3. “Labor’s Bitter Struggle”

IN THIS chapter I shall challenge some of the hardier myths that shroud the history of the strike threat.

The gradual increase in average real earnings that has been almost continuously enjoyed by the laboring, artisan, and white-collar classes over the last two centuries has never been the result of growing merit on their part. Nor can improvement in the average material condition of the people be attributed to any special changes in governmental power and policy over time (although governments naturally like to claim the credit). Still less can the rise in real working-class income per head be claimed to be the result of successful labor union activity which has redistributed income in favor of “the workers” and at the expense of investors. For one thing, those “unprotected,” although often driven by “the standard rate” and union exclusiveness into relatively lower-paid occupations, have otherwise benefited more or less proportionately (see pp. 21-22, 245-247).

The improving real income of the wage-earning and salaried classes has been the consequence of (a) what I shall be calling the “economizing displacement” process, namely, managerial, technological and scientific ingenuities which have progressively displaced labor and assets from their existing employments, thereby releasing effort and resources for providing additional—usually different—outputs, and (b) thrift—the net accumulation of output-yielding assets—resources which magnify the real yield to human effort.

Society has learned how to replace and accumulate assets in an increasingly efficient form, and how to use the services of people in an increasingly efficient manner. The phrase “increasingly efficient” refers to (a) the composition of replacement and accumulation of assets, and (b) the organization of labor, both occurring increasingly in economizing-displacement forms. The achievement of given outputs with fewer workers, and with assets of reduced real value, is continuously rendering workers redundant in their existing occupations and specializations, and rendering assets obsolescent or obsolete in their existing form. This process is the most progressive dynamic force in economic activity because, in releasing a proportion of people and assets from their existing occupations, it leaves them available for the production of additional real income. In the absence of governmental or private restraints on the utilization of the displaced productive power, it adds to the source of demands in general and, in turn, raises the real values at which employment outlets can be profitably offered. More productive use of labor, with a consequent rise in its real earning power, has resulted since the industrial revolution partly through improved arrangements or incentives for investment in human capital and, more important, through providing people with complementary assets and managerial direction that multiply the yield to the people’s innate and developed abilities. This has been possible in most of cases only by overcoming inertias and contrivances that have tended to shut off access to wage-multiplying assets and economizing procedures.

Now unless the almost phenomenal rise of working-class affluence in the western world is recognized as having resulted because of this influence, the material progress experienced can easily lead to the naive inference that it must have been due mainly (or in part) to “a long and bitter struggle” manifested in a growing use of the strike threat. For instance, throughout the last century, the United States experienced a movement of workers from jobs offering relatively low real incomes to jobs of greater productivity and hence higher real incomes. There has been a movement of wage earners away from agriculture to urban and industrial pursuits; a movement from domestic service, including the domestic service of unpaid housewives, to industrial and commercial employments, a general movement from “unskilled” to “semiskilled” jobs and from “semiskilled” to “skilled” occupations, and so forth. The dynamic forces which have overcome the inertias and barriers to mobility in such adjustments are all consequences of the economizing-displacement process, and that has been due to entrepreneurial enterprise and acumen allied with technological progress and thrift. A rapidly accumulating stock of assets is the chief physical manifestation of the development.

Market forces tending to bring about the just-mentioned upward mobility have succeeded against an organized resistance which intensified as living standards rose. Union exclusiveness generally, featherbedding and other make-work practices, and, the most powerful, enforcement of the standard rate have provided the chief resistance to the wage-multiplying forces I have been discussing.

The phenomenon has been interpreted rather differently. Tibor Scitovsky sees it as “a changing pattern of demand [my italics] for people, with fewer positions available in the higher and more in the lower echelons.” “The demand for skilled people,” he says, “has declined relative to that of the unskilled, as has the demand for executives relative to that for clerks and for generals relative to privates.”¹ Certainly emerging affluence appears to have caused a transfer of preference toward the outputs of labor-intensive occupations. But the egalitarian tendency to which Scitovsky is referring is, I judge, a question of supply rather than of demand. Unskilled workers are becoming relatively scarce and expensive. That is because so many of them (or their children) have succeeded in climbing to wage-rate levels at which, through developing technologies, their productivities, their real natural scarcity values, are higher. Equipment in various forms now permits a person without specialized training to do what required long periods of instruction and practice in earlier ages. Normal muscular strength, normal physical and mental health, integrity and trustworthiness—these qualities alone are today very valuable, without any special training and without exceptional talent. If an individual has more than one of these attributes, the value of his services is enhanced accordingly. And if elementary literacy and the ability to do simple calculations can be included in a bundle of such attributes, the value of the possessor’s services is multiplied.² Many specialized skills are in less demand today than in the past (exceptions are largely in the entertainment field), but they have been displaced by demands for other, more general attainments. In the absence of some vertical mobility, the phenomenon that Scitovsky is discussing could not have occurred.

The reason for the rise in “working-class” earning power can be brought home by comparing it with the rise in the aggregate real value of the services of land. This aggregate value—the real income derived simply from ownership of land—tends to increase as the real value of aggregate output increases (that is, as the flow of productive services expands through economizing ingenuities accompanied by population growth and thrift). Early classical economists would have said that, through general progress, landowners have been able passively to “reap where they have not sowed.” But this is equally true of all classes of the community, not just landowners. Except to the extent to which they have been discoverers, inventors, economizing innovators or savers, all groups, rich or poor, have “reaped where they have not sowed;” and they have not been forced to resort to collusive pricing to do this.

To see the phenomenon in perspective, let the reader consider that every site competes with every other site, every acre of land competes with every other acre; yet incomes from passive land ownership have risen as other incomes have risen (I do not say in proportion to other incomes). But nothing resembling the strike threat has influenced the value or rent of land. Admittedly, if the owners of sites around a developing town are allowed to act in collusion, they can exploit the community by raising the price of land needed for the town’s growth. But that illustrates my point. If such collusion were effectively prevented, the landowners would not be unjustly treated. They would still benefit from the general progress, although not then to the disadvantage of the rest; and their benefit would be “unearned”! This is equally true of the community as a whole, including “labor.”

Now it has seldom been to anyone’s interest to draw attention to the real wage-rate increases of those classes which have been excluded from the best remunerated occupations (mainly excluded by standard rates determined under the strike threat). When people enjoy no union protection in the inferior occupations to which they have been relegated, their real incomes still tend to rise steadily with the rise in general productivity, just as their money incomes tend to rise in accordance with the speed of inflation. As Albert Rees has put it:

All . . . sources of information are biased . . . Newspapers and broadcasters give prominent coverage to wage increases resulting from strike settlements or from large scale negotiations because they are dramatic, while little attention is paid to the gradual upward creep of non-union wages. Small wonder that the public does not suspect that in this race the tortoise sometimes catches up with the hare.³

The evidence establishes, indeed, that the wholly “unprotected” wage earner, with no union to offset his supposedly inferior “bargaining power,” gains proportionately as much from general economic progress as the wage earner in a “strong” labor union unless exclusions enforced through strike-threat pressures (or other causes) are currently pushing him further down the scale of relative wage earnings. That is, in the relatively low-productivity spheres to which the “unprotected” are often confined by the “protected,” earnings tend to increase as rapidly as they do in the privileged spheres. Empirical studies disclose no clear correlation between the degree of unionization existing and the speed of wage-rate increases.⁴The facts suggest that the workers’ basic protection against exploitation is market forces; in other words, the alternatives that are open to any person possessing scarce and valuable attributes—skills, muscles, intelligence, or responsibility. And this protection guarantees nonunion workers the highest possible earnings consistent with the non-exploitation of others, that is, of potential competitors and the community in its consumer role.

A curious fact is that at times the unions themselves appear to be pleading that incomes (including fringe benefits) in nonunionized occupations have risen faster than they have in unionized ones. The unions argue this casuistically to show the reasonableness of demands for higher wage rates for their members. But it is not without relevance to the claim that the strike threat can alone secure justice in remuneration.

Unfortunately most writing on this topic is emotion-charged. That is hardly surprising. The strike is a form of warfare (see Chapter 4) and the expectation of its use—as a fact or as a threat—has come to condition nearly all private policy in determining wage offers. The strike-threat system has created a species of continuous aggression and resistance to aggression; and as we shall see, union policymakers have felt it essential to keep alive an undamped suspicion of and lurking hostility toward management and investors. And just as exploiters of aggressive nationalism throughout time and space have always relied upon legends of past struggles for “freedom,” so have union officials and their apologists found it useful to perpetuate the myths of “labor’s bitter history.” That these officials are most often deeply sincere in their beliefs is hardly a mitigation.

The genuineness of many of the influential and disinterested leaders of thought and opinion who have faith in the story of “labor’s bitter struggle” against oppression is enormously important. For instance in the United States, when the Norris-LaGuardia and the Wagner acts were being passed, the public opinion to which Congress is sensitive reflected the conviction that, in the past, “labor” had been shamefully treated. Time-honored but virtually fictional stories of the inequities and iniquities of former days had been propagated and reiterated with conviction by public-spirited novelists, journalists, jurists, clergymen, and academics, as well as by parties seeking to exploit the myths. And the American labor legislation of the 1930s was endorsed, it seems to me, by people who simply wanted to turn the tables. Whereas until then “labor” had been downtrodden, it was now to be assured that it was to be top dog. All the old injustices, inequalities and exploitation were to be swept away. The power of “the employers” to oppress their workers was to be ended and an age of economic justice to be ushered in. Few economists in the United States who perceived the folly of the legislative steps then being taken could conceive of any effective manner in which to communicate their warnings. The most forthright was Henry Simons; but because his teachings did not conform to those of the opinion-molders, his view was that of a tiny minority.

The Norris-LaGuardia and Wagner acts will, I predict, come to be regarded by future historians as economic blunders of the first magnitude. They were worked for and acquiesced to under motivations of almost unparalleled sordidness and cynicism combined with the highest, misguided idealism. For the American worker had not been maltreated and oppressed by managements committed to satisfying the rapacity of stockholders. That was not true of the nineteenth century in either continent; it was not true of the pre-NRA era, and it has not been true since then. “Exploitation” there has certainly been, as we shall see, but hardly at all, if at all, of “labor” by “capital.” And this is equally true of “labor” in all countries of the western world. Economic injustices have had a wholly different origin.

Among those who have been convinced that in past ages labor had to fight against exploitation and oppression, or who find it expedient to pose as convinced, we find today’s “business community” in general. Executives who are wise and expert in the conduct of their functions in markets other than that for labor seldom appear to have any grasp of the economics of wages and no trustworthy knowledge of the history of labor relations and income distribution. The typical private entrepreneur, says Arthur Shenfield,⁵ generally accepts

the popular view of early capitalism that it was harsh, cruel and oppressive. Indeed he will often defend the capitalist system by saying that its early defects, and notably that of the exploitation of the worker, have now been removed, so that it is an efficient producer and distributor of wealth and at the same time guiltless of exploitation. He does not realize that there is essentially nothing in the allegation of early capitalist exploitation which cannot be applied to modern capitalism. He thinks that the low wages and long hours of early capitalism bespoke exploitation, while the high wages and short hours of our times bespeak equity and humanity. He thus displays his ignorance of what it is that determines the general level of wages and hours. . . . Of course, the businessman is not to be blamed for accepting this view of early capitalism. It has been propagated by a long line of biased historians and publicists, and it is now common currency in almost all circles.

Unfortunately, in very few business schools or universities is it thought essential to disturb the stereotypes which have been so formed.⁶ On the contrary, through most of the “labor economists” the legends are perpetuated.

The following pages are devoted to briefly examining the notions which have been propagated during this century about the oppression of the workers in Britain during the emergence of the modern industrial system, and the supposed fight of the unions on their behalf against tyranny, oppression, and injustice in the courts. I use Britain to illustrate because the tendentious writings of British historians such as the Webbs, the Hammonds, Cole, and others have colored the literature of “labor” in many countries.

Since medieval times, the conviction had persisted that it was the will of God that all, except for those in the privileged classes, should work from sunrise to sunset. “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread” was unchallenged as a divine precept. The Sabbath was the Lord’s provision for rest. It embodied the wisdom of the ages. It was almost unchallenged until industrial capitalism had got under way. Only then did technological inventions plus thrift begin to cause a remarkable magnification of the yield to effort and the emancipation of man from the struggle for physical survival.

The “economizing displacement” process which characterized the new industrialism was gradually able to render possible a quite general enjoyment of leisure, even by the lower income groups, through sacrifices which those groups would have felt were powerful deprivations in earlier times. And as labor-saving developments progressed, especially after 1790, the customary contribution of children to the family income of the poor, and the early education of children in industrial skills under parental discipline, were transferred from the squalor of the domestic system to the relatively satisfactory factory environment. Then, by reason of the very progress which had engendered this transition, the output of children became less necessary for the retention or rise of living standards. Machinery economized labor, competition among the workers in each occupation raised the real earnings of noncompetitors, and because the material well-being of the working class as a whole rose, a potentially more rapid increase in the physical welfare of the poorest classes could be sacrificed in return for excluding children from certain kinds of productive work.⁷

Labor’s rising average living standard during the industrial revolution was marked less by increases in the per capita wage rates of which the records survive than by a rising proportion of workers coming to be employed in occupations offering higher real wage rates (a changed frequency distribution, a gradually increasing proportion of workers finding employment in the more productive and higher-paid kinds of work rather than an increase in wage rates for work of a defined type), the achievement of greater leisure, and the amelioration of working conditions, rural or urban. Such wage statistics relevant to that period as we have are, however, too meager to enable us to estimate the speed with which the masses were benefiting. We know that outputs of “wage goods” were increasing rapidly and steadily, e.g., bricks, which were used in building houses for the poor. And we know also that, despite continuous attempts to hinder the economizing displacement process, à la Luddism, the efficiency and the value of the stock of wage-multiplying assets increased. Hence although there must have been some dilution of rising per capita outputs and incomes, because of population increases, it appears to be beyond doubt that the workers benefited absolutely. Their material well-being probably improved more or less in proportion to that of other classes of the community. But certainly environments of home and workshop which had been inherited from the pre-laissez-faire, mercantilist era were steadily being improved. Then, in the light of a rapidly growing ability to produce, the traditional living and working conditions of the wage-earning classes came to be regarded for the first time as deplorable.

This remarkable upward adjustment in standards and hopes, reflecting a new humanitarianism, could well be regarded as emergent capitalism’s outstanding attribute. So rapidly did the new (although partial) economic freedom cause people to change their judgments about what was tolerable that, in doing so, it caused the very forces which were currently eradicating condemned conditions to be blamed for the existence of those conditions.

It is almost platitudinous to say of any age since the eighteenth century that earnings were lower and working conditions had been less satisfactory in previous ages. We shall reach this conclusion whenever we compare any long historical period (say, a decade) with a later one and use the conventional standards of the latter as our criterion.⁸ But that is because thrift, plus economizing displacement, plus discoveries have been continuously augmenting the yield to human effort. The living conditions of the masses in the 1920s were bad in relation to what they are now; they were even worse in the previous decade; worse still in the last century; and they worsen increasingly the further one moves back in time. Yet this does not allow us to say that there was any unfairness in early arrangements for wage determination against which labor had to fight. Such injustices as existed in previous ages were, as I have suggested, in a different form, but probably neither more common nor more reprehensible than those of today. And they did not arise out of the ability of owners of assets, or managements on behalf of investors, to oppress or steal from those who supplied labor inputs.

In the past, general standards of treatment and standards of consideration between different income groups, as well as between different social classes and races, were indisputably such as we should today find intolerable. Precapitalistic attitudes dissolved slowly under the pressures of the free market and competitive institutions. Persons of higher rank would behave arrogantly and peremptorily toward those of a lower rank. The cultured classes would not always cloak their disdain toward groups which lacked refinement of taste, education, bearing and behavior. The upper-middle and middle classes often openly despised “the great unwashed.” Such attitudes alone were “institutional barriers” to equality of opportunity, and there were some deliberately planned and maintained barriers (more in Europe than in the United States—except for the institution of slavery), intended to preserve a way of life which the privileged and ruling classes thought was basically good. But the relative economic inequalities of, say, the nineteenth century, were never the result of any power acquired by the owners of assets or by managements to maltreat or tyrannize over “the workers.”

The most persistent and tenacious myth about the origin of the strike-threat system is that it emerged out of a struggle of the poor against subjection by their “employers.” The truth is that, with hardly any exceptions, it was relatively affluent artisans (by contemporary standards) who first organized for the collusive pricing of their labor. And their motive was, in every case, to defend their privileges—special rights which were contrary to the interests of the poorer classes (and in multiracial countries, poorer races). On this point, even the Webbs note: “It is often assumed that trade unionism arose as a protest against intolerable oppression. This was not so.”⁹ Labor unionism emerged indeed in the form of a strongly class-conscious movement, expressing a determination to maintain a class structure. Throughout, this has been an unchallengeable attribute of the union form of organization.¹⁰ The Webbs describe the union system as “strengthening the almost infinite grading of the industrial world into separate classes, each with its own distinctive ends, and each therefore exacting its own ‘rent of opportunity’ or ‘rent of ability.’” These last terms are skillful euphemisms for “privilege.” The defense of such privilege was, in the Webbs’ words, “the common purpose” of nearly all eighteenth-century combinations.¹¹ Already, in that century, workers’ “combinations” in Britain had resisted powerful equalitarian forces that were being released through the emergence of freer markets in most spheres. History records this not only in such evidence as we have of strike-threat action (then technically illegal) but in the evidence of petitions from workers’ organizations asking the legislature for protection of their customary position (against unprivileged interlopers). The Webbs write, tendentiously, of the eighteenth-century unions having been forced into demanding protection because the industries in which their members were employed were menaced by “pauper labor.” Actually, the industries in which union members were employed would have prospered had labor been recruited freely from less productive and less well-paid occupations, thereby releasing the “paupers” from their poverty. It was sheer sectional privilege for which the unions were asking protection. The interests of those referred to as “pauper labor” were regarded as of no importance, either by the unions or (in this context) by their famed defenders, the Webbs.

Now the method of maintaining the “grading into separate classes” (with the inequalities of opportunity associated with it) has not been mainly restrictive apprenticeship rules and such-like devices for discouraging investment in human capital among the underprivileged. Nor has the insistence in the present age upon the maintenance of “established differentials”¹² been relatively important (although this insistence does disclose the motivation). The principal method has been a simple insistence upon the standard rate.¹³ It has been as a defense of the most blatant privilege that the objection has arisen to “pricing labor as though it were a commodity, and buying it in the cheapest market,” Yet this objection has been elevated into what has almost become a respected ethical principle. This thesis is examined in Chapter 12.

One very shaky argument is that the emergence of unionism during the late eighteenth century was a reaction against great “monopsonies” (as we now call them) among the masters, with the power to exploit labor. Adam Smith referred to what he believed was a “tacit monopoly” among the masters to keep wage rates down. He noticed that the law did not prohibit masters from combining to lower the price of work although it did prohibit workmen from combining to raise it.¹⁴ Nevertheless, it was the tacit combination of masters which he believed was widespread. “Particular combinations” (that is, formal agreements) among masters were, he thought, only “sometimes” entered into.

But Adam Smith’s evidence of tacit combination was the unpopularity of masters who raised wage rates, evidence which suggests rather the normal competitive circumstances of the active world under which competing sellers, hoping that supply conditions are not changing to their disadvantage, regard price cutters with disfavor and reluctantly follow suit.

Regarding the “particular” combinations to keep down wage rates which Adam Smith alleged “sometimes” occurred, although “always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy,”¹⁵ there is no evidence of any such organization to be found in the secondary sources with which I am familiar or in official reports.¹⁶ I believe that Adam Smith’s judgment in dealing with this subject was vitiated by the same defect that George Stigler has held adversely affected Alfred Marshall, “a warm heart.”¹⁷

Even the Webbs’ presentation quotes no facts which might suggest the operation of formal monopsonies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Actually their explanation of the need for the protection of labor relies most often on the fact that “employers” had not combined. They refer, for example, to the craft guilds fighting for legislative protection “against the cutting down of their earnings by the competing capitalists.”¹⁸ This is of course the opposite of the monopsony allegation. If the masters were competing in the sale of the product, they were equally competing for the purchase of labor and materials. Hence they would have been tending to bid up the remuneration of the work force (actual or potential) as a whole, not to push it down.

But it is in respect of the history of judicial decisions under the common law and statute law against “conspiracy” or “combination” that the most serious fictions have arisen. Students have been indoctrinated with the belief that laws enacted in the interests of the relatively wealthy were applied over the ages; and that, increasingly as the industrial revolution progressed, these laws were enforced in a dastardly way—to suppress laudable attempts by organized labor to avoid injustices. Partisan textbook accounts of English experience of early strike-threat activities have created this wholly false impression.

We must notice at the outset that, as feudalism and serfdom disappeared during the last two centuries of the Middle Ages, and especially following the Black Death, associations of workers for peaceful and lawful purposes had been neither illegal nor discouraged. Nor were they ever illegal or discouraged in subsequent ages.¹⁹ But from the thirteenth century, the conviction clearly emerged that certain antisocial practices affecting the pricing of products (including the product of labor) had to be restrained for the common good. Thus, practices known as “forestalling, engrossing and regrating” were forbidden by ordinances and statutes because these were supply and pricing procedures which were perceived to be exploiting the common people through the contriving of scarcities of food and necessities.

Now the common law cases and statutes concerned with the crime of “conspiracy” (dating from the thirteenth century) applied exactly the same principle in more general terms. “Conspiracy” or “combination,” words having an identical connotation until well into the nineteenth century, were prohibited. Indictments generally read “conspiring, combining, confederating and agreeing.” These notions covered any kind of action in concert which aimed at making products (including the product of labor) dearer (for the benefit of those who associated for that purpose) by agreements not to sell below stipulated prices.

The mere fact that the common law on this topic became explicit in statutes suggests that attempts fo fix prices in concert must have occurred deep back in history. And there is evidence of this as long ago as 1298, when an organization of coopers in London was prosecuted for having agreed to raise the price of hoops from one halfpenny and three farthings to one penny. And economic conspiracy cases which did not directly involve laborers or artisans have been noted as late as the eighteenth century. In 1773, the publicans of Westminster were believed to be conspiring to raise the price of beer. The authorities got word of this somehow, and the publicans were at once warned that if they raised the price collusively they would be prosecuted for conspiracy. And there are other examples of steps taken to prosecute for attempts to raise the price of commodities (as distinct from labor) by concerted action.

Collusive action to raise the price of labor was, then, regarded as pernicious only in the sense that agreements to raise the price of food or necessities (such as salt) were considered pernicious. The spirit of the law seems never to have been hostile to artisans as such, still less to the laboring masses. Its hostility was directed against what I like to call “the contrived scarcity.” Cases such as those brought against London carpenters in 1339²⁰ and against shoemakers in 1349 certainly seem to have had the aim of preventing specific commodity prices from being forced up.

One thing which makes the preindustrial revolution era rather difficult to interpret is a blatant inconsistency in this respect. Merchant and craft guilds, constituted by charter, had the explicit right to act in a manner which would have been criminal, under the common law and certain statutes, had it not been for the protection of a charter. Wyclif accused the guilds of conspiring “that no man practicing their craft shall take less payment daily than that they have agreed among themselves,” and that “they oppress other men who are in the right” (meaning that these others were prepared to work for less).²¹ But the guilds were protected by charter. The anomaly can probably be explained in terms of pre-eighteenth-century conservatism. Unsettling change could be prevented by way of protection of a privileged status quo (and this policy took the form among other things of encouragement of craft and merchant guilds) as well as through the prevention of any new privileges which seemed likely to arise. Revolutionary changes were feared. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the guilds had largely lost their power, and rather different forms of organization—labor unions of the modem type—emerged as “friendly societies.”

A supplementary policy, developed following the Black Death, was that embodied in wage-fixing by authority and, following the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers, generally bolstering up the guild system. Important provisions of this statute had, however, the effect of enforcing adherence to contract. An artisan wishing to transfer to another master required a testimonial certifying that he had carried out his obligations to the master he was leaving. In some cases the employee was bound by contract until a specific piece of work had been completed, for example, “any ship, house or mill or any work taken by the gross or piece.”²² If he left before then, his master could claim damages fixed in the statute.

Recourse to special statutes to outlaw “conspiracy” in particular trades seems to have been mainly because really effective enforcement of the common law (when there was no exoneration through guild privilege) had seemed beyond the administrative machinery of the courts until modern times. Common law cases had to be heard by judges and hence were costly. They were time-consuming. By reason of long delays, artisans charged could often escape trial by moving to other districts where they could seldom be traced. Statute law cases, on the other hand, could be dealt with expeditiously by justices. That is why we found “masters,” in the emergent industries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, petitioning Parliament for explicit statutory protection against “conspiracy” for their own industries or trades.²³ In Britain, as a whole, some 40 such statutes were repealed in 1824. But before then enforcement of common and statute law in this sphere seems to have been curiously casual. Moreover, as I have already insisted, conspiracy law was not aimed primarily at labor.²⁴

It is extremely difficult to judge how effective the common law together with general and particular statutes against conspiracy had been before the Industrial Revolution got underway. The domestic system of manufacture, which dominated until well into the nineteenth century, probably meant that members of any trade were usually too scattered to be able to act in effective collusion, whether by restrictive agreement or intimidation of nonconformists. Moreover, the distinction between masters and men was often ambiguous. Such conditions, rather than laws against conspiracy, may help explain the apparent rarity of strike action before 1824.

Nevertheless, the problem to which these laws were believed to offer a solution seems to have increased in importance during the late eighteenth century, probably because of the gradual emergence of labor unions in the modern sense in the relatively highly-paid crafts and occupations, and their apparent growing activity.²⁵ Unions were “friendly societies” concerned with the commendable task of insuring their members against the worst consequences of sickness or unemployment.²⁶ This was the more conspicuous side of their activities but probably not the most important. Indeed, it seems that their insurance funds were often more in the nature of strike funds. Where apprenticeship had survived, they enforced the rules under some protection from the otherwise virtually moribund Elizabethan Statute of Artificers. Some “friendly societies” were trying to maintain, even at that time, what is today called “the closed shop.” In the light of rising sophistication during the eighteenth century, the harm done may well have been becoming more conspicuous. For instance, Adam Smith pointed out that the wool-combers were able, by refusing to take a reasonable number of apprentices, not only to “engross the employment, but reduce the whole manufacture into a sort of slavery to themselves, and raise the price of their labour above what is due to the nature of their work.”²⁷

Already, throughout the eighteenth century, despite evidence that the demand for leisure as such was tending to fall, some of the unions had perceived that, when artisans were remunerated by time instead of by the piece, to enforce by way of the strike threat a reduction of the hours of labor was an effective method of reducing the supply of effort and raising aggregate remuneration. Other restrictions of output were also imposed. The rules of a society would specify the amount of output to be supplied daily or weekly by the worker. At times, these methods drove industries away from where they had been originally located.

The Webbs suggest, however, that in the eighteenth century, the common law was “constrained” to convict striking workers. They present no clear evidence of any such “constraint.” The facts suggest (1) that the tradition of no discrimination against labor was maintained, and (2) that there was considerable leniency in the administration of the existing laws when the alleged offense occurred in the form of strikes or strike preparations. This was partly because of lingering guild influences and possibly because the unions did not represent the masses but what the socialist William Thompson later called (in 1827) “bloody aristocracies” of labor.

As evidence of leniency, we can consider the fact that although combinations in the cotton trade had been forbidden by statute as early as 1749, cotton spinners were obviously strongly organized in the 1790s and a force with which manufacturers had to reckon. Again, London tailors were prosecuted under the common law in 1765; yet they remained organized and further prosecutions against them had to be instituted in 1770 and 1783.

As evidence that the common law doctrine remained neutral, we can consider the 1783 case against these tailors. It was in these proceedings Lord Mansfield, one of Britain’s greatest judges, rendered a famous judgment. The most pertinent passage of the decision reads,

Persons in possession of any articles of trade may sell them at such prices as they individually may please, but if they confederate and agree not to sell them under certain prices, it is conspiracy; so every man may work at what price he pleases, but a combination not to work under certain prices is an indictable offence.²⁸

Obviously this interpretation was aimed against all classes of lawbreakers not just striking journeymen. But from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Webbs maintain, organized workers were subjected to even worse treatment through hostile court interpretations of both common and statute law, and especially of a notorious act of 1799 which had been followed by an amending act of 1800.

Now the actual effect of these two acts was simply to make more explicit what had indeed been the law during four centuries or more. But nearly all writers on this topic, the Webbs being most influential, have represented the “Combination Acts” as the legislative outcome of a sort of conspiracy among “employers” or “capitalists.” Actually the reverse is the truth. The 1799 Act came to be passed almost by accident. Indeed, so casually were both acts enacted that, in Sir James Fitzjames Stephen’s History of the Criminal Law, we are told that “there is no account of any debate on these Acts, nor are they referred to in the ‘Annual Register’ for these years.”²⁹ What actually happened in 1799 was that a bill, more or less in the form of the 40 or so other anticombination statutes already applying to particular trades, was introduced in Parliament. The original aim in 1799 was simply to forbid “conspiracy” on the part of millwrights. During the proceedings Wilberforce (the famous antislavery champion) suddenly and unexpectedly moved for an amendment to make the principle apply to all industries and occupations. There seemed to be no good reason for opposing this amendment and the bill became law with little opposition. No one spoke against the Act on principle, although some thought that too much power was being given to the lower courts. Some unimportant changes were introduced the following year in the amending Act.³⁰

The important point to remember is that the new combination laws did not make any activities illegal which had not already been criminal offenses for centuries. They were, writes Donald Dewey, “thought to incorporate no new legal principle but were rather designed to improve the cumbersome enforcement procedure which largely nullified the usefulness of a conspiracy prosecution.”³¹ Yet they are described as “severe,” as inaugurating “a new and momentous departure,” “a far-reaching change of policy,” an era of “legal persecution” of would-be strikers or strikers. These are descriptions of the acts by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in a seriously slanted work characterized at times by meticulous scholarship—a work which has had an enormous influence in spreading the myth.³² The truth is, however, that the “Combination Acts” were just as leniently, almost half-heartedly, enforced as the common law against conspiracy (and the various special statutes forbidding conspiracy or combination in particular industries) had previously been.

Although the costs of proceedings against strikes or against observed preparations for strikes had probably been cheapened by the 1799 Act, the law retained much uncertainty. In the case of convictions by J. P.’s, appeals to the upper courts became almost habitual; and the judges, as is not unknown today, seemed to enjoy showing their authority and superior grasp of the law by upsetting the decisions of their inferiors. The penalties which could be imposed in the lower courts were much lighter than in the upper courts, but whether the likelihood of convictions when the law had been broken was increased (with a consequent rise in respect for the law) is problematical. The Parliamentary agent who drafted the 1824 Act which repealed these laws (who claimed with good reason that this branch of law had been “his particular study for twenty years”) maintained that the effects of the combination laws had been “negligible”—a “dead letter.”³³ Very few prosecutions had been made under them, he said, but many under the clause of the Statute of Artificers, which forbade any worker to leave his job before the completion of certain specified kinds of work, like a ship or a bridge. Otherwise, such prosecutions of strikers as occurred tended rather to be based on the charge of “conspiracy” under the common law.

The truth seems to be that the masters and the authorities did almost everything within their power to avoid prosecutions. A strike of linen weavers in 1823 lasted 28 weeks before the masters drew the attention of the strikers to the provisions of the 1800 Act. We must remember that masters could also be prosecuted under the combination laws, just as they could for conspiracy under the common law; and there was nothing to prevent the workers’ leaders from drawing the attention of the magistrates to alleged transgression by the masters.

Some of the facts which point to the leniency in administering the law, both previously and subsequently to the Combination Acts, are mentioned by the Webbs.³⁴ Nevertheless, they manage to leave the impression that an era of unparalleled harshness followed during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Other “historians” have reinforced this impression. J. L. and Barbara Hammond write that during this age, “the workpeople were at the mercy of their masters,”³⁵ The Webbs’ inconsistency on the point is monumental. They admit that the representation of the period 1799-1824 as one of “unmitigated persecution” involving continuous repression of the trade-union movement is a “romantic legend” and “semi-mythical,” yet claim at the same time that “the legend is not without a basis of fact.”³⁶ Combinations with the simple aim of insuring enforcement of the law in labor’s favor had been tolerated before 1799, they assert, but were suddenly outlawed afterward. The Webbs contend that before the nineteenth century, unions had not always been prosecuted, even if they were “technically within the definitions of combination and conspiracy,” but between 1800 and 1824, they were. I find no evidence of this whatsoever in secondary authorities. They allege that from 1800 to 1824 the “combination acts” drove union members “into violence and sedition.”³⁷ The truth is that sabotage, violence and intimidation of nonstrikers, managers and owners had been normal concomitants of such strikes as did occur long before the enactment of the new “Combination Acts,” as Adam Smith testified in 1776 (see p. 36). And, after the repeal of these acts in 1824, a year of exceptional disorders accompanied widespread strike activity. It is significant that subsequent history records how, as unions gradually won immunities and privileges before the law, their reliance upon intimidation and violence tended, on the whole, to increase (see Chapter 4). It is not only in the present age that steps taken to achieve peace and protect life and property have been represented as acts of aggression which can thereby themselves be charged with engendering war and violence.

Enforcement of the law against conspiracies seems, then, to have been just as lax, lenient, or reluctant after 1799 as before.³⁸ And it remained true that when there was no clear evidence of illegal conspiracy, associations of workers continued to be looked upon without disfavor. That is, unless they were observed to be arranging in concert not to accept less than an agreed wage rate³⁹ (which as Mansfield’s judgment made clear,⁴⁰ alone constituted the ancient crime of “conspiracy” or “combination”), no action against them is recorded, even in the Webbs’ great book; and just as had happened in the eighteenth century, “when masters complained, the magistrates were more inclined to seek a reconciliation than inflict penalties.”⁴¹

There is no evidence whatsoever that law enforcement initiatives and judgments in common law or statutory conspiracy cases between 1800-1824 diverged from the long-established principles enunciated with the clarity of simplicity by Mansfield. And discussions by unions with managements about wage rates and conditions of work had never been frowned upon, provided they did not lead to anything resembling the strike threat, or to obvious preparations for a strike (as the Webbs themselves indirectly admit.)⁴² On occasion, when such discussions appeared likely to be angry, the magistrates would even be invited to be present as conciliators. Apparently, it was regarded as quite legal for a union in one district to correspond with a union in the same trade in another district about wages and conditions of service.

Many cases in the early 1800s concerned organizations of artisans that, faced with the gradual dissolution of their privileges or the competition of labor-economizing machines, fought to preserve their position with every available legal means. Generally speaking, they were unsuccessful and often had to admit increasing numbers of poorer workers into their protected trades as interlopers and, according to the Webbs, suffer “the progressive degradation of their wages.”⁴³ However, the union leaders were free to petition Parliament and use normal channels of propaganda and peaceful agitation. Some asked that their position be protected by restraint on entry through the application of the wage-fixing clauses of the archaic and ineffective Elizabethan Statute of Artificers, or through its restrictive apprenticeship clauses.⁴⁴ Even such large-scale collusive activities occurred as the organization of a petition with 300,000 signatures asking for the Statute of Artificers to be made effective, and the organizers were in no danger whatsoever of arrest or prosecution. On exceptional occasions, the unions were successful in such requests, presumably because they were not regarded as “combinations” in the legal sense of “conspiracies,” or because they agreed to abandon such organization machinery as could be used for strike-threat pressures.

From the researches of scholars such as T. S. Ashton (who have dug into the correspondence of industrial firms during the period we are considering), we know today what was not known at the time by the law-enforcement authorities. There were indeed secret discussions among industrialists relating to wages. As such, the discussions may have been “conspiracies”—infringements (by “employers”) of the 1800 Combination Act. Yet there were “few, if any prosecutions. . . .”⁴⁵ It is understandable, therefore, that knowledgeable humanitarians of the day should have felt that gross injustice to the workers was involved. But for reasons to be discussed in Chapters 8 and 9, it is highly doubtful whether the early industrial concerns could ever have wielded effective monopsonistic power. The real purpose of the apparent collusion the researches mentioned have disclosed was, I am inclined to think, defense. We know that many trade unions were being formed during the 1800-1826 period, despite the illegality of “combination.” It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that representatives of the investors should have felt it essential to cooperate, not to exploit labor monopsonistically, but in order to resist wage-rate concessions wrung from managements confronted with the strike-threat “in detail.” (See p. 47.)

It was, however, the laxity of enforcement of the anticonspiracy law, not any harshness or savagery with which the law was administered, which puzzles the student who is trying to get to the truth. The findings of the Webbs themselves suggest that the police seldom took any initiative unless requested specifically by “employers”: and that “employers” then, as now, would do almost anything in their power to avoid the staff disharmony and the lasting bitterness which, they knew, followed a defeated strike. Far from being billigerent, managements wanted industrial peace, almost at any cost.

It is possible indeed that the widespread tolerance of illegal strike-threat action encouraged the unions to believe that, if they played their cards correctly, particularly their political cards, they were beyond the law. Already members of Parliament whose constituencies included union members had recognized that they constituted a serious voting bloc. For instance, the Webbs themselves mention how both the Whig and Tory members for Liverpool thought it expedient to take up the unions’ case against the 1799 Act. Of course, laxity in the law’s administration may have created an impression of harshness when prosecutions were brought. Prosecutions may have come to be so unexpected and capricious as to be regarded as outrages. But far from enforcement having been carried out in a spirit of repression, the authorities were obviously “reluctant to interfere in such disputes unless the public peace was thought to be endangered,”⁴⁶ and even so, in less-dangerous situations, the courts appear to have preferred simply to insist upon the dissolution of the unlawful organizations rather than apply the legislatively authorized sanctions. They tried as far as possible to achieve obedience of the law without the imposition of fines or imprisonment.

In part, what seems to have been happening during the first quarter of the nineteenth century was that, because the machinery of enforcement was still inadequate, unions could, by proceeding with careful strategy, often rely upon no action being taken against them. They were advised by such shrewd friends as Francis Place—probably the most successful political intriguer of history⁴⁷—and numerous politicians who had perceived the vote-swinging power of the unions.

As an example of the alleged “repression” which occurred after 1799, we can consider the case of the cotton weavers. They were permitted to organize openly and agitate for legislation which would permit the justices to fix wage rates for them in accordance with the provisions of the outmoded Statute of Artificers. After several years of costly activities, it at last became clear that their efforts had been fruitless. They saw their privileges evaporating as a great increase in the numbers who found their most remunerative outlets in cotton weaving occurred. A huge strike (for those days) was then organized. But no “savage” suppression of these incontrovertibly illegal activities followed. On the contrary, authorities allowed the strike to last for three weeks before calling the police. Then, “the whole strike committee was arrested by the police.” They were found guilty and sentenced to from 4 to 18 months imprisonment.⁴⁸ There was neither injustice nor savagery in the sentences.

As additional evidence of an almost unbelievable leniency in enforcing the combination laws between 1800 and 1824, we can consider the calico printers. Unable to get any effective protection from the law, a calico manufacturer expressed his grievances in a pamphlet in 1815. Addressing the union, he charged

We have by turns conceded what we all ought manfully to have resisted; and you, elated with success, have been led on from one extravagant demand to another, till the burden is become too intolerable to be borne. You fix the number of our apprentices, and often-times even the number of our journeymen. You dismiss certain proportions of our hands, and you will not allow others to come in their stead. You stop all surface machines, and to the length even to destroy the rollers before our face. You restrict the cylinder machine, and even dictate the kind of pattern it is to print. . . . You dismiss our overlookers when they don’t suit you; and force obnoxious servants into our employ. Lastly, you set all subordination and good order at defiance, and instead of showing deference and respect to your employers, treat them with personal insult and contempt.⁴⁹

It seems obvious that, in all the cases of which we know brought under the Combination Acts between 1800 and 1824, those charged with breaking the law (1) knew they were doing so, (2) had often organized in secret, and (3) knew the prescribed penalties which they were risking. But action in concert by the unions to insure the enforcement of the law (when it favored their members), seems to have been just as common and uninhibited during this period as it had been during previous centuries.

Nor is there evidence of further changes in judicial interpretation of the common law disadvantageous to labor after 1800, as the Webbs suggest in the phrase, “the common law doctrine . . ., as subsequently interpreted by the judges, of itself made illegal all combinations whatsoever of journeymen to regulate the conditions of their work.”⁵⁰ For “combination” in the sense attached to that word at the time (namely, “conspiracy”) had been illegal since the Middle Ages. There was nothing new in that. Are not the Webbs’ words, “to regulate the conditions of their work,” a euphemism for “unlawful activities deliberately undertaken”?

The objects of the acts of 1799 and 1800 were simply (I) to make more specific (not so much to lawyers as to the community) the illegality of collusion to force up the prices of output (including labor’s contribution to output), and (2) (a doubtfully successful object) to render the enforcement of the law less costly and less time-consuming. But what is most surprising is that, despite a certain improvement in the law’s explicitness, the apparently quite general acquiescence in collusive action which marked the eighteenth century persisted during the nineteenth. Far from enforcement having become more severe, it seems to have remained disconcertingly mild.

The passing of the generalized Combination Acts may perhaps have been a greater deterrent to strikes. It is rather difficult to judge because, despite the mildness of law enforcement, anything resembling conspicuous concerted action by the workers to fix wage rates had been relatively rare—although increasing and, before 1799, apparently becoming more and more violent. Adam Smith remarked in 1776, as though it were an unassailable fact, that workmen’s combinations “have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrages.”⁵¹ In circumstances which so sober an observer as Adam Smith could describe in terms like that, was it really surprising that there should have been occasional recourse to the courts to check the spread of intimidation, disorder, and sabotage? And were not demands for special and general legislation to assist that process wholly reasonable?

The offense of “conspiracy” was not in itself, as we have seen, concerned with the use of physical force, although intimidation and bodily violence often did in practice supplement the coercive power of “peaceful” concerted action. Nevertheless, the principal purpose of some of the special Combination Acts applying to particular trades (for example, one of 1727 applying to weavers, woolcombers, and framework knitters) had been to suppress more effectively kinds of illegality which were independent of the crime of “conspiracy” (for example, assaulting or threatening masters, breaking into their houses, destroying work, etc).

The Webbs admit that “some combinations of journeymen were at all times recognized by the law” and that “many others were only spasmodically interfered with”; yet they allege that organizers (or would-be) organizers of strikes were subject to “legal persecution . . . as rebels and revolutionaries.”⁵² This assertion cannot be substantiated unless the leaders could be charged with “conspiracy” or organizing violence.

The case which the books most often cite to show the oppressive nature of subsequent policy in the application of the law against conspiracy is that of the “Tolpuddle martyrs.” This case involved farm workers who were trying to form an organization to force up their wage rates. They had established the “Friendly Society of Agricultural Laborers” for their village. Now as a friendly society, such an association was encouraged rather than discouraged by the law.⁵³ But as a cloak for illegal activities (including “conspiracy”), it was not immune from prosecution. In the Tolpuddle case, however, the alleged crime was not conspiracy, but “unlawful oaths.” The society, which had an elaborate ritual and rather frightening paraphernalia—for example, a picture of Death, “painted six feet high”—was demanding loyalty through the administration of oaths. Naturally alarmed, the local farmers pointed out what was happening—preparations for strikes or violence—to the local justices, who were perhaps traditionally sympathetic to farmers (as they were not to the new industrialists). Nevertheless the justices were reluctant to get a prosecution going. They thought it preferable first to warn those concerned of the penalties which had to be imposed under the relevant law—seven years transportation. But apparently the activities of the society continued, and the authorities then felt bound to intervene. It was proved that illegal oaths had been administered—in view of the explicit warning, it seems quite recklessly and defiantly. Five ringleaders (the only members charged⁵⁴) were found guilty under the “Unlawful Oaths Offenses Act” of 1797 (an act inspired by the atrocities of the French Revolution), and not under the combination laws or the common law. Under the 1797 act, the original sentence had been the death penalty; but this penalty had been reduced to seven years transportation shortly before the Tolpuddle case (a fact which in all probability had encouraged the leaders’ defiance). The law (wise or unwise) was clear-cut. The offenses were proven. The court had no option.⁵⁵ Yet the Webbs describe the conviction of the Tolpuddle offenders as a “scandalous perversion of the law;”⁵⁶ and because the sentence to transportation was confirmed by the Home Secretary, the Webbs refer to his “policy of repression. “⁵⁷

The question remains, were the judges and J.P.’s (magistrates) personally prejudiced against the “working class organizations”? I have found no evidence which might suggest bias in favor of industrialists, although in cases involving farmers, both judges and justices may have tended to feel special sympathy for the classes from which they were mostly drawn—the country gentry—or toward whom they might feel a special sense of obligation, that is, the squires and great landowners. Except for J. P.’s in the newly developed industrial towns who might have known and understood the problems of the factory owners, any bias would almost certainly have been against the industrialists whose wealth and status had been built up mostly by their own thrift and acumen (i.e., not acquired in the honorable way of inheritance); whose culture differed markedly from that of an aristocratic tradition; and whose competition for labor was resented (because it was attracting labor to the urban areas and forcing up agricultural wage rates).

We must remember two things about what the Webbs describe as the “savagery” of law enforcement between 1799 and 1824, as well as later. Firstly, the criminal law at that time imposed what we today would regard as ferocious penalties for offenses in all spheres. Secondly, the attitudes of governments and responsible judges were influenced by the shock caused when the murders and other atrocities of the French Revolution became known. No one in England could imagine how the French Government could have been so short-sighted, weak, and ineffective as to allow a group of fanatics to gain control.

But the common law tradition which frowned on “conspiracy” or “restraint of trade” in both Britain and the United States had been throughout protective of the rights of the ordinary man, of the unprivileged, and of the poor. And the destruction of that tradition over the years was a victory for the privileged, not for the exploited or “oppressed.”

I have discussed the position of “organized labor” before the law during what is usually believed to have been the blackest period in British social history—the economic dark age of the Industrial Revolution—mainly in order to illustrate how, in studies of industrial relations, the most preposterous myths can gain widespread acceptance and perpetuation. But similarly distorted accounts of experience in this century—new fables relating to “labor’s bitter struggle”—are becoming part of supposedly unchallengeable history. They condition public opinion everywhere. Even the most courageous and independent critics of the strike-threat regime are today apt to refer to the miserable conditions of former times (say, before the Wagner Act in the United States) when workers were intolerably treated. With such critics, this may perhaps be because of the tactics of exposition; for the argument typically goes on to suggest that today the position has been reversed. Unions, they say, no longer fight injustices, they inflict them. But this has been true. I suggest, of strike threat activity in all ages.

NOTES

¹ Tibor Scitovsky, “A Survey of Some Theories of Income Distribution,” in National Bureau of Economic Research, The Behavior of Income Shares: Selected Theoretical and Empirical Issues. Studies in Income and Wealth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 27: 15-16.

² An apparent phenomenal decline during the last half century in the efficiency of school teaching in respect of literacy and arithmetic, combined with compulsory prolonged schooling, must have braked this tendency.

³ Albert Rees, The Economics of Trade Unions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 80.

⁴ For evidence supporting this assertion, see pp. 245-247.

⁵ Arthur A. Shenfield, “The Businessman and the Politician,” Modern Age 15 (1971): 149.

⁶ The symposium, Capitalism and the Historians, edited by F. A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954) is of the greatest importance in this field. See also W. H. Hutt, “The Poor Who Were With Us,” Encounter, November 1972; and a most important, recently published symposium, The Long Debate on Poverty, ed., A. Seldon (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1973).

⁷ In Britain, for various reasons, the abolition of child labor in those industries in which their tasks were relatively light, preceded the abandonment of child labor in trades such as dyeing, or in mining, or in agriculture, in which children continued for some time to work under more exacting and even less healthy conditions (on the whole),

⁸ Except for wars and revolutions and their aftermaths.

⁹ Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1956), p. 46.

¹⁰ Where color prejudice has been powerfully present, as in the United States, South Africa and, of recent years. Britain, the unions have been the chief protagonists of the less obvious (and hence the most effective) color bars.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 45.

¹² Enforced fixed proportions in the remuneration of different “grades” of labor. (See Chapter 8).

¹³ Indeed, as I have shown elsewhere, in South Africa the enforcement of “the rate for the job” has throughout created a color bar in relation to which all other restraints, such as “job reservation,” are of almost negligible importance. See W, H, Hutt, The Economics of the Colour Bar: A Study of the Economic Origins and Consequences of Racial Segregation in Africa (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd., 1964), pp. 72-86.

¹⁴ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Random House, The Modern Library, 1937), p. 66. The law did prohibit masters from combining to raise prices. (See p. 17, note 4, above and p. 31.)

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 67.

¹⁶ But see p. 34,

¹⁷ George J. Stigler, “The Economist and the State,” American Economic Review 55 (1965): 14.

¹⁸ S. and B, Webb, op. cit. p. 46 (my italics). On the whole, Parliament sided with the craft guilds until the middle of the eighteenth century (by which time their effectiveness was rapidly weakening); but with the spread of laissez-faire ideas in the latter part of the century, Parliament was less inclined to protect craft privileges.

¹⁹ So effectively has the myth I am here exposing been propagated that even in Armen A. Alchiàn and William R. Allen’s University Economics (2nd ed.; Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1967), which contains by all odds the most satisfactory elementary discussion of the labor union issue to be found in any currently used textbook, the student is told that the British anticonspiracy laws tried to abolish “the right to form a union—which is a very different thing from a strike.” Associations of working people were encouraged rather than frowned upon provided they did not resort to anything resembling the strike. Nor is this textbook quite correct in saying that “the threat of violence via the strike was basically what anticonspiracy laws aimed to stop. . . .” (p. 406). This was true only of certain of the special statutes, referred to on pp. 29-30. The gist of any “conspiracy” offense was concerted action to agree upon a price or wage rate. (See p, 31.) Violence was always a separate transgression.

²⁰ The London carpenters were charged with trying to keep “foreigners” (i.e., workmen from outside London) from accepting less than sixpence a day.

²¹ Wyclif was attacking the masons employed in church building. The quotation is A. H. Gardner, Outline of English Architecture (New York: Scribners, 1946), p. 24.

²² Quoted in M. D. George, The Combination Laws Reconsidered, cited in Economic Journal History Supplement, 1927, p. 215.

²³ Important instances were in the woolen, cotton, linen, silk, hemp, fustian, hatters, dyers, pressers and the iron industries.

²⁴ This is surely indicated in the very name of an early general statute: Act of Conspiracies of Victuallers and Craftsmen, 1549. Consumers’ interests were paramount.

²⁵ I say “apparent” because the evidence of growing union activity is mainly indicated in the increasing number of court cases involving unions; and this may have been correlated with rising industrial outputs or due to more vigorous law enforcement.

²⁶ One very defensible practice of those days (which survived into the nineteenth century) was the subsidization of craftsmen in the form of what were called “traveling” or “tramping” benefits if they were prepared to leave an area in which there was unemployment. This could have led to an improved allocation of labor over area—greater geographical mobility.

²⁷ Smith, op. cit., p. 126.

²⁸The King v. Eccles, quoted in Donald Dewey, Monopoly in Economics and Law (Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1959), p. 120n.

²⁹ Quoted in Webb, op. cit., p. 70n.

³⁰ The amendments concerned provision for arbitration.

³¹ Dewey, op. cit., p. 117.

³² Webb, op. cit., pp. 72 and 81.

³³ George, op. cit., pp. 214-15.

³⁴ Webb, op. cit., pp. 64-70,

³⁵ J. L. and Barbara Hammond, The Town Labourer, 1760-1832: The New Civilisation (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1917), p. 129.

³⁶ S. and B. Webb, op. cit., p. 64.

³⁷Ibid., p. 63.

³⁸ See the Minutes of Evidence of the Select Committee on Artisans and Machinery (1824) and George, op. cit. Mrs. George’s judgment (which coincides with my own on this issue) is all the more powerful because her obvious bias is against the masters. For instance, one of the examples she gives of the lax enforcement of the law against strikes is of the stocking weavers whose union had organized strikes with impunity in 1817, 1819, and 1821. Only after the third strike was there a prosecution and four members of the workers’ committee convicted, but released after successful appeal to the sessions. “The prosecution was a monstrous one,” says Mrs. George (op. cit., p. 216). But the strike was unquestionably a criminal act, and Mrs. George (normally an exemplary historian) does not disclose the grounds for her caustic adjective.

³⁹ Or other conditions of work.

⁴⁰ See p. 31.

⁴¹ Dewey, op. cit., p. I88n.

⁴² Webb, op, cit., pp. 74-5.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 59, In the Webbs’ account, there is no hint that, at the time, increasing numbers were raising their earnings by finding better-paid employment in the spheres in which the supposed “degradation of wages” was occurring.

⁴⁴ Whether, on the whole, this statute facilitated the exploitation of labor through monopsony or whether, through response to workers’ pressures, it conferred labor privilege is uncertain. It had long been of no clear effect when its wage-fixing clauses were repealed in 1813. The statute as a whole was repealed in 1824.

⁴⁵ T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 93.

⁴⁶ Dewey, op. cit., p. 119.

⁴⁷ See Graham Wallas’s great and fascinating biography, The Life of Francis Place, 1771-1854 (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1898; New York: Knopf, 1918). Wallas was a frank admirer of that extraordinary man.

⁴⁸ Webb, op. cit., pp. 58-59.

⁴⁹ Quoted in Ibid., pp. 75-6.

⁵⁰ Ibid., pp. 58-59. My italics.

⁵¹ Smith, op. cit., p. 67.

⁵² Webb, op. cit., p. 64. My italics.

⁵³ An Act of 1793 was intended to foster concerted working-class initiative to establish friendly societies.

⁵⁴ Every member of the society could have been charged according to the Act.

⁵⁵ Those who condemn the Tolpuddle sentences point out that the only evidence given about meetings of the friendly society (which had administered the illegal oaths) was that they had been orderly. At that stage, however, the meetings would naturally have been orderly. But where the authorities had not been so alert, organization of the kind which in this case was anticipated and prevented, had brought arson and murder. In certain other localities, haystacks and farms had been destroyed.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 146.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 146. Five years of the seven-year transportation sentences were subsequently remitted, although, through someone’s blunder, it was two years later before four of the five returned to Britain. It was quite common to remit sentences or quash convictions in “conspiracy” cases also, once illegal activities had been abandoned.