CARIBBEAN ECONOMIC HISTORY || Comments on Johnson, Lobdell, Stubbs and Haraksingh

Comments on Johnson, Lobdell, Stubbs and HaraksinghAuthor(s): Mary TurnerSource: Social and Economic Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1/2, CARIBBEAN ECONOMIC HISTORY(MARCH – JUNE 1988), pp. 293-299Published by: Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, University of the WestIndiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27862938 .

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Social and Economic Studies, Volume 37, Nos. 1 & 2, 1988

Comments on

Johnson, Lobdell, Stubbs

and Haraksingh

?Mary Turner

Caribbean labour history in the 150 years covered by the

papers is dominated ? for the workers we are looking at ?

by the pursuit of a livelihood within different systems for pumping out surplus v?lue. The composition of the work force shifts ? in particular, the gender balance changes: women establish a virtual monopoly of specialist occupations within the tobacco industry in Cuba. The composition of

capital formation moves from merchant capital (in nineteenth

century Bahamas) to monopoly capital (in Cuba and Trinidad). For the labouring population, however, life continues to be a

struggle for survival.

Howard Johnson's paper [3] depicts the array of value extraction methods used in nineteenth century Bahamas which ranged from chattel slavery, through various combina tions of labour services and credit systems to wage slavery. Bahamian folk songs of the period may well reflect the theme, "Sixteen tons and what do Iget/Another day older and deeper in debt". The rationalization of these expedients offered in the paper is "shortage of capital" and the need to "restrict

capital outlay for wages". What the employers are doing, how

ever, is just what all employers do ? maximizing profit mar

gins by minimizing wages. The ideal minimum for post emancipation wages was set by the terms offered the slaves,



294 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

as the case of the liberated Africans neatly illustrates. Every expedient described in the paper aimed to maintain this mini

mum as the norm and avoid, wherever possible, payments in cash so as to ensure the employer a second layer of profit from the company store.

Despite these expediencies, however, the pre-capitalist methods of production which, as the paper points out, characterized the Bahamian economy outside salt, pineapple and, briefly, sisal production, generated comparatively low

profit margins which, consequently, did not entice outside investors and created credit problems. An interesting question arises here as to what happened to such profits as were

generated. Some of the merchants used it, evidently, to con

solidate their interests at the expense of their fellows, enmesh

ing each other in the sort of debt servitude they imposed on

the workers. All the same, it is suggested that in 1896 this left about ?70,000 of capital assets owned by some half dozen

merchants. This does not represent great riches, but it would be interesting to know whether it represented material assets

in the Bahamas, or investments at higher interest rates out

side ? in the United States, Canada, or, even the Caribbean.

The most remarkable aspect of these forms of debt

servitude is that they endured so long. Some labourers,

evidently, found individual solutions and emigrated to Florida, but the question arises as to what extent early twentieth

century governmental efforts to end the system reflected

responses to collective pressure ? strikes and riots, for

example. Richard Lobdell's excursion into the elusive depths of

Jamaican census data deals with a population apparently seeking the world of wage work [4]. The most striking single statistic is the 58 per cent increase iji the number of people

claiming an occupation, or even, as one census official

remarked, a multiplicity of occupations between 1881 and

1921. This increase reflects a massive social upheaval involv

ing out-migration, urbanization, and the increasing employ ment of women as both agricultural and domestic workers.

Women in agriculture apparently served as a reserve army



Comments 295

of labour, pushed out of work during the depression years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, pulled in by the impact of emigration and new agricultural developments over the period 1911-1921. In the same periods, however, as Tables 16 and 17 indicate [Lobdell 4], more women claimed to be "planters"; the increases are most significant (between 25 and 36 per cent) in the first period for the west ern parishes of Hanover and Westmoreland and the district between Kingston and Spanish Town (St. Catherine); but the trend continues at an overall rate of about 10 per cent until 1921.

The increase in the number of women designating them selves as planters coincides with an increase in the number of women domestics employed, not in Kingston and St. Andrew

(the main urban centres where the figures for domestic servants remain stable for 1891-1921), but in the rest of the island. Does this increase represent a development in the rural areas and reflect a new layer, or a newly prosperous layer of peasants, or the emergence in the parish capitals of new business and

professional elements? Women moving from the land into domestic work can be seen as a gender equivalent for the

period of male out-migration. Internal migration was a first

step for women on the road to emigration.

Given the notoriously low wages paid to domestic

servants, however, it is difficult to see how further research in this area could discuss the extent to which female employ

ment would "alter household patterns of consumption, saving and investment". Working people display endless ingenuity, as Kusha Haraksingh indicates [2], in using credit, mutual assistance schemes and so on ? but for survival rather than

investment; and the figures would come from the accounts at the corner store rather than the census data. It would be more feasible and rewarding to attack the data relating to

family size and family organization to link income with nutrition and infant death rates and provide an historical

perspective to current studies of female-headed households.

I would also like to see some unscrambling of colonial

government categories which obfuscate class structure and




see closer investigation of the professional and business elements. Their numerical increase is small, but proportion ately large, and of considerable social and political significance.

Women in the Cuban tobacco industry were prized, like the women currently exploited in the offshore industrial enclaves created by the multinationals, for their supposed passivity and flexibility. Jean Stubbs [5] describes how the Cuban women built their bridgeheads in some aspects of to bacco processing in classic circumstances - the nexus of eco nomic and social dislocation associated with the first Cuban

War of Independence, 1868-79. The division of labour with in the industry, however, facilitated the containment of these female bridgeheads, and it is not surprising to find that one area of containment was the stemming process

? skilled hand work rapidly deskilled in terms of wage rates as Cuba became

primarily a leaf exporting country in the late nineteenth

century. The paper attributes the deskilling to the fact that the stemmers were women and black. Table 2 [5] demon

strates, however, that similar percentages of both men and women workers were black and the impetus came from a

combination of increased demand and the introduction of machines in other branches of a multinational production process.

One of the most interesting aspects of the paper concerns

the role of these reputedly passive and flexible workers in

union activity. The stemmers were highly organized by the

1920s, and the communist-led unions of the 1940s were

particularly powerful. The one woman trade union leader who

emerged in this period, however, was American trained. The

process of unionization among women workers is characteris

tically undertaken by men, as unionization efforts in process in the underdeveloped regions of Canada currently demon

strate. The Cuban women had what appears to be an immense

advantage in joining an organized, militant labour grouping. But a couple questions arise: What attitude did male workers

have to unionizing women, and to what extend did the women

remain, until the revolution, essentially ancilliary to the men? These questions aside, the main thrust of the paper clearly



Comments 297

demonstrates the interaction of economic circumstances and

political response - a dimension notably absent from Kusha

Haraksingh's discussion of sugar, labour and livelihood in

Trinidad, 1940-70 [2]. Working life as a struggle for survival is the theme of

Haraksingh's paper. Thoroughly researched from a wide range of sources including a village shop, it demonstrates, among other things, that sugar companies in twentieth century Tri nidad enjoyed advantages denied nineteenth century Baha mian merchants and were buttressed both by the colonial

government and the British Trade Union Congress in their

pursuit of the lowest possible subsistence wage. The results show how successfully twentieth century capitalist interests

were in approximating the achievements of their nineteenth

century predecessors, both in the level of wages paid and the extraction of surplus value by different means: Cane farming for the sugar workers meant overtime work at less than sub sistence rates.

However, responsibility for wage stagnation cannot

properly be attributed, as the paper suggests, to inter-union

rivalry. Union leaders can be condemned for lending them selves to management purposes, for lack of class conscious

ness, or as plainly corrupt, paid to keep the quarrels alive; but the primary interest served was company, not union interest. The sugar companies' determination to keep wages to the minimum, regardless of the rate of profit is not, more

over, specific to sugar companies, but simply characteristic of the system.

Overall, the picture which emerges is that of a labour force with a standard of living recognizably similar to that of the Bahamian workforce in the nineteenth century. Yet, the

paper also makes clear that the situation of the workers was, in vital ways, quite different. The great strikes, one on average every three years, are briefly mentioned. The material sacri fices the sugar workers made in pursuit of long-term political ends, improvement in their bargaining position, are again not

peculiar to sugar workers, but typical of such confrontations. These moments bring us into the twentieth century.




The failure to integrate the sugar workers' pursuit of a

life as well as a livelihood means that the paper does not

succeed quite to the extent the first pages promise ? to pene

trate "the undifferentiated fog of low wages, exploitation and

impoverishment which seem to lie like an all-embracing blanket over plantation labour". What is missing is the political dimen

sion, the clashes between labour and capital which would allow us to view developments within the working class in the

long period under review ? developments that take place as

a result of class struggle. The fog needs to be dispersed by an

attack along the lines exemplified by John Foster's Class

Struggle and the Industrial Revolution [ 1 ]. This leads me to a final, general observation on the limi

tations of pursuing workers simply as subsistence earning units. The resistance of chattel slaves has long been considered an essential element of slave labour studies. To omit this com

ponent from wage labour studies only serves to obfuscate the clash of interest between labour and capital. It generates, in

short, a fog of its own.

REFERENCES

[1] FOSTER, John, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974.

[2] HARAKSINGH, Kusha, "Sugar, Labour and Livelihood in Trini

dad, 1940-1970", Social and Economic Studies, this issue (Vol. 37, Nos. 1 & 2, March 1988).

[3 ] JOHNSON, Howard, "Labour Systems in Post-emancipation Baha

mas", Social and Economic Studies, this issue (Vol. 37, Nos. 1 &2, March 1988).

[4] LOBDELL, Richard A., "Women in the Jamaica Labour Force, 1881-1921", Social and Economic Studies, this issue

(Vol 37, Nos. 1 & 2, March 1988).



Comments 299

[5 ] STUBBS, Jean, "Gender Constructs of Labour in Pre-revolutionary Cuban Tobacco", Social and Economic Studies, this issue (Vol. 37, Nos. 1 & 2, March 1988).



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CARIBBEAN ECONOMIC HISTORY || Comments on Johnson, Lobdell, Stubbs and Haraksingh