Looking for Work? Or Looking for Workers? Days and Hours of Work in London Construction in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This paper provides new information and data on how work and pay actually operated for skilled and semiskilled men on large London construction projects in the early 1700s, and for the first time, offers detailed firm level evidence on the number of days per year worked by men. Construction workers' working days were bounded by structural factors of both supply and demand, men worked a far lower number of days than has been assumed until now. This has implications for our understanding of the 'industrious revolution', and industrialisation.

Economic growth, nutrition and living standards in 19th century Lima: new estimates of welfare ratios using a linear programming model

“…Several studies have assumed that laborers worked 250 days per year (Allen, 2001(Allen, , 2009. Other studies, however, have questioned this assumption (Stephenson, 2018). For Lima, I do not count with information on the number of working days per year.…”

Economic Growth and the Development of Real Wages: Swedish Construction Workers’ Wages in Comparative Perspective, 1831–1900

“…There is now a lively debate about the assumptions underlying Allen's calculations. Especially contested are his assumptions about the number of days worked per year, as well as the contribution of different family members to household income (Stephenson 2018a(Stephenson , 2018b; Humphries 2013; Humphries and Weisdorf 2019; Gary 2018). While these criticisms are highly relevant for the interpretation of absolute living standards, it is not yet clear what implications they have for comparisons of wage levels, since hitherto these assumptions have been the same across countries.…”

The affective origins of the Industrial Revolution

“…The thesis as presented relies on the given fact of the relative greater wealth of the English by the dawn of the eighteenth century. As Baumard acknowledges, although there is a rich literature that asserts this, it is not considered proven, and there is currently an increasing body of new research from all over Europe challenging its traditional foundationcomparative wage data (Humphries & Schneider 2019;López Losa 2016;Mocarelli 2019;Stephenson 2018). The focus on relative wealth and its psychological effects raises at least three important and unanswered questions about the occurrence of industrialisation.…”