Bankers (not money) make the world go around? Towards a labour/tech history of finance

I am at the airport in Melbourne (again). I’m sitting in the window eating one of those excellent boxes of kale, broccoli, beans, seeds, peas and a boiled egg that I am grateful are now available at airports. Next to me a father and daughter are observing the world – look at how that plane looks like a giant shark! And oooh, here come the bags!

What looked like an automated process when a Virgin Airlines robot told me my bag on the conveyer belt was heading towards the same destination as me turns out, my eyes now tell me as this adorable pair observe the world out the window, is also a matter of human labour. A human is driving all the bags to the plane.

One characteristic of the combination of neoliberal managerialism and technological automation is that a whole lot of things are experienced as less material. Even the airport cafe in which I sit. I selected my salad and approached. Ugh, one of those giant iPod-looking terminals. I look it up and down. It did the same. Thankfully a silent human, hovering weirdly in the background, took two lanky steps forward to help me scan my salad and press the right buttons to enable me to pay for it.

This human-machine tag team surely a transitional arrangement, for it makes no sense this way. In due course, surely, I will confidently approach the giant terminal and the young man will have a job doing something less weird. And there will be literally no one to complain to, or ask for help. This, of course, is the ideal experience under neoliberalism, enabling endless cost-saving enshittification (I bet it starts with the seeds in the salad) with no evidence of consumer dissatisfaction (because there is no one to collect said complaints).

This I also know because, like nearly everyone I saw at this week’s mega-meta-humanities and social science conferences in Melbourne, my plane from Sydney to the best-caffeinated city in the world, was cancelled. Needing to fix something in the rescheduling, all I could do was listen to Virgin’s recorded message about how cancelling your flight when you are almost at the airport two hours from your home is perfectly normal and fine, actually.

When it comes to money – which (as we know from the authority of songs about money) makes the world go around – such disembodiment seems kinda fitting.

Since the ATM, money comes from machines. And now, as cash becomes ever-more scarce, it dwells in machines – abstract ledgers that we can check using other machines, and which monitor how much money (but not cash) that we have. Kinda like the silent human who stepped up to press buttons on the confusing terminal, it hovers ever-more in the background, seeming ever-less tangible.

And yet, like that human – and the one driving my bag to the plane just about now, the circulation of money combines all sorts of automation with human labour.

This, plus how bankers pretty much run the world (and have since approximately 1844-ish), makes me want to understand something about the relationship between banking labour (including machine labour) and historical capitalism.

I think this deserves more than a little substack, but in the first instance let me tell you a little bit about a paper I gave a few days ago at the law and history conference in Melbourne. The archival foundation of this paper – meaning the primary historical records I used (in a preliminary way) to talk about banking labour – were some early records of the United Bank Officers’ Association, which was (and so is its successor) a union, formed in 1919.

The United Bank Officers’ Association grew like mad, reaching 10% density for the industry within a few months. Banking was bigger metaphorically than it was numerically, and yet soon found 50-60 new members for its union in Sydney every day in 1919.

Bankers? In a union? Wot?

Yeah, that is what the banks wanted people to wonder too. So in an act of capitalist solidarity, several of Australia’s biggest banks (such as they were in 1919) got together to hire a hot-shot lawyer who would point out, repeatedly, that banks are lovely warm cuddly organisations creating a supportive, highly professional and (importantly) exceedingly well-dressed environment in which white-collar elites were given every opportunity for advancement and riches – given their wonderful proximity to capital – in a way that is supportive of their family and financial obligations.

Certainly, the banks’ lawyers argued, this was not what Australia’s special and (almost) unique arbitration system intended when it referred to ‘workers’, who were dirty and wore terrible clothes (according to the lawyers, not me, obv).

As it turned out, bankers were recruited at approximately age 15 and paid really, really badly. This meant that families who recognised the ‘prospects’ of banking work would subsidise their children’s clothing budget (and sometimes other things) to ensure that this foot in the door would pay off for families that found themselves at the arse end of empire, needing to build a new middle class trajectory for their family.

Wider recruitment was needed during the Great War in banking (as in other industries), so that women and less-elite young men became more important. Union activity grew and bankers like others, including clerks and journalists (with whom the bankers consulted when deciding to unionise), began to see the strength embodies in their work.

And yet, because of the importance of their ‘prospects’ in relation to the sacrifices demanded for entering the industry, bank workers were subject to arbitrary managerial decision-making that kept them fearful and subservient. In 1919 they’d had enough, and collectively pressed for something better.

This is cool – and there is more to this story that I will get to another day. But I want to know about the value of the work they were doing. And here Australia’s arbitration court records offer something exceedingly fabulous. The court’s purpose (once they told the banks and their lawyers that this whole business about their workers not being eligible to form a union was rubbish) was to establish levels of responsibility and therefore salary rates. This means they brought in so many bank employees and asked them to describe exactly what they did at work. Records like these, from Australia’s arbitration system, are not used nearly enough in my view. It is pretty exciting to use a beautiful collection like this one.

As well as an archive that describes 1919 banking work in glorious detail, we also have a beautiful collection of glass plate negatives at the Reserve Bank of Australia archives showing bankers c.1916-1923 doing their work. I am able to (or, perhaps more accurately, able to attempt to) match the descriptions of banking work in the arbitration court to these pictures.

Look at this picture below, for example. We can see some sense of the gendered division of labour in that it is only women working the pneumatic tubes on the right, facilitating communication, probably between the tellers we can’t see and the ledger keepers who dominate the picture. Most of the ledger keepers are men, but some are women. This had become especially common during the war, the arbitration testimony tells us, but in some banks it was not that uncommon beforehand.

Image: General Banking Floor, Commonwealth Bank Head Office 1916, RBA Archive

From teller to ledger

Then the teller takes the duplicate deposit slip to the cash book department. This is like mail-sorting and the deposit slips are organized so that the correct ledger keeper collects it.

Image: Commonwealth Bank – Head Office cnr Pitt Street & Martin Place – Banking Chamber (view 4) – c.1917 (plate 733), RBA Archives. You’ll note the pre-Nazi swastikas in the floor tiles, at that time denoting prosperity. I popped my head in to the building the other day and they don’t seem to be there anymore, surely correctly.

Ledger-keepers performed the work currently done by the banks’ big computer systems.

The ledger keeper would take the deposit slip and enter it against the correct account. At this point it is important that the ledger keeper crosses the deposit slip with a pen so they don’t accidentally enter it twice. They keep the deposit slip on hand until they have enough to call over a clerk, usually a woman (Montgomery Shepherd calls them ‘lady clerks) who checks that each deposit has been correctly entered in the ledger. This happened about twice a day.

As well as the ledger, the ledger keeper has a loose cash sheet where they jot down all their deposits and cheques, for withdrawals. This was then ‘machined’.

Image: Interior new War Loan offices, April-May, 1920: First floor office (plate 200) – zoomed in on machinist.

This picture is actually from the war bonds department but I’ve zoomed in on the woman doing the machining.

She is using an adding machine, a Burroughs I think. At the end of each day the ‘lady clerk’ adds up the deposits for each ledger keeper. These are pasted into the ledger.

Montgomery Shepherd told the arbitration court that ledger keepers were expected to look out for death notices of the people their ledger covered.

Another ledger keeper, William Elmhurst Parnell Carboyd, explained that each ledger keeper is responsible for 500-600 accounts.

He was recalled to give the court more details in which he explained that his ledger consisted of: 483 credit accounts and 91 overdraft accounts. In recent times he also dealt with 74 Stop payment notices and 192 ‘authorities’, which gave the authority for various firms to operate on account. He was also responsible for special notices, which include letters of credit and transfer of balances to the London office.

26 year old John Chandos Elliott described telephoning and telegraphing fund transfers using code that is kept in a secure code book.

The arbitration court was obviously trying to establish levels of responsibility in order to set wages, so they were especially interested in what happens when there was a mistake.

The machining is intended to act as a check on human adding, but is actually a source of errors. Apparently it is easy to forget to ‘reset’ the machine so that there are already numbers stored.

John Elliott said that when there is an error they try to re-trace it. But when it is work that has been machined they can’t easily tell if it is ‘the girl or the machine’.

This reminds us that the work of banking is as entangled with its technologies as it is with the ideas about virtue and integrity that were embodied in the work processes, so that while the machine might enhance a woman’s capacity, the machine was also as plausible an agent of error as she was.

Almost all of the banking jobs that were described in the arbitration court are now done by machines, which also need to be regulated in ways that ensure the integrity of the banks. I think there is space here to think about the feminisation of machines, governed of course by a deeply masculine IT profession, and the connection of feminising and digitisalising labour to masculinised aspects of banking work.

But for now, let’s focus on the ledger keepers where we can see that the physical and technological labour (that is, work being done by both the girl and the machine) of keeping the ledger is fundamental to the functioning of the bank. This is simultaneously embodied and disembodied; one one hand, the ledgers are abstractions of exchanges using currency at the tellers and elsewhere in the economy. But on the other hand, the ledger also seems to be the thing that is most real to the bank, so that the work of the ledger keepers produces and maintains the currency that matters, at least to the bank. That is, when the ledger keepers work, this produces the only thing that really matters to the bank, the ledger.

Since bitcoin, ledger theories are a bit trendy. And (or but?) they might be onto something.

I’m going to give this a bit more thought. If you have ideas about this I’d love to hear them. For now I reckon the ledger (and the ledger-keeper, whether human or machine) might give us some clues about the ecosystem (thinking as an actor-network-system type), the technologies of power (thinking Foucauldianly), or the institutional (thinking through institutional lenses, or else the ‘rule of law’) or maybe (so say some business folk) even the location where the energy of capital and labour collide. Maybe.

Why do I think this might matter? Well we have these two archetypes, in fiction as in real life, of the banker. The first, from Mary Poppins’ Fidelity Fiduciary Bank (left picture below), where a kind of upright masculinity not only holds together British finance but also England herself – and her colonies (listen to the song OMG). So ‘upright’, right? And on the right, the Wolf of Wall Street, where wild speculation is paired with toxic masculinity.

As a historian of professional virtue, this is intriguing. And, I suspect a ledger theory of banking might enable me to see these (upright v toxic masculinities) as two sides of the same ledger, so to speak. That is, the integrity of the ledger is what enables wild speculation.

This will also mean that instead of thinking of money as ‘circulating’ in some sort of disembodied manner, we can better see the labour (human and machine) that makes it go – just like watching the human drive the bags to the plane.

This is a short version (plus airport stories) of a talk I gave as part of a plenary panel and the Australia and New Zealand Law and History Conference on Currency recently. Many thanks to the organisers for having me.