Factory-Labour.
No small difficulty arises from the question: “What is factory-labour?” And yet it is precisely this kind of wage-labour which has received the most comprehensive measure of protection, and become the standard by which protection is meted out to all similar kinds of employment.
The labour-protective laws of various governments have met the difficulty in various ways; but nowhere is a positive legal definition given of the Factory.
In the case of Germany, especially, it is not easy to form a clear idea of the meaning attached to factory labour by the hitherto existing protective laws, and by the von Berlepsch Industrial Bill.
We may arrive at a clearer conception of what a factory really is in the protective sense of the word, by examining first the essential characteristics of such kinds of employment as are placed by the protective laws on the same (or nearly the same) footing as factory labour, and then observing the peculiarities of such kinds of employments as are legally excluded from factory-labour protection.
The same characteristics in all those points in which it is affected by protection, will be found in the Factory, but the peculiarities of the other contrasted class will be absent from the Factory.
In the Imperial Industrial Code, especially in the von Berlepsch Bill, the following four categories of employment are placed on the same footing as the Factory; in the case of the first three the inclusion is obligatory, in the case of the last it is optional and depends on the pleasure of the Bundesrath (local authority):
1. Mines, salt-pits (salines), preparatory work above ground, and underground work, in mines and quarries (other than those referred to in the Factory Regulations).
2. Smelting-houses, carpenter’s yards, and other building-yards, wharves, and such brick-kilns, mines, and quarries as are worked above ground and are not merely temporary and on a small scale.
3. Those work-shops in which power machinery is employed (straw, wind, water, gas, electricity, etc.) not merely temporarily.
4. “Other” workshops to which factory protection (except as regards working rules) can be extended under the Imperial decree, at the discretion of the Bundesrath.[5]
A common designation is needed which will include all these four categories.
We might use the word “workshops” were it not that the employments enumerated in classes 1 and 2 cannot precisely be included in “workshops,” and were it not that class 4 as it appears in protective legislation denotes “another kind” of workshop distinct from that of class 3.