Labor geographies in a time of early globalization: Strikes against Singer in Scotland and Russia in the early 20th century

Geoforum 39 (2008) 1676–1686

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Labor geographies in a time of early globalization: Strikes against Singer in Scotland and Russia in the early 20th century Mona Domosh Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA

a r t i c l e

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Article history: Received 20 July 2007 Received in revised form 14 April 2008

Keywords: Globalization Labor geographies Scotland Russia Strikes Singer Manufacturing Company

a b s t r a c t This essay provides analyses of labor strikes at two early sites (first quarter of the 20th century) of the global production line – Singer Manufacturing Company’s factories at Clydebank, Scotland and Podolsk, Russia – and the labor management strategies that led to and resulted from these particular enactments of power. I focus on the degree to which Singer and its employees were embedded in local, regional and national contexts, and how and why workers’ agency mattered to the course of early globalization. I also suggest that such analyses provide significant understanding of how and why early global production was both different from and similar to contemporary globalization. By so doing, this analysis contributes to theoretical discussions concerning degrees of territorial embeddedness of transnational corporations, particularly in regard to changes over time as well as geographic scale, and adds historical nuance to theoretical questions concerning labor geographies under conditions of globalization. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

‘‘About an hour and a half’s journey from Moscow, in a small city by the name of Podolsk, there is a factory which makes sewing machines. Before the 1917 revolution this plant was owned and operated by the American capitalist, Singer. Today it is owned, like all Soviet workshops, by the working class and run by those who man its machines.” Myra Page, Soviet Main Street, 1933, p. 1. ‘‘The conditions of modern industrial life have been revolutionized during the last 30 years, and the tendency of the changes which have taken place has been towards the amelioration of the lot of the worker... This modern tendency is well illustrated in the case of The Singer Manufacturing Company, Limited, Singer, Clydebank, Scotland, who, some time ago, inaugurated a scheme of recreation activities, by laying out extensive playing grounds adjacent to the factory for the use of their workers.” The Red S Review, vol. 2, no. 8, 1921, p. 10. As two important sites of one of the largest international networks of production facilities in the first decade of the 20th century, the Singer Manufacturing Company’s factories at Clydebank, Scotland and Podolsk, Russia were connected through and constituted by flows of information, materials, capital and people. The majority of those flows were controlled from Singer’s headquarters in New York City, where executives and managers did their best to E-mail address: [email protected] 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.04.004

regulate and moderate the incredibly complex interplay of machines, workers, money, and information that moved between and within the Singer ‘‘empire” and that for most of the early 20th century reaped them and their shareholders large profits. Yet this first large ‘‘global” expansion of American business was not seamless, nor were all the flows of power controlled from company headquarters. The embeddedness of these flows in different places and situations produced quite different outcomes. For example, as the above quotes make clear, both production sites experienced fairly dramatic changes in labor/management practices in the first decades of the 20th century, changes that as I will discuss in this paper were partly in response to a series of strikes and labor disputes. And ‘‘local” situations shaped different trajectories. At Clydebank, outside of Glasgow, Singer adopted paternalist management practices in reaction to the 1911 strike, practices that were meant to ameliorate ‘‘the lot of the worker”, as the Singer Company’s newsletter (The Red S Review) politely suggests. By contrast, in Podolsk, social and economic relations were reordered during the Bolshevik revolution, and the Singer plant, ‘‘like all Soviet workshops”, was run by the ‘‘working class”. America’s first large foray into a global system of production was met with, among other things, resistance and accommodation in one situation; resistance, accommodation, and revolution in another. Whether or not one agrees with John Agnew’s (2005) contention that contemporary globalization is the outgrowth of a particularly American-based set of social values and economic/ political practices, history tells us that US-based corporations began the experiment of establishing extensive sales networks

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and production sites in countries outside the formal bounds of political control as early as the 1860s (Wilkins, 1970; Rosenberg, 1982).1 The two places I analyze here – Singer’s large factory sites in Clydebank, Scotland and Podolsk, Russia – were not the first production sites located in countries that were foreign to corporate ownership, but they were integral parts of the first international network of production. Singer Manufacturing Company’s experience with establishing and monitoring a spatially expansive network of offices, stores, and factories had been well-honed throughout the latter half of the 19th century, as it pursued the growing markets of the American interior and west. This particular American experience was then translated into expansion beyond the national territory. The stories I tell here, then, are stories of encounters2 between American managers and executives who assumed they could bring with them American ways of doing business, and ‘foreign’ workers whose politics were shaped by local, regional and national contexts. These encounters demonstrate in what ways the ‘‘specificities of place” (Walker, 1999, p. 265) mattered in this early experiment of the ‘‘global production line”. 1. Theoretical context In this paper I focus on two key moments/places where the labor geographies of early globalization were in the process of being enacted. By so doing, I plan to address two interrelated theoretical concerns. First, by exploring case studies of the complex and contested processes through which American-based companies began to expand beyond national borders, I respond to the call for empirical studies of how capitalist economies ‘‘are constituted via a complex mix of social relations, of understandings, representations and interpretations, and practices” that varies by time and place (Hudson, 2004, p. 449; Murphy, 2006). The global expansion of capitalism was neither inevitable nor unilinear; it occurred, as Timothy Mitchell reminds us, through ‘‘disruptions and dislocations” (2002, p. 248) that are based in different local situations. Economic geographers have referred to these localization processes as territorial embeddedness (Wrigley et al., 2005; Hess, 2004; Hollingsworth and Boyer, 1997), the degree to which transnational companies ‘‘absorb, and in some cases become constrained by, the economic activities and social dynamics that already exist” (Wrigley et al., 2005, p. 441) in particular places from the scale of the national to that of the local. Scholarly discussions of embeddedness have centered on the degree to which economic institutions are tied to local places in distinction to their characterization as ‘‘footloose”, and in what ways global networks affect these local places and vice versa (Sassen, 2001, 2002; Coe, 2004; Peck, 2005). For the most part, these studies of the embeddedness (or not) of transnational corporations have focused on the late 20th and early 21st centuries, assuming that earlier time periods provide little guidance for understanding the contemporary economic landscape (Dicken, 2003; Dicken et al., 2001; Yeung, 2000; Wrigley et al., 2005). By focusing on two particular instances when issues of 1 Commercial organizations that operate internationally have a long history, with roots at least as far back as the 17th century British East India Company (see Ogborn, 2007). The organizations I am discussing in this paper are among the first to do so under what Chandler has called the ‘‘modern corporate” form – that is, non-state sanctioned, large-scale industries that require complex managerial coordination. See Chandler (1977). 2 I use the term ‘‘encounter” here to indicate my intellectual debt to the range of work within cultural studies, American studies and history that has looked to the everyday and the intimate in order to better understand the maintenance of power within colonial and neocolonial situations. The degree to which we can think of American commercial expansion as constituting a colonial situation is beyond the scope of this paper; nonetheless, this approach has informed my decisions here to provide in-depth analyses of particular moments where power was being enacted and resisted, at the same time. See Stoler (2006), Joseph et al. (1998) and Ballantyne and Burton (2005).

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embeddedness in place came to the fore in the practices of an early 20th century American transnational company, I hope to highlight in what ways particularities of place matter in historical geographies of capitalist expansion. In turn, this historical perspective further problematizes our understanding of embeddedness by adding time as well as geographic scale to the list of important issues that need to be analyzed. In other words, these two case studies bring to light how the embeddedness of transnational companies varies not only by place and across scale (local, regional, national), but also through time (in the cases examined here, the early 20th century). Secondly, since at least in the case of Singer, some of the key ‘‘disruptions and dislocations” (Mitchell, 2002, p. 248) of global capitalist expansion were caused by labor unrest, this analysis contributes to the scholarly discussions concerning the complex relationships between labor and capital in a time of increasing globalization. As many scholars have shown (Wills, 1998; Herod, 1998, 2001a,b; Castree, 2000; Castree et al., 2004), contemporary economic globalization both forecloses and opens up possibilities for creative labor organizing. The international scale of production is a difficult and moving target, pitting workers within one national context against others, and moving capital into and out of places with apparent ease and impunity. Yet increasing global connections also favor labor organizing efforts across national boundaries, and have enabled unions and other labor organizations to gain a more complex understanding of how corporations maneuver on a global scale. The case studies I examine here portray a slightly different set of labor/management relationships. Historians tell us that during the first era of economic globalism, before WWI, labor organizations became progressively more international, spurred by the increasingly harsh working conditions of industrial sites throughout much of the west and a recognition by unions and syndicates of the potential that such transnational organizing could attain (Lorwin, 1929; Kolko, 1994). At the same time, given slower and much ‘stickier’ communication and transportation networks, and far greater investments in local infrastructure, international companies were less able to shift their sites of production, and therefore were embedded in local and regional labor markets in ways different from today’s global corporations. Given this, my exploration of a series of labor strikes aimed at Singer Manufacturing Company, a very early and extremely international US-based company, provides an interesting theoretical and historical comparison for understanding contemporary labor geographies under globalization. I explore in what ways different local, regional, national and international networks mattered to both Singer managers and Singer workers during and after key labor strikes at factories in Podolsk, Russia and Clydebank, Scotland, and how, perhaps obviously, the pertinent issues differed in different places. By so doing, I hope to show in what ways labor organizations and workers’ resistance shaped the course of early global production, thereby highlighting the complexity of the relationships between labor and capital under conditions of early economic globalization. To do so, I first contextualize these two case studies by situating them within the contours of Singer’s global empire and the particular historical geographies of the two sites (Clydebank and Podolsk), before moving to an analysis of labor/management relationships, negotiations, and their aftermath in the 1905–1906 Podolsk strike and the 1911 Clydebank strike.

2. Production sites within the Singer empire When Singer Manufacturing Company petitioned the North British Railway in 1907 to move its line into Clydebank further north in order to accommodate the expansion of its factory, the Railway not only agreed to do so, but rebuilt its station and named

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it ‘‘Singer”, thus marking in stone an alignment of this industrial community just north of Glasgow with the Singer Company that had begun more than 25 years earlier (Hood, 1988). But this intertwining of a company and a place came about rather haphazardly. Singer had not set out to create a formal company town in the way of Pullman or Sunshine, towns that would automatically bear the company’s name, nor was it in any way invested – materially or socially – in the local area. Rather, Singer Manufacturing Company made its decision to locate a production site in Clydebank for the most obvious of reasons – to reduce costs of production. But unlike contemporary globalization, this search for cost savings was not focused on cheaper labor. As early as 1865 Singer Company was looking for ways to decrease its cost of shipment to its fast-growing European markets, and establishing some sort of production facility in Europe seemed the best solution (Davies, 1976). In 1867 the Company leased a factory in Glasgow that it soon outgrew, moving to larger premises nearby in 1869, and then in 1883 to its large newly built factory complex outside of Glasgow in Clydebank (The Red S Review, 1922a). At the celebration of the groundbreaking for Singer Manufacturing Company’s Manufacturing site in Clydebank, local dignitaries and Singer officials (105 people all together) toasted to the health of the community, company, and nation at a dinner held at the George Hotel in Glasgow. The Royal Toast was made by George McKenzie, vice president of Singer, a Scottish-born immigrant to the United States who had worked his way up through the Singer corporate ladder. As an unpublished history of the Singer UK operations states, given this personal history, ‘‘it was very natural therefore that McKenzie’s preference would be to have the proposed factory in Scotland” (Dorman, no date). Whether ‘‘natural” or not, McKenzie’s choice was certainly fortuitous. The site he chose was located between the Forth and Clyde Canal and the Northern Railway line to Glasgow, in an area already known for its shipbuilding and related industries, and with a supply of skilled labor able to commute by train from Glasgow.

In retrospect, Singer’s decision to locate its first significant overseas direct investment in Scotland is far from surprising. In the 1870s and 1880s when these decisions were being made Singer’s foreign sales of sewing machines were increasing rapidly, comprising the fastest growing portion of its market, and European countries formed the most significant portion of those foreign sales, particularly England, France and Germany (Carstensen, 1984). Their factory in Elizabeth, New Jersey produced almost all of the machines for domestic as well as foreign sales, and it was being pushed to its limits (Davies, 1976). Singer managers knew that investing in overseas production would greatly lower transport costs to Europe and would help ease the production burdens on the Elizabeth factory. Yet it also was a very costly and somewhat risky business decision. To establish a full-fledged factory required far more than renting or constructing a building or two, like the company had done previously in Glasgow. Singer Manufacturing Company was a vertically-integrated company – almost every aspect of machine production and sales was controlled by the company. So when Singer executives decided to open a fullyfunctioning plant in Scotland, that decision involved a large complex of buildings and infrastructure (see Fig. 1). In Clydebank, the first set of buildings were constructed on a site of 44 acres and, with costs estimated at over two million dollars (Davies, 1976). In addition to the main factory buildings, where machines and all their parts – needles, fittings, etc. – were assembled, trimmed, and readied for shipment, all Singer plants were fitted with separate foundries for the production of the metal body of its machines, woodworking shops for the machine trim, stands, boxes, shipping facilities, and printing facilities for machine decorations, advertisements, and shipping labels. Singer could hardly be considered what is today referred to as a footloose industry, able to locate and relocate production facilities in relatively risk-free export-processing zones shielded from local regulations. Singer’s production sites overseas required large outlays of capital in terms of buying land, building appropriate structures, training workers, and supplying

Fig. 1. Photograph of Singer’s Clydebank factory complex, circa 1908. West Dunbartonshire Council Central Library, Clydebank, Scotland.

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its own power, and these investments were undertaken in places where the company had little political or social control. Given these potential risks, Scotland was a relatively safe choice for Singer: the company already had production experience there, they were familiar with the skilled workforce, McKenzie had personal connections, and the government of Great Britain offered political security. The company hired a small, Scottish, contracting firm, McAlpine and Richmond, to manage this large project, and a Glasgow-based architect to design the complex (including two three-storey main buildings, and over ten, smaller, one-storey buildings). But to ensure that the process was timely and that the construction was as Singer management had specified, the company employed William Ewan – the person responsible for overseeing the construction of Singer’s large Elizabeth, NJ factory that had been completed in the early 1870s – to be in charge of the whole project (Dorman, no date). By 1884 the buildings were complete, and the factory complex was fully functional the next year. With cheaper costs for labor and iron than its American-based factory site, good transportation, and increasing sales, Clydebank was considered a resounding success by the company. McKenzie soon went on to become Singer’s president. The factory site was expanded in 1907, so that at its peak in 1913 it covered over 100 acres and was producing over 1,300,000 machines a year, most of which were earmarked for European markets (Dorman, no date). The decision-making process that preceded Singer’s decision to construct a factory in Russia was far more complex than at Clydebank. Since Russia was Singer’s fastest growing sales region, and the country had a high tariff wall, Singer executives had been discussing the possibilities of investing in a production facility in Russia as early as the1880s (Davies, 1976: 248). But Russia was a particularly risky place of investment for Singer. Singer’s executives, including President Bourne, were uncertain about the czarist government’s commitment to foreign investment and manufacture (Davies, 1976). In addition, Singer’s sales in Russia were being conducted through a sales agent – George Neidlinger – who worked from his Hamburg office. Having a non-resident in charge of the Russian market was not secure legal footing, and was not looked on favorably by the Russian government Minister of Finance, Count Witte, who wanted to promote Russia’s commercial development (Von Laue, 1963). After much consideration, the Company decided to form an independent Russian joint-stock company – Kompaniya Singer – that would be a wholly owned subsidiary of Singer Manufacturing

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Company. This was part of the Company’s more general strategy to counter ‘‘European nationalism” by forming independent, national companies (Davies, 1976, p. 247). Establishing a joint-stock company in Russia was a laborious and uncertain process. To gain favor from the government, the company wrote in their petition to gain permission to issue stock that they intended to begin manufacture in Russia, something they knew Witte was in favor of, and which later became a condition for government approval for the new company, In other words, to acquire more secure legal footing for its increasingly significant presence in Russia – both in terms of sales, but also in future production – Singer executives decided to form a Russian owned subsidiary; to gain favor in that process, they proposed to begin manufacturing in the country as well. The formation of the joint-stock subsidiary also served the purpose of showing the Russian government the significant capital that Singer was ostensibly raising for investment in Russia. The Russian company originally capitalized at around $10,000,000, which included all of the sales offices, supplies, machines, etc. that were being transferred from Singer’s German company (Davies, 1976, p. 252). On July 31, 1897 the Kompaniya Singer held its first shareholders meeting in St. Petersburg, elected its officers, and discussed plans for its new manufacturing site (Davies, 1976, p. 253). Deciding the precise location of the new factory was also a complicated affair, involving considerations of transportation, an adequate and skilled labor force, and the approval of government officials. As Neidlinger wrote: ‘‘I understand that the Russian Government will patronize industrial enterprises in some parts of the country more than in others, and it would. .. interest me to know where the Government would prefer to see the factory built” (Davies, 1976, p. 256). The board soon zeroed in on the Moscow region and in August they chose a site in Podolsk, a small town 26 miles south of the city (Davies, 1976, p. 257). Negotiations with local officials to buy the site took almost 2 years; obtaining the necessary permits to begin manufacturing took an additional two years so that production at the site didn’t really begin until 1902 (see Fig. 2). The factory complex was put under the direction of Walter Dixon, an American engineer who had come to Russia several years before to help run a locomotive factory (Bennett to Dixon, May 1, 1900). This was an unusual decision for Singer management, who very rarely hired managers from outside the company, but indicates their recognition of the need for someone familiar with the local situation. As E.H. Bennett (Singer’s vice president in charge of new factories) wrote: ‘‘We would like very much to have an American, who can speak Russian and who is acquainted with the ways

Fig. 2. Image of Singer’s Podolsk factory complex, circa 1917. The Red S Review, Vol. 5, no. 5, 1924.

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and habits of the native workmen” (Bennett to Dixon, May 1, 1900). In other words, unlike the situation in Scotland, the establishment of a factory in Russia was a process that Singer found difficult and risky. They were unsure of the government’s commitment to foreign-owned enterprises, and were unfamiliar with the many regulations, both national and local, that governed industries and workers.3 This did not stop the company from making the very large financial investment of a full-fledged factory complex, but it did mean that they hired someone to run it who was more familiar with the local situation than they were. The elaborate processes outlined here also suggest that Singer’s direct investment in Russia was far more political in the sense of involving the Russian government, both at the local and national levels, than were its investment decisions in Scotland. This politicization of Singer – the awareness that direct investments overseas might require political negotiations and control – became more apparent in the next decade, when a set of labor strikes at the Podolsk plant made clear to Singer management the necessity of strong ties to the government to ensure the safety of their investments. 3. The strikes Integral to the immense political, economic and social crises that characterized Russia in the first decade of the 20th century were a series of labor strikes aimed at particular industries (Lorwin, 1929; Von Laue, 1963; Koenker and Rosenberg, 1989; Koenker, 1989; Johnson, 1979; Engelstein, 1982; Kahan, 1989). The general failure of the czarist government to deal with issues of poverty and inequality were exasperated by the financial and military losses of the Russo-Japanese War, leading to massive political upheaval. In October 1905, industrial workers in the Moscow and St. Petersburg region organized general strikes that paralyzed the country (Von Laue, 1963). Despite the fact that labor strikes were illegal in Russia, the government was unable to control the uprisings by workers in the cities and peasants in the rural areas. The October strikes shut the rail lines to Podolsk, causing grave concern for Dixon (Davies, 1976). Troops in Podolsk kept the workers from striking at the Singer plant, but in November Dixon received a list of workers’ demands that included reduced work hours and wage increases. For Dixon, the threat of a strike couldn’t have come at a worse time. The factory has just begun to reach its point of maximum production, and there was a considerable backlog of orders unfilled for the growing Russian market (Davies, 1976). Dixon certainly didn’t want to close the factory, and he attempted to find compromise measures that would appeal to his workers and that would meet with Singer management approval. Earlier in the year he had warned Singer management in New York that he did not believe pushing his workers any harder to increase production was a good solution to his backlog of orders, given what he called the ‘‘present temper” of labor unrest in Russia (Davies, 1976, p. 266). The company listened, and instead had opted to increase the number of shipments of machines to Russia from its Clydebank plant (New York to Dixon, October 13, 1905). But management was not willing to listen to his suggestions to compromise with the workers in regard to their demands for changes in working conditions and wages. Dixon’s attempts at compromise were vetoed by Singer management, and on November 30th the plant was closed. The closure lasted several weeks, enough time for

3 Many of these regulations were put in place in order for the Russian imperial state to maintain control over foreign direct investment which some in the government thought would threaten the state’s sovereignty over its economy. The degree to which foreign direct investment actually did threaten Russian sovereignty is still very much open to debate by historians. See McKay (1970), Blackwell (1970), and Koenker and Rosenberg (1989).

the plant to fall even more behind on orders, forcing the Clydebank plant to step up production (Davies, 1976, p. 273). Singer executives in New York found the situation untenable, and deliberated how best to protect their investments. Singer president Alexander came to believe with Dixon that their labor problems were not going to be solved through any sort of internal, corporate policy changes, but instead through changes to Russia’s political system (Davies, 1976). Therefore they began to engage in and seek ways to influence local, regional and national public policies and affairs. Dixon was optimistic about the political reforms adopted after the 1905 revolution, particularly the establishment of the Duma, a national assembly that the czar called together in 1906, and he believed that if the issue of land reform were resolved, the ‘‘prosperity of the country seems assured” (Davies, 1976, p. 271). In other words, Singer managers, like many other American businessmen at the time, assumed that political reform was the answer to the social and economic problems of the Czarist government (Filene, 1967). The company required stability to conduct its business, and to gain that stability the Company decided it needed some leverage with the government in order to influence policy. It did so by cleverly arranging a set of circumstances that in effect gave money to the czarist government to help pay off their huge war debt. Kompaniya Singer petitioned the government and was allowed to increase the capitalization of the company by issuing an additional $10 million dollars in stocks, with a percentage going to the government in fees. As Alexander wrote, this placed ‘‘a large sum by way of fees in the Exchequer” and therefore contributed to ‘‘the very urgent requirements of the Russian Government for cash” (Davies, 1976, p. 273). In essence Singer management hoped that they could buy influence with the Russian government, and they planned to use that influence to secure political stability. Singer managers also worked at the local level to stop their workers from striking. The one source of information in this regard is from an American journalist, Myra Page, who visited the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and spent time several weeks living in Podolsk. Her account of life in Podolsk and at the Singer factory before the Revolution is based primarily on her interviews with Feodor Trefanov, a metalworker who came to work in the foundry in 1906, just after the major 1905 strike. From this account we get a slightly different story of the 1905 strike and Singer’s management of it. According to Page, after the strike Dixon became more clever in his dealings with the workers and the local state, developing several strategies for dealing with potential labor troubles. In addition to organizing a network of ‘‘spies” among the workers in order to alert him to potential agitators, Dixon pursued a set of policies meant to create a view of the company and of himself as benevolent. In Page’s words: ‘‘Dixon endeavoured to establish himself in the eyes of his employees as a benefactor. He made much display of small favours, and gave premiums at Christmas and Easter” (Page, 1933, p. 19). In addition, he used these favors to create a group of workers who felt indebted to him, in essence building what Page called a ‘‘small labor aristocracy” (Page, 1933, p. 19). One such favor was lending them small amounts of money to build houses. He never intended to collect the money back, but instead to use the indebtedness to keep his workers ‘‘faithful to the company” (Page, 1933, p. 19). Dixon also used personal favors and gifts to ingratiate himself and the company with local state officials. According to Page, special sewing machines were made and given to the governor and other officials, followed by what she suspects are more significant gifts that were secretive. In return, Dixon ‘‘could never complain of the political aid as well as police service he received from the governor” (Page, 1933, p. 20). The effect of the strike on the workers is difficult to gauge. From Page’s account, we get a picture of the Singer workers becoming more and more politicized in the sense of further participation in

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workers’ organizations and national politics. From the few accounts of the 1905 strikes at Singer it is impossible to tell to what degree geopolitical concerns were involved. There is no explicit mention by the workers of the fact that Singer was an American company, nor is there any evidence to suggest that the general strikes were aimed at sites of foreign investments. The politicization that Page refers to is very much about national politics. Here is how Page describes it: ‘‘There had been many strikes and demonstrations during the days of upheaval. The workers, made desperate by hunger and oppression, and supported by the villagers, had attempted to seize the Singer and all local factories, but the governor’s Cossacks had proven the stronger. A new spirit, however, had been released among them which neither discharges, petty concessions from the company, nor arrests and exile could completely destroy” (Page, 1933, pp. 20–21). The Bolshevik party succeeded in organizing secretive, illegal, study circles at the Singer plant, and some of the workers organized a small cooperative store in order to combat the high prices for food. According to Page, ‘‘through it many workers were brought into the movement” (1933, p. 21). These local activities combined with regional and national labor movements led to more disruptions for Singer and other factories in the area. In early 1906 a group of Singer employees presented Dixon with another list of demands, but Dixon was able to rely on his network of ‘‘loyal” employees to help him dismiss the demands as the work of outsiders, not representative of the majority of Singer workers (Bennett to Dixon, February 16, 1906). Singer executives approved of Dixon’s handling of the situation, confident that their political maneuvers combined with Dixon’s local handling of the situation would secure their investments: ‘‘we are more than pleased with the manner in which you have handled this entire matter. .. From this end we certainly expected that you would have much more trouble with your help than you did, although we fully realized the personal influence you have over them and felt quite satisfied that nothing but outside influence could drag the men away from you” (Bennett to Dixon, February 16, 1906). Like the Podolsk strike, the 1911 Clydebank strike needs to be considered within the context of Scotland’s industrial and labor histories. As was the case in many other industrialized countries, Scotland in the late 19th and first decades of the 20th century was home to a series of labor organizing efforts and the rise of labor-oriented political parties, and the Glasgow region, particularly the shipbuilding and other industries along the Clyde, were primary sites for such organizations (Glasgow Labour History Workshop, 1989; Duncan and McIvor, 1992; Kenefick and McIvor, 1996; Dickson, 1982; McKinlay and Morris, 1991). Workers had seen a decline in real wage levels throughout the first years of the 20th century, particularly during the depressions of 1904– 1905 and 1908–1909, while the industrialists who controlled the economy of the region were in general ‘‘authoritarian anti-unionists with a deep-rooted antipathy to collective bargaining” (McIvor and Kenefick, 1996, p. 11). Widespread labor discontent fueled by an uncompromising and despotic set of employers set the scene for regional labor organizing efforts and trade unionism. Seen within this context, the 1911 strike against Singer was not particularly unusual, though it was the ‘‘largest single company strike in Scotland” during this period of general labor unrest (Glasgow Labour History Workshop, 1996, p. 193). It began with a group of 12 women workers in the cabinet polishing department who walked out of work to protest a wage cut and an increase in workload. 380 out of the 400 workers in their department left with them, and with growing support among the workers drew up a set of demands. Singer management met some of their demands but not all, and within a few days support for the strikers carried throughout the plant of almost 12,000 workers, aided by two union efforts: the Socialist Labour Party and the Industrial Workers of Great Britain

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(Glasgow Labour History Workshop, 1996). Negotiations occurred between the plant’s manager, Franklin Park, its superintendent, Hugh Macfarlane, and the strike committee. In the end, the sticking point revolved around issues of collective bargaining: Singer managers wanted to deal directly with the workers who had the initial grievance, while the strike committee with members of both unions sitting on it assumed the authority to represent the workers en masse. For two weeks the strikers remained firm, and the plant came to a standstill. Franklin Park, the manger of the Factory, attempted negotiations with the strike committee, but was not willing to concede to collective bargaining. Park devised a clever strategy for ending the strike: he ended negotiations with the strike committee and officially closed the plant, thereby putting under company control the livelihoods of approximately 12,000 workers, and he made its reopening conditional on a plebiscite ‘‘vote” from the workers. Claiming that he wanted to hear from the workers directly, rather than the committee, Park sent postcards to the employees. Printed on each card was a statement to the effect that the company had heard many workers did not feel that the strike committee was representing them fairly, and therefore the company was asking them to sign a statement that said they would go back to work when at least 6000 other workers had signed and mailed the cards back (Glasgow Labour History Workshop, 1996). They assured the workers that any grievances would be dealt with, but only through direct negotiations with the actual workers involved: ‘‘such a deputation must be composed of workers actually engaged on the particular work over which the dispute has arisen” (The Socialist, May 1911). In response, the strike committee asked the workers to send the cards back to them. Singer received 6527 cards; the strike committee 4025 (Glasgow Labour History Workshop, 1996). After this, the workers in each of Singer’s department took a vote on whether to resume work or not, and voted overwhelmingly to resume.

4. The aftermath: paternalism and politics The effects of this strike on Singer management were diverse. Their immediate reaction was to fire over 400 workers suspected of spearheading the strike through union activities at the plant. But the more far-reaching effect is that Singer realized the company was at risk by forces out of its internal control. President Alexander was relieved that the strike hadn’t spread to other factories, apparently aware for the first time that labor organizing, like Singer itself, could become international. A threatened boycott of Singer products called for by the Socialist paper the Glasgow Forward was taken very seriously by Alexander and others (Davies, 1976, p. 157), furthering their concern for future sales and highlighting to them how their company could become targeted internationally for its poor management-labor policies. In other words, the Clydebank strike also politicized Singer management, but in ways different from that at Podolsk. The strike made clear to Singer what was really at stake in being targeted as a large, international company with poor management policies – a potential collapse of its entire production and sales capacities. This awareness – that the company’s future was partly dependent on its public perception – resulted in large-scale efforts to create a benevolent image of the company, and to make employees feel like they were part of the Singer ‘‘family” – not just workers. This ‘‘labor management strategy” (Castree et al., 2004) proved particularly effective for the factory, creating an atmosphere in which labor organizing was seen as a betrayal of company loyalty. In Clydebank, Singer began to promote company-sponsored activities for its employees: sports teams and athletic competitions, vocational evening classes, social galas. For example, the

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Fig. 3. Singer’s Pipe Band, drawn from Singer’s Clydebank employees, 1921. The Red S Review, Vol. 2, no. 9, 1921.

Singer Pipe band (see Fig. 3), formed in 1914, played at various social events at the factory and in regional competitions throughout the first half of the 20th century. As the company newsletter made clear, even though many of its members were called to duty in WWI, the band nevertheless was able to recruit new members from the factory floor, and the band was kept busy playing at fundraisers for the Red Cross that were sponsored by Singer: ‘‘Every gala day saw the pipers arrayed in all the glory of kilt and plaid, marching through the town, like the pied pipers of old, to entice the crowd to the Sports Field” (The Red S Review, 1921b, p. 15). The Singer Pipe Band was an effective tool for linking Singer Manufacturing Company (headquartered in New York City) with the local region, reinforcing what Singer executives hoped to accomplish – naturalizing the place of Singer within the context of Clydebank, Glasgow, and Scotland. Singer’s sports fields were part of the recreational grounds laid out by the company near the main factory buildings that served primarily as a soccer pitch, but also contained tennis courts and space for other sporting activities. The company sponsored an employee-run Sports Committee whose job it was to organize playing schedules, often with departments competing against each other, and to run the Sports Gala, a celebration of the teams and the competitions that was first held in 1915. At its 1922 Gala, attendance was estimated at between 7000 and 8000 spectators, who came to see not only the awarding of sports prizes, but also to participate in other entertainments: ‘‘High-class refreshments and teas were served in a large stand marquee, and here again the numbers contributed by the Singer Male Voice Choir, under the direction of Mr. J. Johnson, were a much appreciated feature” (The Red S Review, 1922b, p. 11). The company newsletter suggested that all of these social activities – this ‘‘scheme” to ameliorate the ‘‘lot of the worker” – culminated in the construction of the Singer Recreation Hall in 1921 (The Red S Review, 1921a). The building was constructed by Singer at

some considerable cost (ornamented on the outside with Welsh green slates (The Red S Review, 1921a). In addition to the Grand Hall, which could accommodate more than 2000 people and was ‘‘intended to be used for concerts, musical recitals, dramatic entertainments, dances, etc”. (The Red S Review, 1921a: 11), the building contained a large kitchen and eating area, reading rooms, a social parlor, and a lounge and smoke room. All of this, the newsletter suggested, would make the building ‘‘very popular with the employees and their families, who may spend many a happy hour here amid pleasant surroundings” (The Red S Review, 1921a, p. 11). In this way, the company hoped to make its workers feel part of the Singer family, a family that was in place in Clydebank, in effect creating a far more compliant workforce. The Glasgow Labour History Workshop’s summation of these tactics seems perfectly appropriate: ‘‘We would interpret such policies not as an expression of altruistic benevolence but rather as an alternative method of exerting social control over the workforce” (Glasgow Labour History Workshop, 1996, p. 208). Singer managers apparently found this new method of ‘‘exerting social control” so effective that it adopted similar strategies at its other factory sites. At its Elizabeth, New Jersey factory, the company started offering classes and recreational activities in a clubhouse in 1916, followed in the 1920s by the construction of a recreation building; its plant in Wittenberge, Germany also adopted paternal worker schemes.4 This labor management strategy was apparently effective: Singer at Clydebank did not experience any further labor disrup-

4 The information about Wittenberge is taken from a plan of the Singer site there, circa 1914 that shows playing fields and a recreation building. This plan is at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Singer Collection. The information about the Elizabeth factory and its related social and athletic activities is taken from a set of newspaper clippings (primarily the Elizabeth Daily Journal) about the plant site that are held at the Elizabeth Public Library, Local History Collection.

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tions. Thus, while other metalworking industries in Scotland were experiencing an upswing in labor militancy, Singer’s unique policy of paternalism proved successful as a strategy of labor appeasement (Dickson, 1982). Most certainly the firing of workers directly involved in the strike no doubt also contributed to the relatively stable work-management relations after the 1911 strike. Interviews done in 1988 with former Singer employees and accounts written by some of the strikers suggest that the poor working conditions apparent before the strike – a speeding up of production with no compensation – did not change after the strike (Glasgow Labour History Workshop, 1989). What did change is that the Socialist labor party lost much of its support in Clydebank since the majority of its members had been fired from Singer and had left the immediate area. Some workers became more politicized after the strike, and moved their activities to other industries in Clydebank (Glasgow Labour History Workshop, 1996). Tom Bell and Arthur McManus who were both fired from Singer after the strike became active in the Clyde Workers Committee, the Socialist Labour Party, and in 1920 were founding members of the Communist Party of Great Britain; McManus serving as its first president. The prominent labor activists Fanny Abbott and Jane Rae both began their political careers at Singer (Glasgow Labour History Workshop, 1996). For the most part, however, Singer’s new management strategies succeeded in creating an image of the company as benevolent and a feeling amongst its workers that the company cared about their physical and intellectual well-being as much as their productivity. After WWI, the company began publication of its newsletter that was, in the company’s words ‘‘prepared solely in the hope that it may be a link to form a closer connection between all members of the Singer Organization in the United Kingdom” (Red S Review, 1919, p. 1). No doubt Singer management would have tried similar tactics in Russia had it had more trust in its government. Between the 1905 strike at Podolsk and the 1917 revolution the company continued its efforts to develop some influence with government officials but to little avail. WWI created opportunities for Singer given that its major competitors for the sewing machine market in Russia were German-made machines that were no longer being sold. But the War also presented the company with an unexpected crisis. Government officials had found information – credit reports, agricultural data, etc. – stored in several Singer central offices that made them suspect company employees were spying for the Germans. In addition, the name Singer was thought to be of German origin, and Singer had employed many German-speaking workers in its offices. The net result is that the company, like many other companies thought to be under foreign ownership, found itself literally under attack.5 Rioters attacked many of its shops and seized machines and other property of the company, and the local and regional governments did nothing to stop this. Only after concerted efforts on the part of the American government (after much lobbying by Singer) did the czarist government begin to offer protection to Singer’s property.6

5 This populist effort to rid the country of enemy aliens, particularly Germans who constituted a large percentage of foreigners involved in Russian commercial enterprises, was part of a larger nationalizing effort that became sanctioned by the state through a series of economic policies meant to restrict foreign involvement in Russian business. For more details, see Lohr (2003) and Jahn (1995). 6 This information concerning the attacks on Singer properties during 1915 and the various attempts to stop these attacks through political maneuvers is derived from two sources: (1) documents (telegrams, letters, and affidavits) that were part of Singer’s case (hereafter referred to as ‘‘Singer claim”) to receive reimbursement for their Russian losses through the Roosevelt-Litvinov Agreement of 1933; these documents are held at the National Archives, College Park, Maryland, and (2) an array of documents including lists of employees and their citizenship that were prepared by Singer managers in Moscow; these documents are held at the State Historical Archive of Moscow.

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This crisis was followed soon thereafter by the 1917 February toppling of the czarist regime, when Singer found its properties again under possible attack, particularly given the huge political unrest that preceded and followed it. Between February and September (when Singer officially closed its business in Russia) Singer managers and executives carried out extensive negotiations with workers, with government officials of Russia’s provisional government, and particularly with American officials including Ambassador Francis, Consul Summers in Moscow and the Secretary of State, Lansing. The correspondence between these various parties indicates the growing awareness on the part of Singer about the potential losses at stake, the degree to which they were willing to compromise with workers at Podolsk to stay in business, and the ever more politicized nature of Singer’s strategies for survival. In June of 1917, a group of Singer workers met at the Podolsk plant and, calling themselves the All-Russia Conference of Delegates of the Singer Company’s Workers, put together a long list of demands addressed to the Directors of the Singer Company, to which Dixon prepared a point-by-point response. Both documents were forwarded to the Secretary of State through the consulate, with comments from the consul added. The All-Russia conference represented all Singer workers in Russia, not just those in the factory. In other words, Singer’s retail and office employees – by far the bulk of its workers and those not generally involved in union activities – had joined with factory workers to form this new organization. Most of the 42 demands concerned wage issues: increases, payments for lost wages due to service in the war or because of the closure of Singer offices and shops, vacation pay, pensions, etc. But the most serious concerns for Singer were two particular demands that pertained to the control of the company’s assets and production: ‘‘Without the knowledge and consent of the Union, the firm has no right to sell or dispose of its business to another person or Company”, and ‘‘The Singer Company is obliged to permit the Factory Committee to control the proper filling of all demands concerning goods and the working up of raw materials” (Demands of the Singer Employees, 1917). The outrage caused by these two demands can be noted in the memo that accompanied the list of demands and the Company’s response that was sent by the American Consul Summers to the Secretary of State. Summers singles out demand number 33 (the former listed above) as particularly alarming, and writes to Lansing: ‘‘Attention is directed to a number of paragraphs more particularly, as these indicate the disposition of some of the employees’ committees, now associated with every large enterprise, to anticipate social legislation of a farreaching character” (Summers to Lansing, July 25, 1917). But these warnings of social ‘‘legislation” were not new. Several weeks before Dixon had written a memo to Summers that was also forwarded to Lansing that had summarized the status of the company in Russia. In this report, Dixon was already forewarning of political disaster and closure of the plant if some sort of immediate action on the part of the Russian government was not taken. He attributes the worker unrest to the ‘‘influence of irresponsible agitators who all over the country are impelling Russia towards.. ruin” and he calls on the Government ‘‘to inforce order and to restrain the pernicious activities of these extremists and visionaries who are doing such ill service to the cause of democracy” (Dixon, 1917a). But no action was taken, either by the Russian government, or by the US government.7 The factory continued production throughout the summer and early fall of 1917, after accepting many of the workers’ demands in regard to wages, but the company knew this was temporary. This is how President Alexander described the 7 Consular Maddin Summers and Ambassador David Francis wrote on several occasions to the Secretary of State implying that the American military intervention was necessary to keep Russia in the war and to regain stability in the country. See Francis (1921).

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situation: ‘‘In our factory workmen organized from outside by delegates from the Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Committee, and to some extent assisted by the existing Government, have taken from our authorized officers the entire management of the work and placed it in the hands of a committee consisting of one delegate from each of 35 different departments. This committee sits in its office during the entire working hours of the factory, dealing with all questions of management even to the extent of the deciding what wages each man shall have, and what the output of the factory shall be, subject to conditions entirely out of anyone’s control, and in fact, leaving to our management no function whatever except that of paying the bills” (Alexander to Lansing, October 3, 1917). By late September the company had decided to close the factory and to begin to shut down its sales operations. The company printed a pamphlet titled ‘‘The Reasons Compelling the Singer Company to Discontinue its Business” that outlined the steady decline of its production and sales in Russia since the War, and again noted in particular the role of labor demands in their decision to close their business: ‘‘A most fatal influence on the business had been the action of a portion of the Company’s employees who have permitted themselves to close shops at all times of day, to hold meetings during working hours, to absent themselves from their places of employment leaving the property intrusted to their care to look after itself, to help themselves to money they have no right to, to sell goods at prices lower than those fixed by the Management and to call constant strikes as a means of compelling the firm to comply with impossible demands which would involve the expenditure of millions of roubles to grant” (Dixon, 1917b). Taken together, these documents provide an interesting coda to this story of early global encounters. The fact that these documents exist is telling of the situation, not only in that Singer took the unprecedented step of responding to worker demands in writing and as a group (collective bargaining), but also in that Singer publicized these documents to American government officials. In the former case, this shows the degree to which Singer realized that the precariousness of their situation called for compromise and negotiations with workers, and in the latter case, shows how thoroughly political Singer managers had become as their last recourse to what was possible disaster. In other words, Singer managers (Dixon, supported by Alexander) carried out a two-prong strategy of survival: on the ground, and locally, they negotiated and played along with local workers’ committees etc, while behind the scenes they did their best to convince American government officials to intervene politically and/or militarily in Russia. All of this was to no avail. Dixon fled to Moscow and then left for the United States with his Russian wife, leaving the company in the hands of Otto Myslik, a Russian citizen and Kompaniya Singer stockholder. The Podolsk factory was lent to the Russian defense ministry to be used for munitions manufacture, while the thousands of shops and offices were gradually closed. After the Bolshevik takeover of government in St. Petersburg, the remains of the Singer empire moved further east and north following the White army, with the last remaining Singer employees engaged in sales through 1918 (Singer claim, 1930). The Podolsk factory was nationalized and became the First Soviet State Sewing Machine Factory in 1920 (Page, 1933).

5. Conclusions These two stories of encounters between US-based managers and executives, and non-US workers, show how the local, regional and national contexts of labor activism mattered greatly in the course of America’s first significant forays into a global economy. This certainly is not surprising, given recent studies that have countered views of the purported ‘footloose-ness’ of the contemporary global economy with empirical studies of the de-

gree to which global capital is embedded in particular local and regional contexts (Coe and Lee, 2006; Bianchi and Arnold, 2004). But what is significant about these two cases is in suggesting how these non-global cultural contexts of labor mattered, and the implications of these labor/management relations and strategies for understanding the course of early globalization. Even though the uneven geography of labor activism had little or nothing to do with the initial decisions to locate factories outside the United States (unlike contemporary globalization), it did shape in complex ways labor management relationships in early global production sites. Singer did not seek out locations with ‘‘docile” labor for its overseas factories; in fact quite the opposite. Because one of its primary concerns was with finding adequate numbers of skilled workers, Singer sought out locations with high concentrations of already established industries. In the case of Moscow and Glasgow, this meant that they located their factories in local situations characterized by significant labor activism. Given the large investments in infrastructure that overseas production required, Singer was not in a position to respond to increasing labor activism by threatening to move its factories elsewhere. In retrospect, what is most amazing is the incredible tenacity of Singer management’s attempts to maintain control of their Podolsk complex in the face of increasing political unrest, economic instability and labor activism. As a result of this embeddedness, Singer managers found themselves in situations that required adjustments and compromises. In Clydebank, they moved toward a system of paternalism that was meant to foster an image of the company as a benevolent ‘‘family”. In Podolsk, they tried to maintain control over their workforce by buying influence with local, regional and national governments in order to gain some short-term security in the form of policing, and long-term security through legislative reforms. It is unclear the degree to which international labor activism was involved in these two case studies. We do not know if there was any direct contact between labor activists involved in the Clydebank and Podolsk strikes, though it is clear that the threat of potential international action taken against Singer was of paramount concern to its management. Given the growth in sales throughout most of the first decade of the 20th century, Singer managers were under increasing pressure not to shut down any factory production. As was evident in both strikes, Singer’s only recourse when one of its factories was closed down was to shift the burden of production to their other factory sites. A general strike that shut down more than one plant would have done serious damage to the company. The international consumer boycott called for by the Socialist Labour Party in Scotland was taken up at the highest levels of the company. President Alexander considered it one of the company’s gravest concerns. Even though it never materialized, the company moved vigorously to strengthen its benevolent image to its workers through its increasingly broad paternalistic agenda, and to its customers through its advertising images (see Domosh, 2006). Singer’s ‘‘experiment” in global capitalism continued throughout most of the 20th century, but in a modified and chastened version. The company was persistent in promoting and selling its product internationally as best it could throughout WWI, reaching its peak global expanse in the 1920s, but it did not build any additional overseas factories. The Clydebank facility stepped up production and became Singer’s largest plant. Singer’s huge losses that it sustained in Russia (the company estimated it at over $83,000,000) were offset somewhat by a relatively small remuneration it received as a result of the Roosevelt-Litvinov Agreement in 1933, and by amortizing the losses over several years to reduce its tax burden (Singer claim, 1930). Dixon returned to the United States and became the superintendent of the Elizabeth factory; many ‘‘loyal” Singer employees from Russia migrated to other

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European countries and continued to work for Singer; most stayed behind. Following the decline in sales of domestic sewing machines, and the introduction of cheaper machines imported from Japan and then China, the Clydebank factory closed in 1980 (Hood, 1988). The Podolsk plant followed suit, ceasing production in the early 1990s when the Russian market was open to global competition. Acknowledgements I owe thanks to many people and institutions that provided assistance with my research and with reworking this manuscript. Two anonymous reviewers and the editor Michael Samers prodded me to provide more nuance and context for this study and provided much-needed assistance with references. Chris Sneddon helped me situate this study within the framework of labor geographies and the global capitalist economy. In Scotland, I am grateful for the help of Pat Malcolm and the staff at the West Dunbartonshire Council Archives, Clydebank Library, and in Russia I thank Vladimir Kolossov and Robert Argenbright for general research advice, and Elena Trufanova who was a terrific translator at the State Historical Archive of Moscow. I also want to acknowledge the assistance of the research staffs at the Elizabeth Public Library, local history collection, at the National Archives in Greenbelt, Maryland, and particularly Lee Grady at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Much of this research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Grant Number 0647818. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. In addition, I received support for this research from the Rockefeller Center and the Dickey Center for International Understanding, both at Dartmouth College.

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