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]