This article examines why the implementation of factory discipline was important and what kind of measures were used to make discipline work. Factory discipline is as old as the modern industry itself. During the Industrial Revolution manual work was replaced by machine manufacturing, which demanded coordinated and regular activity from the labour force. The first generation of factory workers, who came mostly from the countryside, had no daily habit to follow a regular working routine. They were used to choosing their own working hours and the work that needed to be done. The choice was largely influenced by nature. Due to their habits, it was initially difficult for factory workers to adjust to strict factory life, which differed radically from the rural work pattern and work environment. For ensuring the production process in the new factories workers were expected to go to work on time and to do their part regularly and well, abandon the former timing, habits and customs and accept the established rules dictated by employers. The British textile entrepreneurs were in the pioneering role in establishing work discipline. They tested a number of methods: threats of dismissal, dismissal, rebuke, fining. Among these, fining gave the best results for introducing factory discipline. Fines as a means of economic pressure affected strongly the economic situation of workers, and therefore proved to be the most efficient way to implement behavioural and moral standards of the new era. After all, the workers’ opportunities to improve the quality of life and share the benefits offered by industrialization depended on their wages, which in turn depended on the quality and quantity of production and the workers’ behaviour. Factory discipline was initiated by British textile entrepreneurs. It spread quickly into other branches of industry and into other countries, including tsarist Russia and the Baltic provinces. Thus introduction of discipline can be regarded as a transnational phenomenon. Workers could be punished for a whole variety of infractions: arriving a few minutes late in the morning, being absent from their machine, socializing or eating at work, drinking alcohol, whistling, singing, playing cards or dice etc. For decades punishment was entirely in the hands of employers. It was not until the second half of the 19th century that workers’ increased resentment against hard working conditions, including fines, forced governments to limit the rights of the employers and to regulate legally the relationships between enterprises and workers, including the punishment with fines. In tsarist Russia the relationships between employers and workers were legally regulated in 1886, earlier than in many other countries. The act of 1886 still allowed entrepreneurs to impose fines, but the act established the cases in which workers could be fined and the maximum sums of fines. For ensuring that employers obey the law, the act of 1886 provided that they would be penalized for violations. With law enforcement the fines that a worker might be liable to and that would be deducted from their salary decreased. By that time, work discipline had become a natural principle in the organization of work in the factories. The vast majority of the workers tried to follow the rules and avoid wage reductions in the form of fines, because they had understood that obedience to established rules and focusing on the result of work would lead to an increase in wages. However, there were always a certain number of workers in the factory who remained undisciplined. Work discipline affected also the development of the habit of school attendance of under-age workers as well as adaptation to the rules of common life in the factory dwellings and the strict army discipline of the workers who were future soldiers. Factory discipline changed work patterns, set new timing, increased accuracy and legal obedience and standardized norms of behaviour of the new, industrial society. All these changes were necessary for the success of the machine manufacturing. © 2015, Estonian Academy Publishers. All rights reserved.
