American Shoemakers, 1648–1895

academic paper by John R. Commons

focuses on trade unions, trade associations, and business development

published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 24, Number 1, November, 1909

Notes

• “the earliest and the most strenuous of American industrialists in their economic struggles”
• “highly skilled and intelligent”
• of 17 trials for conspiracy before 1842, 9 were of shoemakers
• “harassed trade”

I

• The Company of Shoemakers

• Probably the first American gild

• Massachusetts Bay colony charter granted October 18, 1648
• coopers got one the same day
• suppress inferior workmen
• authority to examine shops
• authority to regulate work
• appeals to county judges
• reservations
  1. no raising prices
  2. no refusing to make shoes for people of their own leather, for their families
• transitioning from itinerant shoemakers
• 15th and 16th century statutes imposed penalties on those who refused to work in the customer’s house
• itinerants poorly trained, could escape supervision
  • dependent on customers
  • new workplace for each job
  • hard to drive a hard bargain staying in the customer’s house
• “merchant-function” and “master-function” and “journeyman-function”
• “primitive gild in self-interest set itself against the ‘bad ware’ of the preceding itinerant stage”
• “truck-payment” in board and lodging, piece wages for product
• moving to shops “transferred to him the unskilled parts of the work hitherto done by the customer’s family”
• merchant, master, and journeyman in one person
• “the merchant function epitomized the other two”
• personal market
• customer gives order before the goods are made
• customers can’t judge quality
• enough to focus on quality, without directly addressing cost

II

• The Society of Master Cordwainers
• The Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers
• separation of classes
• century and a half later
• “The Trial of the Boot and Shoemakers of Philadelphia, on an indictment for a combination and conspiracy to raise their wages”
  • 159 pages of records
  • “the first American association of employers and the first trade union”
• 1799 strike and lockout, nine or ten weeks
• November, 1805
• had an earlier charitable society
• masters organized first, in April, 1789
  • ended in 1790
  • concerns
    • competition from cheap goods sold at public markets
    • competition from masters offering bargains by public advertisements
  • qualifications for membership excluded these makers
  • doesn’t mention wages or labor
• attorneys for journeymen argued they organized in self-defense after masters organized
• journeymen orgs returning in 1799 and 1805 only temporary
• changes from market shifts
• 1806: “bespoke”
• “retail-shop stage”
  • masters started stocking standard sizes and shapes for “sojourners and visitors”
  • started giving personal credit
  • started putting out materials to journeymen
  • shop work
• “wholesale-order stage”
  • started seeking outside markets
  • “orders” for shoes
  • “wholesale merchant-employers”
  • order work
  • Philadelphia 1806
  • different quality levels for different markets
  • bespoke work for the wealthy
  • shop work for less particular
  • order work for far-away markets
  • market work for the poor
  • employer struggled to require same quality for each
  • journeymen struggled for the same wage on each, with option for more for bespoke
• Boston: no journeymen, every master at first a traveller
• master and journeyman interests coincided
• “cobbling” market work
• wholesale order work separated the interests
• many traveled to open markets in the South
• employers who didn’t branch out and focused on bespoke paid higher wages, held out of employers’ association
• journeymen who did only bespoke and shop work held out of the union
• inferior workmen kept on order work
• some secretly worked under agreed wages
• “Both the employer and the workman on high-class custom-work ‘scabbed’ on their respective class organizations struggling to control wholesale-order work.”
• first society of journeymen in 1792
  • “apparently a secret society”
  • oath to support common wage scale
  • secretly violated
  • dissolved in 1792, the same year
• 1794 permanent society
• employers paid workers advance out of advanced retail price
• couldn’t give advances for order work
• better workmen moved toward custom and retail work, inferior toward wholesale
• qualities diverged
• workmen conceded pay reduction on boots in order to help stoke an export market for them
• cholera epidemic of 1798, wages went down with demand
• after they returned to the city, journeymen organized to raise wages back to pre-epidemic level
• 1804 brief strike
• “the differentiation in prices led to a differentiation in quality”
• retail requires shop on accessible business street, high rents, capital tied up in materials
• “The journeymen are left with only their hand tools and their home workshop.”
• “separated the laborer from the merchant”
• “But the separation is not antagonism.”
• reaching out for wholesale
  • solicitation costs
  • transportation costs
  • storeroom and larger stock
  • riskier credits
  • meets competition, can’t pass along costs so easily

III

• organizations continue to about 1835
• “new and more revolutionary stage”
• “the merchant-capitalist, who subdues both the master and the journeyman”
• “Address to the Journeymen Cordwainers of the City and County of Philadelphia” by 200-member United Beneficial Society of Journeymen Cordwainers
  • consolidated groups into Trades Union
  • “first great general ten-hour strike in this country”
  • fallen wages
  • “depression” began with attempt at opening cooperative shops for cheap export goods
  • quality demanded versus wages paid
• meeting of ladies shoe dealers and manufacturers
  • “knowing that if they were longer to permit the growing encroachments of capital upon labor, they would soon be unable to make any resistance…”
  • pledged to support the journeymen
  • price list
  • switched sides nine months later
• speculative market
• warehouse replaces store-room
• compel competition between masters and journeymen
• discover new sources of cheap labor
• convict labor
  • inmates paid less than half
  • almost one half of Pennsylvania convicts taught shoemaking
• can pick and choose methods of manufacture and shop organization
• “team work”
• “The term ‘manufactory’, as distinguished from ‘factory,’ occurs in the merchant-capitalist stage to indicate the combined warehouse and place of employment where material is prepared to be taken out by journeymen or contractors. It is the ‘inside shop’ of the read-made clothing trade, the contractor’s shops being known as ‘outside shops.’
• “intensifies and even creates the antagonism of ‘capital and labor’”
• takes wholesale-order business from retail merchant
• replaces employer function of retail merchant
  • cheaper to buy stock shoes from merchant than pay journeymen to make it
• “the journeymen he hands over to a specialist in wage-bargaining”
  • “boss”, from Dutch “bos”, manager of a group of workmen
  • or “employer”
  • come up through the trade
  • rents workshop
  • profits only out of wages
  • “plays the less skilled against the more skilled, the speedy against the slow”
  • “his shop is the ‘sweatshop,’ he the ‘sweater’”
  • split into custom merchants, retail merchants, wholesale merchants
  • “From the position of a merchants’ association striving to hold up prices, they shift to that of an employers’ association endeavoring to keep down wages.”

1. The Nature of the Bargain

• wage-bargain
• price-bargain
• greater distance from ultimate purchaser
• bespoke: producer is the seller
  • price-bargain before work done
  • price according to quality
  • wage increases shifted to purchasers
  • wage-bargain is the price-bargain
• retail stage
  • removed one step
  • bargain after work done
  • purchasers split into two classes
• wholesale stage
  • removed another step
  • two price bargains
  • less able to pass wages through
• wholesale-speculative stage
  • 1835
  • “yet another step”
  • “The second bargain, that of capitalist-retailer, is made after the work is done, and it is this that constitutes the speculative character.”
  • moves advantage to retailer

2. The Period and Risk of Investment

• “Throughout the four stages here described there have been no changes in the tools of production.” [???]
• no fixed capital, only circulating capital
• interest, risk, necessary profit
• “But since the position of purchasers in the price-bargains is improved with the progress of the stages, the increased expense on account of circulating capital must be met by deductions from the rates of wages.”
• “The wholesale market is a market for ‘future goods,’ the custom-order market is a market for ‘present goods.’
• “Shop work, order work and speculative work must be manufactured at a lower wage-cost than bespoke work of the same kind and quality.”

3. The Level of the Competitive Menace

• “marginal producer”
  • lowest standards of living and cost and quality
  • “tends to draw down the level of others toward his own”
  • “not necessary that he be able actually to supply the entire market or even the greater part of it”
  • “as a club to intimidate others”
  • “a menace rater than an actual competitor” [???]
  • “break down the spirit of resistance of the high-level producers”
• discover lower levels of marginal producers
• “the merchant-capitalist emerges as the generalissimo, menacing in turn every part of the field from his strategic center”

4. Protective Organizations

• “the better class of workmen restricted themselves as much as possible to custom work, and the quality of this kind of work was improved”
• “just as necessary to set up protection against inferior goods as against low wages”
• initial impetus to organize focused on compensation
• demand same pay for work for all markets
• “It was this demand that forced the alignment of classes, and drove the sympathetic merchant over into the hostile employers’ association.”
• could accommodate only if stayed in narrow bespoke market
• 1835 strike resulted in division into non-competing market segments

IV

• internal change
• mechanization
• before 1837, inventions better called “devices” than machines
• “Even as late as 1851 all of the labor in the manufacture of shoes was hand labor.”
• 1852: adoption of sewing machine
• upper sewing had been women’s work
• initially aids to the journeyman
• “some of them probably operated to transfer the work of women to men”
• “essentially shop tools”
• tin patterns
• stripper
• sole-cutter
• adjustable lasts
• levellers
• skivers
• heel making machines
• lasting machines
• sandpapering machines
• different:
  • pegging machine 1857
  • McKay stitcher 1862
• “usurped not only the highest skill of the workman but also his superior physique”
• McKay took one hour while worker took three
• government demand for armies
• “It was at the middle of this transition period, 1868 to 1872, that the Knights of St. Crispin appeared, and flourished beyond anything theretofore known int he history of American organized labor.”
• 40 or 50,000 members
• “It disappeared as suddenly as it had arisen…helpless protest against he abuse of machinery.”
• “For it was not the machine itself that the Crispins were organized to resist, but the substitution of ‘green hands’ for journeymen in the operation of the machines.”
• “There was but one law…refusal to teach green hands except by consent of the organization.”
• local unions took on other names
• “Even prison labor and Chinese labor were not cheap enough to enable the merchant-capitalist to compete with the product of green hands and steam power.”
• “The factory succeeded also in producing a quality of work equal or even superior to that produced by the journeymen.”
• factory system of current day established in early 80s
• Boot and Shoe Workers' Union since 1895
  • combined merchant-manufacturers and wage earners
  • “against foreign immigrants, prison labor, child labor, and long hours of labor”

IV

• ever widening field of competition
• “Schmoller and Bücher have both avoided the narrow abstractions of Marx, because they have traced out the actual development of industry through access to a wealth of historical material not available to their predecessor.”
• “political extension”
• retail-shop and wholesale-order not so apparent in Europe
• “probably because the powerful gild regulations served to maintain a uniform price for custom work, retail work,a nd wholesale-order work”
• “bald simplicity of American individualism”
• “menace of competition”
• “the part played by the merchant stands out as the determining factor”
• “The key to the situation is at all times the price-bargain.”
• “The ‘conflict of capital and labor’ is a conflict of market and labor…”
• “The conflict is ultimately one between the interests of the consumer and the interests of the producer. Wherever the consumer as such is in control, he favors the marginal producer, for through him he wields the club that threatens the other producers.”
• private organizations, lobbying government for labor protections
• “in colonial America only the soft petition of the Boston shoemakers and coopers in 1648 shows the high-water mark of the gild”
• later, Pennsylvania imposed tariffs
• 1787 federal tariffs
• “what had been an external menace now became internal”
• “But after the merchant-capitalist period, the slogan of the protective tariff became protection for labor, where formerly it had been protection for capital.”
• “Thus have American shoemakers epitomized American industrial history.”

Entries Linking Here

• Market Work
• Order Work
• 📖The Path to Mechanized Shoe Production in the United States 1989
• Shop Work