Victorian Studies

Victorian Studies 45.1 (2002) 175-176

Striking a Bargain: Work and Industrial Relations in England, 1815-1865, by James A. Jaffe; pp. ix + 273. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000, £45.00, $74.95.

One of the many merits of James Jaffe's Striking a Bargain is that it reminds us that we know less about the history of work than we think we do. In this important study, Jaffe takes aim at the Webb-inspired orthodoxy that collective bargaining did not exist before the 1860s. The first half of the nineteenth century is still often held to be a period when primitive trade unions, labouring under legal restrictions, had to learn "the rules of the game" (in Eric Hobsbawm's phrase). At a more profound level, Jaffe is unhappy with market-based models of industrial relations in the early industrial period. In a manner that reminds me of the early work of William Reddy, Jaffe demonstrates how cultural as much as economic forces shaped trade union behaviour.

Contrary to the view that industrial relations were formless or devoid of the institutions that would shape bargaining in the later nineteenth century, Jaffe portrays a world of informal or semi-formal wage bargaining between industrial employers and employees that was frequently sophisticated and effective. In this twilight world, the categories that mattered were not those of class or the market so much as custom, honour, fairness, reciprocity, discretion, manliness, and an acknowledgement of "interests." The key words for artisans in negotiations were "fair play."

Why has this form of bargaining been ignored? In part, the evidence is scattered and anecdotal (problems dealt with by the thoroughness of Jaffe's research). However, if Jaffe is correct, we suffer from a distorted view of the labour process created by the industrial novelists of the 1840s and 1850s who did not bother to consider the complexities of the workplace. Not that economists do much better in Jaffe's account. Adam Smith certainly recognised wage bargaining but other contemporary economists failed to appreciate its importance in the labour market. Jaffe, by contrast, explores work relations in a theoretically sophisticated way, importing ideas from game theory, intellectual history, political science, and postmodernism. Employers and workers, we discover, frequently bargained over wages before 1860. For example, price lists were employed to avoid the dangers of competitive rate-cutting as part of a system of wage regulation that assisted both sides. Courts of Requests often dealt with disputes between management and labour, thus coming informally to regulate employment relations. Jaffe finds evidence of sophisticated bargaining amongst Macclesfield silk spinners, the Coventry ribbon trade, Staffordshire potters, and northern coal miners (all of whom receive detailed case studies). For Jaffe, industrial relations in this period were not only highly ritualised but constituted a form of theatre. He is particularly interesting on the dramaturgical structure of negotiations in which participants in effect played out different kinds of roles (a splendid example of the author's interdisciplinary approach).

Jaffe examines strikes and other breakdowns in employer/employee relations but does not see them as examples of class conflict. His theme is really that of social cooperation. Wage bargaining was a ritual in which people knew their lines in the script. He considers ways in which the power of employers was mediated by cultural considerations, leading to his reconsideration of labour relations (following Marcel Mauss) as a gift relationship. Such a view, which both sides bought into, did not mean, however, that workers saw themselves as subservient. What sustained labour relations was the notion of reciprocity between the two sides. The act of negotiation involved an appreciation of mutual [End Page 175] obligations. Yet this is not a cosy view of the workplace because Jaffe insists that the labour market was "asymmetrical" (19).

The book highlights the importance of shared languages between management and labour derived in part from high culture. Jaffe provides a case study of the London Union of Compositors in the early nineteenth century to demonstrate how it drew upon eighteenth-century moral philosophy. The...