‘Non‐Commissioned Officers’: British employers and their supervisory workers, 1880–1920∗

Cantines d'entreprise et discours hygiénistes dans l'industrie britannique de l'entre-deux-guerres

“…Yet Vernon’s assessment needs to be interrogated, for examining the activities of individual firms reveals that a number of employers continued to invest in canteens after the cessation of hostilities. The shipbuilding firm Beardmores, for example, which established dining rooms for its employees in the first decade of the twentieth century and invested heavily in welfare facilities during the course of the First World War, continued to spend money on its welfare provisions in the period 1918-1919: Joseph Melling concluded that the firm chose to retain lavish welfare facilities as a means of placating and retaining its labour force 52 . Indeed, virtually every annual report issued by the Factory Inspectorate commented on the increasing number of factory canteens, and in 1934 the Inspectorate reported that in some areas ‘workers are so used to finding such provision that they think the absence of it is necessarily illegal’ 53 .…”

“…This Society’s journal, Industrial Welfare , increasingly described the goals of employer-driven welfare schemes as Taylorism, efficiency and human management. With this in mind, the argument that industrial welfare had become a new means to increasing managerial control over workers advanced by Joseph Melling and Helen Jones appears compelling 83 . Melling emphasises how employers utilised industrial welfare in the period 1880 to 1920 to undermine trade unionism by providing alternative financial schemes for savings, targeting groups of workers who played a crucial role in the division of labour.…”

Owning and Belonging: A Semiotic Investigation of the Affective Categories of a Bourgeois Society

“…For example, this larger shift in usage (between examples 3 and 4) can also be seen in part as a shift from the entrepreneurial ideal of nineteenth-century liberal capitalism to the professional ideal of twentieth century capitalism (Perkin 1989). It could also be seen as an index of a broader hegemony of the 'human relations' ideologies of the workplace characteristic of the shift to 'welfare capitalism' (Burawoy 1979;Melling 1980;Littler 1982:55), and in varied forms still very much with us, which have sought to add moral content to the wage contact by emphasizing the 'human element' (Melling 1980:198). 'Human relations' approaches seek to transfer the sentimental 'moral' characteristics of gemeinschaftlike 'belonging' to the alienated 'material' gesellschaft of the workplace (Burawoy 1979;Melling 1980), in which fundamentally conflictoriented discourses of disparate and opposed 'interests' of capital and labor were reformulated in terms of a fundamentally cohesion-oriented model in which strikes and unrest were "the product of misunderstanding and the failure of different sides of industry to treat one another as human beings" (Burawoy 1979:234).…”

Gendering exploitation: the use of gender in the campaign against driving in Lancashire weaving sheds, 1886–1903[1]

“…Obviously, the overlooker was sandwiched between masters intent to extract maximum output from their workforce and the workers in his charge, whose obstinacy and even open rebellion when feeling ill-treated could make life very difficult for him indeed. [25] While other branches of the cotton industry, such as the card and spinning rooms, were largely self-managing, in weaving, the mechanical tasks and, even more so, the managerial functions involved in overlooking had come to form a specialist occupation in the wake of industrialisation. The technical intricacies of the power loom as compared to its manually driven predecessor were believed to be beyond the abilities of the workers, especially since the influx of newcomers into the trade in the early nineteenth century had eroded the general command of mechanics among handloom weavers.…”

“…[29] In weaving, apart from payment by the piece, it was the specific organisation of the labour process that lent itself to increasing productivity without incurring the costs involved in investment in new machinery [30] or rationalised management techniques resorted to elsewhere. [31] Maintaining the quantity and quality of output per weaver, despite the supply of inferior yarn in addition to the ongoing speeding-up of looms [32], was possible through ruthless exploitation of the overlooker's position, which enabled him to pressurise the weavers in his charge into intensifying their labour. The interconnection between driving and rising competition, both at home and abroad, was recognised by employers.…”