The Factory Act of 1850 now in force (1867) allows for the average working-day 10 hours, \.e., for the first 5 days 12 hours from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., including \ an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner, and thus leaving lOJ working hours, and 8 hours for Saturday, from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., of which \ an hour is subtracted for breakfast. 60 working hours are left, lOJ for each of the first 5 days, TA for the last.^ Certain guardians of these laws are appointed, Factory Inspectors, directly under the Home Secretary, whose reports are published lialf-y early, by order of Parliament. They give regular and ofiicial statistics of the capitalistic greed for surplus-labour.
Let us listen, for a moment, to the Factory Inspectors.^ " The fraudulent millowner begins work a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) before 6 a.m., and leaves ofi:' a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) after 6 p.m. He takes 5 minutes from the beginning and from the 1 is due growth is interfered with, either by physical or social conditions. In all European countries in which the conscription holds, since its introduction, the medium height of adult men, and generally their fitness for military service, has diminished. Before the revolution (1789), the minimum for the infantry in France was 165 centi- metres; in 1818 (law of March 10th), 157; by the law of 1852, 156 cm.; on the average in France more than half are rejected on account of deficient height or bodily weakness. The military standard in Saxony was in 1780, 178 cm. It is now 155. In Prussia it is 157. According to the statement of Dr. Meyer in the Bavarian Gazette, May 9th, 1862, the result of an average of 9 years is, that in Prussia out of 1000 conscripts 716 were unfit for military service, 317 because of deficiency in height, and 399 because of bodily defects...Berlin in 1858 could not provide its con- tingent of recruits; it was 156 men short." J. von Liebig: "Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agrikultur und Physiologic, 1863,' 7th Ed., vol. 1., pp. 117, 118.
1 The history of the Factory Act of 1850 will be found in the course of this chapter.
2 I only touch here and there on the period from the beginning of modern industry in England to 1845. For this period I refer the reader to " Die Lage der arbei- tenden Klasse in England, von Fried ich Engels, Leipzig, 1845." How completely Engels understood the nature of the capitalist mode of production is shown by the Factory Reports, Reports on Mines, &c, that have appeared since 1845, and how wonderfully he painted the circumstances in detail is seen on the most sui>erficial comparison of his work with the official reports of the Children's Employment Com- mission, published 18 to 10 years later (1863- 1867). '' hese deal especially with the branches of industry in which the Factory Acts had not, up to 186:^, been introduced, in fact are not yet introduced. Here, then, little or no alteration had been enforced, by authority, in the conditions painted by Engels. I borrow my examples chiefly from the free trade period after 1848, that age of paradise, of which the commercial travellers for the great firm of free trade, blatant as ignorant, tell such fabulous tales. For the rest England figures here in the foreground because she is the classic rejire- sentative of capitalist production, and she alone has a continuous set of official statistics of the things we are considering.
2 24 Capitalist Prodiution.
end of the half hour nominally allowed for breakfast, and 10 mirmtes at the beginning and end of the hour nominally allowed for dinner. He works for a quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) after 2 p.m. on Saturday. Thus his gain is — Before 6 a.m.,...15 minutes.
At breakfast time,...10 „ At dinner time,...20 „ 00 Five daj's — 300 minutes. On Saturday before 6 a.m...15 minutes.
At breakfast time,...10 „ 40 minutes.. Total weekly,...340 minutes.
Or 5 hours and 40 minutes weekly, which multiplied by 50 working weeks in the year (allowing two for holidays and occasional stoppages) is equal to 27 working days."^ "Five minutes a day's increased work, multiplied by weeks, are equal to two and a half days of produce in the year."^ " An additional hour a day gained by small instalments before 6 a.m., after 6 p.m., and at the beginning and end of the times nominally fixed for meals, is nearly equivalent to working 13 months in the year."^ Crises during which production is interrupted and the fac- tories work " short time," i.e.^ for only a part of the week, naturally do not affect the tendency to extend the working day. The less business there is, the more profit has to be made on the business done. The less time spent in work, the more of that time has to be turned into surplus labour-time.
1 Suggestions, &c. by Mr. L. Horner, Inspector of Factories, in: Factory Regula- tions Act. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 9th August, 1859, p.
2 E-epotts of the Inspector of Factories for the half year, October, 1856, p. 35.
The Working Day. 225 Thus the Factory Inspector's report on the period of the " It may seem inconsistent that there should be any over- working at a time when trade is so bad; but that very bad- ness leads to the transgression by unscrupulous men, they get the extra profit of it In the last half year, says Leonard Horner, 122 mills in my district have been given up; 143 were found standing," yet, overwork is continued beyond the legal hours.^ " For a great part of the time," says Mr. Howell, "owing to the depression of trade, many factories were altogether closed, and a still greater number were working short time. I continue, how- ever, to receive about the usual number of complaints that half, or three-quarters of an hour in the day, are snatched from the workers by encroaching upon the times professedly allowed for rest and refreshment."^ The same phenomenon was reproduced on a smaller scale during the frightful cotton-crisis from 1861 to 1865.^ " It is sometimes advanced by way of excuse, when persons are found at work in a factory, either at a meal hour, or at some illegal time, that they will not leave the mill at the appointed hour, and that compulsion is necessary to force them to cease work [cleaning their machinery, &c.], especially on Saturday afternoons. But, if the hands remain in a factory after the machinery has ceased to revolve...they would not have been so employed if sufiicient time had been set apart specially for cleaning, fee, either before 6 a.m. [sic.^] or before 2 p.m. on Saturday afternoons."'^ 3 Reports, &c. for the half year ending 30th April, 1861. See Appendix No. 2; Re- ports, &c., 31st October, 1862, p. 7, 52, 53. The violations of the Acts became more numerous during the last half year ].863. Cf. Reports, &c., ending 31st October, 4 Reports, &c., October 31st, 1860, p. 23. With what fanaticism, according to the evidence of manufacturers given in courts of law, their hands set themselves against every interruption in factory labour, the following curious circumstance shows. In the beginning of June, 1836, information reached the magistrates of Dewsbury (York- shire) that the owners of 8 large mills in the neighbourhood of Batley had violated the Factory Acts. Some of these gf ntlemen were accused of having kept at work 5 boys between 12 and 15 years of age, from 6 a.m. on Friday to 4 p.m. on the following Saturday, not allowing them any respite except for meals and one hour for sleep at midnight. And these children had to do this ceaseless labour of 30 hours in the 226 Capitalist Production.
" The profit to be gained by it (over-working in violation of the Act) appears to be, to many, a greater temptation than they can resist; they calculate upon the chance of not being found out; and v^^hen they see the small amount of penalty and costs, which those who have been convicted have had to pay, they find that if they should be detected there will still be a con- siderable balance of gain...} In cases where the additional time is gained by a multiplication of small thefts in the course of the day, there are insuperable difiiculties to the inspectors making out a case."^ These " small thefts " of capital from the labourer's meal and recreation time, the factory inspectors also designate as " petty pilferings of minutes,"^ " snatching a few minutes,'"* or, as the labourers technically called them, " nibbling and cribbling at meal times." ® It is evident that in this atmosphere the formation of surplus- value by surplus-labour, is no secret. " If you allow me," said a highly respectable master to me, " to work only ten minutes in the da}^ over-time, you put one thousand a" year in my pocket."^ " Moments are the elements of profit." ^ Nothing is from this point of view more characteristic than the designation of the workers who work full time as " full- timers," and the children under 13 who are only allowed to work 6 hours as " half-timers." The worker is here nothing more than perfconified labour-time. All individual distinctions are merged in those of "full-timers " and " half-timers."^ " shoddy-hole," as the hole is called, in which the woollen rags are pulled in pieces, and where a dense atmosphere of dust, shreds, &c., forces even the adult workman to cover his mouth continually with handkerchiefs for the protection of his lungs! The accused gentlemen affirm in lieu of taking an oath — as quakers they were too scrupu- lously religious to take an oath — that they had, in their great compassion for the unhappy children, allowed them four hours for sleep, but the obstinate cliildren absolutely would not go to bed. The quaker gentlemen were mulcted in £20. Dry- den anticipated these gentry: " Fox full fraught in seeming sanctity, That feared an oath, but like the devil would lie, That look'd like Lent, and had the holy leer, And durst not sin! before he said his prayer! " 8 This is the official expression both in the factories and in the reports.
The Working Day, 227 SECTION 3. — BRANCHES OF ENGLISH INDUSTRY WITHOUT LEGAL LIMITS TO EXPLOITATION.
We have hitherto considered the tendency to the extension of the working day, the were-wolf's hanger for surplus-labour in a department where the monstrous exactions, not surpassed, says an English bourgeois economist, by the cruelties of the Spaniards to the American red-skins,^ caused capital at last to be bound by the chains of legal regulations. Now, let us cast a glance at certain branches of production in which the exploita- tion of labour is either free from fetters to this day, or was so yesterda}^ Mr. Broughton Charlton, county magistrate, declared, as chairman of a meeting held at the Assembly Rooms, Nottingham, on the 14th January, 1860, "that there was an amount of privation and suffering among that portion of the population connected with the lace trade, unknown in other parts of the kingdom, indeed, in the civilized world...Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o'clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whiten- ing, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate We are rot surprised that Mr. Mallett, or any other manufacturer, should stand forward and protest against discussion The system, as the Rev. Montagu Valpy describes it, is one of unmitigated slavery, socially, physically, morally, and spiritually...What can be thought of a town which holds a public meeting to petition that the period of labour for men shall be diminished to eighteen hours a day? We declaim against the Virginian and Carolinian cotton-planters. Is their 1 " The cupidity of mill-owners whose cruelties in the pursuit of gain have hardly- been exceeded by those perpetrated by the Spaniards on the conquest of America in the pursuit of gold." John Wade, History of the Middle and Working Classes, 3rd Ed. London, 1835, p. 114. The theoretical part of this book, a kind of hand-book of Political Economy, is, considering the time of its publication, original in some parts, c.r/., on commercial crises. The historical part is, to a great extent, a shameless plagiarism of Sir F. M. Eden's ** History of the Poor," London, 1799, 2 28 Capitalist Production, black-market, their lash, and their barter of human flesh more detestable than this slow sacrifice of humanity which takes place in order that veils and collars may be fabricated for the benefit of capitalists? " ^ The potteries of Staffordshire have, during the last 22 years, been the subject of three parliamentary inquiries. The result is embodied in Mr. Scriven's Report of ]841 to the "Children's Employment Commissioners," in the leport of Dr. Greenhow of 1860 published by order of the medical officer of the Privy Council (Public Health, 3rd Report, 112-113), lastly, in the report of Mr. Longe of 1862 in the "First Report of the Children's Employment Commission, of the 13th June, 18G3." For my purpose it is enough to take, from the reports of 1860 and 1863, some depositions of the exploited children themselves. From the children we may form an opinion as to the adults, especially the girls and women, and that in a branch of industry by the side of which cotton-spinning appears an agreeable and healthful occupation. ^ William Wood, 9 years old, was 7 years and 10 months when he began to work. He " ran moulds " (carried ready-moulded articles into the drying room, afterwards bringing back tlie em];)ty mould) from the beginning. He came to work every day in the week at 6 a.m., and left off about 9 p.m. " I work till 9 o'clock at night six days in the week. I have done so seven or eight weeks." Fifteen hours of labour for a child 7 years old! J. Murray, 12 years of age, says: " I turn jigger, and run moulds. I come at 6. Sometimes I come at 4. I worked all night last night, till 6 o'clock this morning. I have not been in bed since the night before last. There were eight or nine other boys working last night. All but one have come this morning. I get 3 shillings and sixpence. I do not get any more for working at night. I worked two nights last week." Fern^^- hough, a boy of ten: " I have not always an hour (for dinner). I have only half an hour sometimes; on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday." ^ 2 Cf. F. Engels' Lage, etc., p. 249-51.
3 Children's Employment Commission. First report, etc., 1863. Evidence, p. 10, The Working Day, 229 Dr. Greenhow states that the average duration of life in the pottery districts of Stoke-on-Trent, and Wolstanton is ex- traordinarily short. Although in the district of Stoke, only 36'6% and in Wolstanton only 30-47o of the adult male population above 20 are employed in the potteries, among the men of that age in the first district more than half, in the second, nearly | of the whole deaths are the result of pulmonary diseases among the potters. Dr. Boothroyd, a medical practitioner at Hanley, says: " Each successive generation of potters is more dwarfed and less robust than the preceding one.'' In like manner another doctor, Mr. M'Bean: "Since he began to practise among the potters 25 years ago, he had observed a marked degeneration especially shown in diminution of stature and breadth." These statements are taken from the report of Dr. Greenhow in 1860.
From the report of the Commissioners in 1863, the following: Dr. J. T. Arledge, senior physician of the North Staffordshire Infirmary, says: " The potters as a class, both men and women, represent a degenerated population, both physically and morally. They are, as a rule, stunted in growth, ill-shaped, and frequently ill-formed in the chest; they become prematurely old, and are certainly short-lived; they are phlegmatic and bloodless, and exhibit their debility of constitution by obstinate attacks of dyspepsia, and disorders of the liver and kidneys, and by i-heumatism. But of all diseases they are especially prone to chest-disease, to pneumonia, phthisis, bronchitis, and asthma. One form would appear peculiar to them, and is known as potter's asthma, or potter's consumption. Scrofula attacking the glands, or bones, or other parts of the body, is a disease of two-thirds or more of the potters That the ' degenerescence ' of the population of this district is not even greater than it is, is due to the constant recruiting from the adjacent country, and intermarriages with more healthy races." ^ Mr. Charles Parsons, late house surgeon of the same institution, writes in a letter to Commissioner Longe, amongst other things: " I can only speak from personal observation and not from 2 ChUd. Emnl. Comra. I. Report, p. 24.
230 Capitalist Production.
statistical data, but I do not hesitate to assert that my indigna- tion has been aroused again and again at the sight of poor children whose health has been sacrificed to gratify the avarice of either parents or employers." He enumerates the causes of tlie diseases of the potters, and sums them up in the phrase, " long hours." The report of the Commission trusts that '* a manufacture which has assumed so prominent a place in the whole world, will not long be subject to the remark that its great success is accompanied with the physical deterioration, wide-spread bodily suffering, and early death of the workpeople .. by whose labour and skill such great results have been achieved." ^ And all that holds of the potteries in England is true of those in Scotland.
The manufacture of lucifer matches dates from 1833, from the discovery of the method of applying phosphorus to the match itself. Since 1845 this manufacture has rapidly devel- oped in England, and has extended especially amongst the thickly populated parts of London as well as in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Norwich, Newcastle and Glas- gow. With it has spread the form of lockjaw, which a Vienna physician in 1845 discovered to be a disease peculiar to lucifer-matchmakers. Half the workers are children under thirteen, and young persons under eighteen. The manufacture is on account of its unhealthiness and unpleasantness in such bad odour that only the most miserable part of the labouring class, half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it, " the ragged, half-starved, untaught children."-^ Of the witnesses that Commissioner White examined (1863), 270 were under 18, 50 under 10, 10 only 8, and 5 only 6 years old. A range of the working day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night-labour, irregular meal times, meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are pestilent with phos- phorus. Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed in this manufacture.
In the manufacture of paper-hangings the coarser sorts are printed by machine; the finer by hand (block-printing). Thft 1 Children's Employment Commission, p. 22, and xi.
The Working Day. 231 most active business months are from the beginning of October to the end of i.pril. During this time the work goes on fast and furious without intermission from G a.m. to 10 p.m. or further into the night.
J. Leach deposes: " Last winter six out of nineteen girls were away from ill-health at one time from over- work. I have to bawl at them to keep them awake," W. Duify: " I have seen when the children could none of them keep their eyes open for the work; indeed, none of us could." J. Lightbourne: " Am 13...We worked last winter till 9 (evening), and the winter before till 10. I used to cry with sore feet every night last winter. G. Apsden: " That boy of mine...when he was 7 years old I used to carry him on my back to and fro through the snow, and he used to have 16 hours a day...I have often knelt down to feed him as he stood by the machine, for he could not leave it or stop." Smith, the managing partner of a Manchester factory: " We (he means his " hands " who work for " us ") work on, with no stoppage for meals, so that the day's work of lOJ hours is finished by 4.30. p.m., and all after that is overtime." ^ (Does this Mr. Smith take no meals himself during 10\ hours? ) *' We (this same Smith) sel- dom leave off working before 6 p.m. (he means leave off the consumption of 'our' labour-power machines), so that we (iterum Crispinus) are really working overtime the whole year round For all these, children and adults alike (152 children and young persons and 140 adults), the average work for the last 18 months has been at the very least 7 days, 5 hours, or 78i hours a week. For the six weeks ending May 2nd this year (1862), the average was higher — 8 days or 84 hours a week." Still this same Mr. Smith, who is so extremel}^ devoted to the pluralis majestatis, adds with a smile, " Machine work is not great." So the employers in the block- printing 1 This is not to be taken in the same sense as our surplus-labour time. These gentlemen consider 10| hours of labour as the normal working day, which includes of course the normal surplus-labour. After this begins " overtime " which is paid a little better. It will be seen later that the labour expended during the so-called normal day is paid below its value, so that the overtime is simply a capitalist trick in order to extort more surplus-labour, which it would still be, even if the labour- power expended during the normal working day were properly paid.
232 Capitalist Production, say: ' Hand labour is more healthy than machine- work." On the whole, manufacturers declare with indignation against the proposal " to stop the machines at least during meal times.' A clause, says Mr. Otley, manager of a wall-paper factory in the Borough, '* which allowed work between, say 6 a.m. and 9 p.m...would suit us (!) very well, but the factory hours, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., are not suitable. Our machine i3 always stopped for dinner. (What generosity 1) There is no waste of paper and colour to speak of. But," he adds sympatheti- cally, " I can understand the loss of time not being liked/ The report of the Commission opines with naivete that the fear of some " leading firms " of losing time, i.e., the time for appropriating the labour of others, and thence losing profit is not a sufiicient reason for allowing children under 13, and 3'oung persons under 18, working 12 to 16 hours per day, to lose their dinner, nor for giving it to them as coal and water are supplied to the steam-engine, soap to wool, oil to the wheel — as merely auxiliary material to the instruments of labour, during the process of production itself.^ No branch of industry in England (we do not take into account the making of bread by machinery recently intro- duced) has preserved up to the present day a method of pro- duction so archaic, so — as we see from the poets of the Roman Empire — pre-christian, as baking. But capital, as was said earlier, is at first indifferent as to the technical character of the labour-process; it begins by taking it just as it finds it.
The incredible adulteration of bread, especially in London, was first revealed by the House of Commons Committee " on the adulteration of articles of food " (1855-56), and Dr. Hassall's work, " Adulterations detected." ^ The consequence of these revelations was the Act of August 6th, 1860, " for preventing the adulteration of articles of food and drink," an inoperative law, as it naturally shows the tenderest consider- ation for every free-trader who determines by the buying or selling of adulterated commodities " to turn an honest penny."
2 Alum finely powdered, or mixed with salt, is a normal article of commerce bear ing the significant name of ' ' bakers' stuff. " 3 Soot is a well-known and very energetic form of carbon, and forms a manure The Working Day, 233 The Committee itself formulated more or less naively its con- viction that free-trade meant essentially trade with adulter- ated, or as the English ingeniously put it, " sophisticated" goods. In fact this kind of sophistry knows better than Protagoras how to make white black, and black white, and better than the Eleatics how to demonstrate ad oculos that everything is only appearance.^ At all events the committee had directed the attention of the public to its " daily bread," and therefore to the baking trade. At the same time in public meetings and in petitions to Parliament rose the cry of the London journeymen bakers against their over-work, &;c. The cry was so urgent that Mr. H. S. Tremenheere, also a member of the Commission of 1863 several times mentioned, was appointed Royal Commissioner of Inquiry. His report,^ together with the evidence given, roused not the heart of the public but its stomach. English- men, always well up in the Bible, knew well enough that man, unless by elective grace a capitalist, or landlord, or sinecurist, is commanded to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, but they did not know that he had to eat daily in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abcesses, cobwebs, dead black-beetles, and putrid German yeast, without counting alum, sand, and other agreeable mineral in- gredients. Without any regard to his holiness, Freetrade, the free baking-trade was therefore placed under the supervision that capitalistic chimney-sweeps sell to English farmers. Now in 1862 the British juryman had in a law-suit to decide whether soot, with which, unknown to the buyer, 90 % of dust and sand are mixed, is genuine soot in the commercial sense or adulter- ated soot in the legal sense. The " amis du commerce " decided it to be genuine commercial soot, and non-suited the plaintiff farmer, who had in addition to j)ay the costs of the suit.
1 The French 'chemist, Chevallier, in his treatise on the "sophistications" of commodities, enumerates for many of the 600 or more articles which he passes in review, 10, 20, 30 different methods of adulteration. He adds that he does not know all the methods, and does not mention all that he knows. He gives 6 kinds of adulteration of sugar, 9 of olive oil, 10 of butter, 12 of salt, 19 of milk, 20 of bread, 23 of brandy, 24 of meal, 28 of chocolate, 30 of wine, 32 of coffee, etc. Even God Almighty does not escape this fate. See Ronard de Card, on the falsifications of the materials of the Sacrament. (De la falsification des substances sacramentelles, " Report, &c., relating to the grievances complained of by the journeymen bakers, &c., London, 1862,^' and " Second Report, &c., London, 1863."
234 Capitalist Production.
of the State inspectors (Close of the Parliamentary session of 1863), and by the same Act of Parliament, work from 9 in the evening to 5 in the morning was forbidden for journeymen bakers nnder 18. The last clause speaks volumes as to the over- work in this old-fashioned, homely line of business, " The work of a London journeyman baker begins, as a rule, at about eleven at night. At that hour he * makes the dough,' — a laborious process, which lasts from half-an-hour to three quarters of an hour, according to the size of the batch or the labour bestowed upon it. He then lies down upon the knead- ing-board, which is also the covering of the trough in which the dough is ' made; ' and with a sack under him, and another rolled up as a pillow, he sleeps for about a couple of hours. He is then engaged in a rapid and continuous labour for about five hours — throwinor out the dough, ' scalino: it off,' mouldinor it, putting it into the oven, preparing and baking rolls and fancy bread, taking the batch bread out of the oven, and up into the shop, fcc, &c. The temperature of a bakehouse ranges from about 75 to upwards of 90 degrees, and in the smaller bakehouses approximates usually to the higher rather than to the lower degree of heat. When the business of making the bread, rolls, fee, is over, that of its distribution begins, and a considerable proportion of the journeymen in the trade, after working hard in the manner described during the night, are upon their legs for many hours during the day, carrying baskets,