Introduction

This chapter analyses a number of aspects of labour during the period. It takes the deployment of the labour resource as a significant determinant of economic importance, and applies this measure to the economy of Manchester, illustrating how the different deployment of labour reflected the changing economic role of the town during the period. Changes in the nature of labour, and the experience of skilled and manual workers, arising from the transformation of the economy in Manchester and its region are shown, and the inherent flexibility of the labour market and of labourers' practices are shown to be one of the features that allowed the economic changes to take place. Finally the culture of work is discussed, and the responses of the working poor to the major changes of the period are shown, especially in the realm of conflict with employers of labour, which became a crucial element of the mode of working in the new urban industrialised economy.

The Changing Occupational Structure

This section demonstrates the importance of textile and related industries to the economy of Manchester during the period. The chronological pattern of changes to the occupational structure also suggest the impact of innovation on the town. No similar study has been made of Manchester's occupational structure during the period, although Wadsworth and Mann undertook a similar exercise in abstracting the number of persons engaged in different trades listed in the 1773 and 1781 trade directories for the town. [1] They did not, however, include non-textile trades in their figures, and therefore did not show the proportionate importance of textiles in the town's trading system. This section illustrates a very clear pattern.

A traditional economic historical method of determining the relative economic importance of different industries within a town or village is to use a proxy for an occupational structure. Such a proxy is used because it is rare that a comprehensive listing of the whole of a town or village's inhabitants' occupations exists. One of the most easily used proxies, for English local history, is provided by the Church of England parish register, which often, from the mid-seventeenth centuries onwards, lists the occupation of male grooms, or fathers of baptised children. [2]

Table 5.1 shows the different significant industries in the town and the percentages of grooms marrying at Manchester Parish Church, at various dates, following each occupation. The figures are used as a proxy to show the changes which took place in the economy. The limitations of such figures must be acknowledged: they completely ignore the work of women and children, which was significant and will be discussed later, and miss the gender dimension which was particularly important during the end of the period under study, when the expansion of the industry had a distinct gender impact, they are also probably age-biased, tending to under-represent older men, who would probably have married in their twenties.

The figures do however, show a series of trends, which can be referenced to the innovation of the industrial processes described in previous chapters. In the first four of the time periods tabled below, there are virtually no (male) spinners at all. Spinning was overwhelmingly, as contemporaries acknowledged, a task for women and children. By 1790, spinning employed over 9% of (probably young) grooms, falling to 7% by the end of the decade. This transition can only be explained in terms of the commencement of the factory spinning of cotton in Manchester. Likewise with weaving, a third of grooms in the period 1754-7, were weavers. Weaving was therefore the single largest employer of male labour in the town in the mid-century. This remained relatively constant until around 1770, when the proportion of grooms employed as weavers fell to 20%, below which it remained for perhaps two and a half decades, recovering slightly to 24% by 1799. Calenderers, very much a minority occupation throughout the period, when compared with spinning or weaving, after a brief increase in the figures for 1770, fell below their 1754-7 level of 2.2% and remained constant at around 1.6% then after. There is some suggestion (see Table 2.1 in The Manchester Region), that there was a brief expansion of the fustian industry, of which calendering was a finishing process, during the 1770s and 1780s, after which it was eclipsed, but not destroyed, by the growth of the pure cotton industry.

SECTOR	1754-7	1765-6	1770.00	1780.00	1790.00	1799.00
Textiles
Spinners	0.20	0.00	0.00	0.00	9.20	7.20
Warpers	1.60	2.00	1.60	1.60	0.00	1.60
Weavers	33.30	29.10	20.40	16.20	18.20	24.00
Dressers	0.80	1.20	1.60	2.90	3.20	0.40
Bleachers	0.00	1.20	0.80	0.40	0.40	0.00
Dyers	2.00	0.40	2.00	2.40	2.80	2.80
Cutters	1.60	0.80	3.20	2.50	3.20	2.00
Calenderers	2.20	2.00	2.80	1.70	1.60	1.60
Shearers	1.00	0.40	0.40	0.40	0.40	0.00
Other	2.20	1.60	2.00	5.30	6.40	6.40
Distribution	7.00	7.60	6.80	7.10	4.40	2.90
Total Textiles	51.90	46.30	41.60	40.50	49.80	48.90
Clothing	13.00	12.80	12.40	9.70	10.00	9.60
Building	5.20	9.60	10.00	6.00	12.40	1.60
Agric & Food	7.60	9.60	10.00	8.00	7.60	12.00
Soldiers	1.60	3.60	8.00	11.80	1.20	5.60
Other	20.70	18.10	18.00	24.00	19.00	22.30

 Table 5.1. Occupations of Grooms Married at Manchester Cathedral (percentages) [3]

 The table shows that throughout the period, the different branches of the textile industries employed between forty and fifty per cent of grooms in the town of Manchester. Wadsworth and Mann have suggested that "It is highly probably that with the increasing variety of the finishing processes and the expansion of the markets, the Manchester manufacturers tended to become more dealers and merchants than direct employers..." [4] Table 5.1 would tend to confirm this supposition, there being a drop in the percentage of grooms recorded as weavers from 33% in the  mid 1750s, to 16% in 1780, at the end of the authors' period. However, there was an increase in weaving grooms to 24% in 1799, and the introduction of a new class of male manufacturer- the machine spinner. This suggests a resurgence of the importance of the Manchester manufacturer as an employer of labour, after a period of decline.

 The table shows the importance of the textile industry to male employment throughout the period. It also shows the significance of the clothing industry comprising tailors, shoemakers and hatters, the latter using the large quantities of felt produced in the town and in the surrounding countryside. There was a relatively large number of soldiers in the town during the latter part of the period, perhaps as a consequence of the industrial unrest and factory burning which occurred in late 1779, and the French Wars of the 1790s. The erratic percentage of persons employed in the building trade suggests intermittent growth in the town.

 Williamson, taking aggregate data for the whole country, has suggested that "manufacturing was hardly the leading sector driving non-agricultural employment growth during the French Wars... employment growth in manufacturing was a bit below that of services and far below that of mining." [5] The evidence of the occupational structure shown above very clearly attributes Manchester's growth to the growing textile industry: where there was an absolute increase in the numbers employed, as well as a slight relative fall in percentage terms. There was a slight increase in the percentage of men employed in agriculture and food-related occupations, as a result of Manchester's growing importance as a market-centre for both textile products and non-textile goods, such as food.

 One of the weaknesses of  Table 5.1 is that it relates solely to the employment of men (and predominantly young men as well). The surviving evidence for women's "market" employment does not yield to the easy quantification of the marriage registers. Some historians have asserted that industrialisation generated a far greater rigidity in the sexual division of labour: "Technological change brought with it a clearer division of labour between women and men: such a division had always existed within the family... Now the line between 'men's work' and 'women's work' was to be much more sharply drawn, in the home, the workshop and the factory." [6] However, in the Manchester of the turn of the century, certainly in the textile industry, and also in business proprietorship, women had work opportunities which had not been open to them earlier in the century, and which were not open to women of their daughters' generation. There was therefore a wider window of opportunity towards the end of the period- not as great as that open to men- but it was a window which had largely closed by the opening of the Victorian era.

 Women and Work

 This section looks at the role of women in the labour force during the period. It stresses the enormous difficulties of quantification which result in a full assessment of women's involvement in the formal world of work being, if not impossible, then not comparable with the assessment which can be made of that of men. It also shows the importance of women's proprietorship during the period, and raises the question of there having been a network of employment and consumption which, during the closing years of the eighteenth century could briefly have constituted a "women's economy".

 The initial innovation of the factory primarily provided job opportunities for women: throughout the period the textile factory existed to spin yarn, and women had been the traditional spinners in the proto-industrial economy. It was therefore natural that the factory labour force should be largely female. During the factory burning months in 1779, a gentleman warned irate weavers against attacking Arkwright's Cromford factory, claiming that "6000 Men, Miners &c can at any Time be assembled in less than an Hour... [to defend the factory] by which many hundreds of their Wives and Children get a decent and comfortable Livelihood." [7]

 By the 1790s, many men had become industrial mule spinners, and had established their trades unions, making up perhaps 9% of the young male workforce of the town, but women continued to be employed in the spinning factories, especially those on the semi-rural parts of the Manchester region. In 1797, Oldknow announced of his Mellor factory, that "it is my intention gradually to increase my Establishment of Female Apprentices from 50 to 100", and sought "Healthy and good looking girls" to achieve this objective. [8] Women had also been involved in weaving from the early part of the period. A woman was mugged and robbed "of the Money which she had receiv'd for weaving a Piece of Check, and the Warp of a new one, which she was carrying home to weave." [9] By the end of the period, there were many women weavers. In 1803, a Bolton weaver opined "The women's talent is equal to the men's when the work is not too heavy; we have some women whose talent is equal to any man's in the middle kind of work." [10] Another Bolton weaver, when asked how many cotton worker there were in the county, declared that "there are, perhaps, as many Females as Males in some Parts." [11]  By the end of the period, therefore, the gender division of labour was far from resolved and certain: both women and men were engaged in the two main processes in textile production.

 The problem of quantification remains: it is impossible to determine with any numerical certainty just how many women were involved in these processes. However, there are quantifiable series of data relating to women's proprietorship available for the period, from the trade directories, comparable to those data used by Wadsworth and Mann for traders as a whole. [12]

Occupation	1772.00	1788.00	1800.00
black working	2.00	8.00	4.00
clear starching	0.00	1.00	12.00
flour dealing	0.00	3.00	36.00
fustian working	2.00	6.00	14.00
grocery	6.00	2.00	4.00
linen drapery	4.00	11.00	7.00
mantua making	4.00	11.00	29.00
millinery	4.00	20.00	24.00
school teaching	3.00	6.00	29.00
tea dealing	2.00	12.00	4.00
victualling	11.00	0.00	28.00
other	38.00	80.00	191.00
Total	71.00	156.00	316.00

 

 Table 5.2. Businesses of Women Proprietors. Manchester 1772-1800 [13]

 The most conspicuous feature of the table is the diversity of businesses of which women were proprietors. In each of the three years, between fifty and sixty per cent of the businesses did not fall into one of the major groups separately listed above. Some of the businesses could be regarded as the specialisation and sale of traditional, "female", domestic skills in the market place: the clear-starching, school teaching and victualling businesses falling into this category. Some widows took over the businesses of their husbands, especially in retail trades. In 1790 Alice Wilson took over the business of her late husband Thomas, a woollen draper. [14] Such businesses could also be enduring: in April 1790, Ann Birch took over the calendering business of her late husband, and the business was listed in the Manchester directory of 1800. [15]

 It may be rash to write of Manchester having a distinct "women's economy" during the period, but the above table does suggest that the some of the main areas of women's proprietorial involvement were those activities where the likely purchaser would be female: clear-starching, flour dealing, grocery, mantua making and millinery, (girls') schooling, and tea dealing (the consumption of tea having been a distinctly feminine activity). To some extent, consumption and sale may have developed a "gendered dimension" during the 1790s.

 This section has shown the difficulty of assessing the nature and concentration of women's employment in the same terms as men's during the period. It has also shown the diversity of women's employment during the period, and the increased opportunity for women to have extra-mural remunerated employment, which may have increased their independence. The growing significance of female proprietors in the later decades of the eighteenth century has also been illustrated.

 The Changing Nature of Labour

 This section describes the nature of labour as it was conducted in and around Manchester during the period. The geographical mobility of workers and mutability of labour and occupations are demonstrated, and the importance of kinship in both securing employment and in providing a supportive household network when such employment was commenced is shown. This section shows that there was a fluid labour force, both geographically and occupationally, and that this fluidity predates the classical industrial revolution, at least within the geographical confines of the study. These characteristics are in contrast to those found in some other proto-industrial areas.

 There are a number of key features of labour during the period which stand out, particularly in comparison with the experience of other regions. Writing of late eighteenth century Upper Normandy, like Manchester a classic proto-industrial region, Gullickson found that "most children, both daughters and sons, remained at home until they married". [16] In the Manchester region there appears to have been a substantial amount of premarital geographical mobility, although such mobility was often within a relatively confined area. [17] The initial departure from the family home was usually to commence an apprenticeship. Apprenticeships usually began when a child was in the age range 11 to 16.

 The children of those who were burdensome on the poor rates were often apprenticed by the overseers of the poor. Simonton argues that "Parish apprentices were more prevalent in poorer trades, such as cordwaining and weaving, than in prosperous ones, which lends weight to [the argument about] their being cheap supplementary labour instead of receiving meaningful training." [18] In the Manchester region, overseers from a number of parishes predominantly apprenticed boys to weavers, but by the middle of the period in question (say 1775) probably half the young adult males in the region were weavers: there is therefore no reason to suggest that pauper apprentices were disadvantaged in comparison to "private" apprentices from the same social strata as themselves, indeed they may have been at an advantage because the parish paid the apprenticeship premium, which Simonton sees as a means by which the parish could end their relationship and responsibility towards the apprentice, but which was a common feature of the apprenticeship system. In Blackburn the apprenticeship premium varied over time and according to the trade to be taught, but never appears to have been in excess of £10. [19] Even a modest premium of £2 would put an enormous burden on a poor family, the weekly earnings of which were unlikely to be much in excess of 22s.

 Apprenticeship often involved residing with the master. Kussmaul has described apprenticeship and service as "early modern institutional conveyors, moving people from their place of birth to new parishes, and from parish of employment to another". [20] It also involved being subjected to the in loco parentis authority of the master and mistress, which was bolstered by the legal form of the apprenticeship indenture which often required "Ale-houses, Taverns or evil Company he shall not frequent unless it be about his Masters Business thereto be done. Fornication or Adultery he shall not commit, nor Matrimony contract during the said Term." [21] Not withstanding the latter prohibition, during Stephen Hitchen's apprenticeship "he had connection with Joanna Ellis a young woman who lived in the same Family [the family of his master] with him and who happening to be with child his Master persuaded this examinant to Marry her..." [22] In the mid 1790s Robert Aspden apprenticed himself to a firm of calico printers, and lived with his father for the first two years of his apprenticeship, and John Cottam, after becoming an apprentice to the calico printing firm of the Peels of Blackburn, "boarded with several different families in the Townships of Clayton le Moors, Rishton, Accrington and Church." [23] Even for apprenticeships to the more middling occupations "living out" became increasingly important "An Apprentice Wanted To a Silk Manufacturer in Manchester... out of a respectable Family, with which (or some other Friend), he must board during his Term, which is to be considered as Part of the Premium." [24] For the women who were apprenticed, "living in" was more likely because even when apprenticed to a "conventional" trade, they were expected to combine this with household duties: in 1769, Anne Ashton was apprenticed "to be Taught or Instructed in the Trade or Occupation of a Cotton Spinster and housewifery." [25]

Apprenticeships could be terminated for a number of reasons, the most common of which was probably mutual agreement. After apprenticeships concluded apprentices sometimes spent some time working as journeymen for their old masters, but often became journeymen for others, usually moving out of their old master's home. It was common, during this phase of working life, to live in the houses of kin and pay for board. Ralph Almond lived in his brother's house for most of a year "weaving and paying for his Board". [26] In the proto-industrial household, therefore, not everyone was a member of an integrated household production unit: members could act independently in the market, rather than support the activities of the head of the household. Richard Clarke learned to weave in the 1760s at the house of his uncle, initially without wages. [27] It was also common to live with a master, and receive board as part of the wage.

 Marriage was the time after which most couples set up home for themselves. John Tomlinson rented a cottage near Blackburn for 35s per year after he got married, Ralph Almond also took a cottage just before he married, his widowed mother moving with him, Peter Haworth took a farm with his wife when they married in 1755. [28]

The second feature of labour during the period was its occupational mobility. To some extent there was a "labour life cycle", whereby with effort and initiative it was possible to move up what amounted to a proto-"career ladder". James Holcroft of Bolton worked as a weaver for 15 years, before becoming a warehouseman. [29] Bamford became a warehouseman in a far shorter period of time. Radcliffe ascended even higher in the occupational hierarchy by becoming a master at the age of 24, with the savings he had made as a journeyman. [30]

 Other people however, abandoned the trade to which they had been apprenticed. Robert Starkie, who had served an apprenticeship as a weaver, enlisted as a soldier in 1773, and there was an enlistment frenzy in the 1790s, when the French wars made the continental markets almost inaccessible. [31] John Tomlinson was taught weaving by his uncle, and made his living by it for some years, but he made an agreement to work for a carpenter for a year who was "to find and provide for him... meat Drink washing and Lodging and instruct him in the Trade of a carpenter." Richard Clarke had also been taught weaving by his uncle, but by the time of his examination he had become a gardener.

 There was also a fundamental difference in the labour of weavers and that of spinners. The emphasis on discipline on the part of the early factory masters such as Oldknow was a consequence of this difference. The organisers of the weaving process bought labour, and paid for it according to the number of pieces, of a pre-determined length and quality, or paid commission to intermediate manufacturers on the same basis. The factory masters, however, did not buy according to the piece, but they bought a general right over labour between certain times, and it was in their economic interests to both maximise the output of that labour and the concomitant productivity of their fixed capital investment.

 This section has illustrated the considerable mobility of labour within the Manchester region. This mobility was both geographic, whereby young man and women were willing to travel (albeit frequently within the region, rather than outside it) in order to take up apprenticeships or fixed term employment, and also occupational, whereby individuals would undertake a variety of different employments during the course of their lives, even to the extent of moving into and out of notionally skilled work, such as weaving. This mobility was, however, likely to be curtailed somewhat at marriage, when household formation often commenced and couples usually rented a place to live.

 The Wage and its Form

 Various efforts have been made to analyse both the absolute value of and changes in textile employees' wages during and after the period: Baines tabled wages of textile employees, but focused on the period after 1800, central to Chapman's study was a consideration of wages, but his interest focused on the 1890s and the opening years of the twentieth century. The table below is based largely on published material, but as a table it is original.

 Details of wages paid in Manchester for textile and other employments during the course of the late eighteenth century are fragmentary. Table 5.3 collates available evidence.

 

DATE	WAGE	JOB	COMMENTS	SOURCE
1756.00	1s 6d	smallware weaver	Manchester	Shuttle
1779.00	10s - 16s	sail canvas weaver	Warrington	HMM 1421
1779.00	4s	sail canvas weaver (boy)	Warrington	HMM 1421
1786.00	13s 11d	weaver (1 loom)	Mellor	MF 731
1786.00	48s 4d	weaver (4 looms)	Mellor	MF 731
1794.00	7s 1d	weaver (1 loom)	Mellor	MF 731
1794.00	23s 6d	weaver (4 looms)	Mellor	MF 731
1780.00	2s - 2s 6d	female (hand) spinner		Case of Poor Cotton Spinners
1790.00	25s - 50s	calico printer		HMM 2041
1793.00	10s	weaver	Bolton	H of C (1808)
1795.00	20s - 30s	mule spinners		HMM 2298
1795.00	9s - 12s	labourer	Standish	Aikin
1795.00	18s - 24s	adult	Royton	Aikin
1795.00	16s - 17s	women spinners	Royton	Aikin
1797.00	16s	manufacturing worker	Manchester	Eden
1797.00	£1 1s - £2	cotton printers	Manchester	Eden
1797.00	6s - 12s	women	Manchester	Eden
1797.00	12s - 15s	common labourers	Manchester	Eden
1803.00	15s	weaver (hard work)	Bolton	H of C (1803)
1803.00	12s (less)	fustian &c weavers	Bolton	H of C (1803)
1806.00	£1 8s 3.5d	calico printer		Calico Printer Comb pamph
- All day rates are given as weekly values. It is assumed that weekly rates can be determined by calculating six days' work.
- Because of the trade depression arising from the outbreak of war with France, weavers in Bolton were only allowed to do enough work to earn 10s per week.

 

Table 5.3. Wages in Late Eighteenth Century Manchester

 The following features stand out: the pay of women was less than that of men, there was a distinct "hierarchy of remuneration", and that even amongst men, money wage differentials between different trades could be significant. Weavers were paid more than common labourers throughout the period, the new trade of mule spinning was well paid, at least during the mid-1790s, but the best paid trade was that of printing, a trade of considerable significance in encouraging the concentration of textile production in the Manchester region.

 There are numerous problems with the data presented above, which renders its value highly questionable: the chronological coverage is patchy, it is compiled from a number of quite disparate sources, some of the wages are given as day rates and others as weekly rates. The nature of the wage itself was not necessarily time-based.

 It was not uncommon for a weaver to contract with an employer to weave a particular pattern for a particular period of time. James Draper, a Bolton weaver, agreed to weave a particular pattern for his employer for a year in 1802. [32] In weaving, the "wage" was paid according to the piece. [33] The payment of piece rates did not only apply to weavers. In the 1780s Henry Bamber worked as a printer for Daniel Burton a Manchester printer, and was paid 6d -9d per colour printed. [34] However, masters could sometimes effectively renege on their promises. leaving weavers with only the uncertainty of recourse to law. In 1803, a warehouseman said "the Manufacturer will reduce the Wages although the Work is worked in a good and workmanlike Manner, upon some Pretence, either of Hamburgh being taken, or that such a Person has failed, which makes it necessary to reduce the Wages; or that the Markets are so low, the Master cannot give what he promised." [35]

The piece rate paid to the weaver did not solely represent the weaver's income on the transaction. The weaver was often as much of a subcontractor in the production process as was his master. In the early eighteenth century it is probable that weavers arranged for yarn to be bought direct from spinners, and would weave on their own account, and sell their finished cloth to whoever would pay the price they required. By the 1750s it is likely that the manufacturers contracted with the spinners direct, and put out yarn to be woven by the piece, however the weaver had to arrange for other processes, and other expenses to be incurred in order to allow the completion of the weaving. In 1808, a Bolton weaver explained these additional costs "We always paid one fourth for winding, dressing, and implements necessary; besides that, we have candles to find, which cost us one shilling a cut [a 24 yard piece of cloth]... we have looming, and oil and tallow, which cost us about 10d per cut." [36] Some weavers may have some of these operations performed by family members and therefore not incur a extra-household monetary payment, but would still have to pay for consumables such as candles.

 It was not uncommon, especially in the semi-rural parts of the Manchester region for the weaver to lodge with his employer, and in these cases the wage might include board and lodging, or the wage might include board, but the employee had to provide for his own meat and laundry.

 This section has endeavoured to quantify wages paid in the Manchester region during the period, but illustrates the shortcomings of the evidence. There are relatively few references to money wages paid to textile employees (at least within the town of Manchester), wages were not necessarily time-based (even after the advent of the factory they could be piece-based), and a physical handover of cash may only have been a part of the payment of wages: board, food, or the right to take "waste" were all elements of the wage in the experience of some trades.

 The Culture of Manual Workers

 The labouring classes themselves continued to strive to maintain some control over the organisation of work. By about 1790, resistance to the factory system per se, as manifested by the mass burning of factories, and threats of violence against their innovators, had been abandoned as a tactic, and this suggests that the factory system had been accepted by the labouring classes. [37] Ogden dates this acceptance to around the year 1780, and to the publication of a local gentleman, Dorning Rasbotham, who explained the benefits of machinery to the labouring classes. It is likely that mass acceptance took place some time during the 1780s, because the debate about machinery and the factory was very much alive in 1780, and evidenced by the publication of anti-machine pamphlets, and by the burning down of factories.

 In the 1790s, the locus of conflict shifted from the introduction of a factory system, to control over aspects of its organisation. "The struggle between labour and capital often took the form of conflict between capitalist attempts at subordination and labour's cherished independence."[38] A comparison of the organisation of the old artisanal production system upon which worsted smallware manufacture was conducted, with that of the new factory-based machine spinning of cotton will highlight the conflict.

 One of the conspicuous features of smallware weaving, as revealed in a contemporary rule book, [39] was pride in the "beautiful and beneficial Branch of Business", which took a seven year apprenticeship to learn. Hobsbawm's view of the artisan status and pride was that "From the men's point of view it represented the qualitative superiority of the skill so learned - the professionalism of craftsmanship- and simultaneously of its status and rewards."