goods manufacturers.^[59] It also applied to the spinning branch.^[60] This relative invariance within each country makes it implausible to contend that the variation in accounting systems evolved to cope with differing business experiences.

The owners' payment of overlookers and their procedures for allocating overlooking expenses fit the commodity forms of labor German and British producers used in carrying out production. As in the construction of weavers' piece-rate scales, so with overlookers the British relied upon the fiction that owners buy the labor embodied in completed products. The employers paid overlookers so much per length of cloth received and calculated the cost as if it represented labor incorporated as a fixed expense in each portion of cloth. As a British textile accountant put it, all machine workers "expend direct labor," because their work is "seen in the finished product."^[61] The guidelines for discharging weaving overlookers in Britain also confirmed that overlookers received their payment for materialized labor. In many districts, a weaving overlooker was not to leave his place of employment until the weavers he had supervised had turned in all the cloth he had

[58] Bocholter Volksblatt , January 9, 1901.

[59] See the testimony of German weaving manufacturers in a variety of branches, including fancy mixed wool and cotton, Germany, Enquete-Kommission, op. cit., pp. 245, 251, 403, 453.

[60] W. M. Christy and Sons, foreman's notebooks, December 30, 1892, John Rylands University Library of Manchester Archives; Reuben Gaunt & Sons, Box 13, Leeds District Archives; J. Brook A Rational System of Woollen Yarn Costing (Batley: J. Fearnside & Sons, 1926), p. 57; and, for mule spinning in Yorkshire, Yorkshire Factory Times , March 17, 1893.

[61] Charles Williams, "Cotton Mill Costings," Journal of the National Federation of Textile Works Managers Associations Volume V (1925–1926), p. 87. Likewise, in British shipyard and engineering works, the cost of supervision was charged as a percentage of the labor expended on the material. Dempster Smith and Philip C. N. Pickworth, Engineers' Costs and Economical Workshop Production (Manchester: Emmott & Co., 1914), p. 52; "Manager," Examples of Engineering Estimates, Costs and Accounts, for the Use of Young Engineers (Huddersfield: C. F. Maurice, n.d.), p. 4.

superintended.^[62] Otherwise, the overlooker had not "delivered" his labor and did not receive credit for it.

As in the measurement of weavers' activity, so with the overlookers the German producers relied upon the fiction that employers had the right of disposal over the workers' capacity and effort. The German procedure for adding up production expenses mixed the elements of supervisory labor and capital expenditure in apportioning overhead costs. In an accounting manual written in 1903, a costing expert from Aachen saw no incongruity in combining these elements: he suggested a 50 percent cost addition for a category called "overlookers' salaries, electricity, and steam" and joined together supervisory costs and the depreciation costs of looms.^[63] The German accountants handled the overlookers' labor capacity as a kind of "human capital," a conveyable resource rather than a substance received in a product.^[64]

Belabored Fictions

To trace the construction of a "commodity" out of the ephemeral activity of the overlookers we have so far relied upon the cultural assumptions inscribed in manufacturing practice. In contexts where these suppositions had to be articulated explicitly, they can be found in discursive practice as well. The assumption in Germany that textile supervisors sold the disposition over their work activity, not merely objectified labor, came to light in the judicial interpretation of overlookers' employment contracts. The most arresting legal question for German mill owners in 1911, gauging by the coverage given it by the trade's professional journals, centered on a complaint filed by an overlooker in a town near Düsseldorf. Today the minutiae of this conflict seem, in a word, dull—but not the participants' perception of the facts. The news accounts indicate that the owner of a silk mill hired a certain Herr K. in 1910 to oversee his dyeing department.^[65] By the terms of the four-year contract they concluded, the foreman held the title of Obermeister (chief foreman) and headed the whole department. He agreed to obey the firm's production directives under all circumstances. Twelve months after the start of the agreement, the owner found it necessary to divide the velvet section from the remainder of the dyeing department, and

[62] General Union of Associations of Powerloom Overlookers, The Almanack and Guide for 1899 (Manchester: Ashton and Redfern, n.d.).

[63] Reiser, op. cit., p. 146. Similarly, consult Leitner, op. cit., pp. 93, 179.

[64] See HSTAD, Landratsamt Lennep 275, 1865, letter of Bürgermeisterei Radevormwald, for treatment of labor in this fashion.

[65] Seide , April 10, 1912.

he entrusted supervision of the new section to another person. Herr K. retained his title and salary. Yet he charged the owner with a violation of the employment contract on the grounds that the owner had to let him keep the entire department or dismiss him altogether. Before the provincial court in Düsseldorf, Herr K. demanded payment in full of his remaining (three years') salary, since the contract specified that this was due to him in case of dismissal.

How is it that this course of events, whose unfolding makes today for such pedestrian reading, managed to hold the interest of contemporaries? The manner in which the business community endowed the conflict with significance represents an odd fact; its strangeness offers a riddle about the culture of production.

Although the courts ultimately resolved the suit through an evaluation of the pettiest terms of the employment contract, the business community thought that the case raised a basic question about the nature of the factory staff's employment contract. Owners and staff asked whether Herr K. might not have "the right to fully utilize his own capacity for work."^[66] One technical journal summed up the issue at stake this way: "A company official, who has bound himself by a contract, naturally has the duty to place his full abilities at the disposal of the enterprise; but it is not so automatic that he also has the right to see that his capacity for work is taken advantage of to the full."^[67] Certainly this organ's coverage of the affair threw the foreman's right into question. Yet in its analysis the magazine formulated the possibility of the right as the reverse side of the foreman's contractual obligations. And in so doing the journal, like the foreman's lawyer, revealed something about the business community's understanding of the labor transaction that was set in motion by the employment contract.

In formulating Herr K.'s rights, the press assumed that he offered for remuneration, not the successful turn-out of a quantity of dyed materials, but the disposition of his activity. The business community took the foreman's Arbeitskraft as the basis of the exchange, applying the same generic term for the factory official's productive capacities as for those of ordinary workers. This focus on the sale of the capacity for executing work, rather than on its external outcomes, was widespread: in discussions of the legal fine points of hiring factory staff, German business periodicals did not state,

[66] Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , January 4, 1912.

[67] Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , Nr. 13 (1912), p. 255.

for example, that by accepting a position factory officials obligated themselves to do the best job they could for the owner; they said that the staff had to devote all their abilities and knowledge to the interests of the owner.^[68] Only with the premised sale of "labor power" in view could the foreman's lawyer possibly have articulated his client's complaint in terms of a "right to the full exploitation of his labor power."^[69] Since the owner understood that he bought the foreman's full capacity, the argument went, he could not alter that capacity's sphere of operation or application. The contract's provision that the owner still had to pay Herr K.'s full salary even in case of dismissal also follows the supposition that the contract covers the disposition of the activity rather than of the output: Herr K. offered up his full capacities and therefore deserved compensation for having offered them even after he was released from the firm.

In its decision the provincial court of Düsseldorf in 1911 sided with Herr K. The owner appealed the decision on the grounds that it interfered with his prerogative to manage his own business. Finally in 1912 the imperial court at Berlin ruled for the owner; it judged that if the owner had the right to dispense with the foreman's services (at the cost of paying him his full salary), then the owner also had the right to dispense with a part of the foreman's services. In this instance the court ranked the right to full exploitation of one's labor capacity as subordinate to another principle—the owner's management authority. For my cultural analysis the fact of primary significance is simply that the conflict was expressed in terms of the sale of Arbeitskraft at all.^[70]

My interpretation of the German courts' emphasis on labor power, far from representing a kind of philosophic abstraction, does nothing more than follow the thoughts of the participants themselves. In an age when owners usually regarded the small stratum of professional employees as a species apart from the manual workers under command, the owners nonetheless used the term labor power for a factory official's technical services.^[71] Only

[68] Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , Nr. 17 (1912), p. 346.

[69] "Das Recht auf volle Ausnutzung seiner Arbeitskräfte." Ibid.

[70] This final decision by the imperial court also seems to contradict the earlier judgments of provincial courts. For example, the Landgericht of Hanau in 1906 ruled that if a foreman were moved to another position, the employer was obligated not just to assure the same level of pay but to provide a setting that suited the foreman's "abilities and skills." Das Gewerbegericht , Volume 12, Nr. 9 (June 1, 1907), pp. 199–200, ruling of March 13, 1906.

[71] For another instance in which a court—the Prussian Kammergericht—referred to a supervisor's donation as the consumption of Arbeitskraft , see Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , August 7, 1909.

on the basis of logical assumptions about labor activity on behalf of the enterprise in general could they have abstracted this essential similarity between types of action whose overt appearances and prestige seemed otherwise so discrepant.

If the history of Herr K. discloses something about Germans' perception of the labor activity in general, as opposed to something about the status of overlookers, then we ought to be able to find analogous cases for lower grades of workers. This poses a special challenge, since most factory labor codes governing the employment relation specified the owner's right to switch ordinary workers to another machine or task. Yet a German technical journal in 1900 described a dispute involving a lower worker that offers a close parallel to Herr K.'s case.^[72]

The facts of the case were these: a regular factory hand in Berlin stayed on the job after a portion of his company's work force began a strike. The management suspected the worker of organizing support for the strikers at the shop. It requested that he cease actual labor but continue to show up briefly at the company's desk twice each day. In this fashion the firm could isolate him from his fellows but avoid freeing him for an entire day to earn money elsewhere. These check-ins were to continue during four weeks, because, according to the factory labor code issued by the owner, both worker and owner had to give four weeks' notice if they wanted to terminate the employment contract. During this period the firm offered to continue paying the worker his full wage. But the worker objected that unless he worked, he was not obligated to check in at the office at all. After the firm fired him, he complained in court that four weeks' pay was due him for his unjustified removal. His employer argued in court that by requesting that the worker check in, he had simply wished to verify the worker's readiness to work (Arbeitsbereitschaft ). In any event, the employer reasoned, a worker had to report in twice during a regular workday, so the firm was not demanding anything exceptional of him. In the dangerous atmosphere of a strike and at a court which was not known for its support of workers' interests, the judge ruled in favor of the worker. "The plaintiff had a right during the [four-week] interim period not just to payment of his wages," the judge decided, "but to the carrying out of his contractual employment as well."^[73]

[72] Seide , November 14, 1900, p. 728.

[73] Ibid.

The Berlin court's decision attached the complex of legal norms to the employee as a bearer of work capacity, not to a person who merely received pay. In a similar case a decade later, the business court of the city of Chemnitz judged that the employment contract required the owner to use the workers' labor capacity and not merely to guarantee compensation.^[74] In Britain, by contrast, the laws pertaining to employment were the same as those covering agreements for the delivery of products. Workers could be dismissed without obligation, even if the employment contract required prior notice, so long as they received compensation for the work they could otherwise have completed. The concepts of labor that the manufacturers enacted in practice, the courts sanctified in words.

Forms of Authority

German and British weaving overlookers shared the same dependencies and capabilities with respect to employers above and weavers below. In each country the structure of the production site generated similar conflicts among these parties. Yet due to the understandings of labor as a commodity, the paradigms on which people could draw for interpreting friction varied between Germany and Britain, endowing identical problems with contrasting significance. The British and German definitions of labor as a commodity hold contrasting implications for the owner's authority in the workplace. The German view of employment as the command of "labor power" made the exercise of authority over the execution of work an integral part of the process of earning a profit. The German view unified the relations of appropriation and domination. When capitalists purchased "labor power," their receipt of a profit depended on how successfully they converted that labor capacity into labor itself. Without the immediate domination of the worker, the owner did not appropriate a surplus. Marx believed as a matter of theory, not of rhetoric, that the capitalist organization of work was despotic. Although profit may have been realized through exchange on the market, it was generated and appropriated in production.

The purchase of embodied labor in Britain, by contrast, denied any necessary connection between the exercise of authority and the generation of profit. The producers may certainly have believed that the factory proprietor took advantage of his command over capital to pay workers less than he ought. Even so, the owner secured a surplus through an exchange relation

[74] Das Gewerbegericht , Volume 15, Nr. 5 (1910), pp. 103–104.

set up by the trade of resources rather than in an immediate relation of domination. The generation and appropriation of surplus were accomplished at a remove, not through the owner's command over the labor potential and person of the worker and not through the owner's authority over social relations in the factory.

Weaving offers an exemplary environment in which to explore the influence of these concepts of labor as a commodity, because the technical characteristics of the labor process made the overlooker's role more ambiguous in this than in many other industries. Weavers worked on their own when all was well with their looms; the overlooker did not coordinate the work of machines or of people, nor was he required to show initiative in leading a team of workers. He did not have to exercise authority as an intrinsic part of his technical function. Furthermore, the overlooker did not contribute to output by combining in his department diverse outputs or mechanical procedures; he only aggregated outputs from similar machinery. Production was the sum of the individual loom outputs, a feature which made it easier to think of the overlooker as bestowing his labor upon the lengths of cloth rather than as acting in the capacity of a manager. Textile businessmen in Britain referred to their weaving overlookers as machine "operatives," even when they gave overlookers the right to hire and fire subordinates.^[75] Finally, in comparison with a metal-working plant, where each of a company's overlookers might have command over a set of different machine tools and make different kinds of products, a weaving mill had many weaving overlookers, each with a quota of similar kinds of machinery. Because they could compare overlookers who did the identical jobs and they hired many different overlookers for the same job, owners could equate the overlookers' labor and think of it as a homogeneous "input" bestowed upon the fabric.

In this complex situation, how did people on the shop floor define the role of the overlooker? The words used in Britain to designate the overlooker's occupation offer evidence of the participants' emphasis on his role as a technical and productive one. Mill workers in Yorkshire, and on some occasions the owners as well,^[76] called their weaving overseers tuners , a title which put these employees' technical function before their supervisory one. The word overlooker may have appeared in management journals and social

[75] Textile Mercury , July 8, 1899, p. 24; LRO, Minutes of Blackburn Masters' Association, DDX1115/1/2, February 26, 1900.

[76] Textile Mercury , July 8, 1899.

scientific descriptions, but not in the ordinary language of the people on the shop floor. Their interviews and their union newspapers' descriptions of mill life used the word tuner. In Lancashire the popular term was tackler , a metonymic derivative that referred to the overlooker's tools—his tackle—rather than to his authority and place in the chain of command.^[77]

The evolution of textile production from home weaving to the centralized factory allows the analyst to place the dimensions of the overlookers' role—the exercise of a technical skill and the exercise of authority over other people—in a diachronic progression. Loom tuning or tackling had become a recognized occupation in England and on the Continent before the rise of the factory system. By the early nineteenth century handlooms had become complicated enough that special tuners made house calls to fix or adjust them.^[78] In this era the fixers were commonly called loomers. (If the fixer specialized in dobby looms, which had parts called witches, the occupation's popular title carried a pun: "witch doctors.")^[79] The chore of overseeing workers' conduct was added to the "looming" occupation with the rise of factory production. But when the occupation acquired a new popular name in the transition, the workers did not apply to the overlookers the range of terms, such as gaffer or simply boss , that they used for persons in higher authority.

In Germany, despite a path of structural evolution similar to Britain's, the overlookers' titles did refer to their supervisory responsibilities rather than to their technical function alone. The lowest-level weaving overlooker, who had responsibility for a certain section of looms, the workers called the Webmeister ("weaving master") or Reviermeister ("section master"). In contrast to the English weaving overlooker, the German overlooker bore a title that placed him in an integrated system of supervision, part of a hierarchy of officials. The system gave higher-level foremen the title of Saalmeister ("room master") or Werkmeister ("shop master").

These phrases were not empty punctilios; they betrayed the essence of the overlookers' performance in Germany. German officials articulated

[77] Yorkshire Factory Times , October 9, 1891. In some cotton districts overlookers were also called loom jobbers. Cotton Factory Times , December 3, 1886. When the weavers found that the overlooker bullied them, they called for an investigation. In Blackburn, the town clerk investigated claims that an overlooker should be dismissed for "tyranny," although the weavers did not charge the overlooker with brutality. See LRO, DDX1115/1/1, Blackburn, November 6, 1895.

[78] Healey, op. cit., p. 4.

[79] Centre for English Cultural Traditions and Language, University of Sheffield, Bob Turner's interview with respondent A67–72.

the overlookers' role when they were called upon to elucidate a new pension law for "professional technical workers." The law, which took effect in 1913, was based on the longstanding proviso that employers contribute to a comprehensive pension and insurance fund for white-collar workers. It extended this requirement to cover higher-level workers in the workshops as well (technische Angestellte ). Government administrators had to decide exactly which persons the law admitted to the pension system as professional technical workers. According to the district reports submitted to the German Foremen's Union, the owners of large weaving mills recognized the weaving overlookers (Webmeister ) as such professionals for insurance purposes without hesitation.^[80] But some employers tried to evade requests for insurance coverage by changing the overlookers' occupational titles from Meister of various sorts to mere Vorarbeiter ("preparatory workers").^[81]

To adjudicate the resulting disputes, the imperial insurance bureau in Berlin studied in detail the functions of overlookers in the weaving branch. How could this office decide whom to designate as a professional, not just as a schooled technical expert? In the end officials took the employees' exercise of an oversight function, rather than their level of technical expertise, as the critical requirement for classification as a professional.^[82] If weaving overlookers did simple manual work such as installing the warps, they were still higher-level professional workers so long as they also were in charge of watching the weaving process, distributing warps, or enforcing the factory work codes.^[83] In another illustration of the importance given to authority, the imperial insurance bureau decided that in departments smaller than the weaving rooms, such as those for carding or dyeing, supervisors had to have at least two workers under them to be classified as tech-

[80] Archiv des Freien Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, "Geschäfts-Berichte des Zentralvorstandes des Deutschen Werkmeister-Verbandes für 1911 und 1912," p. 17.

[81] Der deutsche Meister , March 15, 1913; Geraisches Tageblatt , October 31, 1912. The courts established, however, that the overlooker's duties, not his title, determined his legal status. Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , August 6, 1910, p. 1007. For a discussion by contemporaries of the status implications of the term Vorarbeiter versus Meister , see Der Textil-Arbeiter , August 4, 1905.

[82] Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , p. 1163; Stadtarchiv Bocholt, K2/276, case from September 24, 1896.

[83] Letter from March 26, 1914, reprinted in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , 1914, Nr. 14; the periodical Das Gewerbegericht cites a decision of the Düsseldorfer Zivilkammer of January 2, 1903, in which the court decided that a loom fixer who "merely assists the weavers in installing the warp and who corrects defects is to be regarded as a foreman [technical professional], even when he stands under the supervision of another foreman." See Volume 9, Nr. 7 (1904), p. 198.

nical professionals (technische Angestellte ).^[84] Income levels and the time intervals by which the salary was calculated were judged to be irrelevant.^[85] Command over other workers was considered the distinctive part of the overlookers' work role. Even technically trained foremen complained that they were viewed by some employers "only as a driver of the employed workers."^[86]

When the German courts were called upon to interpret the overlookers' labor contracts, they too made the exercise of authority delegated by the owner an essential part of the employment relation. By the provisions of the German business law, overlookers, unlike ordinary workers, could be dismissed without the usual notice required by contract if they were proven "disloyal" in their service.^[87] What constituted "disloyal" conduct? The construals of the courts discloses the conventional interpretation of the labor transaction. An industry journal, in an article about the legal definition of an overlooker that appeared in 1912, asserted that an overlooker, by the implicit terms of the labor contract, "obligated himself to devote his skills fully and completely to the interests of the employer."^[88] In this magazine's view, overlookers became instruments of the owners' will, and to support this claim it cited legal verdicts. The German courts had ruled that overlookers, unlike ordinary workers, could not give notice together at a firm. Giving such notice would amount to an attempt to bargain collectively for better employment conditions and therefore would mean that the overlookers were no longer acting "faithfully" to advance the proprietors' interests.^[89]

[84] Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , Nr. 48 (1912), p. 1069.

[85] Das Versicherungsgesetz für Angestellte: Vom 20. Dezember 1911. (Stuttgart: J. Hess, 1912).

[86] Archiv des Freien Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, "Geschäfts-Berichte des Zentralvorstandes des Deutschen Werkmeister-Verbandes für 1912–1913," p. 7.

[87] Germany, Gewerbeordnung für das Deutsche Reich (München: C. H. Beck, 1909), section 133c, point 2.

[88] Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , Nr. 17 (1912), p. 346.

[89] As an appeals court in Dresden reasoned, "If the professional staff resorts to the threat of collectively giving notice, in order through the planned action to force the employer to be more forthcoming, then the staff has grossly violated the duty inherent in the employment relation to safeguard the interests of the owner and to refrain from anything that could run against those interests, and has thereby proven itself guilty of disloyalty in service." The quotation comes from a case involving white-collar workers but applied to the category of professional technical workers as well. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , October 1, 1913, p. 264. For an analogous case outside of textiles where an employer could immediately dismiss a technical professional for collaborating with workers, see Das Gewerbegericht , September 3, 1903, p. 294, Solingen.

The employment contract was void if the overlookers did not minister to the owners as servants.

This bond of service let the courts designate overlookers as literal agents of the owners. According to German law, if a worker grossly insulted the employer, he or she could be dismissed immediately. The statutes, however, did not specifically address the question of whether overlookers, like owners, enjoyed this privilege. When the courts were called upon for an interpretation, they decided that even the lowest-level overlooker ought to be regarded as an "agent of the employer." On these grounds, disrespect toward an overlooker equaled a direct insult to the owner.^[90] The German judicial review for business courts reprinted the rulings of the imperial court in Berlin that emphasized the view that overlookers were agents of the proprietors. The review in 1901 summed up the precedents: "The authority of the employer is transferred to the foreman, for without the accompanying carryover of the 'prestige' of the owner, the transfer of part of the owner's legitimate authority would be unthinkable, otherwise it [the transfer] would directly contradict the interests of the employer, for whose protection the transfer is consummated."^[91] The authority of the employer was distilled in the overlooker's everyday activities.

Although the specification of the overlooker's labor as a ware differed between Germany and Britain and the exercise of authority by overlookers carried different implications, the responsibilities of the overlookers in the two countries did not diverge. Even in the most important area in which overlookers exercised authority—in hiring—the German and the British overlookers occupied approximately equivalent positions. To be sure, one finds great variation within each country in the weaving overlookers' responsibilities for production. There were two benchmark systems. Under the first, the owners or mill directors took responsibility for recruiting and hiring new workers and assigned them to overlookers as

[90] Seide , September 16, 1914; Gewerbe- und Kaufmannsgericht Volume 19 (1914), pp. 271–272. A weaver unsuccessfully challenged the legality of firing him without notice after he called his tuner a "lazy bum" (Faulenzer ). Der deutsche Meister , May, 1914.

[91] Das Gewerbegericht , Volume 6, Nr. 9 (1901), p. 183. See also Volume 7, pp. 209–210, for an analogous decision in Mainz. Some of the disciplinary ordinances issued by textile factories treated disrespectful statements to the owners' representatives as direct insults to the owner. See, illustratively, Landesarchiv Potsdam, Rep. 6B, Kreisverwaltung Cottbus, Nr. 1253, regulations issued December 15, 1905, by the Heinrich Linke factory in Guben. The mayor of Fischeln, a town near Krefeld, reported with approval in a letter to provincial authorities in 1891 that overlookers "advocate the views of the employer frequently and with pleasure in personal interaction with their workers." HSTAD, Landratsamt Krefeld 175, p. 35.

they pleased.^[92] Under the second system, overlookers or departmental foremen did the hiring entirely on their own.^[93] This could lead to extreme decentralization: at a mill near Bradford, a female weaver whom an overlooker fired in 1902 for acting as a ringleader in a "disturbance" immediately found a job under a different overlooker at the same firm.^[94] These two pure systems of responsibility for hiring, in which either factory directors or the overlookers themselves took sole responsibility for hiring, formed in both countries the exception rather than the rule. Between the two extremes lay various mixtures of authority between overlookers and higher managers. At many factories, the overlooker did the hiring, but the director exercised veto power or carried out an interview with each worker before the final decision.^[95] At others the manager did the hiring but restricted the main field of candidates to people recruited or recommended by the overlooker.

In these mixed systems of hiring the producers never arrived at consistent rules for finding new hires. If a manager happened to see a vacant loom one morning, he might immediately put someone on without asking the overlooker, yet assume that the overlooker as a matter of routine would fill

[92] Bernays, op. cit., 1910, p. 186. My interview with Arthur Murgatroyd, born 1902, Halifax. Rowland Kennedy, Westering: An Autobiography by Rowland Kennedy (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1939), p. 95; Cotton Factory Times , February 19, 1897, Rochdale.

[93] For Lancashire, see Textile Mercury , July 8, 1899, p. 23; Bolton Oral History Collection, tape 54, male weaver, born 1898. For Yorkshire, see Yorkshire Factory Times , July 26, 1889; July 1, 1892, p. 5; June 21, 1901, Shipley Mary Brown Barrett, "In Her Clogs and Her Shawl: A Working-Class Childhood, 1902–1914," Bradford Library Archives, p. 56. According to a male spinner, born 1896, most overlookers in the Bradford area did their own recruiting, but it was not uncommon for managers to do it. Bradford Heritage Recording Unit, tape A0091. For Germany, see Stadtarchiv Bocholt, K2/276, December 20, 1900, and 6/K1, 1892, Arbeitsordnung Actien-Gesellschaft für Baumwollindustrie, and, for spinning, K2/276, March 6, 1899; Stadtarchiv Rheine, Nr. 183, February 3, 1915, Dyckhoff & Stoeveken; Staatsarchiv Osnabrück, Rep. 610, Lingen, Nr. 125, "Arbeitsordnung Gerrit van Delden," 1901; Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 14, 1901, Aachen. In the German case, since the workers had to be entered on the firm's chief roster for the owner to make contributions to the medical and insurance funds (Krankenkasse ), the overlooker made the offer of employment but could not become an employer of labor on his own right.

[94] Not until a higher shop master happened to notice her transfer one day did she finally leave the firm. Yorkshire Factory Times , July 4, 1902. The higher supervisor did not himself inform troublesome employees of their dismissal but entrusted delivery of the message to the overlooker. For a parallel example, see Yorkshire Factory Times , December 6, 1890.

[95] Yorkshire Factory Times , October 11, 1889; October 25, 1889; December 13, 1889. For Lancashire, LRO, DDX 1115/1/1, Blackburn and District Managers' Mutual Association, resolution of August 23, 1894. H. Meyer, Einrichtung und Betrieb einer Seidenstoff-Fabrik (Zürich: Juchli & Beck, 1908), p. 19. My interviews with Ewald Sirrenberg, born 1897, and with Hans Penz, born 1895 in Barmen.

other empty looms.^[96] This vague apportionment of responsibility for hiring at mills in northern England could result in overlookers and managers at a firm promising the same loom to more than one person.^[97] Workers in Yorkshire complained that when they wanted to leave the firm they did not know to whom they should give notice.^[98] Likewise in Germany the weavers said they were unsure about which of their supervisors was "really the master" and whose permission they needed to take a day off.^[99] In Germany, on the one hand the newspapers of the textile workers criticized overlookers for abusing their arbitrary powers of dismissal; on the other, the papers acknowledged that in effect overlookers also needed, but did not always get, upper management's consent to fire a worker.^[100] In both countries the compass of the overlooker's jurisdiction was ill-marked and specified more by imputation than by official notice.

If the exact boundaries of the overlooker's responsibility for hiring remained unclear, his influence was nonetheless real. In light of their command over people, how could British producers have crystallized the overlooker's activity as the delivery of materialized labor? Even where British overlookers hired weavers themselves, this could be seen as a technical function, a means of equipping looms with weavers, not weavers with looms. James Burnley, a textile worker and well-known dialect poet, described overlookers' roles in mill life after he revisited a Bradford weaving company: "There are several overlookers in the room, each of whom has the superintendance of a certain number of looms. Their duties are to keep the looms in repair and to supply them with weavers."^[101] Burnley, who had a

[96] Yorkshire Factory Times , May 16, 1890. For cases where the manager overruled the overlooker, see Yorkshire Factory Times , August 3, 1894, Horton.

[97] Yorkshire Factory Times , September 1, 1893, Apperley Bridge.

[98] Yorkshire Factory Times , August 23, 1901. For other complaints regarding the confusion in responsibility for hiring, see Yorkshire Factory Times , October 31, 1890, Bradford and Keighley; March 18, 1892, Ravensthorpe; September 23, 1892, Yeadon; January 2, 1891, Dewsbury; June 19, 1891, Keighley; November 13, 1891, Marsden.

[99] Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , August 13, 1910, and September 14, 1901, Krefeld; Christlicher Arbeiterfreund , September 23, 1898, p. 5; Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , March 15, 1902, Mönchengladbach.

[100] Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 18, 1901. For Yorkshire, see Textile Manufacturer Oct. 15, 1891, p. 456. In part, owners deliberately maintained the ambiguity in responsibility for hiring and firing. They did not always trust their overlookers to hire workers by criteria of efficiency, yet they did not want to diminish overlookers' power to discipline workers. Centralblatt für die Textil-Industrie , 1885, p. 791. According to the Yorkshire Factory Times , a manager in Batley revoked an overlooker's right to hire due to the favoritism the overlooker showed in hiring. See February 7, 1890.

[101] James Burnley, Phases of Bradford Life (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1889), p. 197.

firsthand acquaintance with weaving, expressed himself with precision—and his choice of words made the looms, rather than the workers, the overlooker's real object of attention.^[102] Then, too, the ultimate means by which overlookers supported or dismissed weavers was not that of official commands but of covert deeds. If a weaver got on the wrong side of the overlooker, he or she might as well leave the firm, even if the overlooker said nothing. When a piqued overlooker began to withhold prompt technical assistance, the earnings of the ancillary weaver declined quickly. The authority of the overlooker could be transmitted through their care of the machinery as much as through a chain of command.^[103]

The specification of the overlooker's transmission of labor did not alter the overlookers' functions and responsibilities in Germany or Britain, but it provided the template for workers to formulate their grievances about superiors. For a ground-level view of workers' complaints, I coded the local reports that appeared in the newspapers of the textile workers in Britain and Germany. In Britain, the Yorkshire Factory Times focused its coverage on the everyday concerns of textile workers.^[104] This journal, whose premier edition appeared in 1889, devoted most of its pages to a feature called "Echoes from Mills and Workshops." Each week this revue described incidents at factories in more than a dozen towns and villages, based on correspondents' reports and on letters and tip-offs sent in by workers. Nowhere else, the paper boasted, could one find "so true an index of the life of the textile factory."^[105]

In Germany, reports from textile factories reached two newspapers. In 1889 the "free" (or Social Democratic) trade union of the textile workers began publishing the complaints workers submitted to union officials or voiced at meetings.^[106] The Christian union for German textile workers fol-

[102] The overlookers referred to their wages as "monies coming off the looms." LRO, DDX 1151/19/3, July 31, 1908.

[103] Yorkshire Factory Times , September 19, 1890, p. 4, and March 29, 1901, pp. 4–5.

[104] The editor of a sister newspaper, The Workman's Times , believed that the Yorkshire Factory Times was "specially dominated" by the textile workers. See his comments, August 29, 1890.

[105] Yorkshire Factory Times , April 11, 1902. Twenty-five years after the paper's founding, Ben Turner, one of its original staff members, recalled, "It was a real workmen's paper written by workmen and workwomen for workfolks." Turner described the original network of contributors in the Yorkshire Factory Times , June 25, 1914, p. 4. For an example of an incomplete report from a correspondent that illustrates the amateur nature of the reporting, see Yorkshire Factory Times , October 23, 1891, Bradford. The paper had the largest circulation of any weekly journal in the West Riding (June 17, 1892, p. 8, and April 18, 1902, p. 8).

[106] See Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 17, 1902, Gera, for a reference to the submission process. The reports were published with major editing. Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband,Protokoll der vierten ordentlichen General-Versammlung des Verbandes aller in der Textil-Industrie beschäftigten Arbeiter und Arbeiterinnen (Berlin: Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, 1898), p. 32.

lowed suit with a similar publication in 1898.^[107] I coded the complaints of workers about practices on the shop floor from the earliest surviving volumes of each of these newspapers. In both countries, these early volumes had the richest and most extensive coverage of problems on the shop floor. The British sample covers the years from 1890 through 1893, the German sample the years from 1899 through 1902. I coded the complaints concretely, with over one hundred separate categories.^[108] With such a naive procedure, I could register problems ranging from the cleanliness of the toilets to the timbre of the factory bells used to dismiss the labor force.

The catalog of major complaints listed in Table 1 suggests that in many respects the immediate grounds for conflict were parallel in the two countries. In both, the four most frequent complaints concerned the level of pay, reductions in pay, the fines imposed for allegedly "bad" work, and the disrespectful attitude of supervisors toward their workers. Since the question of interest is how complaints varied within manufacturing processes that were organizationally and technologically alike, I compared the distribution of complaints between countries within the same occupation. The most significant divide is that of the weavers versus those in other textile occupations. In both countries, about two-thirds of the grievances recorded in the newspapers came from the weaving branch (66 percent in Britain, 68 percent

[107] For a description of the process by which workers submitted reports to the Christian textile newspaper, see Archiv der Gewerkschaft Textil-Bekleidung, Zentralverband Christlicher Textilarbeiter Deutschlands, "Geschäftsbericht, 1910–1912," p. 120.

[108] A word on procedure: since I was interested in using these complaints as a tool to analyze perceptions of relations in the workplace , I excluded two kinds of complaints. First, I omitted complaints that referred only to outside agencies such as factory inspectors or the police (these were in any event rare). Second, I eliminated complaints about low wages unless they met one of the following conditions: (a) they attributed the problem to circumstances in the workplace, or (b) they discussed specific rates, modes of payment, or reductions. I excluded general comments about pay that did not meet either of these conditions, on the grounds that they were so vague they could not illuminate workers' perceptions of relations in the workplace. In Britain, where the stories were more numerous, I coded every third issue from these years; in Germany, every issue. If a news story contained multiple grievances, I included each, I am interested in using newspapers for their interpretations of events, not as tools for counting the events themselves. Therefore, where coverage of a strike or protest movement extended across more than a single number of a newspaper, I continued to count each grievance. After all, the same strike could be described in different ways across the weeks. Multiple reports on a single incident were, however, rare. I coded only the weekly local reports, not editorial articles, which were less representative of views on the shop floor. In each country, the sample years included periods of both business recession and prosperity, although I did not find significant differences in the leading complaints generated in good times versus bad.

in Germany). Table 2 compares the twelve complaints that appeared most frequently among weavers alone. The non-weavers were fragmented among so many labor processes that the sample does not allow for such comparisons across other occupations. The figures serve as one piece of evidence among many, not as an arbiter of hypotheses. I cannot derive the meaning of problems as they appeared to the weavers themselves from a set of codings. What appears to have been the "same" complaint for German and British weavers may have come to life in substantially different cultural forms.

To help us begin to appreciate the cross-national differences in the import of complaints, in Table 3 I compare the distribution of persons blamed in the newspapers for workplace problems in all branches of textiles. The Germans assigned blame to the "firm" as a whole for problems nearly twice as often as the British. On the face of it, the meaning of this divergence remains uncertain. It could imply that the German papers considered it less important to censure particular categories of persons, as opposed to the "system," as the cause of problems. Assigning responsibility to the "firm" might also serve as just another way of blaming the firm's owner.^[109] If we leave aside complaints about the "firm," the German papers blamed owners and managers in 75 percent of the cases, compared to 54 percent of the cases in the British paper. Rather than looking upward to the top of the company to assign blame, the incidents reported in the British papers stayed closer to the persons with whom workers labored side by side. Among the complaints that blamed particular categories of persons, the British paper blamed the overlookers in 30 percent of the cases, whereas the German paper assigned only fifteen percent of problems to that lower-level party. If we treated complaints about the "firm" as referring to owners and higher managers, the German complaints would appear even more top-heavy. Finally, the same table shows that within the German sample, the Christian and socialist newspapers assigned blame among the factory personnel in almost identical proportions. If these two journals, which originated in markedly contrasting ideological milieus, assign blame to the same categories of persons in the workplace, we have more secure grounds for supposing that the stories to some extent replicated the workers' formulations, not just the agendas of the editors who processed the stories in their offices.

[109] Blaming problems on the "firm" did not, however, serve as a way of avoiding reprisals for having named particular individuals: other complaints did not always identify even the firm and usually referred only to the position, not the name, of the person blamed.

The German workers' tendency to focus more often on higher-ups is slightly more pronounced among weavers than among the sample as a whole (Table 4). This only accentuates the question of how factories that appear similar not only from the standpoint of organizational structure and technology but in the sorts of conflicts and disagreements they generate can differ significantly as institutions that "produce" a human experience of the labor activity. We need to rely on contextual evidence to assess the cultural significance of the German assignment of responsibility to overlookers. One of the most frequently voiced complaints, that concerning the supervisors' disrespectful manners, illustrates how British and German workers attached different meanings to complaints that appear categorically similar.

For weavers and for textile workers in general, the British newspaper complained more about the disrespectful treatment workers received from supervisors than about any other difficulty. The late-nineteenth-century factory provided a setting in which overlookers could indulge in severe verbal abuse of their underlings. Employers considered it something of a prerequisite for maintaining discipline that overlookers be able to swear in the local dialect.^[110] A reporter from Elland said that some overlookers treated their spot in the mill as a "privileged place." In the overlooker's corner, the reporter said, a female underling might hear "a voice addressing

[110] Sidney Webb, The Works Manager To-Day (London: Green & Co., 1914), p. 105.

her in language known as profane, and which, if used on the public streets by a drunken man, would see him taken in hand by the police."^[111] The textile workers' unions tried without great success to elicit the cooperation of the overlookers' unions in restraining the corrupt language.^[112] They had better

[111] Yorkshire Factory Times , February 7, 1890, p. 5. A female weaver from the Colne Valley summed up her managers' behavior diplomatically in an interview: "The bosses didn't act like they was educated," she said. "They'd no manners." Joanna Bornat's interview with Mrs. B., born 1887.

[112] Bradford District Archives, Minutes of the Overlookers' Society, 3D 86 1/1/11, Spring, 1914; Textile Mercury , April 25, 1914, pp. 328–329. The secretary of the Bradford branch of the General Union of Textile Workers said that his association would investigate every case of verbal abuse by overlookers and, if redress were not obtained, would authorize a strike. Yorkshire Factory Times , May 7, 1914. For the registration of women's complaintsabout foul speech, see Archive of General Union of Dyers, Bleachers, and Textile Workers, Yeadon General Union, minutes book April 6, 1911. Female workers were not the only recipients of verbal abuse: in the textile workers' newspapers of both countries that I coded, objections to the insulting speech of supervisors were statistically no more likely to appear in stories featuring women as the complainers than in those featuring men or mixed-gender groups.

luck in securing the assistance of the courts. One judge in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, ruled in 1913 that a worker who objected to a supervisor's lewd comments could quit work without waiting to give proper notice.^[113]

German workers complained that managers addressed them in military-style, "barracks" language.^[114] They claimed that the supervisors' dictionary of abusive terms included "scoundrel" (Halunke ), "rogue" (Spitzbube ), and "old ass" (alter Esel ).^[115] At a spinning mill in the Mönchengladbach district, workers testified that a supervisor had "badly cursed even older people." The workers at this mill, trying to discover whether the supervisor could be prosecuted for such conduct, sought the advice of police, who would, they supposed, be knowledgeable about the law.^[116]

Not surprisingly, workers picked out their immediate supervisors, with whom they had the most contact, as the most frequent users of humiliating expressions.^[117] In both countries, overlookers received a greater share of complaints about rude conduct than about other problems. British workers blamed overlookers for the ill treatment in about two-thirds of the reported incidents in the Yorkshire Factory Times. In Germany, overlookers received the blame for harsh manners less frequently, in about 42 percent of such complaints. Yet German overlookers received the blame for poor language more often than did managers or owners (see Table 5).

The raw numbers do not show that British workers reviled their overlookers more than the German their own. Rather, they provide clues whose meaning for the participants can be reconstructed by examining the style of the evidence. The British newspaper framed its comments about the overlookers differently than did the German papers. In Britain, workers criticized the overlookers as individuals; their complaints portrayed the

[113] Yorkshire Factory Times , February 13, 1913, Dewsbury Borough Court.

[114] Report from the "Sprecher am Niederrhein," reprinted in Die Textil-Zeitung , March 20, 1899, p. 226. See also Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 11, 1909, Landeshut.

[115] Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 19, 1901; May 4, 1906, Euskirchen.

[116] Gladbacher Volkszeitung , July 13, 1899.

[117] Even at relatively small firms, workers had little contact with owners. One female weaver in Milnsbridge, born in 1903, said that in twenty-eight years of employment she spoke to the boss, Emmanuel Hoyle, on only two occasions. Joanna Bornat's interview with Mrs. T., born 1896. At Taylor's of Batley, the owner left all the discipline to the foremen: Centre for English Cultural Traditions and Language, University of Sheffield, A73–72, Herbert Chapell, Batley, started work before 1914.

personalities of the overlooker. The epithets applied to the overlookers reproduces this personalistic framework. Many of the insults refer to the physical appearance of the overlooker, such as "Golden Whiskers," "Little Darkey Tuner," or "the fancy-moustache stroker."^[118] Others summed up the conduct of the supervisor with nicknames such as "Growler & Howler," "Woman Hater," or "Sleepy."^[119] The British workers' conflict with their overlookers rested on a foundation of familiarity. The British complaints also characterized the behavior of the overlookers by comparing them to animals: a "puddledog that can do nothing but bark," a "bull terrier," a "wild bear."^[120] These analogies removed the overlookers' conduct from the context of the factory hierarchy. They emphasized the overlookers' personal failings rather than their exercise of the authority that inhered in their office.^[121] One story about an unpleasant overlooker (which cited an unfortunate cliché) captured the way workers attributed problems to an unchangeably bad character: "How true it is," the correspondent wrote, "the black man cannot wash his face white, nor a bad-tempered man forget his ways."^[122]

[118] Yorkshire Factory Times , June 13, 1890, p. 4; December 6, 1889, p. 4.

[119] Yorkshire Factory Times , March 21, 1890; December 6, 1889, p. 4; February 28, 1890, p. 4.

[120] Yorkshire Factory Times , March 24, 1893, p. 5; April 8, 1892, p. 5.

[121] A story from Apperley Bridge said that one must consider the character and intelligence of the overlooker before condemning him. Yorkshire Factory Times , May 15, 1891.

[122] Yorkshire Factory Times , November 17, 1893, p. 4.

German workers also used epithets for their overlookers, but of a less personal sort. They labeled their overlookers with general names in popular circulation, such as "brute" (Grobian ), "beast" (Vieh ), and "ape" (Affe ).^[123] These were the impersonal insults that might well be applied to an over-bearing stranger. The German newspapers criticized overlookers as the occupiers of an office who insisted on exercising their authority in the name of the owner. Overlookers, they claimed, had nothing better to do than to demonstrate a "service of love" for their employers.^[124] "One constantly observes that the overlooker at every moment supports only the interests of his master employer," the Textil-Arbeiter reported. "Direct personal contact with the owner," it added, "is suited, like no other practice, to illustrate the superiority of the position of overlooker."^[125]

Another major complaint points to different understandings of the exercise of authority in Britain and Germany. As is shown in Table 2, twenty-three complaints about people who squealed to higher-ups in the factory appeared in my British sample for the weaving branch. Sixty percent of these cases identified overlookers as the culprits. A story from a mill in Dewsbury, published in 1893, conveys the spirit of these reports:

A tuner here is to get married shortly, and the weavers, like good weavers, chaffed him in good fashion. He could not stand it and went and complained in the office. Wasn't it nice to go and complain over a paltry affair like this? I wonder what his affianced will say about it?^[126]

The story illustrates the belief that the overlooker's conduct violates the norm against tattling. Its concluding question hints that the overlooker, by snitching on his underlings, will suffer the censure of his friends.^[127] The account also suggests that workers and overlookers were co-producers, enough on a level for them to form joking relationships.

[123] Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 13, 1914, p. 55; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24677, p. 153; Der Textil-Arbeiter , July 28, 1905, Niederzwönitz. For other generic aspersions, see Stadtarchiv Augsburg, No. 1667, 1903, p. 16.

[124] Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , May 25, 1901, Mönchengladbach.

[125] Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 18, 1901. For a complaint about "fawning overlookers" (liebedienerische Untermeister ) see Der Textil-Arbeiter , July 9, 1909.

[126] Yorkshire Factory Times , August 11, 1893, Dewsbury.

[127] This premise appears in other complaints in this category. For example, one story that warned an overlooker about tattling said, "A certain tackler must mend his ways, if he wants people to believe him to be what he represents himself to be." Yorkshire Factory Times , March 21, 1890, Skipton.

Most of the tales British overlookers took to superiors concerned the alleged errors weavers made in production or the slow pace of their production. An overlooker who tattled became known as a "greasy" tuner, a "greasehorn."^[128] The British complaints regarding tattling about production foul-ups reflect the workers' assumption that the overlooker should not have acted as if he were merely an agent of the owner. The British weavers believed that the lower-level overlookers ought to support their efforts to labor with a degree of autonomy.^[129]

In contrast to the frequent complaints about snitching in the British sampling, the German cases revealed only one example. In this exception, from the Bergisches region, the workers had already launched a movement against the authority of the central management. They complained that an overlooker had informed on the weaver who he believed had given a signal to the others to stop work at their looms before the rest period. The account mentioned the overlooker's conduct only as a detail in its narrative of the work stoppage.^[130] The significant comparison to draw about tattling is this: in Germany, no grievances appeared regarding overlookers' informing about everyday production errors or about workers' demeanor. Instead, the German workers' comments about the overlookers' "service of love" indicate that workers took it for granted that overlookers would keep the owner informed.

The frequency of complaints about the rude manners of overlookers in Britain suggests that overlookers and workers stood in a closer, more equal relation to each other in Britain than in Germany. British workers, in comparison with their German counterparts, expected overlookers to classify workers as colleagues and were perhaps more sensitized to disrespect. Respondents from Yorkshire said that supervisors and weavers drank at the same pubs.^[131] Indeed, the textile workers' newspaper in Yorkshire complained that weavers who shared pub rooms with the overlookers tried to get better warps for themselves or jobs for their relatives by buying drinks for their overlooker.^[132] Yorkshire weavers expected their overseers to socialize with them and accused them of "putting on airs" if

[128] Yorkshire Factory Times , July 1, 1892, Bradford.

[129] Cotton Factory Times , March 11, 1904, Hyde.

[130] The incident occured in Hückeswagen. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , May 25, 1901.

[131] My interviews with Mrs. May Broadbent, born 1896, and with Edward Crowthers, both of Midgley. On socializing between overlookers and workers in Lancashire, see Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 101–102.

[132] Yorkshire Factory Times , September 20, 1889, Slaithwaite; September 27, 1889; October 11, 1889, Bradford; December 4, 1891, p. 5; November 10, 1893, p. 4.

they did not.^[133] British weavers were familiar enough with their overlookers to play practical jokes on them without fear of reprisal when the perpetrators revealed themselves.^[134] As a weaver correspondent from Bingley expressed it, "Tuners are only workers like ourselves."^[135] A spinner from Halifax in an interview put it even more simply: "We was one."^[136]

A careful reading of the textile workers' newspapers in Germany provides insight into a different set of relations in Germany. To be sure, the workers there complained that some of their colleagues used all manner of tactics to bribe overlookers for preferential treatment. They alleged, for example, that some workers gave overlookers free pies and turkeys or agreed to buy trinkets from overlookers at inflated prices.^[137] In their coverage of these incidents, however, the German newspapers did not mention an equivalent to the British workers' tactic of tipping a drink side by side at the pub, perhaps a relationship more intimate or socially reciprocal than the German overlookers would have tolerated. A respondent from Oerlinghausen in Westfalen, for example, volunteered the insight that the overlookers and weavers in town drank at separate inns and that social mixing would have broken an unspoken law.^[138]

The farewell gifts workers gave their overlookers also serve as an index of national differences in relations between these groups. The workers' newspapers in Britain reported that weavers frequently took up collections to provide farewell presents for tuners and managers who were retiring or

[133] Yorkshire Factory Times , February 22, 1901, and July 8, 1892, p. 5, Oakworth. Russell D. Johnstone, "The Textile Industry in Meltham Fifty Years Ago," Institute of Dialect and Folklife Studies, University of Leeds, p. 13. Workers considered it a universal custom to call overlookers by their first name. See, for example, Joanna Bornat's interview with Mrs. T., p. 17, Miss. B. Nr. 5, born 1887, and Mrs. Q, born 1899; my interview with Arthur Murgatroyd.

[134] Elizabeth Roberts's interview with Mr. and Mrs. L1P, born 1894 and 1900; Joanna Bornat's interview with Mrs. H, born 1891, p. 26.

[135] Yorkshire Factory Times , August 12, 1892.

[136] My interview with Arthur Murgatroyd. At the start of the great strike at Manningham mills in 1890, the Bradford Daily Telegraph reported, "It is not the wages exactly which has caused the strike, but the sense of inequity. If there is a depression, the wages of all, including foremen and overlookers, should be reduced. Somehow or other there is the feeling among the workpeople that one is as good as another, although there may be a little pomp" (December 22, 1890).

[137] Staatsarchiv Münster, Abt. VII, Nr. 52, Bd. 1, March 2, 1910, Gewerbeinspektor Bocholt; Stadtarchiv Gummersbach, Akt 4842, November 26, 1889. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , August 11, 1900, Fischeln; June 16, 1900, Krefeld.

[138] My interview with Fritz Soll. Max Weber studied the major mill in this town for his monograph on textile production. See Anthony Oberschall, Empirical Social Research in Germany, 1848–1914 (New York: Mouton & Co., 1965), p. 115.

transferring between mills.^[139] Since the gifts went only to departing supervisors, they could not be reciprocated in favors at work. By all accounts, British workers offered the gifts spontaneously and apart from those bestowed by management.^[140] In Germany, by contrast, stories about unsolicited collective presents from workers to exiting supervisors seem practically unobtainable.

According to German journals of the textile trade, many German owners preferred to hire supervisors from distant areas, on the grounds that strangers could better maintain their distance from the lower workers.^[141] A respondent from Barmen, who became a loom tuner himself, said weavers believed that the manager "deliberately" hired outsiders from other towns as supervisors, with the aim of keeping them separate from the workers.^[142] By comparison with this explicit discussion in Germany, the professional literature for textiles in Britain remained silent about this tactic. Factory ordinances issued by German employers warned that each overseer had the duty "to protect his prestige against the workers."^[143] Indeed, the separation

[139] Yorkshire Factory Times , April 4, 1890, p. 4; October 23, 1891, Ravensthorpe; May 30, 1890, Rastrick; April 25, 1890, Dewsbury; February 5, 1892, p. 4; Sept. 8, 1893, Thongsbridge; November 17, 1893, Great Horton; Cotton Factory Times , Oct. 22, 1886, Rochdale; January 5, 1912, Stalybridge.

[140] Yorkshire Factory Times , February 5, 1892, Liversedge.

[141] Centralblatt für die Textil-Industrie , 1881, pp. 557–558. Die Textil-Zeitung , November 21, 1904, Nr. 47, p. 1162. Max Haushofer, Der Industriebetrieb (München: E. Koch, 1904), p. 380. For an example reported in the workers' press, see Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , June 11, 1910, Wassenberg. Oral reports from German workers confirm the owners' preoccupation with dividing the overlookers from the workers. If an employer promoted one of his workers into the ranks of the supervisors, he took precautions to segregate him from his former peers. A worker from the Münsterland, for example, reported that after his promotion from mule spinner to Meister , the owner forbade him to let his friends greet him with the familiar form of address, du. My interview with Franz Reidegeld, born 1900, Rheine.

[142] My interview with Hans Penz. Weaving overlookers in both countries rose from the ranks of the weavers. Some overlookers briefly attended textile night schools, but only foremen completed a regular course of study. Yorkshire Factory Times , February 13, 1891, p. 4; July 12, 1901, Stainland; April 12, 1901, Bingley; December 18, 1903, Batley. Kirklees Oral History Project, Miss V., born 1901, p. 23. Cotton Factory Times , Sept. 10, 1886, Oldham. Edward Beyer, Die Fabrik-Industrie des Regierungbezirkes Düsseldorf vom Standpunkt der Gesundheitspflege (Oberhausen: Spaarmann, 1876), p. 135. Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , Nr. 44 (1912), pp. 966–967. Heinz the Potthoff, Ziele und Erfolge des Werkmeisterstandes , pp. 4–5. Der Textil-Arbeiter , June 16, 1905, Beilage, and July 26, 1901, Barmen. Weavers emphasized that their overseers were not superior in education.

[143] Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Regierung Düsselfdorf, BR 1015, Nr. 169 I, Gladbacher Spinnerei und Weberei, 1855; Stadtarchiv Rheine, Nr. 183, F. H. Hammersen, 1910; Stadtarchiv Greven, IV o 30–32, labor ordinance for the Grevener Baumwollspinnerei, issued 1886, reissued for the 1891, Gewerbeordnung; Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv Dortmund, S 8/41 L. & S. Leeser, Dülmen, 1892; Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, B46–391, 1846, requires that Meister "ihr Ansehen gegen die untergeordneten Arbeiter zu behaupten wis-sen"; Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, B46–398 Fabrikordnung, L. Hartmann Söhne, 1846; Stadtarchiv Augustusberg, Clauss firm, ordinance 1910.

of overlookers from workers in Germany took the most solid form possible: factories' architectural design. A number of mills in Germany provided toilets or eating rooms for supervisors separate from those for workers.^[144]

The pattern of fining for indiscipline also betrays the greater emphasis placed on the overlooker's authority in Germany. In both Germany and Britain, workers received petty fines for "misconduct." For example, overlookers and foremen punished workers by withholding earnings for offenses such as looking out the window, talking, or letting bobbing lie on the floor.^[145] All of these fines might be explained, perhaps, as measures to ensure high output or to provide greater safety on the shop floor. Beside the fines that bore upon output, however, the German supervisors, unlike their British counterparts, also imposed disciplinary fines for actions they perceived as insults to their authority.^[146] At a firm in Mönchengladbach, for example, the foreman fined a weaver who once forgot and twice refused to take off his cap upon greeting the foreman.^[147] At a firm in Birgden, near Geilenkirchen, a weaver who expressed irritation at the overlooker for not adjusting the loom received a fine for disrespectful conduct.^[148] German managers listed these punishments into "fine books," which include entries for "insolence," "insult," "is always coarse toward me," and "affront."^[149]

[144] Ludwig Utz, Moderne Fabrikanlagen (Leipzig: Uhlands technischer Verlag, 1907), pp. 133–134; Stadtarchiv Oerlinghausen, Floorplan Carl Weber & Co., Oerlinghausen.

[145] Yorkshire Factory Times , November 21, 1890, p. 5; June 10, 1892, Leeds; November 4, 1892, Bradford; March 17, 1893, Leeds, p. 5; Kreisarchiv Kempen, Gemeindearchiv Schiefbahn 715, July 30, 1905; my interview with Herr Schnieders of Rheine, who recalled the stories of older weavers; Der Textil-Arbeiter , April 25, 1902, Auerbach; March 5, 1909, Rheydt; November 25, 1910, Bautzen, and July 15, 1910, p. 221; HSTAD, Regierung Düsseldorf, 24684, April 27, 1894, report on Klauser firm.

[146] On fining for perceived insults, see Wolfgang Ruppert, Die Fabrik (München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1983), p. 211.

[147] Der Textil-Arbeiter , May 20, 1910. The business court in Mönchengladbach ruled that the employer had been justified in levying the fine, because the worker had disobeyed a supervisor's order. See account in Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Protokoll des 10. Generalversammlung, 1910 (Berlin: Karl Hübsch, n.d.), p. 291.

[148] Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , January 20, 1900, and Die Textilarbeiter-Zeitung , October 15, 1910. In another case, a female worker in Krefeld received a fine for giggling at a manager. Der Christliche Textilarbeiter , December 16, 1899. For another fine for disrespectful conduct, see Der Textil-Arbeiter , March 21, 1902, Lörrach.

[149] Such entries were reproduced in Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 20, 1911, for Bamberg. Also see Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv Dortmund, F32, Huesker fine book, 1892–1905; and, at the same archive, F11, Delius fine book, p. 105; Textilmuseum Apolda, Zimmermann firm, "Verzeichnis über verhängte Geldstrafen," 1892 to 1906; Archiv des Volkseigenen Betriebs Palla, Meerane, Gebrüder Bochmann, Nr. 575, Strafbuch, 1905–1906, "Gehorsamsverweigerung." For an example from Göppingen, see Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, Protokoll des10. Generalversammlung , 1910, p. 289.

German overlookers also charged their underlings in court with having affronted them. In fact, the records of the local arbiters from textile towns indicate that this was not uncommon. In Odenkirchen, a textile center in the Rhineland, the summary transcripts show that the legal complaints during a twelve-year period at the turn of the century included charges of insult brought against employees by the following supervisors: a spinning overlooker, a weaving overlooker, a carding room supervisor, two foremen, a maintenance overlooker, and a factory director.^[150] Where such records also specify the location of the alleged offense, they often refer to the factory itself.^[151] The overlookers took seriously the supposition that they shared in the employer's dignity.^[152]

The lists of mill complaints in the Yorkshire Factory Times , and, less frequently, in the Cotton Factory Times might have been expected to mention fining for "affronts" to overlookers' authority. Yet accounts of such incidents are wanting. To the contrary, workers seem to have teased their supervisors to their face. The autobiographies of textile workers describe how workers mocked their overseers. One female weaver from Bradford mentioned her encounter with her overlooker, Harry:

I have not forgotten how he tried to set Ellen Jaratt's loom right  . . . and he had no sooner set it on when the shuttle flew right through the window into the dam, and they never found it yet. I asked him if he had made a goal with that shuttle, and if it counted to his side the other goal, but he pretended not to hear me.  . . . I can say a great

[150] Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, Protokollbücher des Schiedmannes, Odenkirchen, 2769.

[151] For example, ibid., p. 93, October 1902; March 2, 1911; March 14, 1912; July 19, 1912. For another town with similar occurrences, see Stadtarchiv Nordhorn, Protokollbuch B42 Schiedsmann zu Bakelde, p. 148.

[152] Another complaint from Germany indicates that German workers believed the overlookers identified more with the employer's role as a supervisor of labor than with the worker's role as producer. The overlookers responsible for adjusting and repairing equipment, a German newspaper reported, act "as if they had been appointed to the position of coupon cutters. We are used to seeing them scan their section up and down, with a pencil or cartridge pen behind their ear, in a well-cut blue uniform, ostentatiously carrying their writing book rather than outfitted with a leather bag filled with assorted wrenches and physical instruments." Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 11, 1901. The workers' emphasis on the overlooker's task of writing can also be discerned from the surviving fine books. They show that overlookers punished workers who dared glance at their books on the writing pulpits. Stadtarchiv Gummersbach, Nachlass der Gummersbacher Spinnerei Krawinkel & Schnabel, fine for "Gehen auf den Pult"; Der Textil-Arbeiter , January 20, 1911, "Eine Strafliste." Protesters in Germany picked out the writing stands (Pulte ) as targets for vandalism. Werner Rohr, "Die Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung in Nordhorn," diss., Universität Bremen, 1981, p. 47.

deal more about Harry if he tries to be so witty about me being an old maid again.^[153]

Weavers near Baxenden played a game with authoritarian overlookers to shame them. They handed such overlookers the gift of a whip, ridiculing them as slave drivers.^[154] Perhaps the most telling demonstration of British workers' assertion of their equality with overlookers came from Great Harwood, Lancashire. The weavers who struck a mill there in 1893 succeeded in having their overlookers sign an apology, which said, "We, the undersigned, do admit that we have been guilty of driving and humbugging the weavers employed under us.  . . . We herewith guarantee that in future we will not speak to any weaver when going round with the slate or when fetched to tackle their looms."^[155] The autobiographical stories of British workers leave no doubt that they were exposed to tyrannical abuse from some overlookers. At issue is not the degree of cooperation or conflict but the intimate and equalitarian framework British workers used to condemn mishandling.^[156]

The factory owner's first motivation for hiring an overlooker, according to the working-class press in Germany, was not to acquire the skills of a technical expert; it was to obtain an agent through which he could exercise his authority

[153] Bradford , "A Weaver's Notions About Factory Work and Other Work," November 30, 1895. In the original, the last sentence of this quote appeared first. In the representations of complaints in the British textile workers' newspapers I coded, female weavers assigned blame to overlookers more frequently than did male workers, at a statistically significant rate. In Britain, for instance, 40 percent of stories portraying female weavers as the complainers indicted overlookers, versus 29 percent of stories with male or mixed-gender complainers in weaving. In the newspapers' depictions, male or mixed-gender groups of weavers in Britain blamed overlookers twice as frequently as did male or mixed-gender groups in Germany, and female weavers in Britain blamed overlookers two and a half times more frequently than did female weavers in Germany. I plan to publish a separate study contrasting gender distinctions in the two countries. For the present comparison, it is perhaps sufficient to note that the cross-national differences in representations of relations to overlookers traverse the line of gender.

[154] Cotton Factory Times , September 17, 1889, p. 5.

[155] "Strikes and Lockouts in 1893," PP 1894 LXXXI, pp. 625 ff., strike reference number 664, December 14–January 15.

[156] Some British supervisors, including female overlookers, left permanent impressions of ill will. Annie Kenney, Memories of a Militant (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1924), p. 16; Hebden Bridge Oral History Project, OH85/59; "Autobiography of Thomas Wood," regarding mill in Bingley, born 1822, Keighley News , March 3, 1956 ff.; Sherwin Stephenson, "The Chronicles of a Shop Man," Bradford Library Archives; Jan Lambertz, "Sexual Harassment in the Nineteenth Century English Cotton Industry," History Workshop Number 19 (Spring 1985), pp. 29–61. Conversely, many German overlookers had an amiable relation to their underlings within the hierarchical framework. Marie Bernays, "Berufsschicksale moderner Industriearbeiter," Die Frau Volume 18, Nr. 3 (December 1910), p. 136.

over the factory.^[157] As the Textil-Arbeiter said, "The owner of the production shop naturally says to himself that it is in his interest to place the tasks of the workers under control by putting a person there  . . . so that a mere glance from this personage will spur workers to the strictest fulfillment of their duties."^[158] The German practice of fining workers for mere "affronts" to supervisors reproduced the view that the overlookers' exercise of authority in the name of the owner was essential to the extraction of surplus. In Britain, on the other hand, since the overlookers did not act merely to extend the owners' authority, the extraction of a profit for the owner of the factory was severed from the exercise of authority on the shop floor. The Northern Pioneer , a journal for the labor and the "liberal radical" movements in the Colne Valley, expressed the view that the exercise of authority was not an essential aspect of the employment relation and extraction of profit. Textile workers and factory owners, it said in 1883, were merely exchanging their commodities. "Employers should not want to be masters anymore than the men should want to be masters," it concluded.^[159] For the British textile workers, as for artisanal workers in an earlier age, the exchange of labor as a commodity could be not only separated from but contrasted with the exercise of authority. "You are no master of mine," a rule-maker told his employer in the 1840s, "but only a man who buys my labour for a good deal less than it's worth."^[160] The formulation acknowledged a relation that included both formal equality in the marketplace and real exploitation.

It would be simple but superficial to imagine that the differences between practices at the point of production in the two countries resulted from a greater emphasis in general in German society upon authority for building social relations. Such an approach would confuse the ideologies celebrated in the public sphere with actual practice on the shop floor. If the famed tradition of liberalism in British political discourse lent support to notions of individual liberty and autonomy, such ideals did not have any elective

[157] Der Textil-Arbeiter , February 15, 1907, Augsburg.

[158] Der Textil-Arbeiter , October 18, 1901. The workers' comments had grounds in reality: some German want ads for overlookers specified that the overlooker, in addition to having technical training, had to know how to control the workers, or, as one ad put it, "possess complete confidence in contacts with workers." Der deutsche Meister , January 1, 1913, Betriebsleiter for spinning mill.

[159] Northern Pioneer , March 3, 1883. The workers' sentiment survives in rarified economic theory even today. For example, the British economic historian John Hicks insists that a hierarchical relation between employer and worker is incongruous with mercantile society. John Hicks, A Theory of Economic History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 122.

[160] Dyke Wilkinson, Rough Roads: Reminiscences of a Wasted Life (London: Sampson Low, Marston, & Co., 1912), p. 19. Emphasis in original.

affinity with actual use of the British idea of labor as a commodity. After all, the confinement of inmates in fortress-like enclosures scarcely embodied the notion of liberalism. The specification of labor as a commodity in Britain did not inhibit employers from attempting to exercise control episodically in heavy-handed fashion on the shop floor. Although the practice formed no part of the usual organization of production, British employers, if it struck their fancy, fired underlings without warning for looking at them "the wrong way."^[161]

The contrasts between factory procedures in the two countries were based not on degrees of authoritarianism but on the modalities by which employers asserted their domination. British employers devoted no less attention to cultivating a paternalist regime in pliant neighborhoods outside the factory as their German counterparts did. Rather than consecrating their mastery of the transformation of labor power into a product at the site of production, British employers displayed their superordinancy in the community, where they could influence workers' mobility and sense of dependency.^[162] The Strutt family, acclaimed in the early nineteenth century as factory pioneers, watched over their employees' morality by imposing fines for such mischievous behavior outside the workplace as maltreating a neighbor's dog.^[163] In the second half of the nineteenth century, British factory owners did not just support recreational and educational clubs at the mill site. They subsidized workers' clubs, schools, and churches in the community at large.^[164] Interviews with former textile workers from Lancashire

[161] A Huddersfield employer allegedly slapped a female worker in the face. Yorkshire Factory Times , April 17, 1908, p. 4. The editor of the Textile Mercury trade journal, Richard Marsden, told employers to combat idleness with "instant dismissal." Richard Marsden, Cotton Weaving: Its Development, Principles, and Practice (London: George Bell & Sons, 1895), p. 470.

[162] David Gadian, "Class Formation and Class Action in North-West Industrial Towns, 1830–1850," in R. J. Morris, editor, Class, Power and Social Structure in British Nineteenth-Century Towns (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986), p. 50. For the early industrial revolution, see Pollard, op. cit., pp. 201, 205–206; Sidney Pollard, "The Factory Village in the Industrial Revolution," The English Historical Review Volume 79, Number 312 (July 1964), p. 527; David Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1979), p. 180.

[163] R. S. Fitton and A. P. Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights 1758–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), p. 236. Similarly, in 1891 a firm in Bradford allegedly fired a "mill girl" for making a face at a fellow worker outside the mill. Yorkshire Factory Times , June 19, 1891, p. 4.

[164] Anthony Howe, The Cotton Masters, 1830–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 285; Joyce, op. cit., pp. 144–145, 168–175; David Russell, "The Pursuit of Leisure," in D. G. Wright and J. A. Jowitt, editors, Victorian Bradford (Bradford: Bradford Metropolitan Council, 1982), p. 211; Mike Holbrook-Jones, Supremacy and the Subordination of Labour (London:Heinemann Educational Books, 1982), p. 93. Sometimes the material basis of employers' hallowed authority was all too flagrant: until at least the end of the nineteenth century, William Hollins Company in Pleasley owned the town church. Stanley Pigott, Hollins: A Study in Industry (Nottingham: William Hollins & Co., 1949), p. 91.

and Yorkshire towns reveal that into the first decade of the twentieth century many workers still felt compelled to attend the same church or chapel as their employer.^[165] Even in large towns with an adequate stock of housing, some British textile employers (like several of their German counterparts) erected company homes and required subordinates to occupy them.^[166] British textile workers in employer-provided housing denounced the "tyranny" of their dependency.^[167] But the textile industry was in this respect typical of British business.^[168]

The prominent commitment of British employers to molding an obedient community outside the point of production attracted the criticism of German employers. As a businessman from the German wool trade judged in 1886, "To encourage the factory director to exercise surveillance over his people even beyond the work hours in order to look after their moral health—this is one English institution that has been taken too far. By this means one develops only empty-headed workers."^[169] We should not accede unreservedly to the national contrast this executive wished to draw. But his sentiments undermine the presumption that German employers were automatically more custodial. What differed fundamentally between British and German employers was not the general readiness to supervise or control workers but the catego-

[165] Paul Thompson and Thea Thompson, family and work history interviews, no. 67, Bolton, born 1901. Joyce, op. cit., pp. 175–176. Joanna Bornat's interview with Mr. L., born 1899, p. 20. Nonconformist employers treated management of workers' personal life as a moral necessity. S. J. Daniels, "Moral Order and the Industrial Environment in the Woolen Textile Districts of West Yorkshire, 1780–1880," Ph.D. diss., University College, London, 1980, pp. 32, 133; Joseph Wilson, "A Private and Confidential Letter from Joseph Wilson to the Workpeople," Bradford Library Archives. Yorkshire Factory Times , April 4, 1890.

[166] Cotton Factory Times , Sept. 10, 1886, Todmorden; J. D. Marshall, "Colonisation as a Factor in the Planting of Towns in North-West England," in H. J. Dyos, editor, The Study of Urban History (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), p. 228. Patrick Joyce emphasizes that efforts to build company housing varied: op. cit., pp. 121–123. But the employers themselves confessed that, but for lack of capital, they would have liked to have built more housing, "not for the benefit of the hands exactly, but so that they themselves can be ensured an efficient supply of labour ready at hand as required." Textile Manufacturer , June 15, 1901, p. 182.

[167] Blackburn Labour Journal (February 1898); Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 223; Yorkshire Factory Times , June 21, 1901, p. 5.

[168] James Jaffe's The Struggle for Market Power shows that in the British coal industry, too, the employers' claims to superordinancy were exerted, not at the point of production, but in the community at large, where employers sought to control housing and commerce. The Struggle for Market Power: Industrial Relations in the British Coal Industry, 1800–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 73 ff.

[169] Das deutsche Wollen-Gewerbe , November 25, 1886, p. 1497.

ries of social consciousness by which they defined the exchange of labor at the point of production. If the emphasis on the disposition over labor power in the German factory had derived from a general cultural emphasis on authority, we would expect the authoritarianism to carry over into all contexts. Instead, in the community, where social relations were mediated by capitalist relations of production but not cast directly in their image, British employers appear no less interested than their German counterparts in controlling subordinates' leisure, religion, and education.^[170]

Culture's Contemporaneous Effect

This chapter has compared structurally equivalent cases to identify the distinct contribution of cultural assumptions to the status of overlookers. In both Germany and Britain, weaving overlookers occupied an ambiguous position between workers and owners. On the one hand, they sold their labor for a wage, like a worker; on the other, they exercised authority over the production process, like an employer. The production process in textile factories was sufficiently standardized by the late nineteenth century that it offers the comparative analyst approximate controls for differences in the social organization of work. Weaving overlookers in Germany and Britain had the same technical roles, similar locations in the factory hierarchy, similar positions in the labor market, matching levels of pay, and the same responsibilities for supervising workers. Given these structural parallels, the divergent cultural definitions of labor as a commodity in Germany and Britain intervened to give overlookers different statuses. In Britain, the view that labor was sold via its products accentuated the aspect of the overlookers' activity that corresponded to that of a productive agent. In Germany, the view that labor was sold as a service placed an emphasis on the overlookers' exercise of authority in the name of the owner rather than on the delivery of a product; in this manner, the German view defined the overlooker's role as essentially unlike that of a worker.^[171]

[170] Textile Manufacturer , April 15, 1886, p. 168: "In England, he [the supervisor] is distinctly told by his employer that he must listen, and also that he must keep a look-out upon the conduct of his men after mill hours.  . . . I am well informed in a case where a mill manager told his employer that he would not, even at his bidding, have his jurisdiction extended beyond the mill lodge and gates"—accordingly, the manager was fired! In Apperley Bridge, an employer knew his subordinates' habits well enough that when a young male weaver asked for a raise, the employer advised him instead to stop attending the theater. Yorkshire Factory Times , Nov. 17, 1893, p. 4; see also April 29, 1892, p. 5.

[171] Chapter Ten, below, shows that the cultural classification of the overlooker's role influenced the grounds and goals of workers' collective action.

Historians of late-nineteenth-century factory organization have often emphasized the willingness of British employers to dedicate the real control of production on the shop floor to the workers themselves, particularly to those with craft skills. Compared to capitalists in other countries of the time, economic historians reason, British employers generally enjoyed greater access to pools of highly trained workers who inherited their know-how from the country's generations-long edge in manufacture. Since many British enterprises were founded early in the nineteenth century, when entry costs were lower, British companies in branches of production such as iron and steel production or metal work were smaller and more numerous than counterpart firms in later-developing countries. These circumstances made it more difficult for British firms to muster the great resources needed for investing in new technology and management organization in the course of the century and made it less costly for them to rely instead on the technical and organizational skills of their workers.^[172] By this line of reasoning, the British specification of labor as a commodity could well have emerged as a natural reflection of an organizational structure in which employers were compelled to renounce control in reality, not just in ideology, over the conversion of labor power to a product.

A comparative study of the textile industry reveals the limitations of this approach. As we have seen, no prominent organizational differences existed between Germany and Britain in key branches of wool textile production. Yet important cultural differences did arise between them, revealing that the immediate institutional context is not responsible for differences between the materialized specifications of labor as a commodity. At most historical junctures before 1914 in the Yorkshire textile industry, where trade unions were comparatively weak, and at critical moments in the craft trades, such as metal-working after the wholesale defeat of unions in 1898, British employers had carte blanche to reorganize practices on the shop floor to match the self-conscious conversion of labor power to a product.^[173] They did not try. What is more, analysts' reasoning in terms of adaptation to inherited constraints and opportunities fails to explain the structure of practices in large, recently founded companies in new branches of produc-

[172] William Lazonick, Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 184; E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain Since 1750 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), p. 158; Perry Anderson, "The Figures of Descent," The New Left Review Number 161 (January–February 1987), p. 72.

[173] William Lazonick, Business Organization and the Myth of a Market Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 143.

tion, such as motor vehicles. The Engineering Employers' Federation successfully combated the establishment of formal collective bargaining in the British auto industry. Despite the freer rein given to employers to reorganize shop-floor practices in this innovative business, especially after 1922, management left control in the hands of craft workers and relied on payment by results to stimulate productivity.^[174] Surely the employers' premises about the labor transaction, not just structural constraints, contributed to these outcomes.

In view of the visible decline in competitiveness among most branches of British industry since 1914, it is all too easy to read history backwards, attributing the differences between German and British practice before 1914 to German owners' greater push for efficiency. But certainly up to 1914, German textile mills did not operate more successfully than their British rivals. In the branches of wool textiles in 1907, the length of cloth produced annually from a loom in Germany approximately equaled that produced in Britain.^[175] Among the European competitors, Britain's share of world trade in wool fabric rose in the decade before 1914.^[176] In the cotton branch, German businessmen who measured output in Britain near the turn of the century had no doubt that British weaving mills produced more cloth

[174] Jonathan Zeitlin, "The Emergence of Shop Steward Organization and Job Control in the British Car Industry: A Review Essay," History Workshop Number 10 (Autumn 1980), p. 122; Lazonick, Competitive Advantage , op. cit., p. 201.

[175] Gross national comparisons of wool cloth output are necessarily clouded, since the design of each fabric had a strong bearing on the labor and value added. Nonetheless, annual wool fabric production can be estimated very approximately at 3,850 meters per loom in Britain, slightly less in Germany. For Britain I compared output from 1907 and the loom census from 1904, listed in D. T. Jenkins and K. G. Ponting, The British Wool Textile Industry 1770–1914 (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1982), pp. 169, 260. For Germany, see Karl Ballod's calculations in "Die Produktivität der industriellen Arbeit," Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich , new series, Volume 34 (1910), p. 732. I also checked this with the loom count from the 1907 census, excluding hand looms. I compared this with the length of fabric the Germans produced, assuming that ratios between the consumption of wool and cloth output remained constant between 1897 and 1907. This procedure may underestimate German efficiency, but the diminution is offset by the fact that the German output included the contribution of hand looms, which survived in fancy weaving. To add to the murkiness, census takers in both countries inconsistently counted looms that wove mixtures of cotton and wool. Germany, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs , Volume 214 (Berlin: Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, 1910), p. 303, and Arthur Spiethoff, Die wirtschaftlichen Wechsellagen: Aufschwung, Krise, Stockung , Volume 2 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1955), pp. 4–5 and Table 24. Market share is in the end the only usable indicator of performance.

[176] D. T. Jenkins and J. C. Malin, "European Competition in Woollen and Cloth, 1870–1914: The Role of Shoddy," Business History Volume 32, Number 4 (October 1990). Jenkins and Ponting, The British Wool Textile Industry , op. cit., p. 294.

per loom than German contenders did.^[177] The difference in the specification of labor as a commodity did not cause the British to fall behind in production.^[178]

In both countries the character of textile technology before 1914 discouraged contemplation of the systematic conversion of "labor power" into a product. The raw materials could not be manipulated by the available technology according to standard rules, only by knack that defied analysis. "The loom of today is practically identical with the loom of fifty years ago," the Textile Mercury complained in 1912. "The loom may be ranked today as the crudest piece of widely used mechanism extant."^[179] The technician Charles Vikerman remarked in the 1894 edition of his manual on woolen spinning that "no significant technical advance" had occurred in spinning during the preceding fifty years.^[180] Technical experts in Germany voiced similar opinions.^[181] In the hands of workers with only general experience in a textile branch, the equipment that twisted fiber and finished cloth operated too harshly for satisfactory results. Each town became a specialist in a different range of types of yarn and fabric, due to the mysteriously acquired knack of local labor for pushing obstinate varieties of fibers and yarns through the insensitive machinery. Even in the same neighborhood, however, a manufacturer sometimes failed to turn out a particular weave while the nearest challenger down the street, relying on the same kind of loom and material, succeeded.^[182]

The reliance on the workers' knack for product specialties led the participants in the trade to think of fabrics as the result of confecting rather than of manufacturing. Factory managers drew analogies between the spinning

[177] Gerhart von Schulze-Gävernitz, The Cotton Trade in England and on the Continent (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1895), pp. 107–108. On the greater value of British textile production despite the equality in the size of German and British textile workforces, see J. A. Hunter, "The Textile Industries of England and Germany," Textile Mercury , January 23, 1915, pp. 68–69.

[178] In the 1920s the value of output per worker remained somewhat higher in Britain than in Germany in the textile industry as a whole. The difference was not attributable to price levels alone. Robert Brady, The Rationalization Movement in German Industry (New York: Howard Fertig, 1974), p. 268.

[179] Textile Mercury , December 9, 1912.

[180] Charles Vikerman, Woollen Spinning: A Text-Book for Students in Technical Schools and Colleges and for Skillful Practical Men in Woollen Mills (London: Macmillan & Co., 1894), p. 223.

[181] Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , June 27, 1912; Zeitschrift für die gesamte Textil-Industrie , 1910/11, p. 846.

[182] Hermann Dornig, Die Praxis der mechanischen Weberei (Leipzig: A. Hartleben, 1895), p. 29.

of yarn and the distilling of fine drinks. To produce yarn suited for different kinds of twistings, a director from Bolton explained, "one mill may have five or six different 'mixings,' as they are called, each mixing [of cotton types] more or less skillfully adapted to the requirements of the yarn. This is as important, in its way, as the blending of teas, wines, or spirits."^[183] Like the distiller who coped with seasonal variation in the character of the grapes harvested, the spinner dealt with crops of cotton and wool that differed in unpredictable ways, year to year, lot by lot, depending on the season's conditions for growing cotton and raising sheep.^[184] Textile production depended on nature in other ways. The direction of the wind affected humidity and temperature and thus yarn breakages, so workers learned to pace their motions in response to the weather. At a mill sheltered behind a hill they learned a different rhythm of work than in a neighboring establishment exposed to the wind.^[185]

By reason of this technical foundation, the textile industry developed in both countries into a "folk" trade, dependent on native lore and resistant to systematization.^[186] The relatively stagnant design of equipment and the reliance on hit-or-miss tinkering indicates that the specification of labor as a commodity in German textiles did not arise as a consequence of attempts to keep pace with technical change or to rationalize the use of technology.^[187] As the introduction of pay by shot first suggested, the German producers imported the definition of labor into the labor process in the early days of the factory system. They maintained their focus on the transfer of labor power to the employer although the surprisingly primitive technology of textile production during the second half of the nineteenth century discouraged employers from methodizing the conversion of labor power into a product. The adoption of a particular concept of labor in Germany did not reflect utilitarian demands but served as a premise for meeting them. The specification of labor was reproduced, not by its conformity with the tech-

[183] Dobson, op. cit., p. 27.

[184] Cotton Factory Times , March 5, 1897, p. 1; Textile Journal , 1902, p. 359; Fred Bradbury, Worsted Preparing and Spinning , Volume One (Halifax: F. King & Sons, 1910), pp. 19 ff.

[185] Journal of the British Association of Managers of Textile Works Volume 6 (1914–1915), p. 106. Royal Commission on Labour, PP 1892 XXXV, p. 76.

[186] For more particulars, see Richard Biernacki, "The Cultural Construction of Labor: A Comparative Study of Late Nineteenth-Century German and British Textile Mills," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1988, pp. 223–243.

[187] Brady, op. cit., p. 263.

nological environment, but through the symbolic configuration of micro-practices that communicated labor's definition.

In this chapter, as in the two preceding, I have relied on three forms of argument to demonstrate that the cross-national divergences in textile factory institutions had a cultural origin. Most important, I have compared similar business environments in detail to rule out alternative, utilitarian explanations for differences in factory procedures—in this instance, the allocation of overlooking costs—or for differences in the ascription of authority. In particular, my comparisons have excluded explanations based on the timing of the founding of textile mills, on adaptation to the business cycle, or on national variation in the factory directors' commitment to improving efficiency. Second, I have shown that the differing views of labor as a commodity in Britain and in Germany extended into minutiae of factory life where variation did not bear strategic consequences, such as the formal methods for distributing overlooking wages over various types of cloth. The shape of practice in these instances, too, is unamenable to utilitarian explanation. Finally, the contrasting cultural definitions of labor as a commodity in Germany and Britain which found expression in the methods of defining overlookers' remuneration serve as the core principles for interpreting an entire constellation of factory customs. The scope of the instrumentalities elucidated by a cultural principle raises our confidence in the method of analysis and challenges the advocates of purely utilitarian reasoning to account for this range of differences between German and British textile mills. Let them bring their case before the court.

Concluding Reflections on Part One

Part One of this study has not attempted to decide which of two forces, culture or material circumstances, was the more powerful. Analysts who conceive of these forces as variables to be laid out side by side might suppose that their effects were conjoined, but their admixture is in fact more fundamental than that. Not only were both prerequisites for the composition of production, but the very operation of each remains inconceivable without the other. Material constraints assume their social effectivity only as they are encoded by culture; culture operates only as it is materialized in the concrete media at hand. The two forces are different moments in the same social process. Nonetheless, we can still isolate the effects of culture if we ask, not which had the most influence, but which comprised a social logic. The brute conditions of praxis in capitalist society, such as the need to compete in a market, did not provide the principles for organizing practices in forms that were stable and reproducible, for by themselves they did not supply a meaningful design for conduct. Rather, practices were given a consistent shape by the particular specifications of labor as a commodity that depended, to be sure, upon the general conditions of praxis for their materials, but granted them social consequences according to an intelligible logic of their own.

The discovery that factory production in Germany and Britain was orchestrated according to its signifying function bears important implications for sociological theories about the distinguishing character of human action in the capitalist order. Many in the tradition of Western Marxism have viewed the increasing salience of exclusively calculative, instrumental conduct as a characteristic developmental tendency of capitalist society.^[188] But looking at the sensuous realm of practice on the shop floor from a comparative perspective discloses a more complex process. One can, perhaps, refer to the "rationalization" of the labor process at the very end of the nineteenth century, when formal ideologies of management appeared and the legal system, at least in Germany, elaborated more explicitly the rules governing the transmission of labor in the factory. But the development of capitalism was not marked by the progressive reduction of the activity of labor to the logic of instrumental action alone, without respect for action's communicative function. Instrumental action, rationalized by progressive adjustments

[188] See, illustratively, Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 93, 102.

to end-means logic, was still ordered by its conveyance of meaning and followed the cultural coordinates of a commodity form that varied apart from immediate economic conditions.^[189]

If micro-procedures at the site of production were grouped in a meaningful pattern that incarnated different concepts of labor, how did this cultural logic tend to be incorporated consistently into practice? The concept of culture has drawn researchers' attention to the systematicity and global patterning of practices and signs, of strategies and life forms in society. Yet it is too easy to take this patterning as evidence for the influence or presence of something termed culture without asking how culture produces this configuration—or this configuration, culture. No social agent craftily designed the constellation of instrumentalities in the factory to embody, across the board, different specifications of labor as a commodity. By what processes did people create and reproduce not just an accidental assemblage of practices and concepts but an undivided cultural system based on concepts of labor?

To explain the survival of consistencies in the form of practice we need not invoke the notion of an overarching, harmonized normative order, internalized by the agents, that restrains deviant action. Once practices were installed as a consistent ensemble, their very execution could reproduce the concept of labor they embodied. Adherence to an ideal did not descend downward from contemplative knowledge of the general but percolated upward from practical knowledge of the concrete. It was the encounter with ideas residing in these humble instrumentalities that gave producers a practical knowledge of the ideal form by which labor was transferred as a commodity.^[190] The micro-practices contained within themselves the principle that structured the social whole; execution of specific practices could reproduce the structure of the whole from the ground up.

The question that remains unanswered is not how a patterned cultural system was maintained, but, simply, why and how do practices cohere to

[189] Habermas makes distinctions among several modes of action, including instrumental action, defined by its focus on the efficacious employment of technical skills to manipulate the environment, and communicative action, which is oriented to reaching reciprocal understanding with other social agents. This philosophical dissection of types of action reflects rather than penetrates the abstractions of capitalist society. For the divides it presents between modes of action, even if intended to be purely analytic, reinforce the separation between technical and communicative functions in the labor process, whereas the use of the impersonal micro-apparatuses of production performed a communicative function.

[190] On recent experimental evidence that suggests that abstract concepts can be communicated through forms of practice, see Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 183.

begin with? The matched comparison of economic environments for British and German factories shows that, in each country, alternative conventions would have met the requirements of the firm in the realm of capitalist competition equally well. If a method for, say, the imposition of fines is installed under one form of labor as a commodity, the choice of form for other techniques is not entailed by practical necessity. What generated the tendency toward consistency of form?

Even if one admits that agents' cultural schemata are arranged into a systematic whole, it by no means follows that the institutions of the factory must themselves incorporate this coherence. Instead, culture could be used by the agents to formulate only a subjective response to practices shaped by external necessities.^[191] The built-in requirements of the mind for the production of meaning, which the cultural structuralists present as the ultimate cause of the coherence of culture, may well dictate a kind of formal patterning in language and in conceptual designs.^[192] If this holds true for the constitution of language and signification, however, the question—altogether separate—remains of how and why industrial practice in the newly emergent capitalist factory methodically embodied such adroit schemata.^[193]

Max Weber's sociological perspective offers an advantage in responding to the riddle of systematicity in factory practices because it views cultural patterning as a contingent accomplishment open to historical investigation. As is well known, Weber identifies intellectual specialists as the historical actors who are responsible for the creation of doctrines that make possible the systematic patterning of culture and of conduct.^[194] Yet the details of the

[191] Stephen Gudeman seems to adopt this viewpoint in Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors of Livelihood (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). He unearths the underlying structure of peasants' economic concepts in Panama, although their culture serves only as a means for interpreting changes in economic practices dictated from without (pp. 23–25).

[192] Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 55; Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 146.

[193] Donald Donham outlines the problems occasioned by the application of models of language to models of practice in History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 211. A valuable analysis of the alleged coherence of culture appears in Neil J. Smelser, "Culture: Coherent or Incoherent," in Richard Münch and Neil J. Smelser, editors, Theory of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 10–13.

[194] From Weber's standpoint, the congeries of ideas in a society does not organize social reasoning and conduct by a consistent pattern until an ethical or managerial doctrine has been articulated by experts in symbol-making. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), pp. 30, 82.

cases at hand disqualify the Weberian approach to the development of a meaningful configuration of micro-practices in the factory. The principle of labor as a commodity did not form part of a formal management doctrine imparted to factory employers. To be sure, general precepts about the mutual responsibilities of the employing and the working classes had wide currency throughout the nineteenth century.^[195] But those sanctimonious philosophies about virtuous relations had nothing to say about the organization or execution of manufacturing techniques themselves. "So far as we know," Sidney Pollard concluded for the period of early industrialization in Britain, "the management pioneers were isolated and their ideas without great influence."^[196] Since so many factories were family-operated, the technical mysteries of the trade could be passed between generations through firsthand experience in the enterprise. In point of fact, there was as such no formal management doctrine to disseminate during the early development of the factory system. Professional administration of employees did not form an object for sustained reflection and study in either Germany or Britain until approximately the 1880s.^[197] Until then the managerial function on the shop floor was not differentiated from that of technical oversight. Accordingly, books on the management of textile mills most often referred to machinery, not people.^[198] At least until midcentury, the very term manager in Britain lacked a clear referent. The usual title for a supervisor of employees was clerk , a locution directed toward the older activity of book-

[195] Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), Chapter Two; Judy Lown, Women and Industrialization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 96.

[196] Pollard, The Genesis , op. cit., p. 254. Cf. Peter L. Payne, "Industrial Entrepreneurship and Management in Great Britain," The Cambridge Economic History of Europe , Volume VII, Part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 196.

[197] Joseph Litterer, The Emergence of Systematic Management as Shown by the Literature of Management from 1870–1900 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986), pp. 65, 68; Introduction by Anthony Tillett to Anthony Tillett et al., editors, Management Thinkers (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), pp. 48–49. For general reflections on the slow emergence of management as a self-conscious undertaking, see Charles S. Maier, "The Factory as Society: Ideologies of Industrial Management in the Twentieth Century," in R. J. Bullen et al., editors, Ideas into Politics (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 148, and L. Urwick and E. F. L. Brech, The Making of Scientific Management (London: Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1957), Chapter Six. For Germany, see Jürgen Kocka, "Entrepreneurs and Managers in German Industrialization," in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe , Volume VII, Part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 549.

[198] When Babbage does refer to workers at the point of production, he limits his observations to the principles of muscular fatigue, as if people qua producers entered his discourse as machines. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, 1835), Chapter Four.

keeping.^[199] The crystallization of factory practices based on specifications of labor that varied between Germany and Britain occurred decades before the emergence of management science in either country.

The functioning of the networks of communication in the textile districts also excludes the possibility that similarities in practices across regions arose from the diffusion of formal doctrine about the efficient deployment of labor among machines. Although factory procedures in Yorkshire and Lancashire were based on similar principles, in the formative years of the factory system factory owners in these provinces did not remain in contact with each other to transmit information about those practices.^[200] The language of shop-floor life confirms the independence of development. In each of the neighborhoods of Lancashire and Yorkshire counties, managers used distinct vocabularies for parts of the loom and jobs in the mill.^[201] Information about technical innovation—a subject of great concern to mill managers—was slow to diffuse. For example, managers in Elland, just outside Bradford, did not acquire for two decades the attachments for automatically changing the weft color on multi-shuttle looms that were standard in the city of Bradford by the 1870s.^[202] How much less likely is it, therefore, that communication at length among factory managers about the interior social life of the mill led to the standardization of procedures within each country for managing the purchase of "labor" in the factory. The patterning of conduct according to the specification of labor as a commodity did not reflect a deliberate systematization of administrative rules.

If the patterning did not result from agents orienting themselves to environment with a certain schema and then creating a world in the image of this schema—the solution of idealists—neither was it the trace of the imperatives of the capitalist system imposing their image on people's consciousness. We cannot derive the cultural pattern from the functional requirements of the economy operating behind people's backs, for the

[199] Pollard, The Genesis , op. cit., pp. 59, 104, 125.

[200] Payne, op. cit., p. 196. For an illustration of the lack of communication between Lancashire and Yorkshire textile business people at the dawn of the factory era in Lancashire, see the testimony of James Ellis in United Kingdom, Minutes of the Committee on the Woollen Trade , PP 1806 (268) III, April 18, 1806, p. 8.

[201] Biernacki, op. cit., pp. 244–247.

[202] Yorkshire Factory Times , November 15, 1889, "Elland"; April 29, 1892, p. 7. The innovation, called a "revolving loom box," was perfected in 1856. Gary Firth, "The Bradford Trade in the Nineteenth Century," in D. G. Wright and J. A. Jowitt, editors, Victorian Bradford (Bradford: Bradford Metropolitan Council, 1982), p. 17.

differing specifications of labor were both equally well suited for the reproduction of capitalism. Moreover, they could have been used together indiscriminately in one setting. The conditions of the capitalist system may have sustained a cultural outlook, but they did not by themselves inaugurate it; conversely, a cultural template lodged in concrete practice may have served as a moment in the reproduction of the capitalist system, but it did not create a capitalist economy.

The execution of practice incorporates a cultural schema, as Bourdieu always reminds us.^[203] Yet even in his studies of kin-based societies, Bourdieu did not consider seriously the next issue: whence, not just culture, but a cultural system?^[204] If action requires conception, still there is no requirement emanating from the agents themselves that requires diverse practices to follow a single, generalizable idea. The record of anthropological research shows time and again that agents seem to have an inexhaustible capacity for synthesizing contradictory assumptions into a coherent, though perhaps imperfectly consistent, outlook.^[205] The systematicity of practices on the shop floor did not reflect some cognitive necessity lodged in the agents themselves that required them to "think" the structure of society or of the factory with a single principle. Such an explanation would reduce culture to a constraint of the contemplative mind, as if agents engaged in practice so as to gaze upon it from without as upon a work of art—and a simple one at that.

In each country, the operative concept of labor had two guises. Within the rude walls of the factory, the producers transmitted "labor" as an imaginative construct of their lifeworld to their employers through their tangible actions and face-to-face social ties; yet, beyond the realm of lived experience, abstract human labor formed the common denominator by which diverse kinds of products with incomparable use values could be brought into relation with each other and exchanged in the market, awakening to life an impersonal world of commodities in motion. The category

[203] Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 97.

[204] To be sure, Bourdieu explains that whatever cultural coherence is observed in the operation of a habitus "has no other basis" than the coherence of the social structure from which the habitus was derived. This of course leads to the Durkheimian circle: the systematicity of culture is a correlate of the systematicity of social structure, which relies upon  . . . the operation of culture. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 95.

[205] Introduction to The New Institutionalism , op. cit., p. 18; Terence Turner, " 'We Are Parrots,' 'Twins Are Birds': Play of Tropes as Operational Structure," in James Fernandez, editor, Beyond Metaphor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 156.

of labor did not function as a pivotal concept because it expressed the detached logic of the capitalist system, or, from the other side, because it revealed the supremacy of culture in the producers' negotiation of a meaningful order; instead, it bridged these two realms of a market-integrated social structure and the experienced world. If people monitor and organize their conduct in accordance with the commodity form of labor, they reproduce the networks of exchange and of objectified social relations that constitute capitalist society. Georg Lukács, who insisted on linking the dynamic of the capitalist system to the forms of understanding that people used to constitute their practice and experience, gave this insight a classic formulation long ago. "Objectively, in so far as the commodity form facilitates the equal exchange of qualitatively different objects, it can exist only if that formal equality is in fact recognized—at any rate, in this relation, which indeed confers upon them their commodity character," Lukács wrote. "Subjectively, this formal equality of human labor in the abstract is not only the common factor to which the various commodities are reduced; it also becomes the real principle governing the actual production of commodities."^[206]

In capitalist society alone could a concept of labor serve as the organizing principle for a multiplicity of humble practices. Where labor has not been subsumed under the commodity form, it may be recognized as the source of material sustenance but it does not take on the social function of structuring the relation of person to person through the exchange of abstract labor time. Definitions of labor may not surface at all in kinbased or precapitalist societies as a principle for structuring social relations; should they arise, they remain subordinate to other categories coordinating social reproduction.^[207] Only in capitalist society is labor both a form of understanding and the integrative principle that regulates social relations in society as a whole; only there does it bridge lived experience and the invisible functioning of a system.

[206] History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1971), p. 87. Jürgen Habermas reformulates this discovery in his reading of Marx, although he frames it in terms of a hypostatized disjuncture between system and lifeworld: "The disposal of labor power by the producers represents a category in which the imperatives of social integration and those of system integration meet: as an action it belongs to the lifeworld of the producers, as accomplished work to the functional nexus of the capitalist enterprise and of the economic system as a whole." Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), Volume Two, p. 493.

[207] Gudeman, op. cit., pp. 20–21, 24; John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, "The Madman and the Migrant: Work and Labor in the Historical Consciousness of a South African People," American Ethnologist Volume 14 (1987), pp. 191–209.

If these considerations render intelligible the patterning of practice by a specification of labor as a commodity, yet they do not explain why the concepts of labor differed between Germany and Britain. To answer this question requires us to uncover the historical genesis of the divergent concepts and the conditions governing their transmission in quotidian practice. That is the task in Part Two of this work.