Striking a Bargain: Work and Industrial Relations in England, 1815-65 (review)

Striking a Bargain is a thorough and exhaustively researched study of thetheory, discourse, and practice of industrial labor relations in nineteenth-century England. The author argues that, in contrast to the claims of previous scholars, informal negotiation between workers and employers was a prevalent and significant aspect of the early industrial workplace. By focusing on the shopfloor itself, Jaffe hopes to shed light on the inaccuracies of the "metanarratives" of British social and economic history, which have examined labor relations solely in the context of such broader trends as "class formation or the rise of industrial capitalism" (4).

Jaffe gives credit to the foundational work of Thompson in this field and acknowledges the evolution of labor history in the scholarship of Jones, Joyce, Vernon, and Wahrman.¹ The author argues, however, that with their emphasis on theories of class formation, articulation, and conflict, previous historians of labor have overlooked or misinterpreted the essential dynamics of workplace negotiation. According to Jaffe, nineteenth-century industrial negotiations are best understood as a reciprocal cultural exchange involving material elements rather than anexpression of class identity and class conflict at either the materialist ordiscursive level. The author's primary tools of analysis are industrial-relations theory, game theory, and cultural anthropology.

In particular, the anthropological concept of the "gift relationship," as portrayed by Mauss and adapted by Akerlof and Offer, guides much of the author's approach to labor relations.² Jaffe subscribes to the theory that "all 'economic' exchanges were also exchanges of honour, credit and reputation" (8). In their negotiations, both employers and workers sought, albeit from structurally unequal positions, terms that were mutually agreeable according to their own particular interpretations of fairness, loss, and gain. Jaffe argues that the reciprocal cultural exchanges between employers and employees represent an important continuity in England's theorized transition from a "traditional" economy, where wages were governed largely by mutual cultural obligations between workers and employees (Thompson's "moral economy"), to a market economy, where wages were determined primarily by the dynamics of supply and demand.

The heart of Jaffe's work is an extensive examination of how the gift relationship and the general principle of reciprocity operated in industrial workplaces during the first half of the nineteenth century. For his evidence, he draws on trade-union records, accounts of labor disputes in local periodicals, Parliamentary papers, and pamphlets by nineteenth-century union leaders, labor theorists, and economists. In this case-work approach, Jaffe emphasizes that the goals and priorities each side brought to these negotiations, and thus the specific forms that these general patterns took, could vary considerably from case to case.

The author's focus is on organized male labor, in both artisanal trades and, to a lesser extent, heavy industry and mining. There, the dynamics of the gift relationship are clearly evident in the specific cases of workplace negotiation that Jaffe examines. Though relatively deep, the author's approach to the phenomenon of labor relations is also narrow. Women's labor, children's labor, agricultural labor, casual labor, and Irish immigrant labor, for example, are wholly absent from his investigation. Proof that Jaffe's patterns of cultural exchange remained constant among workers regardless of gender, age, and ethnicity would greatly increase the significance and utility of his models.