Before the advent of the industrial revolution, workers were divided into two classes; the skilled tradesmen or craftsmen who had "learnt a specialized craft or 'mystery' by apprenticeship" and the unskilled labourers who "had only muscular strength to sell" (Burnett, The Annals of Labour, 1974).
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In medieval England, trade and crafts were controlled by the merchant and trade guilds and the emerging towns were controlled by the merchant guilds whose members' trade was the basis of their growth. The guilds jealously protected thier own interests and it was impossible to trade or practice a craft if not the member of the appropriate guild.
With few exceptions where large capital investment in machinery was required, such as milling, the basic industrial units was the cottage and the family, perhaps typified by the woollen industry. Apart from fulling the cloth, to which use many watermills were converted, all the stages of manufacture from carding to dying of the cloth were carried out by cottagers under the co-ordination of a wool merchant who arranged for materials and the processed products to be collected and delivered (the "putting-out" system).
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The advent of incresing mechanisation and the arrival of the "factory system" whereby workers worked fixed hours at the factory owner's premises blurred the traditional distinction between the labourer and the craftsman. Many of the factory workers were either unskilled labourers performing such tasks as moving materials or "machine minders", intimately familiar with the particular operation of his or her machine, usually tending to those tasks which could not be automated and able to exercise only limited judgement or discretion over its performance. For these machine minders, only a short period of training was required, rather than a long apprenticeship.
By the early years of the reign of Queen Victoria (1830-1901), the skilled craftsman still dominated the heirachy of labour which included large numbers of semi-skilled (often described as 'less skilled') and the unskilled, usuall known as 'labourers' but there was much shading between the groups with the sharp distinctions which had prevailed previously becomming blurred.
In 1913, Henry Ford (1863-1947) introduced "production lines" using moving assembly belts into his plants manufacturing his already famous "Model T" motorcar enabling an enormous increase in production at low cost and revolutionising manufacturing industry and the availability of manufactured goods to the masses.
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| James Hargreaves (c.1720-1778) |
| | The Lancashire weaver who invented the Spinning Jenny in 1764 allowing a single person to spin eight threads at once - the machine was developed so that up to 120 threads could be spun simultaneously and by the year of his death, some 20,000 of the machines were in use in Britain. |
The advent of steam-powered paper making machinery allowed the mass production of paper giving rise to the large number of office or white-collar workers.
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The Annals of Labour: Autobiographies of British Working Class People, 1820-1920
by John Burnett, publisher Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1974
Recommend a Book for this Page
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