Waterloo and ethical trade

Another instalment in an occasional series on the history of ethical trade

The next few days will be full of stories about the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. I guarantee that nowhere else will you read about how one of the results of the British victory (OK, the Prussians arrived eventually) was an early movement for ethical trade.

The key chap in the story is Robert Owen, (1771-1858), a successful business man, who inspired the oldest United Nations specialised agency (the ILO) and two enormous global movements: co-operation and trade unionism; he pushed Parliament into adopting the first Factory Act of 1819; and he was the forerunner of today’s Corporate Social Responsibility.

Ethical workplaces

In 1815, with Napoleon safely bottled up in exile on the island of St Helena, more than 20 years of war came to an end - with a huge impact on the economy.  As Owen put it,

On the day on which peace was signed, this great customer of the producers died... what was called the revulsion from war to peace had created a universal distress among the producers in the British Islands.  Barns and farmyards were full, and warehouses were weighed down with all manners of production, and prices fell much below the cost at which the articles could be produced... the distress among all work people became so great that the upper and wealthy classes became alarmed, foreseeing that the support of the hundreds of thousands unemployed, if this state of things continued, must ultimately fall upon them.

Concerned at the prospect of the huge numbers of unemployed turning to violence and the ideas of the French Revolution which they had hoped were buried at Waterloo, or the expense of maintaining them under the ramshackle welfare state, the establishment set up a committee, chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Owen - who had an international reputation for running what we would call an ethical business - was invited to present his proposals to deal with the crisis.  His idea was that instead of relieving the unemployed out of the poor rates, the money would be better employed as a capital sum to establish “villages of co-operation”.  These were modelled on New Lanark, in Scotland, his hugely successful spinning mills (still standing, a UNESCO World heritage site - well worth a visit). Here he had shown that it was possible to treat workers well, and make money - a principle that is fundamental to ETI, and the wider CSR movement. In the decade after the guns fell silent in 1815, 20,000 of the great and the good came from all over Europe to visit New Lanark, including a  Russian Grand Duke, the future Czar Nicholas I - such was its reputation.

Owen’s proposed villages were model workplaces, self-contained economic units, with no child labour, an 8 hour day, health care, fair wages and decent housing - ticking many of the boxes of the ETI Base Code.

Owen’s plans were not taken up; the ruling class decided to go for repression instead. But he inspired weavers in Rochdale to start the modern co-operative movement in 1844 - now an ETI member.

Labour law

Also in 1815, Owen proposed what became the first Factories Act. In his draft bill, he wanted to prohibit child labour, and to require proof of age; a limit on hours; no night work for adolescents.  There would be properly qualified inspectors with the power of entry to factories at all times. Copies of the act would be pasted on the wall in all mills.

Many of these provisions are found to this day in Factory Acts all over the world. An independent Factory Inspectorate is seen as essential to protect workers and was even included as a clause in the Treaty of Versailles (article 427).  Posting an abstract of the act appears in nearly all health and safety legislation to this day.

Eventually a very weak version of Owen’s bill was passed, as the 1819 Cotton Mills and Factories Act. But it was the first in a long line, and subsequent acts improved on its provisions.

The origins of the ILO

A pleasant aspect of the peace of 1815 was the possibility after two decades of war - for those who could afford it - of travelling to Europe. And Owen travelled to the equivalent of the G-7 and presented Two Memorials on Behalf of the Working Classes.  In these he advocated international action to fix wages and improve workers conditions.

This was the first occasion international co-ordination was proposed to provide minimum levels of protection for workers and therefore Owen is regarded as an inspiration of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which was founded in 1919 by provision in the Treaty of Versailles. As I blogged last year, the ILO’s conventions underpin the Base Code. 

So 1815, and the peace brought about by Waterloo, led to developing plans for model workplaces; lobbying the European powers for international action to protect workers; and the first model for all subsequent Factory Acts.

Quite a good year for ethical trade. And all thanks to the Duke of Wellington.