Combinations, Hand-Loom Weavers and the Factory Acts

As soon as Lord Melbourne became Home Secretary in November 1830, he asked Senior to look at the question of the law of combinations. In his memorandum, Senior argued that in this case the duty of government was to maintain law and order.

They^[34] accordingly conclude with a series of astounding proposals for the amend­ment of the law. The Act of 1825 could not conveniently be openly repealed; but its mischievous results were to be counteracted by drastic legislation. They recommend that a law should be passed clearly reciting the common law prohi­bitions of conspiracy and restraint of trade. The law should go on to forbid, under severe penalties, “all attempts or solicitations, combinations, subscrip­tions, and solicitations to combinations” to threaten masters, to persuade black­legs, or even simply to ask workmen to join the Union. Picketing, however peaceful, was to be comprehensively forbidden and ruthlessly punished. Employers or their assistants were to be authorised themselves to arrest men without summons or warrant, and hale them before any justice of the peace. The encouragement of combinations by masters was to be punished by heavy pecuniary penalties, to be recovered by any common informer (Webb and Webb 1898: 125).

The report was regarded as politically impossible to implement and was therefore not acted upon.

In 1837, Senior also became involved in two important new subjects, con­cerned with the hand-loom weavers and the Factory Acts, which were later to be associated with his name to an extent almost equal to that of the Poor Law Report.

The plight of the weavers had its origins in the eighteenth century. The development of machine spinning in the 1770s had led to a huge supply of cheap yarn and, as a result, the employment of weavers expanded rapidly to nearly a quarter of a million during the Napoleonic Wars. The power loom for weaving was first invented in the 1780s but was slow to develop. Reasonably high weavers' wages meant that more power looms which were less advanced could be used commercially than would have been the case had wages remained at their earlier, lower levels. These less advanced machines could not be used on some types of yarn and this served initially to maintain the weavers in work. However, as power looms advanced and were able to weave many kinds of fabrics, hand-loom weaving declined, resulting in lower wages and poorer working conditions. Early in September 1837, a Royal Commission of Inquiry was established to examine the condition of the weavers who had become unemployed. Senior was appointed to head the Commission which sought evidence from witnesses in principal weaving districts. The work took four years and it is probable that Senior himself was responsible for writing the report which was published in 1841 (see Bowley 1937: 258).

The first important point made in the Report of the Commissioners was that although the original wording of the Commission’s task was to look into the ‘condition of the unemployed hand-loom workers’, initial enquiries revealed that in fact there were not many unemployed workers but that those who were employed suffered from ‘great privation and distress, arising...from insufficient wages and excessive toil’ (Senior 1841c: 1). The Report has been noted for the quality of its classical economic analysis applied to a concrete case (see Stigler 1949: 25-36). The causes of the weavers’ plight were divided into those affecting demand and supply respectively followed by a discussion of possible remedies. On the demand side, a tax on power looms and duties on imports were considered but rejected on the grounds of doing more harm than good.

One last consideration with regard to the hand-loom weavers was Senior’s insistence on inserting into the Report of the Commissioners elements of his earlier report on trades unions. In a note at the beginning of a reproduction of Historical and Philosophical Essays published posthumously in 1865, Senior maintained that ‘the lapse of thirty years has not diminished its interest.

The law remains as defective as it was in 1831' (Senior 1865, 2: 116). In fact, Senior's arguments for enabling “free labour” in 1841 were even more repres­sive than a decade earlier (see Curthoys 2004: 24).

Senior involved himself in the controversy concerning factory legislation and in particular what was to become the Factories Act 1847 (also known as the Ten Hours Act). Under the Factories Act (Althorp's) Act of 1833, those aged between nine and thirteen were restricted to eight hours of work per day. Children in this age group were required to assist adults. It was envisaged that there would be a “relay system” for children with two shifts covering the per­mitted working day and that, as a result, adults would be able to work a long day.

On 17 March 1837, Senior began a tour of the northern manufacturing districts. Ensconced in the York Hotel in Manchester, he wrote three letters to Charles Poulett Thomson, the President of the Board of Trade. In the first, written on 28 March, he explained that he and his party had been in the cen­tre of the cotton district inquiring into the effects of the Factory Regulations Act on cotton manufacture and any future effects from further legislative interference. He went on to write that ‘as Lord Ashley's motion is at hand...I think you may not be unwilling to hear the results to which we have as yet come' (Senior 1837: 11). He then put forward his well-known, not to say infamous, argument that if the hours of working in a mill were reduced by one hour per day (prices remaining the same), net profit would be destroyed— if they were reduced by an hour and a half, even gross profit would be destroyed. Senior also argued that increasing proportions of fixed capital in buildings and machinery in relation to circulating capital will require longer hours of work but that ‘the exceeding easiness of cotton-factory labours renders long hours of work practicable (ibid.: 14; italics in original). He ended the letter by stating that ‘a ten hours' bill would be utterly ruinous' (ibid.: 16).

Senior argued in the second letter, written on 2 April, that the relay system had failed, that parents were losing money because of the reduction in chil­dren's hours and that the duty of educating children should pass from mill owners to the government. In a third letter of 4 April, he registered his ‘alarm' (ibid.: 26) at the government's proposals to enforce the factory acts by more stringent inspection and ended by stating that the only matters for enactment are ‘ventilation and drainage' and providing ‘means and motives to education' (ibid.: 29).

Back in London, Senior attended a meeting of the Political Economy Club on 4 May and reported on his tour. Leonard Horner, the highly respected Inspector of Factories for Lancashire and Yorkshire, was also present. Senior began by taking the audience through his analysis of the capital structures of cotton mills and laid out his argument concerning the “last hour”. He then went on to state that the attempt to use relays of young people had failed. Asked to speak, Horner pointed out that a large number of manufacturers had been using the relay system quite satisfactorily and argued against some other of Senior's statements. Senior was not convinced and asked Horner to put his arguments in writing and forwarded to him his correspondence with the President of the Board of Trade. Horner's letter of reply of 23 May gave fur­ther substance to his remarks on relays and his disagreement concerning the effect on parental income. Understandably, his strongest arguments came in defending the role of the inspectorate. However, he did agree with Senior on the importance of interfering as little as possible in ‘the productive powers of...fixed capital' (ibid.: 30), and although Horner made no explicit reference to the last hour, he did stress ‘the fatal consequences' (ibid.: 31) of a reduction in the hours worked to ten a day. Senior was critical of Althorp's Act which Horner broadly defended, but both were at one with regard to Ashley's Bill. Horner's letter together with Senior's Manchester correspondence and a pref­ace were published on 8 June 1837 as Letters on the Factory Act.

Senior received both support and criticism concerning the last hour right through the 1840s in the run up to the eventual passing of the Factories Act in 1847 (see Levy 1970: 110—114). Later criticism by Marx in Volume 1 of Das Kapital (Marx 1909: 248-254) triggered further discussion of the propo­sition which continued into the twentieth century.^[35]

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