Establishment of the Unit Price: Entries before
1749
A few months after William Strahan's death in 1785, the London
compositors and Masters came to their first "union wage agreement" which
was binding for most (certainly the majority) of the printing
companies in the city and set the precedent for a later agreement on
pressmen's wages.
[6] The principal
grievance of the compositors was insecurity about their wages: not all
printers charged the same prices for the same work and therefore did not
give the same wages for the same work. Consequently, a compositor could
not leave one shop to go to another one with any ease, for he had no
assurance that the second shop would give the same wages he had been
getting. Further, in any one shop the compositors did not have any
assurance that the Master Printer would charge, or pay in wages, at the
same rate for two similar jobs. The demand of the compositors in 1785 was
that all prices and wages in all shops be the same for any given job. The
same demand is still being made today, in union and non-union printing
companies, for the problem of the standard scale of prices is persistent in
the printing industry. Even when a standard scale exists, it will be
imperfect as far as the employees are concerned, because a scale is fixed
whereas the material they work on will not be the same for any two
jobs.
In spite of the complaints of the eighteenth-century compositors, price
scales were being used long before 1785, and, specifically in the business
of William Strahan, the scale was consistent and practical but flexible. The
compositors could not have had as strong a grievance against Strahan as
they had against some small shops. Even though there is not enough
information available to prove whether Strahan's scale resulted in high or
in low wages, there is ample evidence to prove that Strahan's wages must
have been the same for two similar jobs and that they must have been
consistent. We can know this by extrapolating from the consistency of the
prices he charged his customers. I shall, therefore, examine the price scales
for standard work as it was charged to the customer at
Strahan's
private business.[7]
Discussion of Strahan's standard scale of prices for his customers can
be divided into three parts: the methods of entry in the ledgers, the unit
price for work, and the cost of paper. In addition to the standard scale,
Strahan maintained a separate, consistent scale for "extra" work. Since this
discussion will concentrate on the methods of
entry and the unit price for work, there will be no concentration on paper
or "extra" charges, which are separate studies in themselves.
