A study of the ways in which capitalists attempted to make control of labour a science is fascinating, finds Stephen Carlill

This book consists of a series of connected narratives about workers being reduced to cogs in a machine over the period from the seventeenth century until today. On a basic level, nothing much has changed, but the author nonetheless succeeds in providing continuously interesting and, at times, emotionally very engaging accounts.

In parallel with the accounts of what happened, we get an account of the rationalisations the bosses resorted to in attempt to justify their actions to themselves. The most extreme view being Herbert Spencer’s that working people to death was simply ‘survival of the fittest’.

There are threads that the attentive reader can trace through from one chapter to another. A few examples, mostly using my own language and not the author’s, follow.

Jeremy Bentham devised the Panopticon, a means of isolating its victims from each other and leaving them not knowing whether they are being watched. (There are no pictures in the book and I think their absence detracts from this very well written work. But perhaps this criticism has much to do with my 75 years and younger readers will have already pulled up images of the Panopticon on their smart phones.) The Panopticon is usually mentioned in connection with the design of prisons, which it influenced. However, Bentham originally intended it to be a design for factories. We can be grateful to the author for this nugget of information and the opportunity the book offers to compare the Panopticon and work stations in Amazon’s Fulfilment Centres. The designs of both are intended to isolate workers from their fellows but, in contrast to the Panopticon, there is no possibility of the Amazon workers escaping surveillance for even a moment because there is software always monitoring and recording their performance.

The author traces the spread of industrialisation from Britain to the United States and from there to Japan. Although there were many differences between these societies on the eve of industrialisation, these soon diminished. At the outset of the Industrial Revolution, British labourers made landless by the Enclosures were pushed by poverty into becoming poorly-paid factory workers. In contrast to that push, women were pulled into factory work when industrialisation began in the United States by pay which was much more than what was on offer elsewhere. However, that did not last and employers were soon complaining that rates of pay were so absurdly high that a family could get by for a whole week on only four days’ pay. Four days was two-thirds of the full working week.

Although the switch to industry caused suffering in all three countries, the effects in Japan seem to have been especially harsh. The early Industrial Revolution was a disaster for hand-loom weavers in Britain, throwing them out of work. But at least that happened over a couple of decades as the factory system of producing cloth grew. In Japan, hand-loom weaving ceased almost instantaneously due to competition from imported fabrics after Commodore Perry forced the opening of that country to international trade in 1853. Parents were pushed by poverty into consigning daughters to work in distant factories. One such girl, only twelve-years old, lamented:

‘In this troubled world

I am just a silk-reeling lass

But this lass wants to see

The parents who gave her birth

Their letter says they are waiting for the year’s end.

Are they waiting more for the money than for me?’

The author points out that the only way workers have ever obtained long-running improvements is by collective action, either industrial or legislative. A constant theme throughout the book is that their masters thought them to be slacking. While attempts to force more work were accompanied by rational consideration of what the work involved and attempts at measurement, these hardly amounted to science. Credible laws and theories were noticeably absent. Success came down to how far workers would go along with the bosses’ demands. It therefore seems reasonable to infer that the author intends the book’s title to be ironic.