Handbook Global History of Work

Karin Hofmeester, Marcel van der Linden, Karin Hofmeester, Marcel van der Linden

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110424706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Referencia histórica

Coffee from East Africa, wine from California, chocolate from the Ivory Coast - all those every day products are based on labour, often produced under appalling conditions, but always involving the combination of various work processes we are often not aware of.

What is the day-to-day reality for workers in various parts of the world, and how was it in the past? How do they work today, and how did they work in the past? These and many other questions comprise the field of the global history of work – a young discipline that is introduced with this handbook.

In 8 thematic chapters, this book discusses these aspects of work in a global and long term perspective, paying attention to several kinds of work. Convict labour, slave and wage labour, labour migration, and workers of the textile industry, but also workers' organisation, strikes, and motivations for work are part of this first handbook of global labour history, written by the most renowned scholars of the profession.

Karin Hofmeester and Marcel van der Linden

1.Introduction

The realization that we all live in the same world and that distant regions are interconnected has become increasingly common in recent times. Communication satellites, the Internet, and mobile phones are daily reminders of this. But our supermarkets, too, are proof: coffee from Central America, Vietnam, Indonesia, East Africa; wine from Chile, California, Australia, South Africa, and Italy. But what we often fail to realize is that all these products are based on labour. Somewhere in the world, miners are extracting from the earth the copper, iridium, and coltan that are required to manufacture our mobile phones. Farmers and farm labourers are cultivating and producing the many types of food and drink we consume. Indeed, numerous consumer products involve the combination of disparate work processes. A simple pair of jeans, for example, is the result of a global division of labour: the soft cotton for the pockets might come from Benin, the harder cotton for the jeans themselves from Pakistan, zinc for the zipper from Australia, the blue dye from a German chemical plant, with the whole garment being finally assembled in a low-wage country – perhaps Tunisia.

The global economy is increasingly reliant on collaboration among workers who do not know each other and who are not even aware of each other’s existence. Very occasionally we are given a glimpse of that interconnectedness, as in 2013 when the collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh gave us a chilling reminder that much clothing is produced in appalling conditions by women and children – and men of course – in poor countries. Generally, however, we do not dwell on such global connections, but more and more historians nowadays want to understand them. What is the day-today reality for workers in various parts of the world, and how was it in the past? Under what conditions do they work today and how did they work in the past? What is their remuneration for their backbreaking labour? What did they receive in the past? How can we characterize past and present relationships between men, women, and children? Did workers ever protest? If so, how did they express their disaffection? These and many other questions comprise the field of the global history of work – a young discipline that we should like to introduce with this handbook.

Of course, a great deal of research has already been carried out into the history of work – the roots of labour history go back to the nineteenth century.1 However, earlier studies usually had clear limitations using a very restricted definition of “work”. For example, the cleaning and cooking carried out by housewives was generally not regarded as work, nor were “ignoble” activities such as prostitution. And even those studies that ventured beyond Europe tended to focus only on Europe’s colonies or former settler colonies in the Americas, or perhaps Australia. There, too, was the same tendency to study only the “respectable” work of artisans and wage earners, as if the labour of the enslaved and other unfree labour did not count. But as George Orwell observed just before the Second World War: “All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white skin is always very conspicuous. In northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances are that you don’t even see him. I have noticed this again and again.”2 Most historians and social scientists have been guilty of the same omission.

Only in recent decades has a slightly wider audience realized that the labour of housewives, domestic servants, slaves, and others is important and deserves attention, and that we should also look at the Global South. This growing awareness has multiple causes. One is the process of decolonization that began in the late 1940s. Often, African and Asian historians wanting to write the history of their own countries could not escape the realization that unfree labour had played a vital role in it. At the same time, they discovered that the “national” historiography that predominated in Europe and North America was impossible in former colonial territories since their history was inextricably linked with that of the colonial metropoles. A second key factor was the wave of feminism that spread across much of the world from the late 1960s and which demonstrated convincingly that housewives, too, worked, even if they received no pay in return. An extensive debate about the role of women ensued, and continued into the 1980s. A third factor has been the trend towards globalization, which has gained increasing momentum over the past thirty or forty years. Gradually and inevitably there emerged the realization that we live in one world, and that the vicissitudes of even the most varied individuals are interrelated. And all these insights have left their mark on the social and economic historiography of recent years.

Work and labour relations

Work is an essential element of any human society. But what is work? It can be difficult to see whether some particular activity as such constitutes “work”. Let us suppose we observe a man leaving his house to chop wood. He might be collecting firewood in order to cook food. Or perhaps he wants to light a fire in his hearth. Or, it might be that something else is going on: perhaps he is angry about something and is venting his frustration. Is he a boxer, say, getting fit for his next bout?3 To make the correct interpretation of what we see, we must know not only the direct purpose of the act (here, the chopping of wood), but also the indirect purpose – why is the wood being chopped? A man venting his anger by going to chop wood is not working, but a man chopping firewood for the kitchen certainly is. Some indirect purposes result in work, but others do not.

A second difficulty is that work can take on myriad different forms, and it is not always easy to find a common denominator. There is heavy physical labour such as that performed by the rickshaw driver, miner, or navvy; there is the highly skilled work of the software engineer or nuclear physicist; there is the physically intimate work performed by nurses – and prostitutes. Then there is the stultifying work of the assembly line, or the symbolic work of the shaman or priest; there is paid work, and there is unpaid work. What all these activities have in common is that their purpose is to a great degree indirect: the production of goods or services deemed useful by people, or at least by some people. In that sense work is not play because a game has a purpose in itself; it is played for its own sake. On the other hand the purpose of work transcends the work itself. Its object is to produce goods or services that can be used by either the worker himself/herself or by someone else. Adam Smith put it like this: “Consumption is the sole end and object of all production.”4 Of course, not everyone will find all goods and services equally useful. Some find the manufacture of fur coats useful, others do not. Usefulness is therefore always subjective. But as soon as there are individuals who require a particular good or service, the production of that good or service will constitute work.

Work as a labour process comprises four elements: (i) the effort of workers in converting their physical and mental energies into productive activity; (ii) the means to do so (tools, machines, etc.); (iii) the objects they process (change, move); and (iv) the result of their efforts, the product. Coal miners, for example, drill, blast, and set props. To do so they need lamps, drills, dynamite, and pit props to enable them to mine the seams for the coal that is their product. However, in the service sector those four elements are not always clearly distinguishable. The product of the work of, say, a waitress or a janitor is largely what they do.

Ultimately, all human production of goods and services is based on just two resources: nature and human labour. The economist Alfred Marshall rightly noted that, “In a sense there are only two agents of production, nature and man. […] If the character and powers of nature and of man be given, the growth of wealth and knowledge and organization follow from them as effect from cause.”5 All other so-called factors of production (capital, organization, etc.) are ultimately the product of interactions between human beings and their physical and biological environment. And humans, too, are, of course, physical and biological beings. All elements of the work process therefore comprise both a natural and a social aspect:

In this handbook, more attention is paid to the social aspect than to the natural aspect. Nonetheless, it is important to realize that work is both made possible and constrained by physiological, biological, and environmental factors.

In the past, all manner of unpaid activities were regarded as work. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 (c. 1597), the Prince of Wales says of the Earl of Northumberland: “he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife, ‘Fie upon this quiet life! I want work’”.6 The concept of “work” subsequently took on a narrower meaning.

The specialization of work to paid employment is the result of capitalist productive relations. To be in work or out of work was to be in a definite relationship with some other who had control of the means of productive effort. Work then partly shifted from the productive effort itself to the predominant social relationship. It is only in this sense that a woman running a house and bringing up children can be said to be not working.7

The global history of work is therefore in effect a reversion to a broader interpretation of work, and looks at more than work done simply for payment.

The present handbook frequently refers to labour relations. Labour relations define for whom or with whom one works, and under what rules. Those rules, implicit or explicit, written or unwritten, determine the type of work, type and amount of remuneration, working hours, degrees of physical and psychological strain, and the degree of freedom and autonomy associated with the work.

Global history

Work takes on thousands of different forms. Even the same type of work, for example, weaving cotton or loading a ship, might vary greatly from place to place and from time to time. Moreover, work is embedded in dozens of different labour relations, which in turn continuously change. Understanding the overwhelming range of variation and the historical logic underlying that change is a task far beyond the capacity of individual researchers. No single individual understands enough languages nor can read enough documents and secondary literature to be able to envisage everything of the subject. So teamwork is essential. There are many obstacles to developing a global approach, though some are simply practical. In Thailand, for instance, large quantities of archival material were destroyed when the capital, Ayutthaya, was razed to the ground by Burmese troops in 1767. Archives elsewhere might exist, but in poor condition because of atmospheric pollution, the destructive activities of insects, or adverse weather conditions.

More important, however, are probably the epistemological difficulties. The past twenty or thirty years have seen challenges to the two main weaknesses of traditional historiography, namely methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism.8 Methodological nationalism – not to be confused with political nationalism – links society and state, and methodological nationalists are the victims of two important intellectual errors. First, they normalize the nation state. What we mean by that is that even though they recognize that nation states flourished only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they consider them to be the basic analytical unit of historical research. They then continue to interpret traditional history as the prehistory of the later nation state and consider cross-border or border-subverting processes as distractions from the “pure” model. So in fact we are dealing with a teleology. Secondly, they postulate a direct link between “societies” and “nation states”. Societies are seen as co-extensive with national borders, in the sense that one may talk about a French, Japanese, or Nigerian society. It seems more logical, however, to proceed from the premise that all people who influence one another’s social lives belong to the same society. “Society” then becomes a border-crossing entity in which, by reason of migration, commodity flows, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Regions
• 3. Types of Work
• 4. Labour Relations
• 5. Attitudes To Work
• 6. Labour Migration
• 7. Work Incentives and Forms of Supervision
• 8. Organization and Resistance
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Subject Index
• Index of Names