Unskilled labour before the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution is seen as a major turning point in the management of labour, bringing about employment practices that gave structure and stability to the workforce. This paper provides evidence that employers were using hiring and retention strategies to stabilize the unskilled workforce at least a century before industrialization. We exploit the comprehensive employment records that survive from the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London (1672–1748) to reconstruct and analyse the employment history of over one thousand general building labourers, the benchmark category of unskilled workers for economic historians. We show that St. Paul’s was able to stabilize its workforce by establishing a core group of long-standing workers. Tenure was incentivized with more days of work each month on the site, priority in the queue for retention and rehiring in periods of low labour demand, and the opportunity to earn additional income as watchmen. These strategies reduced turnover and may have allowed the Cathedral to retain the most productive workers, reshaping our understanding of when modern employment practices emerged

Job tenure and unskilled workers before the Industrial Revolution: St Paul’s Cathedral 1672-1748

How were unskilled workers selected and hired in preindustrial labour markets? We exploit records from the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London (1672–1748) to analyze the hiring and employment history of over one thousand general building labourers, the benchmark category of ‘unskilled’ workers in long-run wage series. Despite volatile demand, St. Paul’s created a stable workforce by rewarding the tenure of longstanding workers. More senior workers received more days of work each month, preference when jobs were scarce, and the opportunity to earn additional income. We find the cathedral’s strategy consistent with reducing hiring frictions and turnover costs

Nominal wage patterns, monopsony, and labour market power in early modern England

Records of long-eighteenth-century English wage payments exhibit almost absolute nominal wage rigidity over many decades, alongside significant dispersion in wages paid for the same type of work in the same location. These features of preindustrial wage payments have been obscured by the construction of real wage series, which introduce variation in the deflator. In this paper we show that the standard explanations for wage movements in economic history cannot explain the nominal patterns observed in the data. We suggest that these wages indicate an imperfectly competitive labour market characterised by monopsony and employer power. We discuss the implications for the eighteenth-century British economy and research into long-run wages more generally