Men at work. Wages and industriousness in southern Sweden 1500–1850

Abstract

In his classic works on the industrious revolution, Jan de Vries argues that demand for new consumer goods trigged eighteenth century Europeans to work more. This implies that industrious behaviour and new consumption patterns were two parallel and interdependent processes that preceded the industrial revolution. However, there is an alternative explanation for any increase in labour output on household level, namely that the labourers were forced to work more to meet ends. An indication of this could be that day labourers' relative wages decreased over time. In this article, we investigate this by studying wages from annual and casual labour in southern Sweden and compare their levels with consumption baskets.

Women's work and wages in the sixteenth century and Sweden's position in the ‘little divergence’

“…Our study shows that Gary's findings of high female relative pay in unskilled casual work extended also to employees on yearly contracts. According to Gary, women's labour was high in demand in the late sixteenth century in the regions of her study (Stockholm, Kalmar, and Malmö, at the time a Danish town), and this labour was remunerated on par with men in the same sector. However, women's day wages fell in relation to men's from the early seventeenth century onwards, due to a fall in demand.…”

Work and earning in the nineteenth century: Townley Colliery as a case study

“…Considering low-skilled workers employed by cities, manors, and churches in the period 1500 to 1850, they compare the wages of casual and annual workers in southern Swedenfinding that while both groups saw variable year-on-year income, casual workers required relatively fewer (150-200) days of work to match the income of an annually employed worker until the 'mid-to-late eighteenth century' (when rising prices and stagnant wage rates led to a reversal of this situation), before days required declined back to mid-eighteenth century levels by the 1840s. 27 This type of approach is undoubtedly an improvement on the 'ahistorical and arbitrary guesstimate' of 250 days per year, but there are still important caveats. 28 First, it is somewhat dependent on the assumption that workers were able to directly compare the relative labour and pay of annual and day contracts, and possessed the market power to resist employer demands should a discrepancy appear between the two.…”

The evolution of wages in early modern Normandy (1600–1850)

“…Gará-Zúñiga and Lòpez Losa 2021; Ridolfi 2019; Rota and Weisdorf 2020; Stephenson 2018). Gary and Olsson (2020), and Rota and Weisdorf (2021) instead address this question by building wage-series based on payments made to labourers with fixed annual contracts in the countryside. This paper contributes to the literature in several ways.…”