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[...] From the late 1820s, the weavers brought forward three consistent proposals.
First, they proposed a tax on power-looms, to equalize conditions of competition, some part of which might be allocated towards the weavers’ relief. We should not forget that the hand-loom weaver was not only himself assessed for poor-rates, but paid a heavy burden in indirect taxation:
Their labour has been taken from them by the power-loom; their bread is taxed; their malt is taxed; their sugar, their tax, their soap, and almost every other thing they use or consume, is taxed. But the power-loom is not taxed –
so ran a letter from the Leeds stuff weavers in 1835.1 When we discuss the minutiae of finance we sometimes forget the crazy exploitive basis of taxation after the Wars, as well as its redistributive function – from the poor to the rich [...]
Next, they resented the effects upon family relationships of the factory system. Weaving had offered an employment to the whole family, even when spinning was withdrawn from the home. The young children winding bobbins, older children watching for faults, picking over the cloth, or helping to throw the shuttle in the broad-loom; adolescents working a second or third loom; the wife taking a turn at weaving in and among her domestic employments. The family was together, and however poor meals were, at least they could sit down at chosen times. A whole pattern of family and community life had grown up around the loom-shops; work did not prevent conversation or singing. The spinning-mills – which offered employment only for their children – and then the power-loom sheds, which generally employed only the wives or adolescents – were resisted until poverty broke down all defences. These places were held to be ‘immoral’ – places of sexual licence, foul language, cruelty, violent accidents, and alien manners.1 Witnesses before the Select Committee put now one, now another, objection to the front:
[...] The disparity between the wages of an engineer (26s. to 30s.) or carpenter (24s.) and the spademan (10s. to 15s.) or weaver (say 8s.) in 1832 is such that we cannot allow social conservatism alone to explain it. It suggests that it is the skilled trades which are exceptional, and that conditions in unskilled manual labour or in outwork industries, so far from being ‘specially unhappy’, were characteristic of a system designed by employers, legislators and ideologists to cheapen human labour in every way. And the fact that weaving became overstocked at a time when conditions were rapidly declining is eloquent confirmation. It was in the outwork industries, Marx wrote, that exploitation was most ‘shameless’, ‘because in these last resorts of the masses made “redundant” by Modern Industry and Agriculture, competition for work attains its maximum’.1
All in all, it is an unremarkable record. In fifty years of the Industrial Revolution the working-class share of the national product had almost certainly fallen relative to the share of the property-owning and professional classes. The ‘average’ working man remained very close to subsistence level at a time when he was surrounded by the evidence of the increase of national wealth, much of its transparently the product of his own labour, and passing, by equally transparent means, into the hands of his employers. In psychological terms, this felt very much like a decline in standards. His own share in the ‘benefits of economic progress’ consisted of more potatoes, a few articles of cotton clothing for his family, soap and candles, some tea and sugar, and a great many articles in the Economic History Review.
lmao. the potato thing is expounded on a few pages before and it's good
[...] The commonplace doctrine of employers in the 18th century was the simple one that only the lowest possible wages could enforce the poor to work: as Arthur Young declared, in 1771, "every one but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious". Methodism in no way challenged this doctrine; indeed, it reinforced it with the conventional teaching of the blessedness of poverty. what it did was to provide an inner compulsion as well.
‘It required, in fact, a man of a Napoleonic nerve and ambition, to subdue the refractory tempers of work-people accustomed to irregular paroxysms of diligence…. Such was Arkwright.’ Moreover, the more skilled a workman, the more intractable to discipline he became, ‘the more self-willed and… the less fit a component of a mechanical system, in which, by occasional irregularities, he may do great damage to the whole’. Thus the manufacturers aimed at withdrawing any process which required ‘peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand… from the cunning workman’ and placing it in charge of a ‘mechanism, so self-regulating, that a child may superintend it’. ‘The grand object therefore of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his work-people to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity, – faculties… speedily brought to perfection in the young.’
For the children, the discipline of the overlooker and of the machinery might suffice; but for those ‘past the age of puberty’ inner compulsions were required. Hence it followed that Ure devoted a section of his book to the ‘Moral Economy of the Factory System’, and a special chapter to religion. The unredeemed operative was a terrible creature in Ure’s sight; a prey to ‘artful demagogues’; chronically given to secret cabals and combinations; capable of any atrocity against his masters. The high wages of cotton-spinners enabled them ‘to pamper themselves into nervous ailments by a diet too rich and exciting for their indoor occupations’:
lol
The Methodists made of religion (wrote Southey) ‘a thing of sensation and passion, craving perpetually for sympathy and stimulants’.1 These Sabbath orgasms of feeling made more possible the single-minded weekday direction of these energies to the consummation of productive labour. Moreover, since salvation was never assured, and temptations lurked on every side, there was a constant inner goading to ‘sober and industrious’ behaviour – the visible sign of grace – every hour of the day and every day of the year. Not only ‘the sack’ but also the flames of hell might be the consequence of indiscipline at work. God was the most vigilant overlooker of all. Even above the chimney breast ‘Thou God Seest Me’ was hung. The Methodist was taught not only to ‘bear his Cross’ of poverty and humiliation; the crucifixion was (as Ure saw) the very pattern of his obedience: ‘True followers of our bleeding Lamb, Now on Thy daily cross we die…’2 Work was the Cross from which the ‘transformed’ industrial worker hung.
[...] The twenty years between 1815 and 1835 see also the first indications of independent trade union action among women workers. John Wade, commenting upon a strike of 1,500 female card-setters in the West Riding in 1835, pointed the moral: ‘Alarmists may view these indications of female independence as more menacing to established institutions than the “education of the lower orders”.’
But there is a paradox of feeling even in this advance. The Radicalism of northern working women was compounded of nostalgia for lost status and the assertion of new-found rights. According to conventions which were deeply felt, the woman’s status turned upon her success as a housewife in the family economy, in domestic management and forethought, baking and brewing, cleanliness and child-care. The new independence, in the mill or full-time at the loom, which made new claims possible, was felt simultaneously as a loss in status and in personal independence. Women became more dependent upon the employer or labour market, and they looked back to a ‘golden’ past in which home earnings from spinning, poultry, and the like, could be gained around their own door. In good times the domestic economy, like the peasant economy, supported a way of life centred upon the home, in which inner whims and compulsions were more obvious than external discipline. Each stage in industrial differentiation and specialization struck also at the family economy, disturbing customary relations between man and wife, parents and children, and differentiating more sharply between ‘work’ and ‘life’. It was to be a full hundred years before this differentiation was to bring returns, in the form of labour-saving devices, back into the working woman’s home. Meanwhile, the family was roughly torn apart each morning by the factory bell, and the mother who was also a wage-earner often felt herself to have the worst of both the domestic and the industrial worlds.
This growth in self-respect and political consciousness was one real gain of the Industrial Revolution. It dispelled some forms of superstition and of deference, and made certain kinds of oppression no longer tolerable. We can find abundant testimony as to the steady growth of the ethos of mutuality in the strength and ceremonial pride of the unions and trades clubs which emerged from quasi-legality when the Combination Acts were repealed.3 During the Bradford woolcomber’s strike of 1825 we find that in Newcastle, where the friendly society was so well rooted, the unions contributing to the Bradford funds included smiths, mill-wrights, joiners, shoemakers, morocco leather dressers, cabinet-makers, shipwrights, sawyers, tailors, woolcombers, hatters tanners, weavers, potters and miners.4 Moreover, there is a sense in which the friendly society helped to pick up and carry into the trade union movement the love of ceremony and the high sense of status of the craftsman’s guild. These traditions, indeed, still had a remarkable vigour in the early nineteenth century, in some of the old Chartered Companies or Guilds of the masters and of master-craftsmen, whose periodical ceremonies expressed the pride of both the masters and of their journeymen in ‘the Trade’. In 1802, for example, there was a great jubilee celebration of the Preston ‘Guilds’. In a week of processions and exhibitions, in which the nobility, gentry, merchants, shopkeepers, and manufacturers all took part,1 the journeymen were given a prominent place: