5 - Management Strategies: Systems of Internal Control

Summary

the east India Company's ability to manage its warehouse labourers was assessed by Sir John Hall, Secretary to the St Katharine Dock Company, in his evidence to a Select Committee of Parliament in 1832. Hall's statement makes interesting reading:

The men of the East India Company are constantly loitering away their time; our officers sometimes take the liberty of pointing this out to the elders, &c. of the East India Company, but they say that they have a difficulty in enforcing discipline. I have seen the East India Company's labourers at times asleep in the corners of the floors; their superiors have been told of the circumstance, but there is a want of discipline inseparable from a system, which there is not in ours, arising, I conceive, from the evils of patronage and influence in appointments.

The East India Company did seek to control and discipline its warehouse labourers, although, if Sir John Hall is to be believed, its efforts may not always have been wholly successful. In order to enjoy the benefits described in the previous chapter, the labourers were subjected to restrictions and regulations imposed on them by the Company. As Bowen has written of the Company's regime in general: ‘a ruthless streak of authoritarianism always coexisted alongside a governing ideology that in many ways was liberal in tone’.

The sheer scale of the East India Company commercial operations in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries meant that the directors were faced with the task of managing a warehouse workforce of between two and three thousand men at a time when the capital's economic activity was mainly based on small enterprises with a master and a perhaps a handful of employees. Apart from the London dock companies and the Royal Dockyards, other large establishments tended to be found in provincial manufactories; for example, Matthew Boulton's Soho Works at Birmingham employed approximately 700 workers in 1776. The London dock companies had far smaller permanent labourer establishments, but relied on large numbers of casual workers at peak times who perhaps posed a greater disciplinary problem because of their temporary status. In 1806 the East India Dock Company approved the employment of about 130 permanent men, plus 100 ‘occasional men’.