Abstract
Attitudes toward employment changed across time and place. A variety of labor institutions existed. The relationship between employers and workers raised many ethical issues. There was often an element of coercion within such relationships. What forms of negative incentives, such as physical punishment, were permissible? All too often, employers saw workers as objects to be used. What duties did employers owe their workers and vice versa? The rise of factories in the eighteenth century created new tensions between employers and workers.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Arthur C. Allyn, Jr., owner of the Chicago White Sox, said, “The players, it is true, either have to sign a contract with us or not at all, but they do have the privilege of not at all” (U.S. Congress, Senate 1965, 144).
- 2.
Finland recently has announced to implement a basic income for all citizens (Worstall 2015, no page numbers).
- 3.
Paul Seabright described an experiment where “workers” and “employers” demonstrated reciprocity. The workers who were employed by generous employers were more likely to invest in learning to do their jobs better (Seabright 2004, 55–56).
- 4.
See Porter for a description of English apprenticeship relationships, good and bad (1982, 100–106).
- 5.
The ghosts of St. Monday persists; a Google search of “buying cars made on Mondays” reveals a range of opinions but precious few facts.
- 6.
- 7.
The New York Times reported that fast food franchisees sign agreements prohibiting them from poaching workers from other franchises within the same chain (Abrams, September 28, 2017, B1 and B3).
- 8.
“Regulations to Be Observed in the Lewiston Mills,” circa 1867, posted at http://invention.smithsonian.org/centerpieces/whole_cloth/u2ei/u2images/act9/New_rules.html, viewed May 8, 2013, 1:50pm). Readers may recall their school days, when hall passes were required to use the restrooms.
- 9.
Sister Carrie discovered that the shoe-making factory was a dirty, comfortless place, replete with “disagreeable, crude, if not foul,” washrooms (Dreisler [1900] 2006, 29).
- 10.
Marglin believed owners made themselves indispensable by assigning tasks to workmen, although workmen might have done so themselves (Marglin 1974, 594–595). David Landes argued that Marglin downplayed costs in his condemnation of owners. Marglin did not emphasize the critical role of entrepreneurs in finding ways to mix the factors of production in order to reduce costs.
Bibliography
Abrams, Rachel. “Trapped in Fast Food’s Slow Lane.” New York Times, September 28, 2017, B1.
Ashton, Thomas. An Economic History of England: The 18th Century (New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, 1955).
Bailey, Thomas and David Kennedy. The American Pageant: A history of the Republic (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1983).
Bloch, March. French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966).
Brody, David. Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).
Clark, Gregory. “Factory Discipline.” Journal of Economic History 54(1), March 1994, 128–163.
Cox, W. Michael and Richard Alm. “Have a Nice! The American Journey to Better Working Conditions.” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Reprint from Annual Report 2000 (Dallas, TX: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 2001).
Curti, Merle. History of American Civilization (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, [1953], 1969).
Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, [1900] 2006), Norton Critical Edition, Third Edition.
Engerman, Stanley. “Coerced and free labor: Property rights and the development of the labor force.” Explorations in Economic History 29(1), 1992, 1–29.
Galenson, David. “Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis.” Journal of Economic History 44(1), March 1984, 1–26.
Geremek, Bronislaw. Poverty: A History (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994).
Ginger, Ray. People on the Move: A United States History (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1975). 2 vols.
Gutman, Herbert. “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919.” In Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America; Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 3–78.
Harrison, David. The White Tribe of Africa: South Africa in Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
Hausman, Daniel and Michael McPherson. “Taking Ethics Seriously: Economics and Contemporary Moral Philosophy.” Journal of Economic Literature 31(2), June 1993, 671–731.
Hellie, Richard. “Slavery.” The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2010). vol. 27. 288–300.
Hoffman, Phillip. “The Economic Theory of Sharecropping in Early Modern France.” Journal of Economic History 44(2), June 1984, 309–319.
Kolker, Kenneth. “The Changing Status of the Foreman.” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 22(3), June 1928, 84–105.
Landes, David. “Structure of Enterprises.” The Rise of Capitalism (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1966). 99–111.
Landes, David. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (London, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
Landes, David. “What Do Bosses Really Do?” Journal of Economic History 46(3), September 1986. 585–623. Landes. What Do Bosses Really Do?
Lindblom, Charles. Politics and Markets: The World’s Political-Economic Systems (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1977).
Marglin, Stephen. “What Do Bosses Do? The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production.” Review of Radical Political Economics 6(2), July 1974, 60–112.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production (Moscow, USSR: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961). 3 vols.
McKendrick, Neil. “Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline.” Historical Journal 4(1), 1961, 30–55.
McKendrick, Neil. “Commercialization and the Economy.” The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, edited by Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and John Plumb (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), Vi–262.
Meeks, M. Douglas. God the Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989).
Pinchbeck, Ivy and Margaret Hewitt. Children in English Society. Vol. II: From the Eighteenth Century to the Children Act 1948 (London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
Porter, Roy. English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1982).
Reid, Joseph. Sharecropping as an Understandable Market Response (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
Saxonhouse, Gary “A Tale of Japanese Technological Diffusion in the Meiji Period.” Journal of Economic History 34(1), March 1974, 149-165.
Seabright, Paul. The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Silver, Morris. Economic Structures of the Ancient Near East (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1985).
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner (Indianapolis, IN: LibertyClassics, 1981).
Southern, Richard.W. The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, [1953] 1976).
Thompson, Edward P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present 38(4), December 1967, 56–97.
Ure, Andrew. The Philosophy of Manufacturers: Or, An Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain (London, UK: Charles Knight, 1835).
U.S. Congress. Senate. Professional Sports Antitrust Bill—1965: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly of the Committee on the Judiciary, 89th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965).
Walker, Charles. The Man on the Assembly Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952).
Williamson, Jeffrey. “Urban Disamenities, Dark Satanic Mills, and the British Standard of Living Debate.” Journal of Economic History 41(1), March 1981, 75–83.
Wolcott, Susan. “Perils of Lifetime Employment. Systems: Productivity Advance in the Indian and Japanese Textile Industries, 1920–1938.” Journal of Economic History 54(2), June 1994, 307–324.
Worstall, Tim. “Finally, Someone Does Something Sensible: Finland to Bring in a Universal Basic Income.” Forbes. December 6, 2015. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/12/06/finally-someone-does-something-sensible-finland-to-bring-in-a-universal-basic-income#7704773a, viewed September 23, 2017, 12:45pm.
Zinbarg, Edward. Faith, Morals, and Money: What the World’s Religions Tell Us about Money in the Marketplace (New York, NY: Continuum, 2001).
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1980).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Surdam, D.G. (2020). Labor Relations Through the Ages. In: Business Ethics from Antiquity to the 19th Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37165-4_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37165-4_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-37164-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-37165-4
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)