Task time before clock time
Hiring by the day is older than hiring by the hour, and the difference is not only administrative. Before work was measured in units of time it was measured in units of work: a field mown, a wall raised, a load carried. How that changed, and how completely, is one of the more productive arguments in economic history.
Thompson's account
The argument begins with E. P. Thompson's essay Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, published in Past & Present in 1967. Thompson drew a contrast between task orientation, in which the rhythm of work follows the job and the season, and timed labour, in which the employer purchases hours and the clock adjudicates. Under task orientation, he argued, the working day expanded and contracted with what needed doing, the line between work and social life was indistinct, and the pace was irregular by any later standard.
Industrial discipline, on this account, required people to be taught time in a new sense — through factory clocks and bells, through fines for lateness, through schooling and sermons about idleness. Thompson gathered the evidence of resistance to that teaching: the long habit of Saint Monday, the artisan's slow start to the week followed by a frantic finish, and the persistent complaint of employers that hired hands could not be got to keep hours.
The reopening
The essay's influence was such that its outline hardened into a standard story, and most of the serious challenge has come from historians testing that outline against records Thompson did not use.
Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, in Shaping the Day (2009), assembled evidence on the ownership, distribution and everyday use of clocks in England and Wales from 1300 to 1800, and concluded that clock time was familiar, widespread and practically used well before industrialisation. On their reading there was no single passage from one time-sense to another; there were many overlapping practices, and a good deal of precise timekeeping inside supposedly task-oriented work. Their case rests on the reach of the sources they could assemble, and the coverage is uneven across regions and centuries.
Hans-Joachim Voth approached the period from a different direction in Time and Work in England 1750–1830, using incidental references to time in witness statements given in criminal courts to reconstruct what people were doing at particular hours. The reconstruction suggests that annual hours worked rose over the period, with the observance of Saint Monday declining in London earlier than elsewhere. The method is ingenious and openly indirect: witnesses at a trial are not a random sample of the population, the settings that generate testimony are not typical settings, and a mention of the hour is more likely in some circumstances than others. Voth discusses these limits at length, which has not stopped the resulting figures from being quoted without them.
Where the argument stands
What has survived of Thompson is the observation that time discipline was contested and had to be imposed. What has not survived intact is the chronology, the implied uniformity, and the notion that people working by the task lacked a working sense of the hour. Day hiring sits awkwardly across the divide in any case: paying for a day is paying for a unit of time, but a day defined by daylight and by the job in hand rather than by a dial.
References
- Thompson, E. P. (1967). Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism. Past & Present, 38.
- Glennie, P. and Thrift, N. (2009). Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800. Oxford University Press.
- Voth, H.-J. (2000). Time and Work in England 1750–1830. Oxford University Press.
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