Thus, there is abundant evidence of how labourers and artisans were thought to behave, but it is appropriate now to examine the issue from the perspective of the workers themselves, although even on the level of elementary theory this is a far from straightforward task. There is the basic problem of what constituted labour and leisure. Voluntary leisure time has to be distinguished from involuntary: work cannot be performed if there is no demand for it. What constituted labour is also problematical in a society in which many members possessed or had access to their own means of production (plots of land, basic industrial equipment and such), in which a significant proportion of production, both for self-consumption and for sale, took place within the household, and in which a significant proportion of the labour force combined household production with work for wages. By no means all of the time spent away from paid employment was
`wasted on idling’: those with smallholdings raised crops and kept poultry and animals, while the landless could glean corn and collect fuel, and produce a variety of goods to be consumed within the household or even sold. Indeed, it is possible that much so-called ‘leisure’ might have yielded a greater marginal return than time spent working for wages. Nor did a day off work necessarily mean the loss of a full day’s production. As Adam Smith was to confirm in the 1770s, the working of short weeks by the self-employed or by those paid by the piece could simply mean that they chose to cram five or six day’s production into four.(49) At the same time, the amount of work which individuals sought was conditioned by far more than personal inclination, the level of wages and the price and attractiveness of goods. It varied according to stages in the life-cycle, which for most brought rising then falling numbers of dependent mouths to feed and bodies to clothe, and increasing then diminishing reserves of energy and strength.
Most significantly, conventional economic analysis is of limited rather than decisive assistance in any evaluation of the accuracy of contemporary assertions. The backward-sloping labour-supply function, although in many respects a simple concept to accept in social terms, is much more difficult to comprehend within the laws of neo-classical economics, by which the normal expectations of rational behaviour in a market economy endow the individual worker with a strong desire to maximize income and an almost infinite variety of enticing goods upon which to spend his money. According to these parameters we are instructed that, with the exception of the very well-remunerated, as wages rise so more work will be offered by each worker, because each increase in wages makes leisure more expensive and therefore less attractive. Consequently, it is only at high rates of income, after successive increases in earnings and work-time and decreases in leisure-time have taken place, that the value placed upon leisure will eventually match and then exceed the attractions of further work and the acquisition of yet more goods.
Thus, there is abundant evidence of how labourers and artisans were thought to behave, but it is appropriate now to examine the issue from the perspective of the workers themselves, although even on the level of elementary theory this is a far from straightforward task. There is the basic problem of what constituted labour and leisure. Voluntary leisure time has to be distinguished from involuntary: work cannot be performed if there is no demand for it. What constituted labour is also problematical in a society in which many members possessed or had access to their own means of production (plots of land, basic industrial equipment and such), in which a significant proportion of production, both for self-consumption and for sale, took place within the household, and in which a significant proportion of the labour force combined household production with work for wages. By no means all of the time spent away from paid employment was
`wasted on idling’: those with smallholdings raised crops and kept poultry and animals, while the landless could glean corn and collect fuel, and produce a variety of goods to be consumed within the household or even sold. Indeed, it is possible that much so-called ‘leisure’ might have yielded a greater marginal return than time spent working for wages. Nor did a day off work necessarily mean the loss of a full day’s production. As Adam Smith was to confirm in the 1770s, the working of short weeks by the self-employed or by those paid by the piece could simply mean that they chose to cram five or six day’s production into four.(49) At the same time, the amount of work which individuals sought was conditioned by far more than personal inclination, the level of wages and the price and attractiveness of goods. It varied according to stages in the life-cycle, which for most brought rising then falling numbers of dependent mouths to feed and bodies to clothe, and increasing then diminishing reserves of energy and strength.
Most significantly, conventional economic analysis is of limited rather than decisive assistance in any evaluation of the accuracy of contemporary assertions. The backward-sloping labour-supply function, although in many respects a simple concept to accept in social terms, is much more difficult to comprehend within the laws of neo-classical economics, by which the normal expectations of rational behaviour in a market economy endow the individual worker with a strong desire to maximize income and an almost infinite variety of enticing goods upon which to spend his money. According to these parameters we are instructed that, with the exception of the very well-remunerated, as wages rise so more work will be offered by each worker, because each increase in wages makes leisure more expensive and therefore less attractive. Consequently, it is only at high rates of income, after successive increases in earnings and work-time and decreases in leisure-time have taken place, that the value placed upon leisure will eventually match and then exceed the attractions of further work and the acquisition of yet more goods.
But what is reported by contemporaries as happening in the later seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth is that the labour-supply curve of the poorer members of society began to bend backwards at relatively low levels of income, and it was this preference for leisure over income among those who possessed very little which drove employers to distraction and commentators and political economists to bouts of mercantilistic moralizing. Was such behaviour irrational? How might it be explained?
As a first step, one might question whether the rationality which requires that the maximization of satisfaction be achieved primarily through income and consumption should be applied to the pre-industrial world. Work, consumption and leisure have social and cultural as well as economic dimensions. The manner in which later seventeenth and eighteenth-century men and women assessed the utility of work, leisure and consumables was in large measure derived from the practices and value systems of their working and living environments. The persistence of irregular work habits drew strength from a tradition of discontinuous working which had been nurtured over the centuries by the prevalence of self-employment and piece-rate work, by the uneven phases of the farming year, by the rites, recreations and holy days of the seasons, and by the impact of recurrent sharp vicissitudes in agricultural output, prices and business activity. Moreover, in the immediately preceding era of surplus population, continuous employment had been especially difficult to obtain and, perhaps, owing to a lack of adequate nutrition, also often difficult to sustain.
The disutility of most work was also high, since it consisted in the main of hard manual labour or unpleasant and repetitive tasks. The incentive to perform such work after basic needs had been satisfied depended largely upon what could be purchased with the additional income. But, although the consumption of non-essentials by the lower social strata undoubtedly increased as their range widened progressively in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their prices often fell substantially in real terms, the cost of many items in terms of the labour needed to acquire them does appear to have remained sufficiently high to have dissuaded the majority of workers from engaging fully in `rampant consumerism’.(50) The lack of convenient means of saving and investing surplus income also acted as a discouragement to the maximization of earnings in good times. Indeed, there is more than a little truth in the notion that in the centuries before the industrial revolution men and women worked irregularly from necessity when times were bad and irregularly from choice when times were good.
E. P. Thompson, in a towering contribution to our understanding of the `moral economy’ of work and leisure in a `task oriented’ rather than a `time oriented’ society, judged that the `irregular labour rhythms’, which prevailed when most men were in control of their own working lives, `help us to understand the severity of mercantilist labour doctrines as to the necessity for holding down wages as a preventative against idleness’. However, these and similar sentiments have recently been categorized by de Vries as ironic examples of `historians who regard themselves as champions of the common man’ appropriating the claims put forward by elites seeking to perpetuate the poverty of the common man.(51) While it is true that Thompson was sometimes neglectful of the economic context within which labour operated, he was acutely aware of its social and cultural context, and his work demonstrates how essential it is to temper modern economic analysis and consumer theory with a good dose of contemporary mentality.(52)
Continued from page 11
Peter Mathias has provided a crisp focus on the effects of short-term fluctuations in employment, money wages and prices on the industriousness of the work-force.(53) Such fluctuations were, of course, both commonplace and severe in later seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century England and, as Adam Smith noted, `the demand for labour increases in years of sudden and extraordinary plenty, and diminishes in those of sudden and extraordinary scarcity’.(54) `Windfall gains’, in the shape of exceptionally high but essentially short-lived earnings or substantially reduced outgoings due to bumper harvests and low food prices, were unlikely to induce workers to abandon totally their customary expectations and levels of consumption, and therefore resulted in an increase in voluntary leisure. Short-term leisure preference of this sort featured prominently in contemporary analyses, with their repeated references to the idleness induced by `cheap years’ or a `sudden rise of wages’.
This need not mean, however, that over the longer term more permanent increases in real wages necessarily led to a fall in the amount of labour offered. It is possible for individual workers to indulge in a fair measure of leisure preference and still work more when the demand for labour is high than they had been able to when employment was less easily obtainable. Furthermore, the neo-classical assumption that the labour force is a constant proportion of the total population does not hold true for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their abundance of small-holders and self-producers who might enter or withdraw from the labour market. Thus, even if the amount of labour offered by those currently employed was reduced, higher wages might induce others to enter the labour market. As Mathias has put it: `One man’s leisure preference might prove to be another man’s employment opportunity’.(55) Nor is the persistence of a high utility accorded to leisure necessarily in conflict with an increase in the supply of labour on the market brought about by a shift in the proportions of the productive resources of households from non-marketed goods and labour to marketed goods and labour. Instead, some part of the additional income generated by wives and children in this manner might have been used to support a lower work intensity by the male heads of households. Finally, and most importantly, even a strong predilection for leisure did not mean that increases in wage rates or falls in the prices of subsistence goods were translated penny for penny into more time off work, as was sometimes suggested by contemporaries. In fact, it is much more likely that favourable movements in wage rates and prices would lead to an increase in both leisure and consumption, an outcome which helps to explain the paradox that the poor in times of high wages and plenty were accused both of refusing to work and of consuming more goods, many of which were unbefitting their social station.
Continued from page 12
In short, a multitude of forces pushing in a variety of directions played their part in determining the working patterns of the labouring and artisan classes and the amount of voluntary leisure which they might take, and, what is more, the mix and strength of each of these changed over time, space and occupation. Such a multiplicity of cross-currents, allied to the vagaries of behaviour by individuals and groups at particular times and in particular places, was bound to ferment complexity and contradictions in the accounts of those who observed them, and to impede their ability to represent and analyse. The historian has the advantage of perspective, but also the disadvantage of distance, yet it would appear to be the case that in good times the labouring and artisan masses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries commonly refused to take all the work that was on offer.
VI
It may never prove possible to measure with any pretence of accuracy the total amount of labour supplied in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, or to monitor precisely how it changed over time. To provide a conclusive test of the veracity of contemporary commentators on the behaviour of the generality of labourers and artisans one would need abundant data on the relationship between the cost of living, earnings and the numbers of days worked across a representative range of occupations in a representative sample of regions over an adequate span of years. Sadly, such robust evidence is never likely to be available in sufficient quantities to settle the issue, for the working patterns of even full-time employees can only be gathered from continuous sets of accounts covering long time periods, which record the names of individual workmen and women, the number of days they worked and the sums they were paid; precious few such records survive. However, some progress towards establishing a balance of probabilities can be achieved, and some tangential records may well yield unexpected insights,(56)
Handled sensitively, the most informative records of coalmining operations can provide an illuminating case study, although it must be understood at the outset that colliers were not representative of the labour force as a whole. Due to the rapid expansion of the demand for coal, skilled colliers were frequently in short supply, especially in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their scarcity manifested itself in a variety of ways in addition to enhanced wages and incentive bonuses. Moreover, the nature of the industry usually led coal owners to place great emphasis on continuous full-time working by employees, though with limited success. Thus, there frequently appears to have existed in the coal industry the conditions of which later seventeenth and early eighteenth-century writers complained in the economy at large: a combination of high wages and a reluctance to work. But to understand the true picture in coal-mining it is essential to break colliery work-forces down into their constituent parts. Some employees, such as viewers, overmen and grieves were mining engineers, surveyors, managers and clerks rather than manual labourers, while categories of manual labourers included those who looked after the horses, helped to drain the pits, maintained the wagonways and transported the coal above and below ground. The elite of the labouring colliers were the hewers, who won the coal from the face. Aside from strength and courage, hewing demanded considerable skill and experience in order to maximize the output and preserve the long-term viability and profitability of the pit; consequently, hewers were normally rewarded by rates of pay well above those received by the rest of the manual work-force of the colliery, and by those employed in agriculture in the surrounding countryside.(57)
Bibliography
(1) Charles Davenant, An Essay upon the Most Probable Methods of Making People Gainers in the Ballance of Trade, 2nd edn (London, 1700), 34. Sir William Petty held that `Labour is the Father and active principle of Wealth, as Lands are the Mother’: A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions (1662), in The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. C. H. Hull, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1899), i, 68; while John Locke (1690) thought that `ninety-nine hundredths’ of the value of most commodities `are wholly to be put on the account of labour’: Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1964), 314. For discussions of the recognition of the value of labour by contemporaries, see E. S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism: A Study in the Labor Theories of the Later English Mercantilists (New York, 1965), 160-1; D. C. Coleman, `Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century’, in E. M. Carus-Wilson (ed.), Essays in Economic History, 2 vols. (London, 1962), ii, 299; W. D. Grampp, `The Liberal Elements in English Mercantilism’, Quart. Jl Econ., lxvi (1952), 470-1.