The Decline of Piece Rates in California Canneries: 1890–1960

• Date: 01 January 1986
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-232X.1986.tb00671.x
• Author: MARTIN BROWN and PETER PHILIPS
• Published date: 01 January 1986

SPECIAL

TOPICS

MARTIN

BROWN

and

PETER

PHILIPS”

The

Decline

of

Piece Rates in

California Canneries:

1890-

1960

THE

PIECE-RATE

SYSTEM

OF

WAGE PAYMENT

has been investigated

analytically, empirically, and historically. The analytical literature focuses almost

exclusively on the informational aid incentive functions

of

the piece-rate system

(Mangum,

1962;

Pencavel,

1972).

The

empirical literature attempts to explain the

prevalence of piece-rate system across industries and through time by fitting a single

set of explanatory factors to a wide range of historical, institutional, and technological

settings (Cox,

1971;

McKersie,

1964;

Sherman,

1947).

The historical literature is

concerned mainly with describing the complexity of actual union and management

policies and actions toward the implementation and operation of piece-rate systems

(Schatz,

1983;

Clawson,

1980;

Steiber,

1959;

Nadworny,

1955).

These approaches,

however, have not yielded a consistent, coherent, or conclusive understanding

of

this form of payment.

In this article, we use insights provided by recent literature on the “efficiency

wage”’ to help explain the demise of the piece-rate system of wage payment in

women’s preparation work in the California canning industry. One lesson of this

literature (as well as of the historical literature) is that a wage system may serve

multiple functions simultaneously, and that the relative importance of each function

varies according to prevailing technical and institutional labor market conditions. In

the case of the California canning industry, we find that the piece-rate system initially

served primarily as a hiring system and secondarily as an incentive system.

As

the

technical conditions of production evolved from hand to machine labor, the hiring

aspect of piece rates was made dysfunctional; later, the incentive aspect of the piece-

rate system was undermined. Unionization contributed

to

this process, first, by

accelerating the pace of mechanization and second, by restricting the allowable

dispersion

of

cannery workers’ earnings.

Piece

Rates

and Premechanized Canneries

In the eighteen-nineties,

95

per cent ofwoinen workers in San Francisco

*The authors are, respectively. Assistant Professor

of

Economics, Howard University, and Assistant

Professor of Economics, University

of

Utah.

’For a review

of

this literature, see

Yellen

(1984).

INDL~STRIAL RELATIONS,

Val.

25.

No.

1

(Winter

1986). 01986

by the Regents

of

the

University

of

California.

OO19/8656/86/2

15/1/$10.00

81