5 - Ingenious Mechanics

Summary

By the mid-nineteenth century, a workforce of many thousands had been trained in textile engineering. The best paid and highest skilled were considered part of an aristocracy of labour. Alongside was a multitude of shop-floor engineering workers concentrated on narrowly defined duties in large factories, arguably with little independence or discretion compared with their immediate predecessors. The ways in which engineering workers were employed and trained had evolved, and the trade had changed. Whether this group was less skilled overall, and how far it might have lost touch with the industry's earlier ethos, are less certain.

It seems that chances to progress out of this rather regimented industrial proletariat had been curtailed. Many employees and employers still shared a background of apprenticeship training, an absorption in the skills and knowledge of textile technology. Yet the workers were less likely to advance. After the industry was restructured in the 1810s and 1820s, the size of capital investment needed to set up a machine shop with self-acting tools became an obstacle. The chance of building such a company from scratch was placed out of reach for most. The number of new ventures dramatically reduced in proportion to the enlarged workforce.

And there were other changes. In the large shops at least, some level of stability replaced casual employment practices. This had its attractions, compared with the uncertainties of self-employment. It came at a price, though, the loss of that relative independence to which previous generations had aspired. Capital was not the only hurdle: there was less opportunity to learn about the production process overall, about the commercial workings of the trade, and to be nurtured and supported into self-sufficiency by a former master. Yet the small-scale sector in engineering continued to be very significant, so self-employment was not an impossibility. Perhaps the real barrier was that workers classed as skilled in the larger factories were not really so. In fulfilling only a narrow range of tasks, was their lack of all-round proficiency shielded by division of labour and a range of modern machine tools? Was the trade shedding its broad-based competence?