Lecture 3 – Work in Historical Context

 Work was not always organized as it is today

 Previous systems had many disadvantages, but they had their advantages too
 Improvements to work have been brought about by workers, state actors, employers
and other concerned citizens

Pre-Industrial: Hunter/Gatherer
 Focus on subsistence:
- Obtaining, preparing and preserving food, building housing, making clothing and
ensuring that community members had what they needed to live
- Focus on acquiring necessities
 Indigenous Peoples
- Customs and traditions vary by nation, region, etc.
- Subsistence was a community effort
- Hunting, gathering and manual labour to ensure people had what was needed

Early Canada
 Traditional ways of living and working were disrupted by the arrival of white settlers
from Europe
- Especially with the establishment of permanent settlements in the 1600s
 Resource extraction: hunting, trapping, fur trade
- A conjunction with the Indigenous people
o Living off the land
 Also, formed agriculture and settlements

Early Quebec – Seigneurial System

 Plots of land granted to elite or ‘seigneurs’, who promoted to settle, develop and
oversee the land and its inhabitants
 Tenants rented land from seigneurs, provided them with grain from harvest
 Seigneur provided a mill, and acted as a magistrate to settle disputes and keep order
 Like feudalism
 Community focus of production here too

Pre-Industrial Life and Work

 Production: agricultural, small-scale crafts and trades (butchering animals
predominated
 Organization: small-scale producers linked into community and other organizational
networks
 Division of Labour: intended to be a household division of labour
- Depended on gender, age and class (sometimes race/ethnicity)
o Young boys would follow their fathers; young girls would follow their
mothers
 - Whole community would work together if there was lots of work to do

Key Characteristics of Pre-Industrial Production in the West

1. Household Production Unit
 Work unit of husband, wife and kids (and servants)
- Must have a husband/wife to be part of the household unit
o If not married, men might go into the military instead
 Men focused on main task
- Men are out in the fields; working until the end of daylight
 Women focused on a variety of productive tasks
- Their tasks are very broad; they look after livestock, spend most of their time in the
household (make candles and sew clothes)
 Kids/Servants provided assistance
- If kids were not old enough to contribute, other people’s kid would be brought into
the household
 Flexible division of labour
- People work together

2. Attitudes to Time and Pace of Work

 Spending all time doing what needs to be done to survive
 Task orientation: emphasis on the task, not time or else:
a. more comprehensible
- Workers are doing what needs to be done with the time they have
b. there is little separation between work and life
- No conflict between working and ‘passing the time of day’
- Unless it was harvest time
c. to people used to working by the clock this attitude to work appears to be
wasteful

3. Control, Independence, Sense of Community

 Control over own work
 Independent (men especially)
- Women didn’t have many rights at this time
 Strong sense of community
- May borrow each other’s equipment, help build barns, everyone would decide what
crops were grown

4. Social Inequality
 Profound social inequalities

Rise of Industrial Capitalism

 Many date from 16th and 17th century England
 - Began in agriculture, where there was a change in how people structured their work
and structured agriculture production
o For example, there was a removal of tenants off the land
 These tenants had to find other means
 Become an army of labourers waiting for industrial production
 Emergence of manufacturing, use of steam and electrical power
- This led to efficiency and production
 As people are increasingly working for others, there is more supervision and control
- Control of the labour is important
o For example, synchronization of labour is important
o With many working in a factory all trying to finish one task, the work needs
to be coordinated
 Family, Gender and Production
- Division of labour around gender, age, class persists
- Becomes more rigid, less flexible since less productive work is being done in and
around the home
- Men concentrate on productivity and wage labour
- Women’s duties varied
o Some paid work, less productive labour in the home
o May still have to look after some animals
- Children sometimes gained a wage
- New ideology emerged around the 18th century
o Separation of Spheres
o Men and women were biologically different
o Men were suited for the public sphere (politics, paid work)
o Women were kind and caring, good at looking after other people
 Dependent and emotional so their ideal place was in the home
 Time and Pace of Work
- Time discipline: “a concern for keeping workers on a strict time schedule in an
attempt to control their labour and their movements and activities while at work”
o Co-ordinating labour, steady work output
- Quite a bit of resistance
o A lot of people didn’t like being told how fast they needed to work
 Control, Independence and Community
- Decline in each (with respect to work)
- New communities in unions
- Any time workers try to organize unions; employers try to fire and blacklist them
within the community

Technological Change
 Largest and most crucial part of the Industrial Revolution
 Machinery: could save on labour costs
- Doing work formerly done by humans
 - Could set work pace
o Ensuring that workers did not slack off on the job, but worked steadily
- Overall, increase productivity
 Unlike workers, machines “can work the whole 24 hours without stopping”
- Also, made no distinctions between Sunday’s, holidays and any ordinary day
 Concern for the impact on workers and work
- Machines appeared to work more efficiently than men

Work Under Early Industrial Capitalism

 What were men doing?
- Employment in trades, crafts, unskilled work, factory work, clerical and retail work,
professional work
o Men in factory work were probably working 12-14 hours per day 6 days a
week
o Retail workers had long hours too (14 hour days)
o Clerical workers were educated (accounting, writing, etc.)
- Many still farmed
 What were unmarried women doing?
- Domestic service, factory work (textiles, food production), retail, teaching
 What were married women doing?
- Work in home
o Taking in laundry, boarders, other work done in the home
o Mostly unpaid work
 What were children doing?
- Worked in factories, retail at young age; 10-15 hour days
- There were concerns so limits were placed in the 1890s
o Boys (14 years or younger) and girls (12 years or younger) to 60-hour factory
weeks
o There were exceptions – if needed, the children could work longer but it
shouldn’t happen all the time

What Were Working Conditions Like?

 Generally, not good
- Chaotic
- Dark (didn’t have electricity so only light from windows)
- Poor ventilation
- Not safe
o Stories of people getting their appendages stuck in the machines
 Long hours, low pay
 Little job security
- No social safety net
o No worker’s compensation if injured
 Varied by industrial sector
How Were Indigenous Peoples Affected?
 Traditional ways of living and working became more difficult to sustain due to settler
discrimination, hostility and colonization of the land
 There was a decline in their political autonomy and the traditional ways of support
themselves
 Integrated “into virtually every major resource industry”
- Example: in BC, there is fishing, canning, sealers, farming and ranching, mill work,
freighting and packing, boat-building and logging
 Small businesses, and engaged in the production of handicrafts and carving for sale

Social Inequality/Poverty
 Immigrants: some hold poor working and living conditions, but many blended with
others
- Mixed experiences
o Some settled in and started working immediately, others had more difficulty
- Discrimination was evident
o Particularly with Blacks, Asians and Indigenous people
 There are few job opportunities for people claiming African ethnicity
- There are over-represented in certain forms of less-skilled work
- They have some involvement in skilled trades
- Less involvement in professional type work
 Chinese workers were heavily discriminated against
- Common in the West
- Denied citizenship, jobs in agriculture
 Experiences differed by class
- Middle class people were more likely to be managers, clerical workers and
professionals
o Experienced better working conditions
o Autonomy in work, better pay
o Ideal for middle-class women was not working (especially if married)
o Some worked in teaching, retail shops and increasingly professions
 This was during very late 19th century

Labour Reform
 Workers fought for improved conditions
- Middle class and governments pushed for reform
o Especially for women and children
 The focus was on:
- Shorter working hours, restrictions on women’s and children’s work, safer working
conditions, the right to unionize
- For trades, the right to control their own work and protect their skills

Later Industrial Capitalism (1890s – Early 20th Century)

  There was one major trend: the rise of larger organizations
- Advanced divisions of labour
- Need for coordination of labour
- The impact: new jobs created (jobs became sub-divided)
o Existing jobs altered (more specialization)
o Change in Organizational Structures
 Become more hierarchical
 Rationalization: finding the most efficient means to achieve a given end
- Related to instrumental rationality
- Push towards efficiency by restructuring jobs, establishing formal rules and
hierarchies, and quantifying output
o How? Machinery helps, more supervisors to ensure workers are efficient
- Era where management became a real job
o But, also a problem (how do you manage these large places?)

Late 19th Century – Two Solutions

1) Scientific Management (Taylorism)
 Improved efficiency through controlling workers and how they do their work
 Expand managerial workers
 “Scientifically calculate” the best way to do work
 Management does the thinking of how work should be done
- Workers do the work they are told to do without thinking
 Steps include:
a. study and scientifically calculate how work most efficiently performed
b. separate conception from execution
c. manage plans – tell workers what is to be done, how and in what time
 Emergence of Fordism
- Emergence of assembly lines
o Used to increase productivity through re-organization, technology and
advanced divisions of labour
o Increase pay, increase market for goods, increase stability of labour force
o For example, the greater he paid, the more likely the men were to buy cars
 Treat the employees right and increase his market

2) Personnel/Welfare Management
 Focused on compliance
- Getting workers to want to do the work
 Made the setting and environment nicer
 Created better working conditions
- Belief in happy workers are more productive

 This changes created new jobs

- Clerical work expanded, redefined, and welcomed women into the field
 o Realized women could be paid a lot less than men
- Management seen as a key for effective organization
o There was a rise of specialist managers and expanded use of managers
- There were other specialist workers
o In sales, purchasing, finance, accounting, marketing, etc.
o Organizational hierarchies and opportunities for advancement

Unionization and Workplace Reform

 Burst of unionization after WWI
- People coming home from the war wanting their jobs back when they have already
been filled
- Example: Winnipeg General Strike
 Workers efforts did contribute to workplace reform and better working conditions

Minority Workers
 May have experienced increased limitations
 First affected during economic downturns
- More likely to be fired if company was making cuts
 Jobs open to them may have been restricted
 Discriminatory legislation expanded
- Increase in citizenship requirements for workers

Summary
 Work became more standard and diverse
- More rules and jobs
 Employment expanded
- Less self-employment
 Workers appear to have less control over what they do
- But, they have better working hours, benefits and opportunities
 More recent changes: precarity, new organizational forms, globalization and Post-
Fordism
- Talking about these in the coming weeks