「等級賃金制」の確立 : 諏訪製糸実における誘因体系

抄録

The rank-order wage system was the incentive system used by the silk reeling industry in the Suwa district, Nagano prefecture, before the World War II. It was introduced in the late 1880s by silk reelers, elaborated rapidly from the late 1890s and completed by the early 1900s. This paper deals with its development during this period. As the relative estimation of work was one of the important features of this system, the efforts of young female workers were directed not toward absolute achievement, but toward improving their relative superiority in comparison to other workers, so that they became engaged in endless competition. In other words, the system functioned as a way of raising the incentive of workers without increasing the total sum of wages. By the end of the 1880s, the rank-order wage system was used in estimating labor productivity, as well as productivity in terms of raw material (cocoons), resulting in great increases in productivity in silk reeling. But after the mid-1890s, the American market began to demand higher quality, i.e. more even quality of filatures (machine-reeled silk), as a result of the increasing speed of power looms in the American textile industry. Rapid expansion of the scale of silk reeling factories was not sufficient to satisfy this demand. The silk reelers had to control and optimize the labor output of their female workers in terms of product quality as well as productivity. This was achieved by expanding the rank-order wage system to add the functions of monitoring and estimating product quality. In this way, a very complex wage system had developed by the early 1900s, enabling the silk reelers to control and optimize labor output to a very high degree.