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Legislation on wage labour (from the first, aimed at the exploitation of the labourer and, as it
advanced, always equally hostile to him),
3
is started in England by the Statute of Labourers, of
Edward III., 1349. The ordinance of 1350 in France, issued in the name of King John,
corresponds with it. English and French legislation run parallel and are identical in purport. So far
as the labour-statutes aim at compulsory extension of the working day, I do not return to them, as
this point was treated earlier (Chap. X., Section 5).
The Statute of Labourers was passed at the urgent instance of the House of Commons. A Tory
says naively:
“Formerly the poor demanded such high wages as to threaten industry and wealth.
Next, their wages are so low as to threaten industry and wealth equally and
perhaps more, but in another way.”
4
A tariff of wages was fixed by law for town
and country, for piece-work and day-work. The agricultural labourers were to hire
themselves out by the year, the town ones “in open market.” It was forbidden,
under pain of imprisonment, to pay higher wages than those fixed by the statute,
but the taking of higher wages was more severely punished than the giving them.
[So also in Sections 18 and 19 of the Statute of Apprentices of Elizabeth, ten
days’ imprisonment is decreed for him that pays the higher wages, but twenty-one
days for him that receives them.] A statute of 1360 increased the penalties and
authorised the masters to extort labour at the legal rate of wages by corporal
punishment. All combinations, contracts, oaths, &c., by which masons and
carpenters reciprocally bound themselves, were declared null and void. Coalition
of the labourers is treated as a heinous crime from the 14th century to 1825, the
year of the repeal of the laws against Trades’ Unions. The spirit of the Statute of
Labourers of 1349 and of its offshoots comes out clearly in the fact, that indeed a
maximum of wages is dictated by the State, but on no account a minimum.
In the 16th century, the condition of the labourers had, as we know, become much worse. The
money wage rose, but not in proportion to the depreciation of money and the corresponding rise
in the prices of commodities. Wages, therefore, in reality fell. Nevertheless, the laws for keeping
them down remained in force, together with the ear-clipping and branding of those “whom no one
was willing to take into service.” By the Statute of Apprentices 5 Elizabeth, c. 3, the justices of
the peace were empowered to fix certain wages and to modify them according to the time of the
year and the price of commodities. James I. extended these regulations of labour also to weavers,
spinners, and all possible categories of workers.
5
George II. extended the laws against coalitions
of labourers to manufactures. In the manufacturing period
par excellence,
the capitalist mode of
production had become sufficiently strong to render legal regulation of wages as impracticable as
it was unnecessary; but the ruling classes were unwilling in case of necessity to be without the
weapons of the old arsenal. Still, 8 George II. forbade a higher day’s wage than 2s. 7½d. for
journeymen tailors in and around London, except in cases of general mourning; still, 13 George
III., c. 68, gave the regulation of the wages of silk-weavers to the justices of the peace; still, in
1706, it required two judgments of the higher courts to decide, whether the mandates of justices
of the peace as to wages held good also for non-agricultural labourers; still, in 1799, an act of
Parliament ordered that the wages of the Scotch miners should continue to be regulated by a
statute of Elizabeth and two Scotch acts of 1661 and 1671. How completely in the meantime
circumstances had changed, is proved by an occurrence unheard-of before in the English Lower
House. In that place, where for more than 400 years laws had been made for the maximum,
beyond which wages absolutely must not rise, Whitbread in 1796 proposed a legal minimum
wage for agricultural labourers. Pitt opposed this, but confessed that the “condition of the poor
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was cruel.” Finally, in 1813, the laws for the regulation of wages were repealed. They were an
absurd anomaly, since the capitalist regulated his factory by his private legislation, and could by
the poor-rates make up the wage of the agricultural labourer to the indispensable minimum. The
provisions of the labour statutes as to contracts between master and workman, as to giving notice
and the like, which only allow of a civil action against the contract-breaking master, but on the
contrary permit a criminal action against the contract-breaking workman, are to this hour (1873)
in full force. The barbarous laws against Trades’ Unions fell in 1825 before the threatening
bearing of the proletariat. Despite this, they fell only in part. Certain beautiful fragments of the
old statute vanished only in 1859. Finally, the act of Parliament of June 29, 1871, made a
pretence of removing the last traces of this class of legislation by legal recognition of Trades’
Unions. But an act of Parliament of the same date (an act to amend the criminal law relating to
violence, threats, and molestation), re-established, in point of fact, the former state of things in a
new shape. By this Parliamentary escamotage the means which the labourers could use in a strike
or lock-out were withdrawn from the laws common to all citizens, and placed under exceptional
penal legislation, the interpretation of which fell to the masters themselves in their capacity as
justices of the peace. Two years earlier, the same House of Commons and the same Mr.
Gladstone in the well-known straightforward fashion brought in a bill for the abolition of all
exceptional penal legislation against the working class. But this was never allowed to go beyond
the second reading, and the matter was thus protracted until at last the “great Liberal party,” by an
alliance with the Tories, found courage to turn against the very proletariat that had carried it into
power. Not content with this treachery, the “great Liberal party” allowed the English judges, ever
complaisant in the service of the ruling classes, to dig up again the earlier laws against
“conspiracy,” and to apply them to coalitions of labourers. We see that only against its will and
under the pressure of the masses did the English Parliament give up the laws against Strikes and
Trades’ Unions, after it had itself, for 500 years, held, with shameless egoism, the position of a
permanent Trades’ Union of the capitalists against the labourers.
During the very first storms of the revolution, the French bourgeoisie dared to take away from the
workers the right of association but just acquired. By a decree of June 14, 1791, they declared all
coalition of the workers as “an attempt against liberty and the declaration of the rights of man,”
punishable by a fine of 500 livres, together with deprivation of the rights of an active citizen for
one year.
6
This law which, by means of State compulsion, confined the struggle between capital
and labour within limits comfortable for capital, has outlived revolutions and changes of
dynasties. Even the Reign of Terror left it untouched. It was but quite recently struck out of the
Penal Code. Nothing is more characteristic than the pretext for this bourgeois coup d’état.
“Granting,” says Chapelier, the reporter of the Select Committee on this law, “that wages ought to
be a little higher than they are, ... that they ought to be high enough for him that receives them, to
be free from that state of absolute dependence due to the want of the necessaries of life, and
which is almost that of slavery,” yet the workers must not be allowed to come to any
understanding about their own interests, nor to act in common and thereby lessen their “absolute
dependence, which is almost that of slavery;” because, forsooth, in doing this they injure “the
freedom of their cidevant masters, the present entrepreneurs,” and because a coalition against the
despotism of the quondam masters of the corporations is – guess what! – is a restoration of the
corporations abolished by the French constitution.
7
1
The author of the “Essay on Trade, etc.,” 1770, says, “In the reign of Edward VI. indeed the English
seem to have set, in good earnest, about encouraging manufactures and employing the poor. This we
learn from a remarkable statute which runs thus: ‘That all vagrants shall be branded, &c.’” l. c., p. 5.