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“What's in a Name?” Workplace History and “Rank and Filism”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Richard Price
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Historical truth, like other kinds of intellectual understanding, proceeds through argument and discussion. Thus, we should be grateful to Jonathan Zeitlin for his rigorous responses to a body of scholarship which he categorizes as “rank-and-filist”. Although much of Zeitlin's argument is unexceptional, its proposal to consign as erroneous and irrelevant the scholarship that fits his “rank-and-filist” paradigm requires some examination. Most troubling are the procedures he uses to make his case; the prescriptive advice he offers though not without merit is also highly problematic. I shall discuss these objections in a moment. But first we must define the problem as Zeitlin sees it.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , April 1989 , pp. 62 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1989

References

1 Zeitlin, , “‘Rank and Filism’ in British Labour History: A Critique”, p. 23Google Scholar: “the ‘rank-and-filist’ paradigm is fundamentally unsatisfactory and should be abandoned outright”.

2 Ibid., p. 23. My italics again, because this limitation was not mentioned before nor is it characteristic of much “rank-and-file” scholarship.

3 This theme is quite consciously the central conceptual thread of my Masters, Unions and Men: Work Control in Building and the Rise of Labour 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1980).Google Scholar

4 See Zeitlin, Jonathan, “The Emergence of Shop Steward Organization and Job Control in the British Car Industry: A Review Essay”, History Workshop Journal, no 10 (Autumn, 1980), p. 121Google Scholar where he adopts the “rank-and-filist” position that the peculiarity of the British case is the generalization of informal organization and job control beyond the craft sector. Unfortunately, he spoils this argument by claiming (pp. 129–31) that the non-skilled workers “learnt” these strategies from the skilled. See also his “Engineers and Compositors: A Comparison”, in Harrison, Royden and Zeitlin, Jonathan (eds), Divisions of Labour. Skilled Workers and Technological Change in Nineteenth Century Britain (Brighton, 1985).Google Scholar

5 I should point out that it was employed at a rather late stage of Masters, Unions and Men. Work Control in Building and the Rise of Labour 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1980)Google Scholar, the first substantive index reference to rank and file being page 210.

6 “The Labour Strategies of British Engineering Employers 1890–1914”, in Mommsen, W. and Gerhard-Husung, H. (eds), The Development of Trade Unionism in Britain and Germany 1880–1914 (London, 1985).Google Scholar

7 Joyce, Patrick, Work, Society and Politics. The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Brighton, 1980)Google Scholar and his “Introduction” to Joyce, (ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar. See also, Price, Richard, “Re-thinking Labour History: The Importance of Work”, in Cronin, James and Schneer, Jonathan (eds), Social Conflict and the Political Order in Modem Britain (London, 1982).Google Scholar

8 Zeitlin, , “‘Rank and Filism’”, p. 2Google Scholar. See also Cronin, James, Industrial Conflict in Modern Britain (London, 1979), pp. 24, 56.Google Scholar

9 For an example of radical differences see Hinton's, James review of Price, Richard, Labour in British Society (London, 1986)Google Scholar, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, vol. 51, 3 (1986), pp. 36–40.Google Scholar

10 This was especially true in his earlier work, as it was in mine. See Burgess, , “Technological change and the 1852 lockout in the British engineering industry”, International Review of Social History, XIV (1969)Google Scholar; The Origins of British Industrial Relations (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Price, Richard, “The Other Face of Respectability: Violence in the Man chester Brickmaking Trade 1859–1870”, Past and Present, no 66 (02, 1975).Google Scholar

11 The First Shop Stewards' Movement (London, 1974)Google Scholar; Labour and Socialism (Brighton, 1983)Google Scholar; “Coventry Communism: A Study of Factory Politics in the Second World War”, History Workshop Journal, no 10 (Autumn 1980)Google Scholar, “Self-Help and Socialism: the Squatters' Movement of 1946”, History Workshop Journal, no 25 (Spring, 1988).Google Scholar

12 Best illustrated by his books Industrial Conflict in Modern Britain and Labour and Society in Britain 1918–1979 (London, 1984).Google Scholar

13 See in particular Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction (London, 1975).Google Scholar

14 See Zeitlin, , “‘Rank and Filism’”, p. 8Google Scholar: “most proponents implicitly subscribe” which strikes me as rather heavily qualified upon which to build an effective indictment.

15 See Masters, Unions and Men, pp. 16–17Google Scholar for an explicit rejection of the charge that trade unionism can be seen as “comfortably settling down to impose employer's discipline in return for the right to bargain over economic conditions”. The “discipline” that was imposed was that of the industrial relations system in which the trade unions were partners.

16 See Howard, N.P., “The Strikes and Lockouts in the Iron Industry and the Formation of the Ironworkers' Unions, 1862–1869”, International Review of Social History, XVIII (1973)Google Scholar; Wells, F.A., The British Hosiery Trade (London, 1935), Ch. IXGoogle Scholar; Cuthbert, Norman, The Lace Makers' Society (Nottingham, 1960), p. 43Google Scholar; Weekes, Joseph D., Report on the Practical Operation of Arbitration and Conciliation in the Settlement of Differences Between Employers and Employees in England (Harrisburg, PA, 1879), pp. 3, 15Google Scholar; Morris, J.H. and Williams, L.J., “The South Wales Sliding Scale, 1876–1879”, The Manchester School, XXVIII (1960), pp. 162–4Google Scholar; Fox, Alan, A History of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives 1874–1957 (Oxford, 1958), Section IVGoogle Scholar; , S. & Webb, B., Industrial Democracy (London, 1913), pp. 185–192.Google Scholar

17 Masters, Unions and Men, pp. 116–121.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., p. 190.

19 Clegg, H.A., Fox, Alan and Thompson, A.F., A History of British Trade Unions Since 1889, Volume I, 1889–1910 (Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 472–473.Google Scholar

20 Zeitlin, , “‘Rank and Filism’”, pp. 9, 24.Google Scholar

21 E.g. Labour in British Society, pp. 1–12.Google Scholar

22 Zeitlin, , “‘Rank and filism’”, p. 23.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., pp 24–25.

24 Masters, Unions and Men, pp. 181–83, 258.Google Scholar

25 The following section is taken entirely from Tabili, Laura, Black Workers in Imperial Britain 1914–1945 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Rutgers University, 1985), pp. 313–401.Google Scholar

26 In a remarkable editorial in 1931, for example, the union journal threatened to deny employment (through its National Maritime Board agreement with employers which supposedly gave it a closed shop on British ships) to men who “misbehaved themselves” with employers. Tabili, , Black Workers, pp. 361–62.Google Scholar

27 See also Herding, Richard, Job Control and Union Structure (Rotterdam, 1972).Google Scholar

28 Masters, Unions and Men, pp. 264–66Google Scholar; Tabili, , Black Workers, pp. 379–97.Google Scholar

29 Zeitlin, , “‘Rank and Filism’”, pp. 23–24.Google Scholar

30 Economic History Review, 2nd series, XL, 2 (1987), pp. 159–184.Google Scholar

31 See “Trade Unions and Job Control: A Critique of ‘Rank and Filism’”, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, no 46 (Spring, 1983).Google Scholar

32 For a different evaluation of this kind of history see my review of Clegg, H.A., A History of British Trade Unions since 1889. Volume II 1911–1933Google Scholar in International Labor and Working Class History, no 33 (Spring, 1988)Google Scholar. See also Zeitlin's review of this volume entitled “Trade Union History or the History of Industrial Relations”, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 51, 3 (1986).Google Scholar

33 E.g., Hyman, Richard, The Workers' Union (Oxford, 1971).Google Scholar

34 Just to cite a few examples of this concern from “rank and filist” historians: Cronin, James “Politics, Class Structure, and the Enduring Weakness of British Social Democracy”, Journal of Social History, 16, 3 (1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The British State and the Structure of Political Opportunity”, unpublished paper; “Crisis of State and Society in Britain 1917–1920”, unpublished paper; “Industry, Locality and the State: Patterns of Mobilization in the Postwar Strike Wave in Britain”, (forthcoming in Annali). See also Price, , Labour in British Society, Chs. 6–8.Google Scholar

35 This is the main thrust of the article, although the last two sentences seem to suggest some confusion on Zeitlin's part. Having spent most of the article implicitly denying the value of analyses premised upon economic and social processes, he first retracts then reasserts his earlier assumption about the determinant role of institutions over impersonal forces: “[it is not suggested] that impersonal economic and social processes have no impact on the development of institutions. But it is necessary to insist that social relationships, whether in the workplace, the family or the wider community, cannot be understood without reference to the operation of formal institutions, just as the latter can never be determined by reference to the objective interests of pre-existing social groups.”

36 Savage, Michael, The Dynamics of Working Class Politics. The Labour Movement in Preston 1880–1940 (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar. This book is a highly intelligent attempt to relate politics to structure in a way that avoids the well-known pitfalls that usually accompany that effort. It is a welcome counter-weight to the recent tendency of social history to abandon that effort in its search for meaning through “languages of politics”. One very effective critique that could be made of the historians Zeitlin attacks would be their total ignoring of the role of gender in the division of labour. For this see Whipp, Richard, “The Stamp of Futility: The Staffordshire Potters, 1880–1905” in Harrison and Zeitlin, Divisions of Labour.Google Scholar