‘Benevolent employer in the Quaker tradition’?
Published in 18th-19th Century Social Perspectives, 18th–19th - Century History, Features, Issue 4 (July-August 2013), Volume 21The factory opened its Dublin operation in 1851, and by 1911 it employed approximately 3,000 workers. George Jacob, chairman from 1902 to 1931, is remembered in the Dictionary of Irish Biography as a ‘benevolent employer in the Quaker tradition’ who was ‘ahead of his time with employee-focused reforms’. Yet unlike George Cadbury or Arthur Rowntree in Britain, Jacob paid low wages and his Quakerism did not prevent him from profiting from war: he supplied biscuits to the British army. These policies made the factory a frequent target of the labour newspaper The Irish Worker and its successor, James Connolly’s Workers’ Republic.
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