Modern World History

Tenille Brown

Dr. Carl Garrigus

Modern World History

Trident University

July 31, 2017

Modern Wage Labor System

Early civilizations had one great challenge coming up; labor. Individuals were comfortable going about their domestic businesses and fending for themselves to the extent that nobody was looking for employment. This created the first problem, which was labor mobilization. At the time, efficiency was low and investors wanted higher returns. This created a scenario where cheap labor was preferred. These two factors combined, a situation existed in which slavery became the solution for capitalists and investors. However, as industrial revolution picked momentum, labor movements emerged that championed for better wages. Furthermore, it was determined that slavery was less productive hence the beginning of the journey to modern wage labor. Below are select aspects of the build-up that had significant impact.

Task-Orientation in Pre-Modern Societies

Task-orientation is a form of labor discipline contrasted to time orientation. For task-orientation, the focus is on completion of the tasks with little regard paid to the demarcation that should exist between leisure and work. What matters therefore is not the number of units of time one spends while working, but whether one completes certain tasks or not. Notably, since the units of measuring time such as minutes and seconds matter not, task orientation relies on natural phenomena such as the sunrise and sunset to mark the beginning of work and closing of work (Thompson, 1967).

Task-orientation as opposed to time-orientation therefore had significant effect in ordering life during the pre-modern societies. To begin with, task-orientation shaped division of roles on gender grounds. There was little regard of modern measurement of time and natural phenomena were used hence automatically making household chores female affair. Furthermore, since task-orientation implied disregard of time units, activities of the day were also limited hence very rarely would one hold numerous jobs, as is the case today (Thompson, 1967).

The Work Patterns

The article describes a dominant work pattern among several groups of workers, which was persistent across regions during the pre-modern times. The article in particular identifies artists, writers, small farmers and students. These groups have one thing in common; they have control of their own working lives. As such, their work patterns have been determined and identified as similar.

Thompson therefore observes in the article that individuals who are in control of their own working lives have a work pattern of alternate bouts of intensity and idleness. What this means is that since these individuals are not formally employed and are not under any contract with factories, they have peak period characterized by intense labor and off-peak periods characterized by idleness. Taking students for instance, holidays are characterized by idleness when it comes to academic undertakings. Thompson observes that the persistence of this work pattern raised questions as to whether or not this is the natural human work rhythm (Thompson, 1967).

St. Monday

The practice of celebrating St. Monday referred to the reluctance to work on Monday in extreme cases or where contract was binding, the temptation to sleep and extra hour on Monday morning instead of getting to work early. In some cases, people would actually toss a coin to decide whether or not work on Monday. Factories had to adjust to the celebration of St. Monday such that on Mondays, all that was done was work take-ins and give-outs.

The celebration of St. Monday was largely attributed to the heavy drinking that took part over the weekends such that the hangover effects were felt on Monday. Notably however, not all groups celebrated St. Monday. Notably among these groups were shoemakers. For those that celebrated St. Monday, it was observed that it had adverse economic effects. Firstly, men would drink up the money meant for the week leaving the family with no social amenities. Secondly, St. Monday affected productivity since Monday largely went to waste (Thompson, 1967).

New Values and Attitudes towards Time

Upon the introduction of time-oriented labor, realizations were made that some workers would show up at work and lazy around. It was also observed that some individuals were more productive in less time compared to others and hence exploitation among workers. Furthermore, people in charge of time could tamper with the clock just to go home early. On the part of the factory owners, they could exploit workers by giving too much work and short deadlines or make the working hours longer by tampering with the clock. What then the moralists decided to introduce was a concept called ‘time-thrift’. This is equivalent to time wastage and they associated it with poverty (Thompson, 1967).

Measures to address time wastage were put in place through concepts such as early rising, time observance and schooling. For instance, those that slept too long past early morning were associated with poverty in order to give everyone the sense of urgency that would make everyone race against time. In factories, time wastage was to be curbed by diligence reward rather than hours worked since some of it could have been spent idling. Children were to be taken to school to learn industry, frugality amongst other things. The bottom line is that moralists were against human leisure since this was viewed as a waste of time and people were made to chase time with concepts such as mortality (Thompson, 1967).

Reference

Thompson, E. P. (1967). Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism. libcom.org/files/timeworkandindustrialcapitalism.pdf.