4.6. Wage Labour

Jan Lucassen 4.6. Wage Labour Definitions of wagelabour in the legal and social sciencesare useful for historians of work, but they never cover the full human experience. The following definition at- tempts to include as manyaspects as possible: “Wage labour is work, which is per- formedonthe basis of acontractbetween aworker (or agroup of workers) and an employer,and which the employer remuneratesinthe form of awage.”¹ Wagesmay consist of money or goods in kind. Cases in which employers remunerate workers ar- bitrarily(without taking into account aspecific amountofwork), in which remuneration takes place without acontract(for example, when ahousewife feeds and clothes her husband and children), and in which employers coerce workers into employment without areal contract, as in the case of corvée labour in pre-market societies likeAncient Egypt or the Pre-Columbian societies in the Americas, convict labourers,orchattel slavesare thereforeexcluded. Frequently, the recipient of the wageisfreetospend it at will, but not always.Exceptions includechild labourers, who have to pass their wages on to their parents or guardians, or workers in atruck system, who are obliged to spend at least apart of their wageinthe employer’sshop. Sometimes wages are also paid to slaves-for-hire, who have been sent out by their owner to earn money with an employer,and who are usuallyallowed to keep a part of their remuneration. They perform akind of wagelabour if they themselves, and not their owner,makes an agreement with their employer.Insum, wagesare but one type of remuneration for work. In this chapter,wewill onlyuse the term wagelabour if wages are paidbased on acontract. Accordingtoour definition, wagelabour is based on market exchange: the workers offer theircapacity to work, and the employers offer remuneration in money or kind in return. Amajor characteristic of wagelabour is that it presupposes acontract,implicit or explicit,oralorwritten. The contract specifies (i) the identity of the contracting parties; (ii) the relationship between performance and remuneration; (iii) the durationofthe agreement; and (iv) the conditions under which it maybeter- minated prematurelybythe worker or the employer.Inthe remainder of this article Iwill discuss systematically, but briefly, these four elements of the labour contract, thus further clarifying what wagelabour is and how it overlaps in multiple ways with other labour relations.Thereafter,Iwillgiveaconcise historical outline of wagelabour from its origins to the present day. General works on which this essayisbased areMarcel van der Linden, Workers of the World. Essays toward aGlobal labor History (Leiden and Boston, 2008); Marcel van der Linden and LeoLucassen (eds), Working on Labor.EssaysinHonor of JanLucassen (Leiden and Boston, 2012); and JanLucas- sen, Outlines of aHistoryofLabour (Amsterdam,2012). The latter publicationand this essayadopt the global taxonomyonlabour relations as developed over the last decade at the International Institute of Social History (see chapter4.1). DOI 10.1515/9783110424584-021 396 Jan Lucassen The labour contract andits elements Historical evidence shows that it is much more important to know whether acontract is recognized by the contracting partners and by local or broader society than whether parties have entered into it implicitly or explicitlyand—in the latter case—whether and how it has been put on paper.Recognition of such an agreement by the polity is, after all, essentialfor the enforcement of the contractand for solutions in the case that the contractisbreached by one of the parties involved. The waythatitisdocu- mented—in memory,onapiece of paper that is or is not signed, by anotarial deed, etc.—maybevery important in aparticularcase but not for the definition of wage labour.The different formsofenteringinto acontractrelatemore closelytothe levels of literacy and the juridification of asociety. i. The contracting parties In labour history,wenearlyalways talk about the relation between the wagelabourer and the employer as if these weretwo individual people.² The reality is often very different.Labourers are often hired as agroup and not individually, or individual labourers agree amongst themselves, locallyornationally, to accept work onlyunder certain conditions.Journeymen’sguilds, mutual benefit societies and trade unions are examples of more permanent workers organizations that collectively bargain. ³ Another example of groups thatcollectively takeonwork are production coopera- tives, dating backtothe nineteenth century, but this does not pertain to wagelabour.⁴ Employers can unite in order to imposeconditionsonworkers who wish to be employed by them. An employer doesn’tneed to be an individual but can alsobe the state in amarket economyoranother corporate bodythat does not work for prof- its. In terms of contract enforcement this has major consequences, as we will see below.The Soviet Union and other socialist countries,which existed in the twentieth Forcollective wage-labour relations see JanLucassen, “The Other Proletarians:Seasonal Labour- ers, Mercenaries and Miners”, International Review of Social History,Supplement 2(1994), pp. 171– 194;and Piet Lourensand JanLucassen, Arbeitswanderungund berufliche Spezialisierung.Die lippi- schen Ziegler im 18. und 19.Jahrhundert (Osnabrück, 1999). An autonomous division of tasks within agroupwas historicallythe rule in printinghouses and amongst the porters and heavers at the docks. JanMaterné, “Chapel members in the Workplace: Ten- sion and Teamwork in the PrintingTrades in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, Internation- al Review of Social History,Supplement 2(1994), pp. 53–82; JanLucassen, “Work on the Docks:Sai- lors’ Labour Productivity and the Organization of Loading and Unloading”,in: RichardW.Unger (ed.), Shipping and Economic Growth 1350–1800 (Leiden and Boston, 2011), pp. 269–278. David F. Schloss, Methods of Industrial Remuneration. Third edition revised and enlarged(London, 1898), pp. 319–365, 406–419; Vander Linden in this volumeCh. 7. 4.6. Wage Labour 397 century,werespecial cases. There markets,includinglabour markets, wereabolished and replacedbystate organized employment that left out labour contracts but main- tained remuneration by wayofwages. This is another example of work for which wages are paid but which, according to the definition used in this chapter,isnot con- sidered wagelabour. Because of the historical importance of collective contracting and its relative obscurity this phenomenon needssome more elucidation. AccordingtoDavid F. Schloss, cooperative workischaracterized by the following elements: a) the members of the cooperative are associated by their own free choice, and they determine for themselveshow manypeople and which people are part of the group;b)the associated workers selectamongst themselvestheir own leader; c) they arrangethe division of the collective wages between all of the members of the group (includingthe leader)insuch amanner as is mutuallyagreed upon as being equitable. Accordingto rules madebefore the work starts, the group determines which members receive which part of the total sum receivedbythe group.⁵ This so-called cooperative subcontracting was alreadydocumented amongst Mes- opotamianbrick makers in 484–477BCE.⁶ With the spread of large mono-cultures, cooperativesubcontracting became very popularinmarket economies,asitenabled employers to respond quickly to short term demandand take on manylabourers at once. It wasfirst found to be acommon practice in Classical Antiquity and again from the late Middle Ages onwards in Western Europe. Outside agriculture, it domi- nated seasonal work like mining,the public and privateconstruction of dikes,ca- nals, and (rail)roads,and the construction industry. In the mining industry,the basis of the group was often the household, and men, woman, and children could be part of the group. Aparticularseam, from which coal or ore wastobeextracted, was subcontracted to the group.⁷ Breakingore at the sur- face was also subcontractedtogroups of women. The demise of serfdominCentral and Eastern Europe enhanced this type of organization. In Europe it reached its peak Lucassen, “The Other Proletarians”,after Schloss, MethodsofIndustrial Remuneration,pp. 155– 165. See also Lourens and Lucassen, Arbeitswanderung und berufliche Spezialisierung,and Gijs Kessler and JanLucassen, “Labour Relations,Efficiency and the Great Divergence. ComparingPre-Industrial Brick-Makingacross Eurasia, 1500 –2000”,in: Maarten Prak and JanLuiten van Zanden (eds), Tech- nology,Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy in the East and West (Leiden and Boston, 2013), pp. 259– 322. Michael Jursa, Aspects of the EconomicHistoryofBabylonia in the FirstMillennium BC. Economic Geography,Economic Mentalities,Agriculture, the Use of Money and the Problem of EconomicGrowth (Münster,2010), pp. 261–263, 280. E.g. J. Taylor, “The Subcontract System in the British Coal Industry”,in: L. S. Pressnell (ed.), Stud- ies in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1960), pp. 215–235; TimWright, “‘AMethod of Evading Man- agement’.Contract Labor in Chinese Coal Mines before1937”, ComparativeStudies in Society and His- tory,23(1981), pp. 656 – 678. 398 Jan Lucassen before WWI. After the war, mechanization diminished the need for seasonal wage labour,especiallyinagriculture and construction.⁸ When mechanization spread, workshops were replacedbyelectricallypowered factories with machines. Supervisory challenges weresolvedbythe introduction of piece

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