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- Title
How skilled were Lancashire cotton factory workers in 1833?
- Authors
Boot, H. M.
- Abstract
The article draws inferences about levels of skill, the costs of acquiring skill, and the returns to skill among British factory workers at the end of the classical phase of the industrial revolution. Industrialization may have called for a more adaptable and eventually a more literate workforce, but until the 1830s changes in rates of literacy in Great Britain, as well as their links to the process of industrialization, are uncertain both in direction and in pace. The simplest way to think about human capital is that it is the quality of labor or the set of skills which enables a worker to perform at a higher standard. In Great Britain almost all pay structures contained elements of artificiality which hindered the freedom of earnings to reflect levels of skill and productivity. Deliberate restrictions on entry, prejudice, custom, a sense of fair play or a just wage, and ideas that certain classes of work should be restricted to persons from particular social classes and be accorded an income appropriate to the class, were all forces which affected wages but had little to do with the skill or productivity of a worker.
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; COTTON trade employees; INDUSTRIAL revolution; INDUSTRIALIZATION; INDUSTRIAL workers; WAGES
- Publication
Economic History Review, 1995, Vol 48, Issue 2, p283
- ISSN
0013-0117
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1468-0289.1995.tb01419.x