A friend recently loaned me Shoshana Zuboff's amazing book, In the Age of the Smart Machine. Providing a detailed and fascinating history of technology in the workplace, Zuboff's study provides a captivating analysis of the extensive changes worker's faced with the adoption of modern information technology.
I wanted to share this passage, which comes from an early chapter in the book. While a little off the book's central theme, it gives the reader an idea of how much workplace norms have changed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Clearly, the values and mores of what we now call the working class have little parallel in early societies.
One study of Birmingham, England, from 1766 to 1876, found that well into the nineteenth century, workers continued to celebrate Saint Monday – a weekly day of leisure spent in the alehouse enjoying drink, bar games, entertainments, “pugilism,” and animal fights. The tradition of Saint Monday followed from the bouts of weekend drinking and represented deeply held attitudes toward a potential surplus of wages: “The men … [are] regulated by the expense of their families, and their necessities; it is well known that they will not go further than necessity prompts them."
The industrial entrepreneurs tried, usually without success, to prohibit the observance of Monday as a holiday. Boulton and Watt’s first enterprise foundered on the continual drunkenness of their work force. The owner of a button-making factory decided that although he would not be able to control his workers, he would make an effort to train his apprentices in more industrious work habits. His diary records his frustration: “This evening Edward Lingard’s misconduct in going to the Public House in the afternoon for drink, contrary to my inclination and notwithstanding I had forbidden him from it only yesterday – this I say, and meeting him on his way back, induced me to hastily strike him. With which my middle finger was so stunned as to give me much pain.” In addition to the time lost through observing Monday as a holiday, harvest time and other traditional feast days kept workers away. In 1776, the famous Josiah Wedgwood, who pioneered new techniques of pottery production and business management, wrote to a colleague: “Our men have been at play 7 days this week, it being Burlem Wakes. I have rough’d and smoothed them over, & promised them a long Xmas, but I know it is all in vain, for Wakes must be observed though the World was to end with them.”
Nineteenth-century American industrialists faced a similar set of problems when it came to honing the worker’s body as an instrument of production. The owner of a Pennsylvania ironworks complained of frequent “frolicking” that sometimes lasted for days, along with hunting, harvesting, wedding parties, and holiday celebrations. One manufacturer filled his diary with these notes: “All hands drunk; Jacob Ventling hunting; molders all agree to quit work and went to the beach. Peter Cox very drunk and gone to bed… Edward Rutter off a-drinking. It was reported that he got drunk on cheese.” In 1817, a Medford shipbuilder refused his men grog privileges, and they all quit. The ship’s carpenter in one New York Shipyard describes the typical work-day: cakes and pastries in the early morning and again in the late morning, a trip to the grog shop by eleven for whiskey, a big lunch at half past three, a visit from the candyman at five, and supper, ending the work day, at sundown. He recalled one worker who left for grog ten times a day. A cigar manufacturer complained that his men worked no more than two or three hours a day; the rest of the time was spent in the beer saloon, playing pinochle. Coopers were famous for a four-day work wee; and the potters in Trenton, New Jersey, immigrants from Staffordshire, were known to work in “great bursts of activity” and then lay off for several days.
