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Expanding Class
Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850-1950
By Don Kalb Duke University Press
Copyright © 1997 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9943-8
CHAPTER 1
Communal Commotion: The Complexities of the Shoemakers Conflict in 1910
In the summer of 1910 the Dutch town of Waalwijk, on the river Meuse, in the shoe-producing district of barren central Brabant, flourished. Wages were relatively high, unemployment was negligible, so it was perfectly legitimate for the municipal secretary to show some modest signs of pride in his yearly report to the queen. Social relations appeared to be harmonious, and in a sense Waalwijk stood as a symbol for the better times to come in this backward region. As in all central Brabant municipalities, a Catholic Shoemakers Union existed in this town but, as could be expected in a place where living conditions by any standard were substantially better than in the mainly protoindustrial neighboring villages, it was rather passive. In the hinterland, the earnings of the home-working population were substantially lower, the working day much longer, and, as a consequence of the Truck system, prices of primary products 10 to 20 percent higher. In comparison, workers and factory owners in Waalwijk had established relations of reciprocity and seemed apparently agreed on creating economic and social progress.
Against all expectations, however, this town experienced an explosive labor conflict. In the early morning of 24 August 1910 a strange and severe dispute broke out in the factory of the van Schijndel family. This factory, the largest and most advanced workplace in the Netherlands, was famous locally for its technical and social achievements. It was even permitted to carry a royal predicat. In its stitching department, where some forty-five girls were employed on sewing machines to produce the uppers of high-class ladies' shoes, a young teenage girl asked a friend, who was working next to her, to be so friendly as to pass a glass of water. She was brutally reprimanded by her employer, whereupon the chairwoman of the local girls' branch of the Catholic Shoemakers Union, who happened to work on the same line, intervened, showed herself to be very upset about old van Schijndel's behavior, and judged that social relations in the factory were too bad for them to continue working in it. She demonstratively left the work floor, to be followed immediately by the stitching girls, who were all members of the girls' branch of the union. On hearing what had happened, more than half the male workers in the factory, about fifty men, who in many cases were probably the fathers and brothers of the striking girls, followed suit. Thus a superficially trivial event had occasioned a collective walkout.
For the second time that year, the strikers reported to the committee of the Catholic Shoemakers Union, which met in the nearby village of Kaatsheuvel, that the van Schijndel family refused to recognize the union and used constant minor threats, in the form of fines and restrictions, against its members. In the local and Catholic press the legitimacy of such an irregular and wildcat strike was fiercely disputed, but the committee unanimously stood behind its members, and declared that van Schijndel had waged an underground war against the Catholic workers' organizations. The strike, it maintained, was legitimate, as it was a struggle for union recognition.
Present-day Dutch historians with left-wing and humanist inclinations have reproduced this explanation for the strike at the Royal Steam Shoefactory of van Schijndel. But, as I will try to show, they have thereby reproduced an articulate discourse, mainly in the Catholic press and that of the Catholic Shoemakers Union, that obscured more fundamental causes. This, indeed, alludes to a more general problem of historical research on the working classes. Documentary sources tend to represent dominant meanings, and this in principle is also true of the sources from established labor unions, where divisions between functionaries and workers have developed, and certainly for those unions in continental Europe that embodied cross-class alliances as did the Catholic labor movements in the Netherlands.
Here a claim is made for a very different interpretation, one that is anthropologically stronger and sheds new light on the course and dynamics of Catholic union formation in the Dutch periphery. It will be argued that central Brabant's shoemakers, instead of defending the Catholic union, were actually motivated by deeply felt distresses concerning their place and prospects in the social relationships of shoe production. Such anxieties were totally ignored by this union. The event therefore showed the fracturing of a Catholic union rather than its popularity.
Moreover, I want to take this conflict and the interpretations that have sought to explain it then and now as an opportunity to criticize two main tendencies in contemporary historical sociology and social history. The first tendency, which is associated with the work of E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Charles Tilly, stresses the rationality and strategic nature of working Class responses to capitalist development. The second, stemming from the work of Gareth Stedman Jones, among others, maintains that class interests do not just speak for themselves but should be first produced in political languages of class, conflict, and reciprocity. I will argue that both approaches are in need of a more anthropological understanding of participants in hegemonic processes. We must leave the human capacity to experience the materialities of life intact and at the same time recognize the problematic nature of articulate sociopolitical languages. For any analyst of class both the conceptual distinction and problematic relation between articulate languages and practical experiences is of vital importance. A better understanding of participants in hegemonic processes can be developed empirically by paying due attention to the details of routine-breaking events.
CLUES TO CLASS AND CONFLICT
Collective action always produces unfocused and inconclusive messages in the contemporary press, which often, because of their character, are not properly handled by historical researchers who strive to build a coherent narrative. This is certainly true in this case. Thus the persistent denials of the employer that he was trying to tackle the Catholic Shoemakers Union has for all practical purposes been seen as merely a rationalized self-defense. In his letters to the press and to the union he was, however, very careful to stress that he had only been opposing "a spirit of discontent" that had, in his view, particularly arisen in the stitching department. He insisted that by fining people he had only been reasserting control in the factory. "We declare," he wrote, "that the control we exercise in the factory is not yet sharp enough to counter the slowing down of work and the pointless chattering." He was convinced of the noncooperative attitude of the stitching girls. "That the girls don't work as regularly as they should is proven by the fact that their production was substantially higher during the week before the Waalwijk Fair. Why don't they always work like this?" The employer felt it was perfectly legitimate to exercise authority on the shop floor and therefore against his honor to start negotiations with the union leadership. In his opinion it was they who were fundamentally at fault.
His stance is to a certain extent confirmed by journalists of the Catholic daily press, who did not take at face value the union's claim that Van Schijndel's workers were denied the right to organize. On the basis of an inquiry on the spot it was concluded that the whole conflict was very "subjective." If there was an offensive against union rights it was not waged openly or directly. Considering all the information, the rather neutral Dagblad van Noord-Brabant concluded: "There seems to be no reason for following the logic of the conflict to its extreme, because it is all very subjective. It is not possible to make an ultimate judgment."
Though many comments from the press were strongly criticized by the Catholic Shoemakers Union for their bourgeois misunderstanding of proletarian life, the union committee, in a published letter to Van Schijndel, surprisingly supported this purported "subjective" nature of the protest. "The organized stitchers and shoemakers seem instinctively to have understood the intention to destroy the Catholic Union," it said (my emphasis). Maybe there were no facts to be shown, it said, but there was surely a problem of psychology. The letter made much of the maltreatment and extensive control of the workers in this factory. This is important because it confirms the picture painted in the above-mentioned remarks about strained relationships. This picture is strengthened, moreover, by other information. For example, we learn that the shop floor regime was not only restrictive but also highly arbitrary. One worker reported that one day he was fined for throwing shoes to the next colleague on the line, while on another day he had been ordered to do so. Finally he was fired for being a troublemaker. Taken together, such messages point to the existence of a rather despotic work regime.
Other bits of information suggest that this despotism was not limited to Van Schijndel's factory. On the contrary it seemed to be typical of modern shoemaking factories in central Brabant. This is shown by an earlier instance of collective protest in the nearby village of Kaatsheuvel. In 1909, when the government, in a half-hearted effort to regulate labor relations, required the signing of individual labor contracts and the framing of factory rules, the workers at van Dortmond's factory went on strike after reading the bad arrangements for overtime and the generally restrictive spirit of the factory rules. As was mentioned by the Catholic shoemakers' press, the stitching girls were even scared to work under such regulations. After two days of negotiations, Van Dortmond changed the text about overtime and promised not to take the regulations too literally. This was accepted as a compromise. It is interesting, however, that Van Dortmond, like Van Schijndel, was known locally as a very good "patron," someone who was in the forefront of social-minded employers in this municipality. Nevertheless, as at Van Schijndel's in 1910, it was only "his" workers who went on strike. These two conflicts in the most advanced and respected factories of central Brabant were, moreover, the only ones to occur in the region after 1905. Other potential conflicts used to be resolved quickly by the retreat of the employers. Paradoxically both these "progressive patrons" stubbornly clung to their positions. This suggests that their stance was not just coincidental.
Stubbornness was especially true of Van Schijndel in 1910: he flatly refused to talk to Catholic labor representatives or even the clergy, and thus did nothing to reinstitute daily routines. This sternness caused a completely unexpected situation in Waalwijk. In fact it featured a couple of events that, more clearly than anything else, contained hints of unreported but widespread dissatisfaction over the nature of social relationships in shoemaking in general. In the first week after the strike began the clergy and Catholic union officials had succeeded in "Catholicizing" the strike. Striking workers were asked to remain indoors and to visit church every morning for prayers. They were also told not to drink any kind of alcohol. This was obviously part of an effort to turn the conflict into a ritual of solemnity, devotion, and loyalty to the church. In the face of a fierce criticism of the union's leadership in the press, the strikers were willing to demonstrate their utmost Respectability.
But nothing of this demonstration of Catholic respectability was continued in the next weeks. Instead, a kind of spontaneous mass mobilization erupted that ultimately forced the mayor of Waalwijk to call in extra forces from the military police. Already, in the first week of September, a big fight broke out in the public square in Waalwijk when someone had dared to criticize the Catholic union. More than five hundred people threw lumps of earth at the man, who was lucky to escape. In the second week a blackleg was attacked by a crowd of people. He was knocked about, and consequently suffered a nervous breakdown. Set free by the police, he was brought home, but this again led to a large crowd surrounding his house. The police resorted to armed action to disperse the mob. On the morning of Thursday, 15 September, a male scab escorted by the police was welcomed by a crowd of more than a thousand people, many of them not belonging to the Catholic union. That same evening, someone who was reported to be a dealer in blackleg labor was attacked by another crowd and could only save himself by fleeing into a nearby house. On the next Friday a permanent threat of violent escalation which the police did not seem able to cope with led the mayor to forbid any further public gatherings. The Catholic union leadership immediately, but uncomfortably, felt itself obliged to ask its members not to participate in crowd actions any more. It is not certain whether this really happened. Though further incidents were only vaguely reported in the press, it is clear that minor disturbances, and their potential escalation, went on for much longer. Special police measures were only canceled the following spring.
It is evident from the mass unrest in the town of Waalwijk that, above all, grievances were in no way limited to Van Schijndel's factory. Rather, the strike created an opportunity for the expression of discontent that was widely felt throughout the working population. Moreover, the crowd activities that led to the calling of the military police were rather uncoordinated, "unpolitical" in the narrow sense of the word, and potentially violent. There was clearly widely felt indignation at Van Schijndel's policy and at blackleg practices, but it was not channeled into concerted action. Rather, it was aimed in the main at defenseless common people, who could only be accused of having broken the front of spontaneous and inarticulate popular solidarity in the town. Thus it seems that only public fractures of working class solidarity sparked off violent mass action.
However, there also emerged more effective acts of solidarity with the strikers. The industrial communities of central Brabant raised substantial amounts of money to support them. Some people began playing music to raise money, others sold handmade shoes. Many people turned the tradition of improvised oral verses to the cause of the union, poetically condemning blackleg practices and glorifying the union and its priests.
The conflict, though, was eventually won by Van Schijndel. After some months he was able to contract a sufficient number of scabs to run his factory. The strikers, moreover, all found jobs elsewhere. But the Catholic Union of Shoemakers never canceled the sanctions against working for this employer. Time and again moderate leaders tried to place the issue on the agenda, but it always aroused the membership's fierce condemnation. Interviewers in the 1970s were struck by the emotions which still hung around the strike of 1910. Old shoemakers were still moved to tears by the memory of Van Schijndel's victory.
It must be emphasized, however, that we have various information that does not fit easily into the neat picture of threatened union rights at Van Schijndel. Rather, we have a set of hints that relationships on the shop floor were quite strained, and that the phenomenon was not limited to this one factory, as there are indications that things also occurred in other "advanced" factories in central Brabant. Also the nature of the collective commotion that emerged in the aftermath of the strike suggests that grievances were not limited to just this employer. Rather, they point to problems of Legitimacy in the wider community, concerning the development of relations in shoemaking in general. It should be stressed that neither in the local press nor in the Catholic shoemakers' press was there any sign that literate elites or the shoemakers' leadership in the unions in fact understood this development and its social consequences, at least not on a public or analytical level. Thus, contemporary discourses did not recognize changes in daily life. Therefore attention must now be given to the social bases, the development, structure, and ideology of the Catholic shoemakers' unions.
SOCIAL CATHOLICISM, CLASS, AND ECONOMY IN CENTRAL BRABANT
The formation of a large Catholic workers' movement in the Netherlands has been one of the central issues of social and historical thought in this country. The Catholic workers' movement not only almost equaled socialist unions in number, it was simultaneously one of the major institutions of the Catholic bloc, and thus a central phenomenon in the religious-political segmentation of the Dutch population in the twentieth century. This was particularly true in the southern provinces, which, though extensively industrialized, remained peripheral and underdeveloped up to 1950. The Catholic workers' movement and the Catholic bloc as a whole developed a strong position, unrivaled by left-wing organizations.
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Excerpted from Expanding Class by Don Kalb. Copyright © 1997 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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