‘Medieval Working Practices’? British Agriculture and the Return of the Gangmaster

Abstract

The Select Committee Report reviewed here outlines both the fact of and the dynamics structuring the return to British agriculture of the gangmaster system. Wrongly described by some observers as an aspect of a developing capitalism, by conservative historiography as benign/non-coercive, and by the present British government as the resurgence of ‘medieval working practices’, this highly exploitative form of labour contracting was condemned earlier, by the 1867 Children's Employment Commission. Then, as now, it involved the recruitment/control of casual workers, and is currently based on much the same kinds of coercive mechanisms as its nineteenth century counterpart. Rather than being a pre- or non-capitalist relic, however, the gangmaster system corresponds to the restructuring of the rural labour process by cost-cutting agribusiness enterprises and commercial farmers. As such, it is argued here, it represents the authentic face of a twenty-first century capitalist agriculture.

Notes

Tom Brass formerly lectured in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University.

That US capitalism does indeed utilize unfree labour is evident from many sources (see, for example, US Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor [1970], Lichtenstein [1996], Angelo [1997], Krissman [1997]).

Citation used in this review article follows the twofold referencing method adopted by the EFRA Committee document. First, to the section that is the Report itself (pp.1–33). And second, to the section containing Evidence (Ev 1–109). The latter consists both of written materials submitted to the Committee and the cross-examination by its members of the witnesses themselves.

As the Report under review makes clear, the kind of recruitment/control/coercion associated with the gangmaster system is currently found also in some areas of British manufacturing industry, particularly where 1980s deregulation of employment pay and conditions has given rise to subcontracted economic activity ( = sweatshops), albeit disguised conceptually by terms such as ‘outsourcing’, ‘self-employment’ and ‘the informal economy’.

The government view of it as a ‘pre-capitalist’ form coincides with the interpretation advanced by exponents of the ‘semi-feudal’ thesis. The government intention, announced at the end of the 1990s, to eradicate this form of labour contracting, was due to a concern not for workers' rights so much as for revenue lost as a result of tax evasion.

Not as controversial as it once was, it has to be said. Those who in the past have opposed strongly the view that agrarian capitalists deploy unfree labour have argued either that where coercion is used agriculture cannot be capitalist, or that such workers are free, coercion notwithstanding. Some have quite simply changed their minds, while others have qualified positions held previously.

An example of this view, applied to coal mining, is Taylor [1960: 234], who argues that ‘[s]ub-contracting, in short, both from a narrowly economic and from a managerial point of view, was a form of organization peculiar to the adolescence of industrial society and destined to disappear as the British economy grew to maturity’.

The most robust defence of this position comes, unsurprisingly, from conservative historians. Its most succinct expression is that of Hayek [1954: 9 – 10], who protests that: ‘There is, however, one supreme myth which more than any other has served to discredit the economic system to which we owe our present-day civilization … It is the legend of the deterioration of the position of the working classes in consequence of the rise of “capitalism” (or of the “manufacturing” or the “industrial system”). Who has not heard of the “horrors of early capitalism” and gained the impression that the advent of this system brought untold suffering to large classes …. The widespread emotional aversion to “capitalism” is closely connected with this belief that the undeniable growth of wealth which the competitive order has produced was purchased at the price of depressing the standard of life of the weakest elements of society’. It was, perhaps, this kind of view that the author had in mind when, in the following fictional account, Buckman [1891: 42–4] satirized both the way rural life in nineteenth century England was idealized, and in particular the manner in which the work regime of the agricultural labourer was depicted. ‘We have mentioned previously that the Arcadian plebeians work for the chiefs. That's what they will tell you if you inquire. Their methods of working are, however, thoroughly Arcadian. For instance, having been to the homestead in the morning, the son of toil receives his orders and starts to his work. He has not proceeded far before he meets another Arcadian of like attern to himself. The two Arcadians stop when they are alongside of one another, and give a half turn round. Then they commence the important ceremony known as passing the time of day. Each one makes some topical observation to the other. … The son of toil at last reaches his field, after going through the same ceremony with other Arcadians whom he may meet, and perhaps he does a full fifteen minutes' work – really honest toil. Then he leans on his implement with a smile of satisfaction and contemplates the view. Possibly he descries in the roadway some Arcadian acquaintance, and he forthwith commences conversation. It matters not how far it be from the road, or wherever it is that the other Arcadian is situate. Even if there be a matter of thirty chains between them, the conversation will be just as spiced and just as confidential as if they were within a yard of each other. Fifteen to thirty minutes will be consumed in this ceremony, and then there will be some more work done. It is not etiquette in Arcadia for any one to pass down the road without holding a conversation of at least five minutes in the case of a mere casual acquaintance to thirty or forty minutes in the case of better known personages. Besides these ceremonies is the homage to be paid to the bottle. Worship at this shrine is performed as devoutly as any religious ceremony in the world, and the worship must be repeated a number of times in the day. Furthermore, there are certain specified times for the consumption of “nuncheon” and the necessary dinner-hour of an hour and a half. What with all the ceremonies and observances, and the labours performed, a more industrious man than an Arcadian plebeian is not easy to meet with.’

This view is found in a recent and highly problematic history by Armstrong [1988: 97] of agricultural workers in Britain. Ironically, Armstrong contrasts his own approach to the issue of rural labour with what he terms ‘a new style of social history … dominated by a conviction of the explanatory value of the concept of “class”’, which, he maintains [ Armstrong, 1988: 13], is ‘not to the taste of all historians’. The irony derives from the fact that, where the analysis of gangmasters is concerned, the approach of the ‘new social history’ closely identified by him with the History Workshop Journal is in some important respects no different from his own. Thus, for example, in her account of the gender-specific aspects of participation in gang labour by women workers, Kitteringham [1975: 98ff.] comes dangerously close to dismissing criticisms of the exploitation by gangmasters of child and female labour as ‘Victorian bourgeois moralizing’, and consequently of recategorizing exploitative relations of production as their ‘other’ – evidence for working class (and especially women's) empowerment. This difficulty stems from a laudable but problematic objective informing much ‘new social history’ associated with the History Workshop Journal: namely, the desirability of identifying all ‘from below’ forms of agency as empowering, or – as Thompson [1963: 12] put it, memorably – to rescue ‘those below’ from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. The same approach also informs earlier historiographical accounts of the rural labourer, such as that by Fussell [1949], a celebratory text that is almost a plebeian variant of Country Life; its highly romanticized account of rural habitations should be contrasted with that contained in Dodd [1976: 56 – 7] and Heath [1989: 28ff]. Both the ‘new social history’ and its precursors suffer from the same kinds of shortcoming. First, the privileging of locality over the wider context, and with it the downgrading of an over-arching political economy. And second, taken to its logical conclusion, the ‘new social history’ approach necessarily leads ultimately to a denial that any ‘from below’ activity in which rural workers participate can ever be disempowering – which is precisely what the more conservative historiography of Armstrong also does.

For coercive recruitment/control by labour contractors in these different national contexts, see respectively Singh and Iyer [1984], Krissman [1997] and Martins [2002].

As such, recruitment/control/coercion by a gangmaster corresponds to workforce decomposition/recomposition involving the replacement of free labourers with unfree equivalents, a form of capitalist restructuring that amounts to a process not of proletarianization as much as deproletarianization. Because proletarianization is equated invariably with the cessation only of ownership of means of production ( = land), and not also with the capacity of a worker personally to commodify his/her own labour-power, the cessation of the latter as a result of coercive control exercised by an employer or contractor does not prevent rural labourers being categorized – incorrectly – as a proletariat. Thus, for example, Howkins [1985: 9] wrongly equates the casualization by the gangmaster system of the agrarian workforce in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Norfolk with the emergence of a rural proletarian ‘with nothing to sell but his labour power in a free market which was overstocked, and which valued him at naught’. Others to whom this same criticism applies include Hobsbawm and Rudé [1969] and Morgan [1982].

Classic accounts of the nineteenth century rural gangmaster system in Britain are found not just in the Children's Employment Commission [1867] and Marx [1976: 850–53] but also in Heath [1989: 148ff.], Hasbach [1908: 193–204] and Green [1920]. They are absent from the equally classic history by the Hammonds [1920] of rural labour only because their account deals with the period before the gang system rose to prominence and became a focus of concern. Marx himself regarded official publications issued periodically by the British state as an invaluable source of information. His views merit quoting at length [ Marx, 1976: 91]: ‘The social statistics of Germany and the rest of Continental Western Europe are, in comparison with those of England, quite wretched. But they raise the veil just enough to let us catch a glimpse of the Medusa's head behind it. We should be appalled at our own circumstances if, as in England, our governments and parliaments periodically appointed commissions of inquiry into economic conditions; if these commissions were armed with the same plenary powers to get at the truth; if it were possible to find for this purpose men as competent, as free from partisanship and respect of persons as are England's factory inspectors, her medical reporters on health, her commissioners of inquiry into the exploitation of women and children, into conditions of housing and so on.’ It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the findings contained in nineteenth century commissions of inquiry have been challenged periodically by conservative historiography. Thus for, example, Hutt [1954] insists that child labour employed in British factories was well paid, ‘wholesome’ and light in nature, that child labourers were ‘free agents’ ( = ‘choice-making’ subjects), and that factory owners were ‘men of humanity’.

Hasbach [1908: 199, 203, 272] indicates that where the gang system flourished, as it did in the Fenland area, the labour-power of men was increasingly replaced by that of women and children, the reason being that the latter not only worked as hard as men but were also easier to control and less costly to employ. In such circumstances, he emphasizes [ Hasbach, 1908: 200, 201], control exercised over the workforce by the gang overseer was based on coercion.

See Hasbach [1908: 362] and also Green [1920: 77], who observes: ‘The pinch of poverty was increased, too, by the falling off in family earnings. It was chiefly through the action of the trade unions that the degrading gang system of employing married women, young girls and boys on field work under a ganger who exploited their labour … had largely disappeared.’ Some official accounts offer a different reason for the decline of the gangmaster system towards the end of the nineteenth century. Hence the report by Board of Agriculture and Fisheries [1906] about the decrease in the rural labouring population maintained that it was the Elementary Education Act of 1870 that put a break on gangmaster recruitment. This it did by restricting the employment of children, thereby depriving gangmasters of this source of easily controlled and cheap labour. Hence the claim [ Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, 1906: 10] that: ‘These changes paved the way for the agitation of the early [1870s], when for a time capital and labour on the farm organized their forces and came into the open, and in some districts bitter, conflict. From this period dates a change in the relationship of masters and men. Agricultural labour attained economic freedom, [even] if it did not acquire at once the same degree of mobility as industrial labour …’. The National Union of Agricultural Workers was founded in 1872, but dissolved in 1896. It was reconstituted in 1906 as the Eastern Counties Agricultural labourers and Smallholders' Union, becoming the National Agricultural Labourers' and Rural Workers Union in 1912 and the National Union of Agricultural Workers in 1920 (for the history of which see Groves [1949]). It eventually became part of the much larger Transport and General Workers Union.

For the unfree nature of mine labour, see Anonymous [1899: 121ff.] and Page Arnot [1955: 5–6, 9–10]. In an attempt to exculpate capitalism, the conservative historian Ashton [1954: 37] argues that in Britain unfree labour was found not in towns but in villages, the sub-text being that industry – which was capitalist – employed only free labour, while agriculture – which according to him was still in a pre-capitalist stage – did not. This view (unfree labour = pre-capitalist relation, free labour = capitalist relation) is one shared, unsurprisingly, by neo-classical economic historiography that in the mid-1970s attempted to revise the meaning of antebellum plantation slavery, and, more surprisingly, by the supposedly Marxist interpretations of rural India advanced at that same conjuncture by exponents of the semi-feudal thesis.

Under the Master and Servants Act of 1824, any agricultural labourer attempting to leave his existing work and seek an alternative job without first obtaining the permission of his current employer was liable to imprisonment for breach of contract. It was finally repealed in 1867. Other, more subtle, forms of control – based on employer collusion – were also practised. Hence the relationship between labourer and farmer in early nineteenth century Britain, described by Howitt [1838: 176, 178] in the following terms: ‘They hire for the year, under very severe punishment in the case of misbehaviour, or quitting service; they cannot have fresh service, without a character from the last master, and also from the minister of the parish! … The farmer takes the man, just at the season to get the sweat out of him; and if he dies, he dies when the main work is done. The labourer is wholly at the mercy of the master, who, if he will not keep him beyond the year, can totally ruin him, by refusing him a character’ [emphasis in original]. The same source [ Howitt, 1838: 182] continues: ‘but the fact, that these poor people must bring a character from the last master before they can be employed again, is one which may seem at first sight a reasonable demand, but is in fact the binding link of a most subtle and consummate slavery. I have seen the effect of this system in the Derbyshire and collieries. There, amongst the master colliers a combination was entered into … This rule, that no man should be employed except he brought a character from his last master was adopted; and what was the consequence? That every man was the bounden slave of him in whose employment he was’.

The operation of the truck system in the early 1840s is described [ Dodd, 1976: 43, 53] in the following manner: ‘It is a common practice in these counties [Kent, Surrey, Sussex] to pay the wages, both of men and women, by a check drawn upon the miller of the village, who is generally related to the farmer, the laborer getting part of his wages in flour and part in money; or it may be, that the miller again hands him over to the grocer; and thus the poor man in general pays from 25 to 30 per cent more for his victuals than in justice and honesty he should … [T]he truck-trading oppression of the gangmaster, who not only screws down his [worker's] wages to the lowest cent, but supplies him with inferior articles at the highest price; while it subjects [the worker] to greater personal toil …’.

The generally oppressive and exploitative conditions faced by rural labour in Britain are outlined by Howkins [1990: 113]: ‘Since at least the middle of the nineteenth century the farm worker has been among the worst paid and worst treated of all male English manual workers. At virtually no point since 1850 have agricultural wages exceeded 50% of the national wage; until the Second World War farm workers were excluded from the provisions of the National Insurance Act and the Bank Holidays legislation; employment by the day remained common until the 1920s while the hours worked were long and irregular. For women who worked the land conditions were worse.’

Over the late nineteenth and early twentieth century concern about the coercive power exercised by commercial farmers over their agricultural workers was expressed by liberals and socialists alike. Thus, for example, the following comments by an investigative journalist [ The Special Commissioner of The ‘Daily News’, 1891: 110–11] with Liberal party affiliations: ‘Nobody would say Lord Wantage was a man to exercise any improper influence on his people; but he is a strong Tory, has been a member of the Tory Government, his agents are Tories, and he owns all the land and all the houses, and can give or take away employment. I could not find anybody who knew of a political meeting having been held in these places. I heard it rumoured that there was one man who dared to avow himself a Liberal, but I couldn't find him. “Oh, yes sir,” said a woman in the place, “they all votes Lord Wantage's way, of course. It wouldn't do for 'em to go agin 'im.” I am assured that the admirable little public house in Ardington is to a great extent a failure, because the men find that they are not free to talk there, and that whatever they say is liable to be carried by the birds to the agent's or bailiff's ears. The people are managed and governed and controlled without the least voice in their public and collective affairs, and, though they undoubtedly have strong opinions on certain matters, they dare not give expression to them.’ A Fabian Society pamphlet [ Pedder, 1904: 11–13] published at the beginning of the twentieth century indicates how the tied cottage system operated to the advantage of the farmer, enabling him to exercise what amounted to extra-economic control over an agricultural labouring family: ‘If [the worker] goes into the cottage provided, the trap falls. He will be had up before the magistrates if he refuses to fulfil his agreement of service, in writing or verbal’. The twin issues of rural employer collusion to hold down agricultural wages and the use of tied housing to prevent workers joining unions or voting for political candidates not approved by the farmer also emerged at a Conference held at Ruskin College, Oxford, during 1916, where trade unionists discussed the policy they wanted to see implemented after the 1914–18 war [ Orwin, 1917: 82, 95–6].

‘Hiring-fairs are about done away with nowadays’, noted one observer [ Kitchen, 1940: 99 – 100, 101], who had himself been an agricultural labourer, ‘no farm servant being compelled to stay at his place twelvemonth. But at the time of which I am writing, when a hired servant had taken his “fastening-penny” he was bound by statute to live in and sleep on the premises from 1st December to the following 24th November; to become, in fact, the property of his master … So that is how we carried on before the Great War [pre-1914]. Then the Agricultural Wages Act came into force, and altered the custom of hired servants being tied for twelvemonth. To me it always seemed a wretched business, especially for a lad of thirteen or fourteen, to be taken like a sheep or calf to market and sold to the highest bidder’.

For accounts of these labour camps, which existed in Britain from 1927 until 1939, see Hannington [1937: ch.VII], Colledge [1989], and Colledge and Field [1983]. The work done by those sent to such ‘training camps’ consisted of forest clearing, roadmaking, drainage, excavating and quarrying.

See Hannington [1937: 100, 102–3,107], who reports one labour camp inmate as saying that ‘many of the trainees … soon find themselves used to cut down the wages of the workers in the south [of the UK]’. Another, based in Scotland during the mid-1930s, observed similarly that ‘[i]t was meant to be public work that we were doing, but in fact the big landlords were paying the government and we were working on their estates for four bob a week’ (‘Jobless “hardened” in labour camps’, The Guardian, London, 12 August 1998).

See Hannington [1937: 105]. Opposition to this process of workforce restructuring was behind the TUC General Council decision that ‘no support should be given to training … schemes which have for their object the supply of semi-skilled labour in competition with skilled workers, or for the training of men and women to take their place in industries in which there is already considerable unemployment’.

For the ‘hidden subsidy’ argument, see for example Butler [1946: 140] and Newby [1980: 137–8]. A more persuasive argument [ Newby et al., 1978: 159] is that the tied cottage is a factor which helps ‘explain why the earnings of agricultural workers are amongst the lowest in Britain and why, since the Second World War, the average hourly earnings of agricultural workers have deteriorated markedly vis-à-vis those of industrial workers.’ Standard accounts of the tied cottage in post-war rural England are also found in Newby [1977: 178ff.; 1980: 136–9], who notes that between 1948 and 1976 the number of farm workers living in tied cottages increased from 34 to 53 per cent. A detailed account of the more recent political struggle to abolish tied housing is contained in Danziger [1988: 164 – 85]. The latter text underlines the centrality of tied housing to struggles between farmers and agricultural workers: ‘Although it may appear to an outsider to be uncontroversial, the agricultural tied cottage system represents far more than simply a means of accommodating 50 per cent of the country's farm labour force: it can be found at the heart of many of the most bitter and intense conflicts in the history of agricultural labour relations. The attitudes held by farmers and farmworkers to the tied cottage system are in some cases diametrically opposed … The importance of the tied cottage issue to each side is attributable to its close bearing upon the objective economic interests of agricultural employers and workers as defined by the capitalist economy in which they interact. For the employer, the tied cottage is a valuable instrument for ensuring adequate supervision of valuable livestock, as well as being a means of controlling labour supply. Conversely, for the worker, the tied cottage represents a tool for depressing agricultural wages, restricting labour mobility to other industries, and sharpening the worker's sense of insecurity and isolation’ [ Danziger, 1988: 156].

This raises the important issue of the connection between kinship and coercion. For example, in the case of tied housing, compulsion might be exercised on a young agricultural labourer (to work in a gang and/or accept a lower wage, etc.) by members of his family resident in such accommodation. Rather than being simply ‘kinship coercion’, however, such pressure is more accurately identified as originating from the employer, being transmitted via the family of the labourer concerned. The extent of the pressure to which parents were subjected in order to send their young children to work in gangs is evident from an observation in the 1867 Sixth Report, that they would welcome legislation compelling the attendance of their children at school. In other words, only by invoking an alternative source of power – the state – would it be possible for agricultural labouring families to resist the coercive power of the local rural establishment (farmer and clergy). On this point, the Children's Employment Commission [1867: xx] concluded: ‘[T]here is much evidence that shows that the parents of the children would in many instances be glad to be aided by the requirements of a legal obligation [for their children to attend school] to resist the pressure … to which they are often subject. They are liable to be urged at times by the parish officers, at times by employers, under threats of being themselves discharged, to allow their children to be taken to work at an age when it would manifestly be to their greater advantage that the school attendance should not be broken in upon, or entirely discontinued; and it is plain that many naturally well-disposed parents would welcome a regulation …’.

Hence the observation by witnesses [ Children's Employment Commission, 1867: 36, 38] both that ‘[f]armers complain of not being able to get labourers when there are labourers in the town wanting work’, and that child workers were ‘treated harshly’ and taken from schools because gangs were a response by the farmer to the ‘expense of adult labour’ [emphasis added].

The parallel between the gang system in the north of England during the early nineteenth century and slave gangs in the West Indies was lost neither on observers writing at that time, nor on gang members themselves. Hence the following comments by Howitt [1838: 165–6]: ‘A person from the south or midland counties of England journeying northward, is struck when he enters Durham, or Northumberland, with the sight of bands of women working in the fields under the surveillance of one man. One or two such bands, of from half a dozen to a dozen women, generally young, might be passed over; but when they recur again and again, and you observe them wherever you go, they become a marked feature of the agricultural system of the country, and you naturally inquire how it is, that such regular bands of female labourers prevail there. The answer, in the provincial tongue, is – “O they are the Bone-ditches,” i.e. Bondages. Bondages! That is an odd sound, you think, in England. What have we bondage, a rural serfdom, still existing in free and fair England? Even so. The thing is astounding enough, but it is a fact. As I cast my eyes for the first time on these female bands in the fields working under their drivers, I was, before making any inquiry respecting them, irresistibly reminded of the slave gangs of the West Indies: turnip-hoeing, somehow, associated itself strangely in my brain with sugar-cane dressing; but when I heard these women called Bondages, the association became tenfold strong.’ That such a view was shared by ‘those below’ is confirmed by a woman who worked as a gang labourer in the 1860s. ‘On that day I was eight years of age’, she recalls [ Groves, 1949: 30], ‘I left school, and began to work fourteen hours a day in the fields, with from forty to fifty other children, of whom, even at that early age, I was the eldest. We were followed all day long by an old man carrying a long whip in his hand which he did not forget to use. A great many of the children were only five years of age … For four years, summer and winter, I worked in these gangs – no holidays of any sort, with the exception of very wet days and Sundays – and at the end of that time it felt like heaven to me when I was taken to the town of Leeds and put to work in the factory. Talk about the white slaves, the fen districts at that time was the place to look for them.’ This was confirmed by others writing in the 1870s [ Heath, 1989: 152]: ‘And even supposing that by strict and careful supervision the grosser forms of evil are kept down, the private gang system does not afford any alleviation in the labour-slavery which has been the lot of these poor fen women and children for two generations.’

Of children working in gangs, one witness [ Children's Employment Commission, 1867: 39] observed: ‘If idle or careless, they are excited to greater care and diligence with oaths and curses, an occasional kick, and if these fail, are beaten with a stick’. According to another witness [ Children's Employment Commission, 1867: 35] who also worked in a gang when young: ‘The first gang I was in was composed of 20 to 30 boys … The ganger was a man well known for his cruelty. I saw him beat one boy till his wounds had to be dressed. He kept us in the wheat when it was above our waists the whole of a wet day, so that we were working in drenched clothes, and any attempt to leave was met by a beating’.

Gangs sometimes worked throughout the night, and as a local official noted [ Children's Employment Commission, 1867: 35 – 6, 37], ‘[f]requently sicknesses arise from little girls going to work in the wet and cold weather, and being thinly clad …’. One 14-year-old female worker complained [ Children's Employment Commission, 1867: 36]: ‘Digging carrots is very hard work. The gangers takes the work, and makes the children work so hard. We always know when he has taken the work. We have to work so much harder’. Similarly, another labourer observed [ Children's Employment Commission, 1867: 37]: ‘Many of the children have to stay at home from having got bad from wet’. A 78-year-old ex-gangmaster himself admitted [ Children's Employment Commission, 1867: 38] that ‘I have hold on heavy land … It was a very nasty job for girls when the corn was wet … It is very bad work for girls’. This was confirmed by a bookseller who ran a Sunday school [ Children's Employment Commission, 1867: 35], who pointed out that ‘on Sunday children attending my Sunday school show a state of exhaustion which is painful to witness’. The Children's Employment Commission [1867: xii] concludes that ‘the interest of the gangmaster leads him to keep the whole of his gang at full stretch while at their work, with the shortest possible intervals of interruption’.

This was also true of workers in the ‘butty’ gangs deployed in coal mining where, as even conservative historians such as Taylor [1960: 217, 218] accept, labour ‘was difficult to obtain [,] and a premium, therefore, was placed upon efficient and forceful management’. The same source concludes both that ‘it is no cause for wonder that the small mine owner should have found in the system of sub-contracting not only the most feasible but also the most desirable solution to his managerial and labour problems’, and that ‘[t]he butty, raised in a harder if no more exacting school, responded only to the stimulus of profit, and was encouraged to drive his men to the utmost in its pursuit’. As with the gangmaster system in agriculture, the ‘butty’ gang was strongly opposed by the miners and trade unionists [ Taylor, 1960: 219, 231].

This downwards economic spiral is described by Dobb [1946: 165] in the following manner: ‘It is often the poverty of male wage-earners which compels the women members of the family to go out and seek employment, and so enables the “sweated trades” to thrive on the supply of cheap labour thereby created; and once the price of labour falls substantially, its supply-price is likely to be reduced, so that worse terms of employment are readily accepted in the future’. This very point is confirmed by the 1867 Sixth Report itself [ Children's Employment Commission, 1867: xx]: ‘It is averred that under the present system, by which the labour of children and women is so largely employed, the price of many kinds of work which is ordinarily done by adult male labourers is much reduced, and such labourers are kept out of employment for several weeks, or even months, while their wives and children are doing the work’.

This element of workforce restructuring escapes Armstrong [1988: 98, 99], who notes in Panglossian terms: ‘There is no reason to suppose that the gains of migrant workers, whether drawn from English towns, from Ireland, or from other agricultural districts, were at the expense of local people … the inference must be that male workers were more regularly employed as the demand for and supply of labour more nearly approached equilibrium, due to downward migration and to the progress made by agriculture in raising production and creating opportunities for employment’. His conclusion is couched in similarly idealized terms: ‘To sum up, the case for inferring an improvement in the farm worker's position rests less on demonstrable improvements in real wages than on better opportunities to earn those wages’.

Concerns about depopulation were voiced by almost all those writing the about rural issues in late nineteenth century Britain (see, for example, The Special Commissioner of the ‘Daily News’ [1891], Millin [1903], Pedder [1904], Board of Agriculture and Fisheries [1906], Collings [1906: 376ff.] and Levy [1911]).

See Tribe [1981: 35ff.] for an account of the ‘English Model’ of agrarian capitalist transformation.

Both the reasons for and the result of enclosures carried out in nineteenth century Britain are of course a matter of debate, some of which has been conducted in this journal [ Wells, 1979, 1981; Charlesworth, 1980; Reed, 1986; Mills, 1988; Mills and Short, 1983; Donajgrodzki, 1989]. Among the issues raised in the course of this debate are whether or not a peasantry can be said to exist, what dynamic structured its economic reproduction (depeasantization or repeasantization), and what was the object of agency undertaken in rural areas.

For this complaint by farmers about labour mobility, see the Children's Employment Commission [1867: vii].

That the alleged incompatibility between unfree labour and more advanced productive forces – a claim made by exponents of the semi-feudal thesis, among others – is wrong emerges clearly from the strong link between them as set out in the 1867 Sixth Report. The latter indicates that the gangmaster system emerged only when better technology had made possible the draining of fenland, the rich soil being ideal for the cultivation of wheat [ Children's Employment Commission, 1867: vii, 14]. Both the clearing of the land and the harvesting of the crop were tasks undertaken by child labour organized by and under the control of gangmasters. In the early 1890s, Heath [1989: 151] described the resulting situation in the reclaimed fenlands as follows: ‘These enormous tracts of land require constant labour to keep them well cultivated. The soil is so prolific that the weeds would soon choke everything else if they were not vigorously kept in check. The farms are generally very large, and run a long way into the fen. As a rule, there are no cottages upon them, and they therefore depend almost entirely for their labour on the native supply in the various villages … The want of house-room naturally prevents any influx from other parts of the country, and the consequence is, that for about eight months of the year, every available woman and child is pressed into service.’

On this point see Newby [1987: 85–6], who states: ‘The Act introduced a licensing system and restricted the employment of females and minors, thereby eliminating many of the economic advantages of employing a semi-permanent “casual” labour force. Farmers … then sought to secure their supply of labour by building cottages near their own farms … Tied cottages could be held only for the duration of employment on the farm; if the worker ceased employment for any reason he could be required to seek housing elsewhere. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century the significance of tied housing was to grow [thereby increasing] the degree of dependence upon farming employers and [rendering] farm workers even more vulnerable to petty harassment and oppressive threats’. Elsewhere the same writer [ Newby, 1977: 41] notes that the origins of the post-1860s tied cottage ‘lay in the desire by farmers to control the supply of their labour force and to restrict its mobility’.

Calls for protection exposed the well-known economic contradiction between farmers and manufacturers. Farmers wanted higher food prices, which in turn required tariffs to exclude cheaper food imports from abroad. By contrast, manufacturers wanted low food prices, so that the bundle of wage goods consumed by their workers remained low, and with it the wage costs of industry. Crosby [1977] attributes the development of not just conservative ideology but a nationalist political consciousness among English farmers during the first half of the nineteenth century to the fear of foreign competition, and in particular cheaper grain imports. From the 1850s to the early 1870s, this fear diminished, as infrastructural improvements contributed to a 25 per cent increase in farming profits. From the 1870s onwards, however, the fear of foreign competition increased once again, and with it calls for protectionism, a pattern that was repeated during the 1930s.

The constant downward pressure on agricultural wages and living standards of the rural poor generated much debate about causes of and solutions to ‘distress’ in the countryside. Hence the following combination of acute observation and resignation [ Anonymous, 1840: 21–2]: ‘The situation of the labourers, and of the whole class of agricultural poor, has attracted, for a considerable time, the attention of the country … As the complaints of distress are very general in all branches of industry, the agricultural poor appear to be suffering in common with those other portions of the community, whose subsistence does not depend upon a settled income. But the labourer suffers in a greater proportion: his gains in the most favourable periods do not much exceed the amount of the sum required to purchase the bare necessaries of life; he has no superfluities; and whenever a reduction of his profits takes place, no economy can supply the deficiency. The means are withdrawn by which his health and strength, his sole property, can be preserved, and the term poverty is not a metaphor applied to him, as it often is when used with respect to higher classes, whom a change of circumstances only makes poor by comparison with that which they possessed before … if there be any laws resulting from the institutions that establish property in land which necessarily limit, in a country fully peopled, the share of the labourer to a portion which can only procure for himself and family a bare subsistence, it is vain to seek any considerable improvement of his condition, and the government can do no more than protect him in the enjoyment of the part allotted to him … History does not deal much in the records of the poor’.

The same appears to have been true of the ‘butty’ system in coal mining where, in the context of increasing competition, sub-contracting permitted employers to cut costs yet simultaneously intensify control over their workers [ Taylor, 1960: 227ff.]. Even on farms that attempted to combine economic efficiency with ‘social’ objectives, such as that carried out in the northeastern country of Cumberland during the 1860s, more expensive permanent workers were replaced with cheaper temporary variants [ Lawson, Hunter et al., 1874: 319ff.]. Although the state introduced regulation following the recommendations of the 1867 Sixth Report, legislation was in many cases ignored, and gangs continued to flourish. Thus, for example, Heath [1989: 151–2] reported hearing the following admission from a large farmer in the 1870s: ‘The result of legislation for public gangs will be great evasion of the Act under the form of private gangs, which will require dealing with just as much’.

The Committee member was Austin Mitchell, a leftish ‘old’ Labour Member of Parliament, who not only asked consistently searching questions but – as importantly – also showed a commendable disinclination to accept evasive or incorrect answers from witnesses appearing on behalf of (or sympathetic to) government, agribusiness and gangmasters.

According to one witness, the turnover of a single gangmaster increased from £3 million to £10 million in a relatively short period, between 1992 and 1996 (Ev 50 note 8, Ev 52). Despite widespread fraud and evasion of tax and labour legislation, only 13 gangmasters were prosecuted in the 18 months prior to the EFRA Committee hearings (Ev 36). Those prosecuted by the state (Home Office, Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise) are workers who are either illegal immigrants or drawing unemployment benefit, not gangmasters (Ev 39, 46), an anomaly to which Austin Mitchell draws attention. In the 1,800 ‘removals’ only 170 were failed asylum seekers (Ev 40).

It is clear that, just as in the nineteenth century, the element of worker indebtedness is both inbuilt into the relationship between a gangmaster and his labourers, and licenses the control/coercion exercised by him over them. Not only were the workers – mostly young people – housed on farms in portacabins supplied by the gangmaster, therefore, but their wages were subject to multiple deductions – again by the gangmaster – as a result of which they went into debt (Ev 54 note 15).

These (and other) cases were supplied by the Citizens Advice Bureaux (Ev 90–95) located in the eastern region of the country, where the large commercial farms are situated. Together with the trade unions, the Citizens Advice Bureaux provided the Committee with both the most powerful evidence of coercion/control exercised by gangmasters and the most radical criticisms of their labour regime. Among the many instances of employer coercion was one in which a gangmaster agency ‘brought along their own security people’ (Ev 94). Generally speaking, ‘[m]ost workers who have sought advice … are experiencing exploitative employment contracts, which commonly have closely interlinked employment and housing issues, with one being reliant on the other. Long hours and poor working and accommodation conditions seem to be common. Poor employment practices include infringements of the National Minimum Wage, rights to paid holidays and statutory sick pay, notice rights and protections from illegal deductions from wages’ (Ev 94).

Hence the view (Ev 94) that: ‘Fear of retribution, combined with the assumption that they may be working illegally, and fear of loss of job and home means not only that such workers fear to seek advice but they are also highly unlikely to complain or use the Employment Tribunal System. Employers and agencies are able to take advantage of this’.

In what at times comes close to being supermarket-centric testimony that is also sympathetic to gangmasters, the witness who supplied this input to the EFRA Committee had a hard time disguising this sympathy (despite trying ‘to take a balanced view’). Among the claims made by this witness (Ev 59–61) was that the idea of corporate responsibility was ‘a difficult question’, that there was no solution to the gangmaster problem, and that 80 per cent of workers interviewed ‘expressed satisfaction with their employer’. Maintaining that no difference existed between gangmasters and labour agencies, the witness confessed that ‘I cannot sit here and truly believe that they [gangmasters] set out to abuse people’ (Ev 61–2). This particular witness was accused by Austin Mitchell of ‘extolling gangmasters’ and of rushing to form ‘the National Association for the Rehabilitation of Gangmasters’; when asked by him whether the gangmaster himself was ‘standing around when 80% expressed satisfaction’, the witness replied ‘I have no idea’ (Ev 61). It is somewhat disconcerting, to put it mildly, to come across the following kind of contradictory evidence: on the one hand, the admission that the gangmaster system corresponds to ‘a kind of slavery’, yet the simultaneous insistence that ‘all I can say is that I have been in the hostels, I have eaten the food, I have slept in the hostels. There are people trying to give good jobs to people who want to do them and I feel that to just come at this totally from that area [i.e., gangmaster system = slavery], although I know the Committee has said that there are good gangmasters and so on, is not on’ (Ev 63).

The similarity between the two conjunctures giving rise to the gangmaster system is striking. Like the era following the repeal of the Corn Laws, the 1980s was a period characterized by increasing economic competition on a global basis. At each conjuncture, therefore, the gangmaster represented for its respective commercial agrarian enterprise a specifically capitalist method of keeping labour costs low and simultaneously maintaining control over the workforce.

It should be emphasized that the Committee member concerned was not racist, merely protecting the interests as she saw them of workers in her constituency. The same cannot be said of groups on the political right, for whom the element of ethnicity/nationality would be paramount.

Hence the view [ Children's Employment Commission, 1867: xxi] that ‘[s]ome of the largest occupiers also and others maintain that, within their own experience, no physical hardships not common to all agricultural labour are inflicted upon the young or upon females who have worked for them in a public gang; that some public gangs are well conducted, and are therefore unobjectionable…’. Similarly, in his testimony [ Children's Employment Commission, 1867: xxii] the Earl of Leicester maintained that the gangmaster system was ‘as beneficial to the labourer as it is profitable to the employer’. These claims, made by commercial farmers and landlords to justify the gangmaster system they used, were dismissed by the Children's Employment Commission [1867: xxi] in the following terse manner: ‘We do not think that these views are likely to prevail against the great mass of testimony of a contrary description throughout the evidence … We cannot think that the perusal of the evidence will leave room to doubt that the public gang system is one which, – whether the mode in which it is carried on be looked to, or the circumstances out of which it had its origin, – can deservedly excite any reluctance to place it under salutary regulations.’

On this point, the conclusion in the Sixth Report of the Children's Employment Commission [1867: xxi] is unambiguous: ‘Should, however, the gradual abandonment of the public gang system be the result of the legislative interference proposed, the entire evidence proves that such a result would be in accordance with the best interests of the labouring agricultural population now subject to it.’

That the incompatibility of child labour with education was a central part of the class struggle was a fact recognized by both parties to this conflict – rural working-class families and employers. That the latter perceived this to be so is clear from Hannington [1940: 9–10], who makes the following observation about the British capitalist class during the early nineteenth century: ‘Their attitude on education was clearly expressed by one of their spokesmen, Mr. D. Giddy, President of the Royal Society and a Member of Parliament. In a speech in 1807, opposing elementary education for working-class children, he said: “However specious in theory the project might be, of giving education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would in effect be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants on agriculture and other laborious employments to which their rank in society had destined them; instead of teaching them subordination, it would render them factious and refractory, as was evident in the manufacturing counties; it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books and publications against Christianity; it would render them insolent to their superiors; and in a few years the result would be that the legislature would find it necessary to direct the strong arm of power towards them, and to furnish the executive magistrate with much more vigorous laws than were now in force”.’

This was rather obviously true of most, if not all, capitalists at that conjuncture. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, for example, an anti-socialist text included a lengthy argument supportive of the urban sweatshop system [ Howell, 1892: 109ff.] and opposing state legislation/regulation, described as contrary to the interests of the working class. For holders of such views, therefore, the slogan ‘liberty for labour’ meant freedom not from capitalist control/coercion but rather from state intervention. The argument consisted essentially of the assertion that, as nothing could be done about the urban sweatshop, there was no point even in trying. The oppression inherent in it was blamed not on capitalism but rather on ‘feckless’ working-class families (‘The head of the family, the responsible bread-winner, has been the chief promoter of sweating’).

Hence the claim by a farmer [ Children's Employment Commission, 1867: 38] that the ‘employment of child labour seems cheap but it is not really cheap, because the work is not done well …’. In a thinly disguised piece of propaganda that sought to justify existing inequalities and production relations by putting strong arguments into the mouth of a farmer (‘Stubbs’) and weak ones into that of his labourer (‘John Hopkins’) and the latter's spouse (‘the wife’), the following exchange is found [ Anonymous, 1833: 114–15]: ‘… so you see’, [said Stubbs], ‘that this humane regulation of the magistrates encourages idleness just as much as it encourages early marriages, and a superabundance of children’. ‘But worst of all,’ said the [labourer’s] wife, ‘is, that it teaches them to be idle, discontented, and riotous, and madly burn the very ricks of corn that might have made them bread … my uncle said that the labourers now-adays were quite different from what they used to be. Their characters quite changed within his memory; not but there may be some among them right-minded still, but, take the general run, they are a bad set. There was one of them so impudent as to say to his employer, – ‘If you don't give me better wages, I will marry to-morrow, and then you must maintain me at double cost’. For the fellow was sharp enough to know, that, though the magistrates paid the difference, it came out of the farmer's pocket in the shape of the poor's rate.’ ‘But when the parish maintains them, the parish ought to make them work,’ said John. ‘So they do, as far as they can [said Stubbs]: they send them round to the farmers in gangs, and when the farmer can find them work, they pay the wages to the parish …’. Significantly, the anonymous writer of this pro-farmer propaganda was Jane Marcet (1769 – 1858), born into a wealthy Swiss banking family and an influential popularizer of arguments about political economy in the early nineteenth century.

This was in keeping with farmer ideology generally, the patronizing (and indeed class) attitude of which towards agricultural workers is epitomized by the following [ Anonymous, 1834: 120]: ‘As to the obstinacy of labourers, it has a very obvious, and a very justifiable source … A kind word may do something; reason and a draught of ale more; … Encouragement, of this substantial kind, is the surest way to secure good servants; but it should be sparingly administered, and never except for extra exertion. Ignorant people are too apt to regard spontaneous favours as rather due to their own merits than to the generosity of their master, and if not thus frequently indulged, they become discontented and sulky. The full performance of their regular duties should, therefore, be rigidly exacted for the stipulated remuneration; but occasion may be found to show them little acts of kindness, without increasing their sense of self-importance; …’.

An abstract of the Report of the Lords' Committees on the Condition and Treatment of the Colonial Slaves [ London Society for the Abolition of Slavery, 1833: 477ff.] outlines evidence taken by them on that subject during 1832. Among the many pro-slavery witnesses interviewed, the Duke of Manchester testified that ‘[t]he treatment of the slaves was excellent; their food and clothing abundant (though he cannot specify quantities); and their dwellings remarkably good in general … [t]he only idea, he conceived, the slaves had of emancipation was having nothing to do’. He accepted that slave insurrections in Jamaica during 1824 ‘were to be traced to the [slave's] desire to emancipate himself,’ but maintained that these ‘disturbances’ had nothing to do with and ‘certainly did not arise … from ill usage’. His concluding words were that on estates ‘the Duke always found old slaves comfortably provided for, he supposed by their own families’. Another pro-slavery witness, a lawyer from Jamaica, insisted that ‘want, as to food or clothing, was unknown among them [plantation slaves] … and, as far as he knew, their treatment was good and kind’. The same witness continued that floggings were not severe, and the ‘treatment of the slaves was, he also believed, lenient; and the leaning of jurors, on trials, in their favour: but he could not recollect particular instances. Indeed he had never seen a slave trial. The judges were almost all planters’. These kind of views about the well-being and easy life of their unfree plantation labour have an almost universal existence where agribusiness capitalists are concerned, and similar claims can be found in almost any account by them of the nature of the labour regime on their rural properties.

During the early 1840s, therefore, the gangmaster system enabled a farmer to disclaim knowledge of and responsibility for his workers. Dodd [1976: 53] makes this clear: ‘There is a complete disseverment between the farmer and the laborer; the former has no interest either in the character or condition of the latter; the whole power, as well as responsibility, is delegated to a … grasping gangsman, whose tyranny is the more oppressive …’.

In the course of taking evidence for the 1931 Royal Commission investigating the working conditions of industrial and plantation labour in British India, an Indian representative was strongly discouraged by the Chairman from pursuing a line of questioning about the extent to which carpet-making factories owned by British capital were responsible for the coercive practices utilized by master weavers against unfree child labour employed indirectly by the former and directly by the latter. What had happened was that, when challenged that he himself was responsible for the employment of low-paid unfree labour in carpet-making, the representative of the British factory denied culpability by claiming that, although as far as he personally was concerned child labour was free to come and go as it wished, he was unable to guarantee that this was how the master weaver – the direct employer of such workers – perceived the situation. In short, any shortcomings in the pay, working conditions and treatment of these workers were nothing to do with him. For these exchanges, see Royal Commission on Labour in India [1931: 98–9, 277, paragraphs B-1279 to B-1280 and B-1277(a) to B-1277(g)].

Following the extensive documentation of widespread coercion and violence practised against debt peons employed on sisal producing capitalist estates in Yucatan, landlords accepted that this had occurred, but always on estates other than their own. On this point, Gruening [1928: 138] makes the following laconic observation: ‘In 1923 I travelled through those regions. Even the Yucatan hacendados denied little, although at the time with a militantly revolutionary governer, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, in the saddle, recollections of that nature were painful. It was on the other fellow's hacienda that those things happened. “We treated our peons very much better than the rest.” The hacendados were unanimous on that point.’

This ideological defence is by no means confined to agribusiness, and is deployed also by urban industrial capitalists relying on the gangmaster system. When confronted with the long hours worked and low pay received by migrants employed in his factory, the English managing director of a Korean-owned multinational blamed the gangmaster, saying the latter ‘was entirely responsible for the Chinese workers, who were technically employed by [the gangmaster's] agency, not by the company … [the gangmaster] submits a claim. We pay him direct, the minimum wage per worker plus a management fee. He houses the workers and feeds them. We provide space at the factory for his Chinese cook. What he pays the workers is up to him’ (‘Tragic death that uncovered the shadowy world of Britain's hidden Chinese workers’, The Guardian [London], 13 January 2004). Perhaps the least surprising thing about this case is that, when this same multinational corporation first based its subsidiary in northeastern England, the local Member of Parliament – one of the chief architects of ‘New’ Labour – praised the company effusively, insisting ‘[s]ome have the impression that the success of the tiger economies is based on sweatshop labour … [t]his is a false picture’.

In an entirely predictable form of blame avoidance, one gangmaster eschewed the very label itself, insisting that ‘we're an employment agency now … so we are not gangmasters; although we came from gangmaster stock shall we say’ (Ev 52).

In an important sense, this claim about the improving conditions of the rural labourer has always been a central component of farmer ideology, as Howkins [1990: 114] makes clear.

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Tom Brass

Tom Brass formerly lectured in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University.