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'The skilful unskilled labourer': The Decline of Artisanal Discourses of Skill in the NSW Arbitration Court, 1905–15
Ben Maddison*
For several centuries artisanal meanings dominated Anglophone discourse on skill. By the start of the twentieth century this dominance was being eroded. The records of the New South Wales Arbitration Court show that older artisanal meanings were losing the credibility that they used to have and were being contested by new understandings of skill more attuned to the commodified labour regime of industrial capitalism. Heydon's apparent oxymoron reflected his position as a mediator of these changes, trying to balance the historical stability presented by artisanal classifications, with the taxonomy that was developing to describe new and more-intensively commodified industrial realities.
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| In a 1910 case in the New South Wales (NSW) Industrial Court, Justice Heydon remarked that he found the 'ironworkers assistant ... difficult to classify, ... a useful skilful man'. Several years later he had refined this into the apparent oxymoron 'the skilful unskilled labourer'.1 While all around many were using the newly-coined term 'semi-skilled' to describe 'the skilful unskilled', Heydon's glorious doublespeak suggests that he found the term complex and problematic. He was not alone in this. The employer who described the operation of stationary steam engines as neither skilled nor unskilled, but 'skilled labouring', evidently shared Heydon's anxieties. So too, it appears, did a union representative when he described certain types of work in sawmills by commenting that 'Any labourer cannot do it; it is an intelligent skilled labourer who can do it'.2 |
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I argue in this article that the use of such apparent oxymorons by Heydon and his contemporaries made perfect sense when considered in a broader historical context. As Darnton and many others have pointed out 'individual expression takes place within a general idiom'3 and this article identifies the general idiom and broader context within which these terms and phrases were set. The internal contradictions within terms such as 'skilful unskilled labourer' or 'skilled labouring' captured in crystalline form wider social and industrial contradictions, as the new order of industrial capitalism sought to eradicate the older artisanal practices and meanings of skill, and replace them with industrial meanings and practices that facilitated the intensification of labour commodification. |
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Arbitration Records and Historical Research | |
| This article is principally based on transcripts of cases in NSW Arbitration Court (1905–08), and Industrial Court (1910–15). These transcripts constitute an unparalleled body of evidence of the usages and meanings of skill current in early twentieth century New South Wales. While similar evidence can be found scattered through newspapers, parliamentary papers, company archives and labour movement records, extensive gleaning of these sources is required in order to bring the fragments together and make them useful for intensive research on the historical meanings of skill. While this process reveals much about the range of meanings of skill and their patterns of usage, the fragmented nature of the evidence requires the active intervention of the historian to bring those meanings and discourses into dialogue with each other. |
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Arbitration court transcripts solve some of these problems, because they provide in a uniquely concentrated form the linguistic evidence of contemporary vocabulary and grammar through which discourses of skill were articulated. It is no accident that the words, phrases and concepts that made up discourses of skill clotted together specifically in the Arbitration Court in this period. After his accession to the presidency of the Arbitration Court in July 1905, Judge Charles Heydon – in contrast to his reluctant predecessor, Judge Cohen – set about developing systematic principles through which arbitration could be conducted. This meant that in Heydon's court there was close scrutiny of issues surrounding work and its value, and this necessarily generated the extensive discussion that makes contemporary discourses of skill so visible in the 1905–08 NSW arbitration court.4 Here, more than in most places, words counted, and this meant that language was often selected with all the care that accompanied an awareness of what could be at stake if a verbal slip was made. More importantly, the adversarial nature of Arbitration Court proceedings meant that different meanings of skill were often ranged against each other in arguments presented to the court. Court transcripts are thus unique in providing a window through which we can observe historical actors (rather than historians) bringing meanings of skill into dialogue with each other. |
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While the records of the early twentieth century NSW arbitration system are thus invaluable for research of this nature, their use needs to be approached with sensitivity to the factors that shaped them. Employers and workers paid considerable attention to the selection of witnesses whose evidence would best support the case being presented. Thus, to take one example, the United Society of Boilermakers and Iron Shipbuilders (USB) when preparing for arbitration in 1911, instructed its shop delegates to 'procure two members whom they consider the best out of each shop, and that they ... go through our claims and see what evidence they can give to them'.5 Similarly, the ITEA called on its members in 1912 to 'attend the sittings of [the Engineers Wages board] and gain some knowledge as to how the men were putting their case as regards the skill and labour attached to each class of work', and resolved that 'As soon as the [ASE] case is closed a special meeting of members be called to prepare the case of the Employers, so far as selecting evidence'. This meeting discussed 'the evidence required in answer to the claims of the ASE' and selected 'special witnesses' to address issues about machine work, dirt money, overtime, blacksmiths and apprentices.6 Further complicating matters, legal participants were quite well aware of this selective aspect. An employer's advocate commented in a 1907 case that
It is the same thing that always happens, the Union coming here with an exaggerated claim, and we have to do something the other way. We minimise the labour as much as they exaggerate it.7
A union advocate made a similar point from the other side of the fence when he commented in a 1910 case that 'it is very unsatisfactory for this Court to have to decide on the evidence' called by the employers and the unions, because the employers 'see everything with an eye blind to any skill on the part of the worker, whilst the worker is apt to exaggerate his skill'.8 |
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Court transcripts also need to be read in light of the fact that the information they contain systematically encourages depictions of the early twentieth century dialogue over skill as a straightforward class contest, albeit one mediated by lawyers and judges. As feminist scholars have pointed out, this can lead to misleadingly one-dimensional interpretations of arbitration, and Lee, Frances, and Bennett have shown how the gendered dimensions of court proceedings can be revealed by reading transcripts as complex and multi-layered texts, rather than simply as inert 'records'.9 Alive to this approach, this paper engages in a discursive reading of the transcripts. The patterns of usage, vocabulary and context through which meanings were constructed, shows that skill and class intersected in more complex ways than is suggested in the simple model of class relations privileged in the arbitration court system. |
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The 'art and mystery' of Artisanal Skill | |
| In 1907 Frank Eland, a stove moulder giving evidence in the case between the Stove and Piano Frame Makers Union and Fred Metters in the NSW Arbitration Court, commented that 'Ironmoulding works by no rule; it is judgement'.10 As the work on British and American working-class mentalities by Hobsbawm, the Hammonds, Rule, Malcolmson, Burnett, and Braverman indicates, in expressing himself in this way Eland was drawing on one of the most important and longstanding motifs of the artisanal discourse of skill.11 His emphasis on the lack of 'rule', and the quality of 'judgement' was a modernised version of what an older idiom had described as 'art and mystery'. As many Australian labour historians have shown, the 'art and mystery' tradition was also alive and well in nineteenth century Australia. Its colonial persistence can be seen that the 1844 Apprenticeship Act, which referred to those engaged in any 'art, mystery or manual occupation' as Shields noted. Fry also picked up the presence of the artisanal idiom in 1880s Australia, observing that 'in the most skilled occupations ... an "art and mystery" had to be acquired'. Similarly Hagan titled a section outlining the nineteenth century printing trade in Australia 'The Art and Mystery of Printing', and Ellem described how in the Australian tailoring trade in the later decades of the nineteenth century 'The "art of cutting" ... was referred to ... Pamphlets and books on its "secrets" abounded.'12 |
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While the medieval terminology had waned by the early twentieth century, its sense of skill as a pre-rational and intrinsically creative quality continued to inform contemporary views about skilled work. While 'art and mystery' and associated terms such as 'artificer' had become comparatively rare in discussions about skilled work, a union advocate's repeated reference to blacksmithing, turning, caulking and riveting as 'art' suggests that even in 1910 they still had some cachet.13 To conceptualise occupations as 'art' called forth age-old tropes through which artisanal skill described and explained itself. A variety of terms were used to describe this sense of skill, from Eland's 'judgement', to the classic 'rule of thumb', or the more visceral 'feeling' or 'instinct'. Thus Alexander Easton, a Sydney blacksmith, claimed that he could assess when metal was at precisely the right temperature to work, through his 'practical experience', 'judgement' and 'Instinct, with the eye'. Similarly John Kennedy, a riveter, described his knowledge of when a rivet was tight enough as 'merely instinct'.14 In a further attempt to secure this artisanal representation, the union advocate drew on evidence given in a 1908 case by an employer, who had argued that blacksmiths were 'not made', and that 'blacksmithing work is work particularly requiring a natural gift'.15 |
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This sense of skill as a quasi-biological, internal, intrinsic quality was engrained in the evidence given by members of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) – labour aristocrats par excellence– when they appeared in the arbitration court in 1908. It informed the union's argument that piecework 'takes out of a man something for which he does not receive a recompense no matter what wage you may guarantee him' (emphasis added). This 'something' – that which could not be measured, described, learnt - or paid for - was artisanal skill.16 A similar sense of inalienable quality was also preserved in the rather antique terminology used by an ASE fitter, when he argued that that each of the engineering trades 'ought to have all the mechanics care shown on it', and this was given a distinctly medieval inflection when he added that 'a thing built on honour will last'.17 This was engineers' ability expressed in terms of internal character traits denoted by 'care' and 'honour', rather than simply a range of technical abilities and knowledge that could be applied to production, and paid for. Views such as that given by a Sydney engineer in 1868 that artisanal skills were founded on 'a mode of acquiring knowledge which you cannot impart to another' were widely accepted and usually went unchallenged.18 |
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Contesting Artisanal Meanings of Skill | |
| From at least 1600 to around the mid-nineteenth century artisanal meanings and explanations of skill were dominant and relatively stable throughout the Anglophone world. This long history of course meant that artisanal meanings were not instantaneously eradicated in the few years encompassed in this study. At the same time, this longevity makes all the more striking the contestation of artisanal meanings of skill that can be seen through the lens of arbitration court transcripts. |
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We can observe part of this contest in action by following how artisanal claims were received in a 1910 metal trades case. The case, which was described significantly by one participant as 'a sort of scientific inquiry of ... work', displayed profound scepticism about the (non-scientific) claims and explanations of artisanal skill. A blacksmith (Easton) claimed that power–hammer smiths had to be able to detect whether the proper degree of heat had been obtained, but although he was able to attribute this to 'practical experience' he could not be more definite because 'it is a thing I cannot explain'. In a transcript bereft of dramatic inflection, the sarcasm still drips from the employer advocate's cross–examination: 'What is this mystic indication you get?' he enquired.19 |
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Heydon lent his assent to this demystification of artisanal categories and descriptions. when he commented that as a boy 'seeing blacksmiths making horses' shoes ... They did not seem to me ... to require a great deal of skill; I think I could have judged myself'.20 Similarly, when ASE members claimed that only tradesmen could use engineering tools, Heydon responded by recalling that 'when I used to ride a bicycle I knew all about the spanner and everybody in the community can use the spanner'. This was hardly rousing endorsement for the 'mystery' of blacksmithing or engineering, and was typical of the scepticism with which the non-rationalistic claims engrained in the discourse of artisanal skill were being treated.21 |
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When innuendo and 'common sense' were not enough, court proceedings produced a more coherently articulated juxtaposition of the respective logics mobilised by both adherents and antagonists of the artisanal view of skill. The Sawmillers (1905) was one of the foundation cases in the evolution of arbitration in Australia, and skill was its key issue.22 One of the objectives of the Sawmill and Timber Yard Employees Association (STYEA) in the case was to get the Court to 'lift the trade up ... by bringing about an apprenticeship system which turns out competent journey men' in the machining branches of saw milling. In order to do this the union needed to demonstrate that machining was as skilled as other apprenticed trades, and it attempted to do so by showing – not that it was an 'art and mystery', but that it required the rational qualities 'knowledge' and 'intelligence'. Saw mill machining, like saw-doctoring, was described as 'a trade you cannot pick-up, you have to be taught it'.23 This was a great contrast to the idea within artisanal discourse that skill was 'acquired'. It was left finally to Judge Heydon to articulate these differences in approaches to skill, although when he did so it was refracted through the prism of artisanal skill. In declining to establish an apprenticeship system he commented that sawmill machining
is hardly as appropriate a subject for apprenticing as many other trades, because what the apprentice would have to do would be to learn things; whereas the real thing that a boy is apprenticed for, as I understand, is to acquire skill in some handicraft, not to learn certain facts. Setting the machines ... and so on seems to me rather a set of facts which an observant person can learn than a skilled handicraft which he acquires.24
In making the distinction between 'certain facts' or 'knowledge' of 'things', on one hand, and acquired skill, Heydon was implicitly critiquing the view of skill being deployed by the union. While Heydon would perhaps not have agreed with a witness like Eland who argued that skill was difficult to define, he would have agreed that it was more than knowing facts. The understanding of 'facts' and 'things' was knowledge reducible to the certainties of a learning process. Skill was something less tangible – capacity 'acquired' in a process much less determinate than that implied in the teaching and learning of facts. Heydon summarised these differences when he explained in another case that he disagreed with the ASE argument that specialist engine patternmakers were as skilled as generalist 'all round' patternmakers because the difference between then was really 'a matter of knowledge, and not of skill'.25 As Heydon's discriminations suggest, within the artisanal framework skilled workers did not simply activate a repertoire of learned technical abilities, but expressed in their work interior qualities that had been rather mysteriously 'acquired'. |
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Artisanal Skill and the Standard Wage | |
| The collapsing credibility of artisanal understandings of skill in the early twentieth century can be traced further by examining how the craftsman's longstanding claim that all members of the trade were equally skilled was received in the NSW Arbitration Court. Originating in the caste-like vertical structures of the medieval guilds, the belief that all members of a trade were equal in skill had been powerfully translated into the nineteenth century wage-labour context. Both in Britain and in Australia this view about skill took concrete form in the standard wage that was at the heart of the pay rates demanded by craft unions. The standard wage meant, in brief, that all members of the same occupation or craft within a union (some unions, such as the ASE, contained members of several crafts) were in principle to be paid at the same rate of pay. No matter how much this varied in practice, as a principle it carried the implication that all workers receiving the standard rate were equally as skilled as each other. It was vital to the maintenance of this system that craft unions were able to portray themselves, or the trades within them, as communities of the equally-skilled. Union rules such as those governing apprenticeship and membership were in part designed to ensure this outcome. |
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The strength of these views was evident when the members of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners and the Progressive Carpenters confronted the Master Builders Association in the Arbitration Court in 1905. The case was essentially about fixing a standard wage in the industry, and the union case relied heavily on the credibility of the artisanal view of skill. Their case started with an articulation of the fundamental artisanal position by their advocate Beeby, who asserted that the men were 'a competent and qualified body of men, between the individual members of which there is very little distinction' in terms of skill. This equality in skill meant 'there should be no gradation between individual members of the trade, that as a body they are entitled to the fixed standard or minimum wage'.26 |
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While the employers tried to erode this view by pointing to the development of distinct specialisations amongst the union members, such as floor laying and ceiling work, which made them semi-skilled rather than skilled, the union witnesses consistently rejected this idea. Try as they might, the employers could not shift union witnesses from their determination to adhere to the homogeneity in skill of their members. Even working on such promisingly artisanal material as J.V. Davidson, who described himself as 'an all round man', and added – with a sniff of contempt for the idea – that he was 'not ... a specialist in any shape or form', the employers could not induce any admission that the members of the Carpenters and Joiners were anything but equal in skill.27 |
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To buttress this claim the unions called on their brothers in the Stonemasons, whose secretary also explained to the court that the Stonemasons did not recognise any difference in level of skill of the members, because 'we are all as good as each other'. He agreed with the employers' summary of the artisanal position:
The aim of the union is to preserve that surface uniformity, to allow no preference for one man over another in the matter of skill ... one man is not to be entitled to get a higher wage on the ground of superior skill.28
This crystallised perfectly the logic that concretised artisanal attitudes to skill in the standard wage. It was the hub around which craft union and after craft union built their cases in the NSW Arbitration Court. It animated the concerns expressed by some members of the United Society of Boilermakers that 'that there was a danger in going to the Arbitration Court' because it was likely it 'would grade the men [into levels of skill] and so cut the wages down'.29 It was also manifest in the arguments presented by the ASE, as it tried to manage the complex occupational cluster of trades that had evolved as its membership over the years. It sought to portray each of them as a community of equally-skilled workers. The union's advocate was at pains to point this out, arguing that 'As a matter of practice there are no engine fitters and patternmakers getting more than anyone else, they are all getting the same wage'. The ASE secretary, himself a patternmaker, asserted that despite the 'entirely different' work of fitters and turners, they were equal in skill. Other categories of ASE labour were considered in the same way. Brass-finishers, for example, were considered by the ASE to be 'On the same level' as fitters and engine-smiths. Something of the engrained centrality of this stance in a craft union like the ASE is registered in the Secretary's response that it was 'simply incomprehensible', and that he 'did not understand the meaning' of the employers' proposal to introduce a differential in the pay rates for turners and fitters. The ASE President summarised the artisanal position by stating that the various branches of the engineering trade 'all stand on the one plane so far as wages are concerned ... and so far as skill is concerned'.30 |
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Against the Standard Wage | |
| Despite employers' frequent attacks, workers had successfully defended the standard wage in Australia since at least the 1840s.31 By the end of the nineteenth century increasing mechanisation and task specialisation in many industries were making this defence much more difficult. If mechanisation tended to only patchily reduce employers' dependence on 'all-round' craft skill, as Shields and others have argued, the diversification of the Australian economy in the decades surrounding 1900 nonetheless spawned a whole range of more specialised workers. As unions manoeuvred to maintain their industrial positions during this period, they recruited many of these more-specialised categories of workers, and by the start of the twentieth century the membership of many craft unions was often a mixture of 'all-rounders' and 'specialists'.32 |
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As the examples in the previous section suggest, this heterogeneity made it increasingly difficult for unions reliant on artisanal understandings to portray themselves as communities of the equally-skilled. This was a propitious context for employers such as those in the engineering and shipbuilding industries to develop a more focussed attack on the standard wage. In a 1908 case, engineering employers tried to attack turners, the most vulnerable of the engineering trades. While the employers readily admitted that some turners were highly skilled, they also maintained that their work shaded imperceptibly into that of 'machinists' who worked the machines that were increasingly being used in engineering workshops, and eroded the coherence of the category 'turner'. Another iron trades employer complained that in training workers in specific aspects of locomotive manufacturing he 'had to pay the average rate to a second-class man until he becomes first class', due to the ASE insistence on the standard rate of pay for all members. The iron trades employers argued that the Court should follow through the logic of the heterogeneity within these occupations, and overturn the standard pay rates.33 |
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While on this occasion Heydon declined to do so, he listened carefully to other aspects of their argument, especially where it took the form of a general assault on the principle of equality in skill. Franki, the president of the Iron Trades Employers Association (ITEA), explained to the Court that he considered the artisanal idea poorly founded because, considering 'two [technically identical] engines made by two different men ... one will be 10 per cent higher in value than the other'.34 Such views reinforced those that Heydon already held about skill. He had always been dismissive of the successive assertions by trades like carpenters, joiners and stonemasons, about the equality on skill of their members, stating in the Carpenters Case his view that there 'is always a difference between the skill of different men'. He energetically expanded on this view, commenting that he had 'never yet met any class of men where there were not inequalities, one man better on one thing and one better on another', and that for the union 'to stand up here and say as a matter of fact that amongst 250 men there are no inferiorities and superiorities, is simply nonsense'.35 |
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The attempt by a metal trades advocate in 1910 to build an argument on artisanal foundations, met a similar fate. It was hardly convincing to begin with an almost routine call-and-response format that induced from a succession of union witnesses 'evidence' that riveters, turners, fitters, and blacksmiths employed in rolling stock manufacture were equal in skill to their brother unionists employed in the craft heartlands of shipbuilding, boilermaking and engineering industries. Drawing on the creeping credibility crisis of the artisanal view, the employers' advocate described the attempt by the USB to argue that wagon riveters were equal in skill to boilermakers employed on shipbuilding, as 'insulting to the intelligence'.36 A building employers' advocate summarised these stances when he concluded his case with the assertion that the unions' claims of the homogeneity in skill of their members 'as a proposition depends on an entirely arbitrary basis, and cannot have any foundation in fact'.37 |
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The deployment of this type of invective indicates how strong was the tide against which artisanal logic now had to contend. The force of these harsh words was that the claims to equality in skill and the standard pay rates that it was based on, was an arbitrary and artificial dogma that no longer conformed to the realities of modern industrial production. In particular, the critiques of artisanal claims suggested that the occupational classification into distinct 'trades' no longer sprang organically from the technical features of production – if they had ever done – and that the whole of the artisanal classification of work was an artefact of 'union power'. |
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Third Man Theme | |
| By attacking the artisanal assertion of skill equality and the standard wage, employers hoped to reduce their wages bills. Successfully done, this would mean that instead of paying skilled rates for a semi-skilled worker - or skilled rates to a skilled worker only employed doing semi-skilled work - as they believed that they were often forced to do through the classificatory structures of artisanal skill, they would now be able to secure a much greater alignment between rates of pay and degrees of skill. By thus ensuring that they got what they paid for, they were attempting to enhance the commodity character of their employees' labour. |
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'Unskilled' workers also shared this logic of labour commodification, albeit from the opposite position. While their employers were trying to ensure that they got what they paid for, these workers were trying to ensure that the employers paid for what they got. That employers and some groups of workers shared a similar logic belies the model of class struggle as a simple contest between black hat/white hat beloved of much labour and industrial relations history. Workers consigned to the 'unskilled' camp by the artisanal dichotomy, also had an interest in intensifying the commodity character of their labour, and like the employers they sought to do so by breaking down artisanal structures. They sought to replace them with a conceptualisation of labour as an elongated continuum that would allow recognition of different degrees of skill. This tactic was exemplified in virtuoso style by the arguments put forward by the STYEA in the Sawmillers Case (1905). The STYEA maintained that their members could be 'very clearly divided into three ranks ... a certain section is very highly skilled; ... a large section is ... partly skilled; and another ... unskilled labour'.38 The union also proposed a more fine-grained distinction within these classes based on levels of skill. These three categories were broken into 11 subdivisions, themselves subdivided into 48 separate occupations. As the employer's advocate described, this scheme involved dividing the labour into
almost infinitesimal portions ... so that in the same partially skilled class of labour there is one with a slightly higher degree of skill and that has to be met with a minimum wage of 1d or 2d a day.39
The union's claims on the 'skilled' side abandoned the homogeneity in skill of the artisanal categorisation, and replaced it with a graded continuum of skill. For example, the old category 'sawyer' was broken down into three skill-defined grades. The same logic was applied at the other end of the spectrum. Here the union's claims attempted to prise away from the 'unskilled' category a number of occupations designated by the employers as 'labouring', and to reposition them in between 'skilled' and 'unskilled'. Thus the union argued that sawyer's assistants – the 'pullers out' – as well as timber-stack builders and timber classers were 'partially skilled', and should be paid at a rate that recognised their intermediate position on the continuum of skill, rather than at the lowest rate for simple labouring work. In short as the union advocate argued, the union had identified several classes of labour
In which a certain knowledge of the trade is required, a certain capacity for measuring ... we submit it is a partially skilled trade; that is to say it is not work that an ordinary labourer can do.40
Nor were these views about skill simply those of the union's officials. Mr Oliver, a puller-out, when pressed by the employers to 'admit it is only labouring work', described how it took him two years to become what he described as 'a properly skilled man'. In doing so he attributed the term 'skilled' with a radically different meaning to that available in artisanal discourse. So too did Mr Chowne, a barge logman, and self-described 'labourer', who replied to the employer advocate's statement that 'About the skill required in trimming a lighter – you don't say it is much?' with an unequivocal 'Yes, it is'. In doing so not only had Chowne contradicted his own union secretary's earlier appraisal that 'Of course, it is labouring work', but in the process had confidently asserted that 'skill' and 'labouring' were no longer mutually exclusive terms.41 |
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The STYEA's exploration of the possibilities that emerged once the artisanal dichotomy was abandoned was somewhat precocious, as Heydon's exasperated summary of the union's position suggests. In the claims, he said,
A man doing one kind of work is to get one wage, and a man doing another kind of work is to get another age, and a man doing another kind of work is to get another wage, and a first class man doing particular work is to get one wage, and second class man another wage, and a third class another wage.42
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As frustrating as they may have been to deal with, the STYEA's efforts nonetheless represented in a heightened form the approach that was becoming typical among unions of industrial and 'unskilled' workers. Although most unions challenging the artisanal dichotomy were content to struggle over recognition of an intermediate category between 'skilled and 'unskilled', their logic was the same as that of the STYEA. By scattering skill throughout the taxonomic space between 'skilled' and 'unskilled', and attaching specific pay rates to the different categories, they were intensifying the commodity character of their member's labour. This was a central objective of an array of unions of unskilled and industrial workers that appeared in the Arbitration Court. The Mattress Makers union, for example, argued against their employer's view that machine mattress weavers were skill-less. Union Secretary Kattee concluded his description of machine mattress weavers with the comment that 'As far as I can see ... weaving does want skill'. To argue this was not to argue that mattress weavers were skilled workers, but that they had 'a certain amount of skill'.43 Similar arguments were made by the 'unskilled' workers grouped together in the Ironworkers Assistants union. The union's witnesses argued that 'skill' could be found in a variety of sites throughout the labour process, and it was anti-artisanal logic indeed to hear the union's advocate ask an employer witness whether there was 'any reason to think that an assistant to blacksmith has to be a very skilled man?' This effect was heightened when the union advocate skilfully played an employer witness in order to bring out an anti-artisanal message. For example, he asked an employer 'supposing ... an utterly unskilled man who had never done the class of work before [was employed], how long would it take him to become an ordinary blacksmith's assistant?' This was surely a leading question, because the reply – from one to two years – allowed the union to then ask 'You would call an ironworker's assistant a skilled man?' The employer's reply that he 'would to a certain extent', measures how far the artisanal dichotomy was being destabilised and replaced with a view that reinscribed with a measure of skill occupations that had previously been classed as utterly 'unskilled'.44 |
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Contradictions of Change | |
| While employers and the 'unskilled' shared the logic of undoing artisanal skill in order to intensify the commodity-character of labour, this was not a harmonious relationship. Like the 'unskilled', employers were also interested in breaking open the artisanal dichotomy, and gaining recognition of intermediate categories. But in doing so they had to tread carefully – as the efforts of the 'unskilled' taught, prising apart the artisanal dichotomy opened the prospect of increasing the wage rates of some types of (hitherto 'unskilled') labour. Alert to the dangers of their position, employers thus often preferred to use skill-less terms such as 'improvers' or 'experienced labour' to describe intermediate categories of workers. The equivocations of a sawmill employer suggest some of the discriminations that came into operation. When he was asked to classify log band sawyers, he initially faltered 'I do not know whether to call it skilled labour or experienced labour'. Reflecting on the fact that his current log band sawyer had started as a labourer in the mill, he concluded that 'You might term it experienced labour', and in doing so revealed the operation of the distinction between 'skilled' and 'experienced' workers.45 We have already seen above that more specific terms were also used, such as the 'machinists' that the ITEA tried to differentiate from 'turners'. Sensitive to the implications of terminology and classification, the ITEA was thus cock-a-hoop when the Coachmakers (Rail) Board decided that USB boilermakers employed in wagon-making were less skilled than those employed on boilermaking. The USB summed up the effect of this decision, describing it as 'a scandalous and ridiculous one [that had] altered the term "Plater", which has been in use for the past 70 years, to the term "Assembler", and has reduced the wages of those workers'.46 |
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While employers were thus not interested in putting in place a system that acknowledged the skill-content of their 'unskilled' employees, this was an inexorable accompaniment to their determination to break down the homogeneity of the category 'skilled' workers. Try as they might, it became more difficult for employers to avoid the increasingly useful descriptor 'semi-skilled'. When building employers' tried to differentiate 'specialist' from 'all-round' carpenters, they did so by describing them as a 'class of men who earn their living as semi-skilled workmen'. That this was considered a powerful attack on the artisanal dichotomy is indicated by the union's response that the Court should stipulate in its Award that 'none but journeymen and apprentices [are] to be recognised in the trade'.47 |
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Occasionally an employer - recognising that the contradictions inherent in the employer/'unskilled' assault on the artisanal system could lead to the process of labour commodification escaping from their control - attempted to reverse this dialectic by reinstating the artisanal system. In 1915 the Ironworkers Assistants – now transformed into the Federated Ironworkers Association (FIA) – applied the logic that they had developed, with the unwitting assistance of their anti-artisanal employers – and served on the latter a log of claims that, as the ITEA noted with alarm, 'embodied a Classification of Work and considerable increase in Wages'. In discussing how they could respond, one employer suggested the Association should 'abandon the term "skilled labourers" ' in referring to FIA members, and revert to the term 'assistants to Mechanics' that had pertained until around 1900.48 |
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It was, however, too late for this. From the employers' point of view, the assault on the artisanal paradigm was starting to pay great dividends in eroding the homogeneity in skill of skilled trades. This development was captured by a union advocate in the Industrial Court in 1910. He noted that because the Industrial Disputes Act (1908) 'enables the Court to appoint a Board to deal with an industry', it thereby allowed employers to say that
'we are a separate industry ... and the man who is working on a railway wagon is a railway wagon smith' ... and so it would go until the engineers, taking them as an example of a trade, would be split up into every class there is of an article to be manufactured and they would be no longer engineers, but they would be the particular smiths or the particular engineers in the article they were making ... no longer mechanics in their particular trade, ... no longer tradesmen as defined by their particular Unions, but tradesmen classified by the particular work which they are doing. [emphasis added]49
By 1913 the salience of the concept of the skilled trade had been eroded to such an extent that it allowed Royal Commissioner A.B. Piddington to observe that
the term 'craft' ... has come to be used in the vernacular ... as meaning not only skilled crafts but of any distinctive callings whether skilled, partly skilled, or not skilled at all.50
And as Piddington's reference to the vernacular suggests, this transformation in the meanings of skill was now widely held. In any case, it was just this erosion of artisanal skill that allowed the Secretary of the artisanally 'unskilled' ironworkers assistants to claim that their work was 'highly skilled'. Such a description was impossible at any time before 1900.51 |
31
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Conclusion | |
| The language preserved in arbitration court records allows historians to reveal more clearly the agonies of this transitional moment, the death of an old taxonomic order, the birth of the new, and its wider connections to the transformation of class relations. |
32
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The proliferation of signs in and around the early twentieth century NSW Arbitration Court announced the terminal decline of the artisanal framework. Yet rather than seeing this as the end of all that was good, a bleary-eyed artisanal nostalgia, it is important to recognise that this very decline opened up new possibilities for hitherto excluded groups of workers. The declining power of artisanal discourse was the condition that enabled W.G. Spence to comment in 1915, that 'as to the difference between skilled and unskilled labour ... there was really no such thing as unskilled labour. It was merely a question of the degree of skill'.52 Moreover, as one contemporary observer noted, the rising living standards of Australian workers since 1907 was testament to the success of the trade unions' policy 'to minutely classify grades of work, and to attribute to the workers in the different grades some degree of skill'.53 While this surely exaggerated the level of material success, it accurately identified the principal mechanism through which this was prosecuted. |
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This was, then, the old world going and the new world coming, and someone like Heydon was caught in between. A more-northerly example of Macintyre's Victorian liberals, Heydon's role was that of trying to manage this historic transformation in regimes of labour, capital accumulation and class formation.54 Rather than simply operating as a conduit through which the needs of employers were translated un-mediated into legal form, Heydon's approach to arbitration was refracted through a range of complex considerations. The intentions of the framers of the 1901 NSW Arbitration Act provided him with a definite yet widely spaced set of parentheses. At one end lay the comment of the NSW Attorney General, Bernhard Wise, who on introducing the Act described it as a measure that would 'as it were crystallise the current industrial morality' in New South Wales. At the same time, Wise made it clear that the Act was also designed to facilitate the industrial development of the state.55 |
34
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Heydon's views on skill capture him steering a course between these two imperatives. On one hand, he could see the value in the older artisanal structures, and on the other, how ill they fitted with the new realities. For him the artisanal classification was a structure that reflected 'current industrial morality', and a point of stability within a rapidly changing world. His 'skilful unskilled labourer' thus tried to inhibit populating the space between 'skilled' and 'unskilled' with disruptive new categories of worker such as the 'semi-skilled'. At the same time, Heydon felt a need to respond to the new realities of work, and the new framework through which it was being conceptualised, which allowed the idea that the 'unskilled' could be 'skilful'. Thus, rather than an oxymoron, his 'skilful unskilled labourer' was a linguistic artefact whose hybrid character expressed the transitional character of the times. |
35
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Ben Maddison is a lecturer in history at the University of Wollongong. His current research is on common land in Australia and other colonial societies; commodification and class formation; and the life of Eric Dark.
<benm@uow.edu.au>
Endnotes
* This article has been peer reviewed for Labour History by two anonymous referees.
1. For these examples see Industrial Court of New South Wales: Appeal by the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, the Australian Society of Engineers, the Amalgamated Coachmakers Society, the United Society of Boilermakers, Iron Workers Assistants against Award of Coachmakers Board, August 1910, (hereafter Appeal Against Coachmakers Award), New South Wales State Archives (hereafter NSWSA), vol. 99, 2/15, p. 283; Industrial Court of New South Wales: Appeal by Federated Ironworkers of Australia for Representation on the Leather Trades Group No. 8 Board, 20 September 1915.
2. See firstly Court of Arbitration: Shore Drivers and Firemen's Union v Hillman and Co. Common Rule Application, 1907 (hereinafter Shore Drivers Common Rule Application). Transcript, NSWSA, vol. 49, 2/102, p. 64, and Sawmill and Timber Yard Employees Association v the Sydney and Suburban Timber Merchants Association (hereinafter Sawmillers Case) 1905. Transcript. NSWSA, vol. 14, 2/65, p. 505;
3. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, Penguin, 1988, p. 14. For more concentrated discussion on the collective and social character of apparently individual statements see Penelope Corfield, 'Introduction', in Penelope Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class, Blackwell, Oxford, 1991, pp. 19–24; William H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980, pp. 10–13; Peter Burke and Roy Porter (eds), The Social History of Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, pp. 1–20.
4. Heydon had achieved a reputation as a legal systematiser in the 1890s, when he had carried out a rationalisation of the colony's laws. For this and in general on Heydon, see Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 9. Also see N.G. Napper, Mr Justice Heydon and the Living Wage: Industrial Arbitration in NSW, 1905–1914, BEc (Hons) thesis, University of Sydney, 1983. E. Ryan, Two Thirds of a Man: Women and Arbitration in New South Wales 1902–08, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1984, pp. 31–3 sympathetically contrasts Heydon to Cohen. For Heydon as a pioneer see Napper, pp. 43–8, 100–1; Peter G. Macarthy, 'Wage Determination in New South Wales, 1890–1921', Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 10, 1968, pp. 193–8; Alice Coolican, 'Master Builders and the beginnings of arbitration' in Stuart Macintyre and R. Mitchell (eds), Foundations of Arbitration: The Origins and Effects of State Compulsory Arbitration 1890–1914, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 262.
5. United Society of Boilermakers and Iron Shipbuilders, General Minutes (hereafter USB Minutes) 1876–1915, State Library of New South Wales, Mitchell Library, 17 January 1911.
6. Iron Trades Employers Association Minutes (hereinafter ITEA Minutes), Metal Trades Employers Association archives, North Sydney. 9 January and 15 February 1912.
7. Shore Drivers Common Rule Application, pp. 254–5.
8. Appeal Against Coachmakers Board, p. 573.
9. The literature on the origins, purposes and effectiveness of state compulsory arbitration in Australia is voluminous. An incisive survey of the key issues can be found in Stuart Macintyre, 'Neither Capital nor Labour: The Politics of the Establishment of Arbitration' in S. Macintyre and R. Mitchell (eds), Foundations of Arbitration: The Origins and Effects of State Compulsory Arbitration 1890–1914, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989. For the gender dimensions see J. Lee, 'A redivision of labour: Victoria's Wages Boards in action, 1896–1903', Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 88, April 1987; R. Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria 1880–1939, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1993; L. Bennett, 'The Construction of Skill: Craft Unions, Women Workers and the Conciliation and Arbitration Court', Law in Context, vol. 2, 1984; L. Bennett, 'Job Classification and Women Workers: Technological Change and the Conciliation and Arbitration System, 1907–72', Labour History, no. 51, November 1986.
10. Court of Arbitration: Stove and Piano Frame Moulders and Stovemakers Employees Union of v. Fred Metters and Co., 1907, (hereinafter Stovemakers Case) NSWSA, 2/99, Transcript, vol. 46, p. 45.
11. E.J. Hobsbawm, 'Artisans and Labour Aristocrats?' in E.J. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1984; J.L. Hammond and B. Hammond, The Skilled Labourer, 1760–1832, Longmans, London and New York, 1979, p. 3; J. Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth Century Industry, Croom Helm, London, 1981, pp. 194–213; John Rule, 'The property of skill in the period of manufacture', in P. Joyce (ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987; J. Burnett (ed.), Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s, Allen Lane, London, 1974 (especially G. Sturt, 'The Wheelwright's Shop', p. 249, and pp. 312–25); R.W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England 1700–1780, Hutchinson, London, 1981, pp. 83–93; H. Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1974, pp. 124–5, 131–7.
12. John Shields, Skill Reclaimed: Craft Work, Craft Unions and the Survival of Apprenticeship in New South Wales, 1860–1914, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1990, p. 30; E. Fry, The Condition of the Urban Wage Earning Class in Australia in the 1880s, PhD dissertation, Australian National University, 1956, p. 372; James Hagan, Printers and Politics: A History of the Australian Printing Unions, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1966, pp. 1–5, p. 58; B. Ellem, A History of the Clothing and Allied Trades Union, PhD dissertation, Department of History, University of Wollongong, 1986, p. 39.
13. Appeal against Coachmakers Award, pp. 144–9 (blacksmithing), p.156 (turning), p. 457, (caulking) p. 177 (fitting).
14.Ibid., p. 147, p. 457.
15. Court of Arbitration: Amalgamated Society of Engineers, New South Wales District v. Iron Trades Employers Association, 1908 (hereinafter Engineers Case), p. 650; Appeal against Coachmakers Award, p. 44.
16.Ibid., p. 97.
17.Ibid., p. 299.
18. Select Committee into the Method of Testing Marine Steam Boilers', New South Wales Parliamentary Papers, 1868/9, vol. 3, D.C. Dalgleish, qq. 116–8.
19. Appeal against Coachmakers Award, respectively p. 294, p.147,
20.Ibid., p. 148.
21. Engineers Case, p. 521.
22. For this appreciation of the historical importance of the Sawmillers Case see Macarthy, 'Wage Determination in New South Wales, 1890–1921'. The characterisation of the case as about skill is in Sawmillers Case p. 123.
23.Ibid., p.145.
24.Ibid., p. 441.
25. Engineers Case, p. 146.
26. Carpenters Case, respectively pp. 6, 23.
27.Ibid., p. 47.
28.Ibid., p. 228.
29. USB Minutes, 30 September 1902.
30. The quotes can be found respectively in the Engineers Case, at pp. 18, 79, 221, 78.
31. L. J. Hume, 'Working Class Movements in Sydney and Melbourne before the Gold Rushes', Historical Studies Australia and New Zealand: Selected Articles, Second Series, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1967, p. 38.
32. Shields, 'Skill Reclaimed', pp. 150–65; Ken Buckley, The Amalgamated Engineers in Australia, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1970, pp. 133–4.
33. Engineers Case, pp. 444–54.
34.Ibid., p. 400.
35. Carpenters Case, respectively p. 24, p. 228.
36. Appeal against Coachmakers Award, respectively p. 458 (riveters), p. 156 and p. 165 (turners), p. 68 and p. 180 (fitters), p. 124 and p. 140 (blacksmiths); p. 526 (employer's remark).
37. Carpenters Case, p. 228.
38. Sawmillers Case, p. 6.
39.Ibid., pp. 6–12, pp. 499–500.
40.Ibid., p. 10.
41.Ibid., p. 35, pp. 184–5.
42.Ibid., p. 5.
43. Mattress Makers Case, p. 181, p. 21.
44. Ironworkers Assistants Case, p. 18, p. 25.
45. Sawmillers Case, p. 213.
46. 'Secretary's Report, for the Half Year to 30th June 1910', enclosed at USB Minutes, 9th August 1910.
47. Carpenters Case, pp. 30, 27.
48. ITEA Minutes, 8 March 1915, and 'Minutes of Special Committee Meeting', 2nd March 1915.
49. Appeal Against Coachmakers Award, pp. 286–9.
50. 'Royal Commission of Inquiry on Industrial Arbitration in the State of New South Wales', NSW Parliamentary Papers, 1913, 2nd session, vol. 1, ch. II: 'The Mode of Mapping Out the Field of Industrial Arbitration', p. xlvii.
51. The IWA Secretary's (Mr Drake) comment is in ibid., q. 16886.
52. Spence's remarks are in M. Atkinson (ed.), Trade Unionism in Australia: Report of a Conference Held in June 1915, under the auspices of the Workers Education Association of New South Wales, the Economic Research Society of Sydney, and the Labor Council of New South Wales, Sydney, 1915, p. 46.
53. G. Anderson, 'Industrial Tribunals and Standards of Living', in F.W. Eggleston, E.R. Walker, G. Anderson, J.F. Nimmo, G.L. Wood, Australian Standards of Living, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1939, pp. 75–6.
54. Stuart Macintyre, A Victorian Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries, Oxford University Press, Australia, Melbourne, 1991; Stuart Macintyre, 'Labour, Capital and Arbitration, 1890–1920' in B. Head (ed.), State and Economy in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989.
55. Quoted from a speech by Wise in 1900, extracted in C.M.H. Clark, Select Documents in Australian History, Vol. II, 1851–1900, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1979, p. 634.
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