Evolution of Work: an Outline of Changes During the Last Centuries

The amount of change that has occurred in the last two centuries to the way we work has been astronomically and could be argued to be the greatest change in any time period during human history.

One of the major factors for why the working world is the way it is today, is because of a direct consequence of the industrial revolution which saw mass technological changes as a result of new energy sources (i.e. coal and steam turbines). This saw initially Britain have a monopoly which created great wealth and allowed the building of the British empire, of course the wealth was distributed very unevenly. The wealth would expand to other countries such as France and Belgium with their own revolutions, however the poor distribution of wealth in these nations made Karl Marx and others create socialism “the worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains”. During these times, the types of jobs were that of factory staff, coal miners and farmers. 

The next big change for the working world came early in the 20th century with the improvement of the assembly line and the popularity of Fordism. Fordism is the concept that if you were to spread prosperity through increased wages it allows your employees to spend. The consequence of such was new production methods focused on making a lot of the same product as well as mass consumerism. Partner this with the winner takes it all mentality of laissez fair which was the policy of little government interference and we saw the economic boom of the 1920’s. This was not a sustainable economic boom the issues of relying on mass consumption and lack of interference from the government resulted in the great depression.

After the great depression and world war 2 the nature of work began its transformation from material to immaterial which we see today. This allowed the creation of the white-collar class who did clean work based on information such as in advertisement or in management. Hardt states that there are 3 ways of immaterial work, first the creation of information such as blueprints, then there is dealing/analysing data this could include journalism to computer programming and the finally there is the labour of dealing with people and their emotions such as therapists or GPs. The after effect of this increase in information based work is the rise of neoliberal capitalism also known as Thatcherism this is the belief that the market does not need state regulation because if the rich gain mass amount of wealth then the finances will trickle down to everyone.

The current working environment is heavily influence by corporate cultures, large organisations either monopolised or with select few competitors filled to the brim with bureaucracies this means there is little to no tension between the wants of the individual and the wants of the company as a whole. There is the issue of the prioritisation of the stakeholders to that of the employees making the employee feel undervalued or not communicated with. These saw the increase in work technology and communication technology most notably the internet which allows rapid communication between employees and international partners. Finally, with a larger work force we see a low minimum wage and the decrease of real wages.

Richard Sennett stated three issues with the current working environment (the craftsman). They are that there are teams that last only short team changing from task to task and job to job therefore they cannot build up the relationships or team work to be the most efficient that they can be. Secondly there is the ever changing of what your expected of from external forces making it hard to know what areas to focus on. Finally, there is the ever instability within the company no matter of previous success, seen by frequent and often unnecessary redundancies with all these factors it no surprise there is a lack of loyalty between the companies and the workers.

In conclusion the amount of change seen over the course of the last two centuries has been vast, motivated by technological, political and communicative changes. Seeing both the positives of the changes i.e. the 1920’s boom or improvements of worker’s rights and the negatives of the change i.e. the great depression and monopolisation we can evaluate why the worker environment is the way it is and work out what if effective and what is not for future endeavours.