Labour History
By Anna Sailer
They were also not fixed in time but products of historical circumstances. Thus, the author points out, during the 1870s this system was used by the employers to maintain a ‘reserve army of labour, in a context of recurring labour shortages’. But during the 1890s, the multiple-shift system represented ‘a qualitatively new development’ in which the managers tried to control deployment of labour in certain crucial departments of jute industry in the name of standardization and rationalization. The process of control intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century and finally the multiple-shift system and work gangs were abolished by the early 1930s. Single-shift system was now imposed in many mills with increasing managerial control over the work process.