Mrs Na van Assendelft van Wijck-Meijer washes her children in the tub in front of her house, Lindenstraat, Amsterdam, 1951.
Today, most people on this planet spend more than half of their waking hours working, including travelling between the workplace and home; and while asleep they recover from the fatigues of their work. Seen that way, the story of work is to a great extent the history of humankind. But what exactly do we mean by work?
The main problem with the countless definitions of work and labour is their one-sidedness. Generally, they emphasize some forms of work while neglecting others. For example, women’s work is often overlooked compared to men’s, work outside the factory walls compared to that going on inside them, intellectual work measured against manual work, work in the home (when it is recognized at all) contrasted with work outside it (also known as the ‘reproductive–productive’ contradiction).
And it is really not simple to come up with a definition of work for a book such as this with the ambition to cover the whole of world history. A good starting point is the broad definition of work by US sociologists (and father and son) Charles and Chris Tilly:1
Work includes any human effort adding use value to goods and services. However much their performers may enjoy or loathe the effort, conversation, song, decoration, pornography, table setting, gardening, housecleaning, and repair of broken toys, all involve work to the extent that they increase satisfactions their consumers gain from them. Prior to the twentieth century, a vast majority of the world’s workers performed the bulk of their work in other settings than salaried jobs as we know them today. Even today, over the world as a whole, most work takes place outside of regular jobs. Only a prejudice bred by Western capitalism and its industrial labor markets fixes on strenuous effort expended for money payment outside the home as ‘real work’, relegating other efforts to amusement, crime and mere housekeeping.2
The great merit of this definition is that it is explicitly not limited to market-related activities. It is worth reiterating the attention the Tillys draw to housekeeping as real work: ‘Despite the rise of takeouts, fast foods, and restaurant eating, unpaid preparation of meals probably constitutes the largest single block of time among all types of work, paid or unpaid, that today’s Americans do.’ If this is true for the birthplace of the Big Mac and Kentucky Fried Chicken, then we can safely apply this observation to the rest of the world and to human history as a whole.3
The problem with such universal definitions is that it is never entirely clear which human pursuits cannot be defined as labour. The Tillys explicitly exclude three types of activities from their definition: ‘purely destructive, expressive, or consumptive acts’.4 They regard purely destructive labour as anti-work, since it does not add use value, rather it deprives commodities of value. This would seem to exclude many or all of the activities of, say, soldiering, due to the undeniably destructive aspects of this profession; but military craftsmanship is work, however, not only because, in practice, daily barrack life is non-destructive, but also because the intention of much, if not all, conscious destruction is to add value to other commodities and services.5 By precluding pure expression and consumption, the Tillys are excluding those activities that, in principle, have no use value for anyone other than the producer himself. Their reasoning is sound. Even the broadest definition of use value does not include, for example, ‘solitary weightlifting pursued solely for personal gratification’. This is in contrast to ‘weightlifting for the pleasure of sports fans’. With the addition of this social criterion, only a handful of activities fall outside of the Tillys’ definition – eating, drinking and sleeping (collectively referred to as ‘recuperation’) as a means for every person, and therefore every producer, to sustain his mechanism. I regard all human pursuits apart from free time or leisure as work.
A brief note about leisure.6 A mid-twentieth-century series of studies found that work, or activities directly related to work, represented 25–30 per cent of men’s time (in wage labour and commuting), 40 per cent of housewives’ time, and 50 per cent of the time of mothers with a paid job, while sleeping accounted for a third and eating and personal care a tenth of all individuals’ time. The hours remaining for leisure time thus varied from around 30 per cent for wage workers (mostly men) to around 15 per cent for housewives, and a little over 5 per cent for mothers with a paid job.7 Yet even that time was not necessarily free. The studies found that both men and women spent the majority of their free time engaged in social obligations – club membership, volunteering, paying visits – which, though pleasurable, are seen as obligations. Interestingly, research among indigenous Ecuadorians reveals differences with European ideas about obligations and leisure: ‘They work steadily when necessary but not in the Western tempo . . . All their time is used, if not in work then in other “structured activities”. However, in their non-work time . . . they often enjoy drinking and hilarity. The Indian works and saves as if weddings, Christenings, birthdays and fiestas were the main reason for living. . . . They do not regard such fun-making with the same attitudes that Westerners have for leisure.’8
American sociologist Nels Anderson believed that, even in the industrialized world, ‘non-work obligations’ are distinct from leisure: ‘It is in performing such obligations that one gets his status as a good spouse, good parent, good neighbor, good citizen, good friend and so on, all roles in which status must be earned, and the effort may be highly satisfying. The effort may be equally as satisfying as leisure activity.’9 So, although the Tillys would perhaps place these types of social obligations under their definition of work, I don’t want to go that far. We are certainly not talking here about time that one can fill at will. For the vast majority of history, free time consisted of brief play and amusement and, for the happy few, of travelling for pleasure (the so-called grand tour), holidays and hobbies; that is to say, activities carried out purely for pleasure and at one’s own expense.10 The ordinary man or woman in the West only came to experience such things in the course of the twentieth century. To this day, these kinds of activities are never, or rarely, an option for large parts of the global population.
We have strongly held views about the role that work plays in our lives – whether it be our preference for self-employment or salaried work, our ideas about typically male or female work, or what we believe to be fair remuneration for the tasks we perform. These views have developed over time, based on our collective work experiences and, ultimately, they originate from the beginning of our existence as human beings.
We define work not only according to our individual efforts – the pain in our back, the sweat on our brow or our mental fatigue – but also according to those with whom, for whom, or even despite whom, we work. People are not solitary islanders: even Robinson Crusoe found his Friday (and swiftly put him to work as his servant). Human relationships are central to work and will be a major emphasis of this book. Looking at work’s long and global history we can see recurring patterns in the way principles of work are ingrained in our intimate social interactions, the ways in which we enjoy or spend the fruits of our labour, and what work means and has meant to us. Are we forced to work for someone else or do we have a choice? What is the reward for our labour and who determines what it should be? Can we put up with pay gaps? Do we work together within a household or with others outside it? Who will take care of us when we cannot or can no longer work? In so many ways work defines us socially. Consequently, the pursuit of fair compensation (via private and collective strategies) is inherent to the social character of work.
From prehistory until today, a number of solutions have been devised for organizing work. Until some 12,000 years ago – that is, for 98 per cent of the history of humankind and until the ‘invention’ of farming – work was divided among small communities consisting of only a few households. In close mutual cooperation, they collected their food and shared the fruits of their labour among themselves based on reciprocity. We can call these reciprocal labour relations11 between members of a few households that collaborated in bands of hunter-gatherers internal – in contrast to later, external labour relations outside the household or bands of households.
The food surpluses of agrarian societies made large-scale division of labour possible, resulting, after thousands of years, in the earliest cities with specialist division of labour and, ultimately, 5,000 years ago, in the first states. In these more complex societies, consisting of hundreds or thousands of households, other external labour relations now emerged alongside reciprocal labour relations. These can be broken down into self-employment and tributary labour – complemented later, after the emergence of markets, by free wage labour, slavery and employership. From that moment, human history can essentially be viewed as an eclectic mix of a handful of different labour relations that existed subsequent to, alongside and in competition with each other.
We have become much more aware of this eclectic mix since the demise of the Soviet Union, when the state socialism or command communism alternative in Eastern Europe declared itself bankrupt – when also, and not coincidentally, intense globalization simultaneously arose. China, Africa and pre-Columbian America all have their own fascinating histories of work. Taken together, these histories indicate much more than any simple, steady line of development from hunter-gatherers to the slaves of antiquity, the serfs of the Middle Ages, the farmers and artisans driven into the factories, via a detour to communism (or not), and, more than 100 million concentration camp labourers later, to the here and now.
Looking at work across time and space enables us to trace the complexity of work’s story. (See ‘A note on histories, methods and theories of work’, pp. xiii–xvii, for the different histories of work and labour relations and a survey of the theoretical field.) Aside from the market economy that we now take for granted are revealed arrangements based on reciprocal relations (founded by our hunter-gatherer ancestors yet still familiar to today’s households) and tributary redistribution societies. We can see recurrences in history: large-scale wage labour, slave labour, self-employment, even market economies themselves have appeared multiple times, in various parts of the world, and (sometimes) vanished again. These in turn have given rise to very different relations between people and work, and wildly fluctuating remuneration – not always due to the market, or those in power, but also because of wage workers’ individual or collective actions in pursuing fair compensation for work done, addressing – or exacerbating – social inequality.
The building blocks of such fundamental structural change in work’s history are the experiences and behaviours of the individual working man and woman. Generally, people do not work alone and certainly not only for themselves. In the first place, every individual spends the largest part of his life working within or for a family or household, defined here simply as a group of relatives, who pool their incomes and who, as a rule, live and eat together. The activities of all members can thus be seen as a whole.12 The members coordinate their activities, and, to that end, we can speak of a group strategy – a ‘household living strategy’.13 This domestic arrangement involves the division of tasks according to skills, gender, age, and a marriage strategy. Taking the idea of the individual person as the core, we can distinguish a first shell – the household – around an individual.
Furthermore, members of different households work together in larger social groups, called polities – the second shell. For a long time, these were small, like the bands of hunter-gatherers, but these bands also operated within a larger entity, a group of bands in which, for example, marriage partners were exchanged, necessary for genetic diversity. Later, following the Neolithic Revolution, (city) states became viable. The exchange of goods and services could be organized via tributary redistribution within these complex polities, such as in Ancient Egypt or in the Inca Empire, but gradually also through markets.14 Polities allowing markets establish what their rules of play are, but can also be held hostage by certain players in this market.15 Then, fickle power relations are possible between actors, who at times lean more on the polity, at others, more on the market.
People work with and for others. This suggests horizontal and vertical labour relations within and beyond the household. Horizontal labour relations emerge from working together with equals or co-workers. Vertical labour relations define who we work for and under what rules. These rules (implicit or explicit, written or unwritten) determine the type of work, the type and amount of remuneration, working hours, degrees of physical and psychological strain, as well as degrees of freedom and autonomy.16
By making a distinction between individuals, households, polities and the market, vertical labour relations in particular can be mapped: who determines which work is to be done and under what rules and conditions? That is the way we usually talk about work relationships and, thus, all members of a given society can be classified by asking the following straightforward questions: are they not working yet or can they no longer work? Do they have so much money that they do not have to work at all? Do they work primarily in a household or small band-like unit; in a tributary-redistributive society in the past where everyone’s efforts were focused on the god and his temple; or mainly via the market? And, if via the market, either as a small independent enterprise, as an entrepreneur, as a wage worker, or as a slave?
The sum of all these labour relations is what characterizes a society – so we can speak of hunting-gathering, tributary-redistributive or of market polities.
One of the limitations of labour history to date is that labour relations are mainly restricted to vertical oppositions within market societies – between employee and employer, slave and slaveowner, citizen and state. Certainly, this is important and therefore this story will encompass trade unions, strikes, (written and unwritten) employment contracts, as well as work incentives, the ways in which an employer can encourage his workers and even his slaves to perform more and better. Such incentives are, as the Tillys rightly point out, never wholly about money: workers are never motivated solely by wages. To the reward of compensation they add, alliteratively, commitment and coercion to the mix.17 All three can be used, to different degrees, to talk about anyone who performs work. But although the power relations between employer and employee (free or not) are real and important, the behaviour of a working person is explained by more than just this type of subordination. In all known societies, as a rule, people work together with others (members of the same household, fellow wage workers, fellow slaves and fellow forced labourers) and their mutual, horizontal, relationships are an intrinsic part of labour history.
A wide variety of mutual cooperation and opposition is possible, depending on some form of ‘contract’. The foundation is the generally silent contract between household members working together – unpaid caring work, or labouring on the family farm. Most readers now will have an individual work contract, but still will have to deal on a daily basis with colleagues in a more or less pleasant way. This was not so different in the past, though there we also often encounter groups of workers who hired themselves out and received piecework pay via cooperative subcontracting.18 The equally subcontracted but not-at-all cooperative ‘sweating’ industry continues to demonstrate how abusive such relations can be, yet slaves also worked together and free and unfree workers could cooperate at the same job. All such horizontal work relationships could make life easy or difficult for workers; it is not only dependent on their owner and boss.
In short, both horizontal cooperation and vertical subordination are key elements in a comprehensive history of work and will be a major theme of this book.19 The power resources in vertical labour relations, for example those of master versus servant, or plantation owner versus slave, are greater because, ultimately, they can be enforced through the polity. But that does not mean that in everyday practice only vertical labour relations can make or break the pleasure in work.
The relation between effort and remuneration is also a key factor in linking individual working experience with structural change. In the case of hunter-gatherers, the group works together and the yield is, in principle, equally distributed among members; this would not have been much different among the earliest farmers (even until 1,000 years ago in Africa). Ultimately, however, agriculture could yield such large surpluses that some members of the group could specialize in non-agricultural crafts, and a few were then able to appropriate a larger proportion for themselves. Moreover, the group could now also become so large that these aggrandizers took on the necessary leadership role.
The distribution of surpluses would take a special form in the emerging cities and city leagues. In these complex societies, formal redistribution systems arose, for example around a temple. All surpluses belonged, in theory, to the temple gods and their servants – that is to say, to the elite, among whom the priests then divided the total. There were, of course, differences in this redistribution, depending on the presumed importance of households in the polity. In such theocratic societies, priests were, after all, more important than farmers. Thus, the uneven redistribution of communal revenue became institutionalized.
In the states – that is, the polities – that emerged from city leagues, elites became increasingly powerful, internally and externally. Internally, they could now claim for the state not only all revenues but also the means of production and, in exchange for remuneration, the services of non-property-owning citizens (for example, as professional soldiers). At the same time, citizens could work for themselves and, in addition, traders and other professionals could acquire production resources and, ultimately, they could also employ wage workers. Externally, the polity could acquire prisoners of war and have them work as slaves. Once available as a production resource, these enslaved and their descendants could also be acquired and put to work by private individuals. In addition to land and goods markets, this also created slave and labour markets.
Given the frequent mismatch since the emergence of states between effort and remuneration – in short, social inequality – a key question is how the victims (and sometimes compassionate outsiders) reacted. After all, the common heritage of mankind stems from the much more egalitarian work relations among hunter-gatherers, which, it cannot be repeated enough, covers 98 per cent of our human history. As will be elaborated in more detail in Chapter 1, the principle of reciprocity is at the basis of human work relations. The many subsequent deviations from this, both in tributary-redistributive and market polities, made ideological adjustments necessary to reconcile working people with the new situation of inequality. Or, they are strived for at least. The alternative, after all, is the destabilization of a polity.20 In this book we will see individual and collective attempts to deal with this problem.
Individual attempts at improving working conditions (or mitigating or averting a deterioration) by entertaining good relations with the boss or his aides are the rule. Similar behaviour applies to the self-employed and their customers. Failing that come attempts to find a new boss (or for that matter customers), locally or by migration.21 But working people can also choose other solutions. In practice, this is done by combining different labour relations over time, rather than with a sudden change of strategy. Think of the cottage industry, in which peasants combined agricultural work with weaving cloth. The so-called proletarianization of peasants who became factory workers took many generations, sometimes up to ten. Even slaves, for instance in the Roman Empire and in nineteenth-century Brazil, could try to save their earnings and buy their freedom. This way, they might acquire freedom for themselves or their offspring and continue independently as smallholders or artisans. Russian serfs worked for themselves, on top of enforced work for their landlord, but, in many cases, added to their income by wage work in the city.
Collective power, on the other hand, is harnessed through the use of strikes, mutual benefit societies and unions. The manifold options for individuals to strive for improvements in their work and remuneration (or to prevent deterioration) apply also to collective strategies. Wage workers can join a strike or not, stay neutral or cross the picket line. Slaves may abscond, make the best of their situation, start a rebellion or join forces to repel it.
All known labour relations have resulted from these strategies and their various inversions and combinations. Subsequent shifts in the directions of, first, increasingly dominant slavery and second, wage labour, are obviously powered by states. States can, for example, impose slavery, but they can also abolish it again. They can make free wage labour or employer and independent entrepreneurship possible through legislation and regulation, but they can also expunge it, as was the case with communist revolutions in various countries.
Distinguishing between the shifts initiated by the state and those by working people is useful in terms of filleting work’s history, and also lends workers an essential agency. However, it also veils the connection between the states and citizens. Polities cannot change the rules with impunity and workers cannot go against polities unsanctioned. The binding force is the prevailing system of rules and ideas about work and labour relations, what we could call the role of work ideology as a binding force in society.
This book is structured chronologically and thematically and addresses common themes that recur, to a greater or lesser extent, in each period, of which I distinguish six. The first is by far the longest, from the emergence of Homo sapiens (who, based on genetic calculations, split off from Neanderthals 700,000 years ago) to the Neolithic or agricultural revolution. Initially, and this must be our starting point, there was essentially no distinction between human and animal attempts to survive, but through the development of human speech and thus new forms of communication, new forms of collaboration grew. The individual lived within a household, households formed bands, and bands exchanged individuals. All work took place within these units.
Reciprocity would have long been the rule with the Neolithic Revolution from roughly 12,000 years ago. Nevertheless, it offered increased opportunities for obtaining and hoarding food, and thus for the division of labour, which may have led to greater enrichment of some households and, ultimately, to disparities between households. Here, the seed was sown for inequality; alongside cooperation, subordination was now being created too. The differences, however, were still small in the second period distinguished in this book, and Africa demonstrates that there is no causal link between the agricultural revolution and social inequality.
Following the emergence of cities, first in Mesopotamia some 7,000 years ago – extremely late in the evolution of Homo sapiens – and a little later in China and India, the division of labour between urban and rural areas and among urban residents was possible. The emergence of city leagues and states from 3000 BCE strengthened this trend. This third period created the full spectrum of labour relations as we have known it ever since. Alongside individuals and households, polities with their institutions became indispensable, starting with the polity (city, temple or state), which collected the surplus production, for example for the god, and then redistributed it (tributary-redistributive labour, as in Ancient Egypt and pre-Columbian America). In the first states, four new types of labour relations appeared: free wage labour, slavery and self-employment (including by tenants), and, finally, employership. From this point, human history can be seen as a competition between different labour relations, with fluctuating relationships between cooperation and subordination. This determines the classification in the fourth, fifth and sixth periods.
Around 500 BCE, a renewal in human transactions took place in three locations in the world, with far-reaching consequences for the already existing labour relations: the advent of currencies. This ‘invention’, and especially that of small coins for daily use (deep monetization), facilitated the expansion of market transactions, especially the payment of wages and spending these wages on purchasing daily food and craft products from the self-employed. Given that these forms of work have become so important, if not self-evident, today, a separate chapter has been devoted to those parts of the world where large-scale wage labour and monetary wage payments developed. Indeed, they were able to thrive in long-term successful (urbanized) states where consolidation was at least as important as expansion and aggression. Examples of this can be found in various parts of Eurasia between 500 BCE and 1500 CE. This forms the fourth period: in particular, the Persian–Greek–Roman–Byzantine–Arab sequence in the west of Eurasia, the Mauryas and successors in South Asia and the Han and Song dynasties in China, as compared with state formation elsewhere, without wage labour, especially in Africa and the Americas.
Some states were so successful, also and especially economically, that they expanded globally in what I categorize as the fifth period, roughly 1500–1800. This was the time of ‘globalization’, in the current sense of the word.22 In these centuries, competition between political entities took such forms that the organization of labour in the different parts of the world began to vary widely. To mention the most striking examples: the expansion of free labour in Western Europe with new forms of collaboration, and, conversely, new forms of subordination in the guise of serfdom in Eastern Europe and slavery in Africa and the Americas, but also in South and South East Asia. At the same time, however, both in East Asia and in Western Europe, and apparently independently of each other, there was an intensification of the labour of peasant households with an increase in women’s labour, the so-called Industrious Revolution.
The sixth and last period (thematically divided between Chapters 6 and 7) starts with the Industrial Revolution. The division of work and skills created innumerable new occupations, and subsequently eradicated many others. Robotization is the phase we live in now. This also led, albeit in fits and starts, to a major shift in labour relations. Slowly but surely, the importance for the market of domestic, independent and somewhat faster, unfree labour decreased. This was heralded by the abolition of slavery in Haiti, of the transatlantic slave trade and of serfdom in Eastern Europe, culminating in the establishment of the International Labour Organization (hereafter, ILO) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The shifts in labour relations outlined in this book (see Figure 1), and certainly the global convergence of labour relations in the last two centuries, should not be seen as a natural phenomenon, but primarily as the result of individual and collective strategies and actions by working people. Consequently, cooperation and subordination regained some balance. This is the history of the labour movement, of workers’ parties and of the welfare state – the core of classical labour history. And, moreover, not only did global labour relations converge but also, significantly, labour relations between men and women.
However, as the recent history of Western Europe, Russia and China teaches us, as well as the current global economic crisis, this is not a simple, unilinear development. At the same time as the growth of global prosperity, in particular since the Second World War, inequality between workers has increased. The book concludes by reflecting on future developments. What can longer-term historical patterns underlying current concerns about pressing issues such as migration, robotization and social equality tell us about where work is taking us? How will our essential need to work manifest itself in a fast-changing world? Can we choose what our working lives will look like next?
This book suggests that there are answers to these questions. The long-term experience of humankind shows not only that work is necessary for our survival – even in our era of robotization. Work is more than that: the sense of fulfilment it brings makes it indispensable for our self-esteem and the regard of our peers. The history of humankind may be conceived as straddling two fundamental tensions: our evolutionary history and our existence as hunter-gatherers until a few thousand years ago determines our basic striving towards fair compensation for our efforts, yet the division of work in more complex societies easily occasions inequality. The story of work makes clear that strong ideologies defending inequality may be lastingly successful, yet globalization points in another direction. Despite the nadirs of unfair remuneration of the last centuries, the universal appeal of fairness seems to be prevailing now. Bringing it into practice without succumbing to the lure of utopias of sorts is the difficult task ahead.
Figure 1. The shifts in labour relations outlined in this book.