TR 1070 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: E. P. Thompson, Industrial Revolution
5 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
EP Thompson
Big Picture:
Reality of work begin to change
Perception of time changes
Before time was something human beings experienced naturally
and viscerally
The way animals experience it
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After, time is abstracted by a machine
Outside not in
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Something we tell not something we experience
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§
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•
Clocks are archetypal machine
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Time alienates us
Away from home, a natural place
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Puts us in a technological place
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Following perception of time, work itself begins to change:
These changes in the perception of time set the stage for the industrial
revolution and the coming of industrial capitalism and modern industrial work-
discipline
•
To buy and sell time, you have got to be able to measure it
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Before the transition to industrial capitalism:
Irregular work patterns and rhythms
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Work bouts fairs 156 holidays a year
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Nature dictates
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No managers or owners
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Old authority is feudal-more social than economic
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The place of work is at home or in the community
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Leisure and work blended together (beer)
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Jobs largely interchangeable
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Work is not paid for the most part
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After the transition to Industrial capitalism:
Work synchronized and regulated (timed by clocks)•
Authority (marketplace and bosses) dictate •
Modern classes emerge based on workers vs managers of workers•
Place of work is removed from where people live•
Work and leisure is sharply divided (everclear)•
Specialists are the rule •
Labor market begins •
Workers resist the coming of work discipline
They are losing an old way of life- their traditional culture
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Thompson wrote "the onslaught, from so many directions, upon the people's
old working habits was not, of course, uncontested. In the first stage, we find
simple resistance"
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Stage One: Simple Resistance
Saint Monday is an example of resistance
Saint Monday was the day workers simply didn’t show up after the day off
Sunday
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Origin of weekend as we know it
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Stage Two: Worker Resistance
In the next stage, the workers begin to fight, not against time, but about it.•
Workers begin to fight for time free from work•
The shorter hours movement begins•
Leisure, for workers and some their bourgeois supporters, becomes the way to
recapture the old convivial culture of the Feudal past
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Workers struggled for shorter hours
In 1820, working 6 days a week from dawn to dusk (60-70 hours a week)
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For over a hundred years, the hours got shorter gradually
1840, 10 hour day
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1900, 8 hour day
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16% decrease from 1900 to 1920
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American Dream is higher wages, and more time•
All visions were attached to the gradually reducing work day•
In the 1920s/1930s people like John M Keynes predicted that the gradual
decline in shorter work hours will not stop
It didn’t happen!!!!!!
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2/27 Lecture Notes
Monday, February 26, 2018
3:26 PM
