The Dispute in the Textile Trades (1932)

From the November 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

In January, 1931, the Textile employers declared a lock-out over wages and the attempt to secure the introduction of the more-looms-to-a-weaver system. The workers put up a stronger resistance than the employers had anticipated (all the stronger because the trade union members resolutely refused to give their officials power to negotiate), and on February 16th the lock-out was withdrawn. The employers continued to press this year for wage reductions and more looms—and on July 25th a strike began at Burnley, followed on August 29th by a general stoppage of work by the weavers. After a dispute lasting for a month, work was resumed on September 28th, most of the strikers being taken on again. The terms were a heavy defeat for the workers; wages are reduced by about eight-and-a-half per cent. (1s. 8½d. in the £), the more-looms system is to be introduced as soon as a Conciliation Committee is appointed, which is expected to be within two months, and the provision for reinstating strikers is most unsatisfactory. The Employers’ central organisation is merely bound “to recommend its local associations strongly to persuade all their members to offer employment as speedily as possible to all operatives who have been displaced.” How unsatisfactory this is will be seen from the fact that one of the questions at issue in the general dispute was the employers’ refusal to reinstate strikers already out at Burnley.

Part of the weakness of the textile workers is plainly due to disunity and faulty organisation. The Weavers’ Amalgamation consists at present of 36 district associations, each of which has complete autonomy and can act independently of the others. One of the results of the strike failure is a renewed move to form the 36 associations into one centralised union. On the other hand, the Nelson Weavers’ Association is balloting on s proposal to withdraw from the amalgamation because of dissatisfaction with the settlement, and at Burnley a new local union has been formed in opposition to the Burnley Weavers’ Association, which is also a local organisation. The new union is stressing the principles (embodied in its rules) that “no strike will be initiated or ended without members meeting” and “members’ decision in any dispute shall be final” (Manchester Guardian, October 17th). One of the provisional officials said that the members thought it would be easier to form a new body than to reform the old, and that considerable support is being given among the weavers.

A still further cause of weakness is the failure of the textile workers as a whole to act together. Emboldened by their victory over the weavers the employers then pressed their demand for reductions of pay of the spinners. At first the employers declared that on no consideration whatever would, they agree to a smaller reduction than 1s. 8½d. in the £ (the figure accepted by the weavers in their settlement).

The unions had already agreed (Manchester Guardian, October 19th) to accept a reduction of 9¾d. in the £, and when a lock-out was threatened for Monday, October 24th, a settlement was reached on the basis of a reduction of 1s. 6½d in the £.

One lesson of these disputes is obvious. The workers cannot hope to put up the maximum resistance that conditions will allow if they are hopelessly divided, giving the employers the opportunity of depleting their funds by sectional disputes and defeating them piecemeal.

Edgar Hardcastle

50 Years Ago: Why the Workers Save (1991)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Times (April 21st 1941) published an article based on first-hand knowledge of the workers’ attitude towards the Government savings campaign. The writer comments on the fact that many workers save in order to be able to face the anticipated depression after the war. “A majority of the working-class expect hard times after the war,” he writes, and quotes a Bradford weaver, who said : —

“I think there’ll be a big slump. I was in t’last slump; it was a terrible time. People didn’t save anything. I was always telling them, if it’s only two or three shillings, don’t spend more than you need. If it’s anything like the last, God help them.”

The naive writer of the article is rather surprised to learn that the attitude of the workers towards saving is not like that of the capitalist: —

“It is only in a very few instances that a working man is putting by money as a form of capital accumulation, which will eventually enable him to invest in property or become a small trader. Most often saving is a form of insurance against known contingencies : marriage, sickness, death, unemployment, old age, hard times . . . even at the poverty level families frequently save, at the expense of their elementary subsistence needs . . . ”—(The Times, April 21st, 1941.)

In short, the capitalist saves out of his superfluity in order to accumulate capital; the worker saves out of his insufficiency in order to protect himself against capitalism and the capitalist.

[From the Socialist Standard, June 1941.]

Marx on Free Trade. (1926)

From the February 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from previous issues)

Mr. Bowring’s speech is the more remarkable because the facts quoted by him are correct, and the phrases with which he seeks to palliate them are characterized by the hypocrisy common to all Free Trade discourses. He represents the workers as means of production which must be.superseded by less expensive means of production, pretends to see in the labour of which he speaks a wholly exceptional kind of labour, and in the machine which has crushed out the weavers an equally exceptional kind of machine. He forgets that there is no kind of manual labour which may not any day share the fate of the hand-loom weavers.

“The constant aim and tendency of every improvement of mechanism is indeed to do entirely without the labour of men, or to reduce its price, by superseding the labour of the adult males by that of women and children, or the work of the skilled by that of the unskilled workman. In most of the throstle mills, spinning is now entirely done by girls of sixteen years and less. The introduction of the self-acting mule has caused the discharge of most of the (adult male) spinners, while the children and young persons have been kept on.”

The above words of the most enthusiastic of Free Traders, Dr. Ure, are calculated to complete the confessions of Dr. Bowring. Mr. Bowring speaks of certain individual evils, and, at the same time, says that these individual evils destroy whole classes; he speaks of the temporary sufferings during a transition period, and does not deny that these temporary evils have implied for the majority the transition from life to death, and for the rest a transition from a better to a worse condition. When he asserts, farther on, that the sufferings of the working class are inseparable from the progress of industry, and are necessary to the prosperity of the nation, he simply says that the prosperity of the bourgeois class presupposes as necessary the suffering of the labouring class.

All the comfort which Mr. Bowring offers the workers who perish, and, indeed, the whole doctrine of compensation which the Free Traders propound, amounts to this—

You thousands of workers who are perishing, do not despair ! You can die with an easy conscience. Your class will not perish. It will always be numerous enough for the capitalist class to decimate it without fear of annihilating it. Besides, how could capital be usefully applied if it did not take care to keep up its exploitable material, i.e., the workingmen, to be exploited over and over again?

But, then, why propound as a problem still to be solved the question: What influence will the adoption of the Free Trade have on the condition of the working class? All the laws formulated by the political economists from Quesnay to Ricardo, have been based upon the hypothesis that the trammels which still interfere with commercial freedom have disappeared. These laws are confirmed in proportion as Free Trade is adopted. The first of these laws is that competition reduces the price of every commodity to the minimum cost of production. Thus the minimum of wages is the natural price of labour. And what is the minimum of wages? Just so much as is required for production of the articles absolutely necessary for the maintenance of the worker, for the continuation, by hook or by crook, of his own existence and that of his class.

But do not imagine that the worker receives only this minimum wage, and still less that he always receives it. No, according to this law, the working class will sometimes be more fortunate, will sometimes receive something above the minimum, but this surplus will merely make up for the deficit which they will have received below the minimum in times of industrial depression. That is to say that within a given time which recurs periodically, in other words, in the cycle which commerce and industry describe while passing through the successive phases of prosperity, overproduction, stagnation, and crisis, when reckoning all that the working class has had above and below mere necessaries, we shall see that, after all, they have received neither more nor less than the minimum; i.e., the working class will have maintained itself as a class after enduring any amount of misery and misfortune, and after leaving many corpses upon the industrial battle-field.

(To be continued)

Marx on Free Trade. (1924)

From the August 1924 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from June “S.S.”)

In 1829 there were, in Manchester, 1088 cotton spinners employed in 36 factories. In 1841 there were but 448, and they tended 53,353 more spindles than the 1088 spinners did in 1829. If manual labour had increased in the same proportion as productive force, the number of spinners ought to have risen to 1848; improved machinery had, therefore, deprived 1100 workers of employment.

We know beforehand the reply of the economists—the people thus thrown out of work will find other kinds of employment. Dr. Bowring did not fail to reproduce this argument at the Congress of Economists. But neither did he fail to contradict himself. In 1833, Dr. Bowring made a speech in the House of Commons upon the 50,000 hand-loom weavers of London who had been starving without being able to find that new kind of employment which the free traders hold out to them in the distance. Let us hear the most striking portion of this speech of Mr. Bowring :—

  “The misery of the hand-loom weavers,” he says, “is the inevitable fate of all kinds of labour which are easily acquired, and which may, at any moment, be replaced by less costly means. As in these cases competition amongst the work-people is very great, the slightest falling-off in demand brings on a crisis. The hand-loom weavers are, in a certain sense, placed on the borders of human existence. One step further, and that existence becomes impossible. The slightest shock is sufficient to throw them on to the road to ruin. By more and more superseding manual labour, the progress of mechanical science must bring on, during the period of transition, a deal of temporary suffering. National well-being cannot be bought except at the price of some individual evils. The advance of industry is achieved at the expense of those who lag behind, and of all discoveries that of the power-loom weighs most heavily upon the hand-loom weavers. In a great many articles formerly made by hand, the weaver has been placed hors de combat; and he is sure to be beaten in a good many more fabrics that are now made by hand.”

Further on he says:—

  “I hold in my hand a correspondence of the Governor-General with the East India Company. This correspondence is concerning the weavers of the Dacca district. The governor says in his letter: ‘A few years ago the East India Company received from six to eight million pieces of calico woven upon the looms of the country. The demand fell off gradually and was reduced to about a million pieces. At this moment it has almost entirely ceased. Moreover, in 1800, North America received from India nearly 800,000 pieces of cotton goods. In 1830 it did not take even 4000. Finally, in 1800 a million of pieces were shipped for Portugal; in 1830 Portugal did not receive above 20,000.’

  “The reports on the distress of the Indian weavers are terrible. And what is the origin of that distress? The presence on the market of English manufactures, the production of the same article by means of the power-loom. A great number of the weavers died of starvation; the remainder have gone over to other employment, and chiefly to field labour. Not to be able to change employment amounted to a sentence of death. And at this moment the Dacca district is crammed with English yarns and calicoes. The Dacca muslin, renowned all over the world for its beauty and firm texture, has also been eclipsed by the competition of English machinery. In the whole history of commerce, it would, perhaps, be difficult to find suffering equal to what these whole classes in India had to submit to.”

(To be continued)

Aggressive Lancashire Capitalists. (1912)

From the February 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rarely has our “free” Press had such an innings as during the recent cotton lock-out in Lancashire (and during the Parliamentary recess, too). Thousands of columns of servile paid trash have been written “about it and about.” Let us sift out the wheat from the chaff, and see what really is the position of the workers in Lancashire. Children leave school to work half-time in the weaving mills at the age of twelve, and full time at about thirteen. After “tenting,” or helping a four or six loom weaver, they get first two looms to look after, then in the course of time, three and four looms. Four is the usual number — when six are minded a “tenter,” or help, is necessary.

The average earnings per loom (given by Wood in his “History of Wages in the Cotton Trade”) are 6s. 6d. per loom per week for a two loom weaver ; 5s. 11d. per loom per week for a three loom weaver ; 6s. per loom per week for a four loom weaver; but many have help to pay for. Weavers having happy family connections or other exceptional help may become overlookers and earn 45s. or 50s. weekly, conditioned by the earnings of the weavers. The overlooker, paid on the weavers’ earnings, is thus tempted to keep production up to the maximum.

A large number of weavers are women, and when married many continue their employment. The sight of women taking out infants to their nurse at half past five on a winter’s morning is an incident of family life which only an anti-Socialist can appreciate. In Burnley, out of the total number of married women and widows, 33.8 percent. are occupied in various industries. The average earnings per loom before mentioned only applies to times of regular employment, “bad” times come, when many looms are stopped and fewer hours worked. Taking all in all, the outlook for a lad or lass when school is left behind, is, in Lancashire, much the drab, dull outlook of the worker the capitalist world over.

Beaming Radical politicians gloat over the extravagant prosperity of the weavers compared with the poverty of their forebears. Let us briefly examine the course of events.

In Lancashire, says Toynbee, “we can trace step by step the growth of the capitalist employer. At first we see, as in Yorkshire, the weaver furnishing himself with warp and weft, which he worked up in his own house and I brought himself to market.” By degrees he became dependent on the merchants at Manchester, who gave him out warp and raw cotton. Finally the merchant would get thirty or forty looms in a town — then came the great mechanical inventions.

The times when the weaver fully or partially controlled his product were decidedly his golden age. Down to the year 1810 the hand-loom weaver waxed fat; then the power loom caused a catastrophe. Even in 1833 the hand loom weavers out-numbered the power loom weavers by three to one. Says Mr. Wood: all the records agree that an extraordinary fall in prices paid and amounts earned by hand loom weavers took place between the early years of the century and 1830-40. In Lancashire in 1806, according to the same authority, there existed :

80,000 to 100,000 factory operatives earning 9s 6d. to 10s 6d. per week.
165,000 hand-loom weavers earning 18s. to 24s. per week.

From the year 1806 down a rapid change took place in the earnings of the hand-loom weavers, a reduction in wages of 50 per cent. taking place in 25 years. The competition was drastic, and it was not until 1840 that the turn was taken, and not until the year 1890 that the wage level (nominal wage) of 1800 was again reached truly a century of progress for the workers.

Besides changes in piece wages (for over 30 years stationary) there are two factors affecting the wages of weavers: the speeding-up of the looms and the increase in the number tended. These factors become more important if we remember that in the year 1901 over 350,000 fewer persons were employed in the textile trades than in 1851; a diminution contemporary with a constant increase in the quantity of textiles produced. If we take the cotton trade alone we find a slight increase in the number employed, an increase, however, negligible compared with the vast difference in the amount of stuff produced This is the truth: after a century of mechanical change we have not equalled the conditions existing prior to that change — now power loom production is established the worker is in many ways in an inferior position to that of the weaver in the palmy days of the hand-loom. If it is not so I should be pleased to see some textile union leader haul forth some facts.

To come to the lock-out, during the past year an attempt has been made to bring non-unionists into the ranks of the textile unions. Oral persuasion failed in some cases, and the weavers at an Accrington mill refused to work with non-unionists. The reply of the masters was to lock out the bulk of the weavers in Lancashire. Now what were the masters' motives for their action ? Were they anxious that a few non-unionists should have freedom or license or liberty or some other abstract concept? Reverse the position and imagine that but ten percent. of the weavers were in the union, and that the ninety per cent. non-unionists threatened to cease work unless the unionists abandoned the union — would then the bosses have prated about freedom and liberty? It is not at all likely. The unionists would have to surrender, for at such a time, in the midst of a trade boom, the mills would never have closed, and it would have been left to the philosophers to prate about liberty. So in the case of the lock out it cannot be possible that the bosses were much bothered about the few non unionists.

In searching for reasons for the lock out it is necessary to ask: Were the masters opposed to the trade unions on principle? Would they not rather negotiate with the unions than with unorganised workers? The following quotation from the “Manchester Guardian” of Jan. 20th, the day following the settlement, is apt here : 

“Comparatively few employers could be found to deny, or even question, the advantage winch they as employers have gained from the regulation of wages and the general systemisation of conditions of employment which their own associations and the uuions have jointly brought about. We believe that a great majority of employers wish the unions to be strong, if for no other reason than that they shall be able to prevent the minority of what may be described as non-union employers from competing unfairly with them by paying wages less than the standard rates.”

The following gem is from the “Blackburn Daily Telegraph'' of Jan. 19th. The manufacturers “have a direct interest in the effective working of the employees’ unions, which they have no desire to see smashed, as they operate effectively in keeping prices at a uniform rate. The absence of these organisations would result in certain firms underpaying, to the detriment of all fair competition.”

Such citations could be reproduced in abundance from the capitalist Press at the time of the lock out.

It is the writer's opinion that the cotton capitalists do not desire to smash the unions so long as they retain their present servile position. Then why the lock out? Why this apparently disproportionate, huge lock out in reply to a strike at a single mill? Does it not look as if it were a case of using a steam hammer to smash a nut, even if there was danger of an extension of the strike? The truth is probably this—that within the Lancashire unions exists a militant section, and it is this minority which has taken the initiative on the non-unionist question and forced action upon the supine majority in the unions. The capitalists are not afraid of trade union leaders of the old school, but, rightly or wrongly, they look with suspicion on the activities of a section of the workers.

The lock-out was settled on terms that left the weavers in a worse position than before the non-unionist agitation. When the terms were known meetings of protest were held in many weaving centres; in Nelson. Accrington, Blackburn and other towns vigorous language was used anent the terms obtained, a majority of those who take an interest in the working of the unions condemned their “delegates” Unfortunately, many are insensitive to humiliation by employers, and it is such the “delegates” lean upon for a mechanical support.

This minority I speak of are not Socialists; they are no doubt reformers and would disavow the class war. But the silly habit of looking upon capitalism as a thing that was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, is fading away. A more rebellious, if uninformed, spirit animates many of the workers. It is this which the masters fear.

Many factors are at work which will in the near future bring these operatives to see that Socialism is the only way out of the mire. Their stationary wages, the increase in the cost of living, the failure of the Labour Party, the “flitting” of their leader, Shackleton, the obvious permanency of their proletarian condition under the present system—all such factors must tend to compel the workers in Lancashire to make the war against the bosses political besides industrial; and permanent, not haphazard and fitful.

John A. Dawson.