LABORERS

LABORERS. Overtime, output schedules, and standardized wares suggest both rapid and regular production. Steady, fast-paced toil also conjures up the factory and mechanized work—and workers. Craft shops and even many mills, with the languid splash of their waterwheels, evoke a more leisurely rhythm of labor, a human pace governed by the hand and readily disturbed by the seductions of the tavern or carnival. A vast divide supposedly separated these two worlds of work, one modern and the other traditional, one in which time is spent and the other in which time was passed (Thompson, p. 359). There is much to commend in this conventional depiction. But the intensification of labor did not await the machine, and in many trades and settings, time became money without Watt's engine.

WORKSHOP ORDER AND CONTROL

Fashioning a saddle, a wig, or a pewter cup in early modern Europe was often frustrating. When markets turned inviting, petty craftsmen and substantial manufacturers frequently faced idle workbenches and inadequate inventories. Locating ample raw materials, since many were perishable, could be maddening. Papermakers, for instance, engaged in an endless search for white rags, the material base of their reams, but knew that most bales of discarded linen would be streaked with dirt or human filth. At the other end of the process, successful producers of sheets of paper or panes of glass relied on cumbersome, risky portage. Teamsters turned into thieves, or simply abandoned fragile wares in the rain and dropped them on muddy roads. Above all, when demand surged, securing a group of skilled hands or a single man with indispensable know-how was an art in itself. And, once hired, said the masters, these workers rarely toiled with a proper sense of urgency.

Apprentices in the skilled crafts learned their trades slowly, with formal indentures generally lasting from three to seven years. Since employment was fleeting, they also learned quickly to labor slowly, which stretched hours and spread work and wages around. After completing their terms, these youths entered restless, spot labor markets, in which bosses discharged printers and stonecutters as soon as they completed a press run or a building. Ever boastful, Benjamin Franklin surely failed to endear himself to his brother workers in a London printing house by sometimes "carr[ying] up and down Stairs a large Form of Types in each hand, when others carried but one in both Hands." His "constant Attendance" and abstention from Saint Monday, usually observed by pressmen and compositors at an alehouse, "recommended [him] to the Master," but never to his fellows. When he violated yet another of his comrades' rules, the "Chapel Ghost," the guardian of their properties, exacted revenge by "mixing [his] Sorts, transposing [his] Pages, breaking [his] Matter" (Franklin, p. 99–101). In every mechanical art, skilled men sweated mightily to keep their ranks thin, familial, and initiated. Ensuring the appropriate duration of their toil was a crucial element of this mastery. Moreover, the men who enjoyed it did not depend on a foreman's watch. Legislation from fourteenth-century Verona reveals that the town bell sounded the time to leave for work, the start and conclusion of the noon meal break, the afternoon respite, and the close of the workday (Goldthwaite, p. 290). At the building site of Santo Spirito, a clock chimed every thirty minutes, thereby empowering the workers as much as their masters (King, p. 51).

In 1796, the English Parliament mandated that paperworkers should take thirty minutes to fashion each post of paper, the trade's production measure, and fabricate twenty posts per day. This clause was never enforced; papermaking went on as it always had, until the pulp ran dry. Meanwhile, French paperworkers traditionally commenced their day's work in the middle of the night, from midnight to three A.M., and labored into the early afternoon. To economize on candles and oil, the master papermakers of Thiers decided to shut their mills until just before daybreak. Incensed, the paperworkers stayed away from the shops, leaving their bosses surrounded by vatfuls of perishing pulp. The manufacturers turned to youngsters, women, and "workers foreign to the province," but the scabs decamped quickly, the masters dismissed the women, and the producers' pleas to innkeepers "to cut off credit to the rebels" failed to bring the strikers to their knees. Despite the state's edict that the journeymen's workdays were to be divided equally around noon, a local official, Mignot, intervened in vain, for the paperworkers bent "neither to threat nor to persuasion." After two months of trouble and idled vats, the Thiernois masters threw in the towel: the paperworkers continued to start their day at three A.M. (Gachet, p. 130). "This is probably not the right hour to pursue a rigorous policy" toward the journeymen paperworkers, Mignot concluded (ibid.). Yet skilled paperworkers toiled within a complex division of labor and had an active, stiff-necked association.

Of course, the distance between the skilled man and the unskilled, the gagne-deniers, 'penny earners', in France, was not always great and, especially in hard times, could close rapidly. Witness the twin definitions in eighteenth-century Paris of the term tonnelier, at once a cooper and a longshoreman unloading casks of wine (Haim Burstin, "Unskilled Labor in Paris at the End of the Eighteenth Century" in Safley and Rosenband, p. 68). That said, the hod carrier and street sweeper inevitably lacked many of the rights and powers of the skilled guild member, and doubtless possessed less mastery over the time and hours of their work. Still, it was widely recognized that the Auvergnat immigrant to the capital often became a water carrier, the Lyonnais served as a porter, the Savoyard shined shoes and swept out chimneys, and the Norman broke stones. Equally, in 1786, Parisian penny-earners dared to rise against a new company destined to monopolize the delivery of packages in the city and hence displace "established" porters (Burstin in Safley and Rosenband, p. 71). Such men did not expect to labor regularly and likely would have been thrilled with two hundred days (even partial days) of work in a year. Quotas were certainly distant from their orbit of toil, but they, too, evidently put a price on their labor and knew how to secure—and protect—these precious hours.

THE PACE OF LABOR

So the length of the average early modern European workday will continue to be hard to determine. Unstable employment, seasonal patterns of production, and complicated accounting of time at the bench mandate cautious, cross-trade comparisons. London tailors, after all, labeled their slow summers "cucumber time," when they could afford little else on which to subsist (Rule, p. 51). In printing, papermaking, and leather breech making, a "day" represented a closely negotiated amount of work rather than a fixed set of hours. Just to assess the earnings of the shipwrights in the royal dockyards of England, John Rule observed, involves the deciphering of the meaning of "treble days, double days, dayand-a-half, two for one, task, job, common hours, nights and 'tides."' Worse yet, these words, and hence the toil they depict, often defied conventional definitions (Rule, p. 63). At the far edge of this terminological thicket, consider this vague, but eloquent, rendering of the hatter's day: "a man goes early and works late" (Rule, p. 55). In fact, when work was available, journeymen on both shoulders of the Channel routinely put in twelve- and fourteen-hour days, and sometimes labored even longer. Parisian blacksmiths endured workdays of fourteen hours in the eighteenth century, while bookbinders sweated for sixteen (Sonenscher, p. 95). Still, in 1776, the willful Josiah Wedgwood admitted, "Our men have been at play 4 days this week, it being Burslem Wakes. I have rough'd & smoothed them over, & promised them a long Xmass, but I know it is all in vain, for Wakes must be observed though the World was to end with them" (Pollard, p. 182). Wedgwood was both angered and puzzled by a problem, from the masters' perspective, that extended far beyond his pot-bank: why did the laboring poor, so often desperate for work and familiar with punishing hours of toil, respond so peculiarly to the carrots and sticks he proferred? The issue, known to economists as "leisure preference," can be reduced to a paradox, at least to modern readers responsive to the lure of high pay and other incentives: early modern Europeans tended to cut back on hours and effort when work was plentiful, wages high, and grain prices low. Long ago, Max Weber provided an explanation for this practice: the worker "did not ask: how much can I earn in a day if I do as much work as possible? but: how much must I work in order to earn the wage which I earned before and which takes care of my traditional needs?" (Rule, p. 52). Eighteenth-century observers were less charitable, instead condemning the dissolute ways of the working classes. Restif de la Bretonne explained that the "dearness of labor" actually threatened a populace that "if it can earn what it needs in three days, only works for three days and spends the other four in debauchery" (Michael Sonenscher, "Work and Wages in Paris in the Eighteenth Century," in Berg et al., p. 150). An English clothier put it bluntly: elevated rewards had rendered his hands "scarce, saucy and bad" (Rule, p. 54).

High wages, however, had yet to become the order of the day. Put another way, relatively few among the laboring poor enjoyed the chance to respond to the carrot while all too many still felt the compulsion of the stick. This circumstance suited those "low-wage thinkers" who celebrated long hours at flinty pay as the surest means to combat indolence and intemperance. But enlightened thinkers like Adam Smith had reached a different conclusion: "That a little more plenty than ordinary may render some workmen idle, cannot well be doubted; but that it should have this effect on the greater part . . . seems not very probable." Indeed, Smith added, "Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious" (Smith, pp. 81–83).

CONSUMER CULTURE AND THE "INDUSTRIOUS REVOLUTION"

For high pay to work its magic, however, the laboring poor had to sacrifice their leisure in favor of consumption. Even the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker, who lacked internal promptings to maximize and accumulate, took pleasure in finery or an extra dram. As the Old Regime progressed, the wants of the past—goods that journeymen and penny earners had once dreamed about—were becoming needs. In an era when appearance still remained the measure of a man (and a woman), bourgeois and nobleman alike grumbled about the pretensions of their inferiors. An anonymous memoir from Montpellier, penned in 1768, raged that "The most vile artisan behaves as the equal of the most eminent artiste or anyone who practices a trade superior to his. They are indistinguishable by their expenditures, their clothes, and their houses" (Darnton, p. 134). Shopgirls now wore silk stockings, and, to the horror of their betters, might be mistaken for persons of quality.

Perhaps the blurring of certain social lines during the twilight of the Old Regime accounted for an exaggerated concern over the ostentation and "luxury" of the laboring poor. If the plight of the casual laborer Louis Bequet, who crowded into one Parisian bed with his wife and five children in 1779, was unusual, cradles and children's beds remained rare among the common sorts. Nevertheless, cheap knockoffs of muffs, snuffboxes, umbrellas, and countless other items increasingly figured among the inheritances of eighteenth-century workers. As Daniel Roche commented, they were "learning to be consumers" (Roche, p. 127). Nothing symbolized this education more than the prevalence of mirrors in working-class quarters. Here was evidence of a newfound attention to appearance among the popular classes, and possibly a willingness to exchange leisure for adornments. This was fertile soil for the manufacture of time-discipline at the workbench, both inside the factory and outside its gates.

The penetration of this "consumer revolution" into the lower ranks of European society, however incomplete, poses a critical question: if real wages in the eighteenth century were stagnant at best, how shall we account for the widening array of wares present in the inventories of the laboring poor? Jan De Vries has worked out an ingenious solution to this conundrum, which he termed the "industrious revolution" (De Vries, p. 255). This approach rests on careful consideration of the early modern European household as a site of production and as a source of labor power, as well as a web of consumption and distribution. De Vries contends that laboring households in England, northwestern Europe, and colonial America made decisions that enhanced both the supply of commodities and muscle outside the home and the demand for goods purchased in the marketplace. Thus peasants intensified their production for the market, unemployed hands in agrarian regions were increasingly put to work at the loom and the spinning wheel, and women and children performed more waged labor.

BUREAUCRACY, EXPLOITATION, AND EFFICIENCY

While an internal impulse to consume blossomed, it is also likely that a measure of exploitation, especially of women and children, accompanied the secondhand tapestries hanging in ever more households. Wages, however, also may have granted some independence to these women. Perhaps this relatively free hand, plus a taste for what a few extra sous could buy, helped prepare them for their role in the mills and factories of the industrial revolution—a role that submitted them to wearying, regular workdays (when the machines did not break down) of twelve hours or more, six days a week.

To reduce theft and coordinate the sweat and skills of a large number of hands, substantial workshops had systems of labor discipline, including time management, well before the turn to mechanized production and steam power. Unlike lesser hand papermakers, the Montgolfiers, one of the largest producers in late-eighteenth-century France, installed a precisely bounded workday, with quotas for each of the sections of a proper day's work (Rosenband, p. 108). Consider, too, the Venetian state shipyards, better known as the Arsenal. By 1600, a battalion of administrators supervised this enterprise. They included at least a score of clerks and bookkeepers, as well as nearly one hundred technical and disciplinary figures who oversaw every facet of production. (Of course, all this should not be construed to mean that skilled and unskilled hands alike gave up their dodges, pranks, and capacity to steal rope and timber.) As a result of its organization of production and the Republic's resources, the Arsenal was renowned for its capacity to turn out considerable numbers of battle-ready warships in a matter of months or even weeks (Robert C. Davis, "Arsenal and Arsenalotti: Workplace and Community in Seventeenth-Century Venice" in Safley and Rosenband, p. 180). Yet much of the work in these yards revolved around traditional skills, with their conventional nomenclature and custom.

A very different project took shape in the English dockyards under Samuel Bentham. Appointed inspector-general of the naval works in 1795, he embraced the quantifying spirit of the Enlightenment, particularly as a tool for the creation of orderly shops. He approached the resources at his disposal with an accountant's eye and sense of efficiency. He also intended to overthrow the journeymen's rule of thumb and settle scores with these overmighty hands. So, his proud widow explained, "He therefore began by classing the several operations requisite in the shaping and working up of materials of whatever kind, wholly disregarding the customary artificial arrangement according to trade." From there, Bentham developed machines "independently of the need for skill or manual dexterity in the workman" (Linebaugh, p. 397). He reorganized and sped up the refitting of ships, introduced a new method for joining wood, and adopted the steam-powered sawmill for the handling of rough timber. This last innovation helped put an end to "chips," the right of journeymen to the shavings and flakes from recently worked wood, which frequently justified the disappearance of much larger pieces from the yards. And he installed the principle of "INCESSANT WORK," as he scripted it—twenty-four-hour shiftwork (Linebaugh, p. 399). Lastly, like the Montgolfiers, who had locked out their veteran hands (and, they hoped, their custom) and trained a bevy of newcomers in the art, Bentham attempted to drown the old ways of the dockyards in a deepened pool of workers. "It is well known," he claimed, "that an increase of the number of workpeople in any business is the most effectual bar to combinations [trade unions]" (Linebaugh, p. 400).

In the Netherlands, guild regulations around 1500 required the observance of forty-seven feast days. With the Protestant reform of religion, this number fell to six (Jan De Vries, "Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods," in Brewer and Porter, p. 110). Later, the Montgolfiers secured lengthy workyears that doubtless earned the envy of their competitors. Many entrepreneurs, however, remained slow to press for greater time discipline, attributing Bentham's or the Montgolfiers' success to state support, advanced technology, and unusually stable markets (Pollard, p. 192). Still, the pace of manufacture quickened and became more regular at once, despite incomplete shifts and wholesale retreats. As E. P. Thompson acknowledged, "the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports," gradually accomplished their work (Thompson, p. 394). So did the new patterns of consumption and market behavior within the households of the laboring poor. After all, the heirs of those men and women saddled with twelve-hour workdays fought for half-Saturdays and the ten-hour day.

See also Commerce and Markets ; Consumption ; Guilds ; Industrial Revolution ; Industry ; Wages .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Edited by Leonard Labaree et al. New Haven, 1964. Poor Richard in his own voice.

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by Edwin Cannan. New York, 1937. Endless insight, and several surprises, about production and its rewards.

Secondary Sources

Berg, Maxine, Pat Hudson, and Michael Sonenscher, eds. Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory. Cambridge, U.K., 1983. A set of challenging essays about work and wages before the onset of large-scale mechanization.

Brewer, John, and Roy Porter, eds. Consumption and the World of Goods. London, 1993. A vast collection full of stunning detail about everyday material life, both high and low.

Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York, 1984. A series of evocative depictions of eighteenth-century lives.

De Vries, Jan. "The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution." The Journal of Economic History 54, no. 2 (June, 1994): 249–270. A brilliant synthesis of the current debates about consumption and the coming of the industrial revolution.

Gachet, Henri. "Les grèves d'ouvriers papetiers en France au XVIIIème siècle jusqu'àlaRévolution." Eleventh International Congress of the International Association of Paper Historians. Haarlem, 1972. Wonderful accounts of centuries of conflict in a venerable French trade.

Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History. Baltimore, 1980. An elegant, comprehensive history, written with verve and masterly detail.

King, Ross. Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture. New York, 2000. A model popular account.

Linebaugh, Peter. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1992. Controversial and rich in vivid detail.

Pollard, Sidney. The Genesis of Modern Management: A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.Cambridge, Mass., 1965. The classic depiction of the nature and methods of early industrial labor discipline.

Roche, Daniel. The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the 18th Century. Translated by Marie Evans. Berkeley, 1987. Superb discussions of the material culture and reading habits of the common classes.

Rosenband, Leonard N. Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France: Management, Labor, and Revolution at the Montgolfier Mill, 1761–1805. Baltimore, 2000. A careful account of the introduction and response to an innovative system of labor discipline.

Rule, John. The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth Century English Industry. New York, 1981. A brief but comprehensive account anchored firmly in rich detail.

Safley, Thomas, and Leonard Rosenband, eds. The Workplace before the Factory: Artisans and Proletarians, 1500–1800. Ithaca, N.Y., 1993. A collection that ranges widely across Europe and its crafts and industries.

Sonenscher, Michael. Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades. Cambridge, U.K., 1989. A deeply researched discussion of guilds, work, and political economy, primarily during the twilight of the Old Regime.

Thompson, Edward P. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York, 1991. An extraordinarily rich exploration of the cultural world of the early modern English laboring poor.

Leonard N. Rosenband