7 - Varieties of work

Summary

The nature of work changed in the second half of the nineteenth century. All the advanced capitalist countries experienced the rise of the factory system, the intensification of machine production, the massing of wage laborers, and the subdivision of labor. While the beginnings of industrialization in the United States are typically marked by the 1820 founding of the first mill town in Lowell, Massachusetts, from 1850–1900 there was dramatic expansion in every industry, from locomotives, reapers, and Winchester rifles to textiles, cigars, and glassmaking. In the years between 1860 and 1920 the volume of manufactured products grew fourteenfold. The post-Civil War era ushered in what labor historian David Montgomery has called a “cult of productivity,” characterized by ever increasing rates of output and scientific methods of management, imposed by a professional managerial class. While workers of the late nineteenth century were fully habituated to an industrial time sense (a transformation in the culture at large symbolized by mass-produced pocket watches from the American Watch Company of Waltham, Massachusetts) they were also aware of the power they wielded, as a deliberate collectivity, over production processes. As one efficiency consultant observed, every factory has “a fashion, a habit of work, and the new worker follows that fashion, for it isn't respectable not to.” Employers could be equally tenacious: in 1885 managers at the McCormick reaper plant responded to a conflict with unionized iron molders by firing them all. Moreover, the harmony of working-class interests was subject to constraints peculiar to the American context.