BELL HOURS: WORK VALUES AND DISCIPLINE IN THE AMERICAN TEXTILE INDUSTRY, 1787-1880 (BUSINESS HISTORY, LABOR)

This study examines owners' and operatives' work values and discipline, such as concerns for wages, profits, punctuality and steadiness at work, in the United States' first major industry. It argues that more continuity and diversity existed in employers' and employees' work habits than earlier authors have described. Unlike previous interpretations on work culture in industrializing America, this study also stresses economic motives and concerns as a fundamental factor in defining employers' and employees' work values.;Operatives brought their own values and concerns to textile factories. Most textile employees between 1787 and 1880 were members of families that worked in the mills in order to earn wages for the family's livelihood. Beginning in the earliest mills operatives worked steadily and punctually to gain earnings for the household. Indeed, hands often spurned idleness that would cost them pay. Yet workers' concerns also led them to increasingly protest against speedups, stretch-outs and pay cuts that threatened their livelihoods and families. By 1880 thousands of workers had turned out against employers' policies. Their values and concerns clashed directly with owners' efforts to maintain profits.;Employers' quest for profits guided much of their business decisions and the discipline they instituted between 1787 and 1880. In early mills employers established wage incentives, factory rules and contracts in order to gain maximum output from workers. Early factory owners also led mill village churches and schools in order to achieve a disciplined work force. As they built more mills and increased production, however, later owners faced growing competition and falling profits. To meet competition they developed by 1880 new methods of cutting labor costs, including speeding up machinery, establishing premium systems, and enforcing discipline more stringently. By 1880 they concentrated on reducing labor costs in their factories and left leadership of schools and churches to other middle-class moral reformers.