The Shearing Labour Process, 1900-1914

Abstract

Recent studies of the Australian Workers' Union ( AWU) and working class politics in the pastoral industry have concentrated on the unions, its leaders, and on the property ownership of its members. This has obscured social relations of production between employers and employees within the labour process. Nor has enough attention been given to the position of pastoral workers as persons who do not own the means of production but work for wages.1 For such labour historians working class formation occurs through trade unions and other forms of political and economic organisation. There are also writers such as Connell and Irving who are in the tradition of culturalist history developed by E. P. Thompson.2 For them class is a felt experience, a set of beliefs and attitudes, a self-conception arising out of a way of life. They focus on the culture of the working class, on human agency, rather than economic structure. They recognise the importance of class relations, but equate these relations to how groups perceive themselves. This article traces working class formation to relations of production, to an economic structure rooted in the workplace where employers and employees confront each other. However, the workplace does not consist of economic relations alone, but also of juridical, ideological and power relations. As this article shows, a focus on social relations of production does not imply economic reductionism. Nor does it exclude human agency or consciousness. Buyers and sellers of labour power enter into economic relations that are simultaneously political, legal and cultural relations. Contemporary discussions of the labour process have been triggered by Braverman's argument that under modern capitalism there was an erosion of the ability of employees to regulate how work was done. In essence Braverman has focused on relations between employers and employees as power relations that were structured by technological changes. A growing division of labour, the decline of craft, and the deskilling of labour separated the conceptualisation of production from the execution of the plans of management. Control passed almost inevitably to management.3 Australian labour historians have challenged these conclusions. Bulbeck has shown how in the furniture industry compromise between factory owners and the union was more common than total opposition or subordination.4 Frances has argued that while deskilling occurred in the Victorian clothing industry, the extent of deskilling varied between different sections of the labour process, with the skilled and reskilled tasks performed by a male elite, while the deskilled tasks were left to female workers.5 These arguments are of some use to our analysis of the shearing labour process. In the first section of this article the rapid diffusion of shearing machinery is discussed. It is argued that machine shearing replaced hand shearing because it made possible cheaper and speedier shearing, but the use of machines did not improve managerial control. Nor did it lead to deskilling, and shearers won the power to decide the kind of machines they would use. Such con