Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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externalities, often justifying urban locations despite the many drawbacks. A fun-
damental reason why labour markets create large externalities is that employers,
with the obvious exception of formal slavery, cannot own their workforces and
therefore cannot rely on benefiting from what they invest in their workforce. In
the development of labour markets in Britain, two general strategies were avail-
able, with very different implications for the urban system.
1
First, the employer could rely on an external labour market to supply the nec-
essary skills, and accept that this might mean paying workers a premium for the
training they had in some sense funded for themselves. Such rich external labour
markets were concentrated in major urban centres, or sometimes specialised
agglomerations such as the Staffordshire Potteries, and there was a further
premium to be paid for congestion. Reliance on external labour markets gave
employers no particular stake in individual workers, and the notion of a career
had limited meaning: instead, workers’ earning capacity was regularly assessed
over their lifespan by the market, and while initially it tended to rise as they
gained experience and contacts, in the longer term it fell through worsening
fitness and health, and increasingly obsolete skills.
Secondly, employers could seek to internalise the labour market and create
their own workforce. This was more easily achieved where skills were specific
to the particular firm, but then the employer had to fund all training; where the
workplace was isolated, in which case the employer often had to provide housing
and amenities; or where the enterprise was large, so that employees could be
motivated by the prospect of progression up an elaborate hierarchy. As enter-
prises became larger and more complex, understanding of how the organisation
operated became a significant skill in its own right.
In reality, these two models blended and the costs of creating a workforce
rarely fell entirely on the employer or entirely on the workers. The state also
came to take on a growing share of these costs. However, in any given period
different sectors of the labour market can be placed somewhere between these
extremes: in the s, both casual labourers and artisans had regularly to look
for work while clerks, factory workers and miners in some coalfields often had
long associations with particular workplaces; similarly in s Britain there
were still casualised dockers and a large apprenticeship system alongside armies
of ‘company men’ working towards a gold watch. Further, over the hundred
years or so with which we are concerned, men’s work at least saw a growing
internalisation of labour markets and the emergence of the ‘modern career’, in
which employment within a single organisation was seen as ideally a lifetime
commitment with steady earnings growth terminating with retirement at a fixed
David Gilbert and Humphrey Southall
1
These basic labour market concepts are discussed in many texts on labour economics, such as J. T.
Addison and W. S. Siebert, The Market for Labor:An Analytical Treatment (Santa Monica, ), but
for their application to the study of towns and cities see also A. J. Scott, Metropolis:From the Division
of Labour to Urban Form (Berkeley, ).
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age. Of course, the growing numbers of women in waged work were excluded
from these norms. Indeed, it can be argued that the development of this modern
career pattern depended on this restriction of women to short careers before
marriage and a subsequent marginal position in the labour market as part timers,
very poorly paid outworkers and unpaid domestic workers.
2
Our main concern here is with entry into the labour market and subsequent
career paths, and their consequences for individual towns and the urban system.
There are, however, other dimensions of the operation of labour markets which
had a direct influence on the nature of towns and cities. One example is the way
that attempts to regulate prices and wages influenced the development of urban
institutions; until the late nineteenth century most employers’ organisations were
restricted to a single town or district. Some urban institutions were straightfor-
wardly economic such as the boards of conciliation and arbitration which spread
across the country in the s and s.
3
But the development of other kinds
of urban institution was often shaped by strategies which were developed to reg-
ulate labour markets. As we argue later, the provision of local social infrastruc-
ture by ‘paternalist’ employers often made good economic sense in specialised
industrial communities, while in larger towns there were often close links
between the networks established in employers’ organisations and those of local
government. Similarly, the influence of organised labour spread beyond the
industrial relations system into the provision of social institutions and the
involvement in urban government.
In what follows, we examine several of the most important sectors of the
labour market, following the paths taken by individuals over their lives. We
sketch out the development of each of these sectors, developing an account of
the changing nature of life-paths and career structures, and their implications for
the developing urban system. Three dangers with this approach need to be
noted. First, our sectors cannot be exhaustive. Three other groups which played
a notable role in shaping the urban system were workers in retailing, workers in
public utilities and the non-casual sectors of transport, notably the railways.
Secondly, our sectors of the labour market should not be confused with indus-
trial sectors. Very similar practices characterised artisan employment in strikingly
different nineteenth-century industries, such as engineering, building and print-
ing, while their employer’s business was a near-irrelevance to the twentieth-
century office worker. Thirdly, any discussion of the labour market must speak
of ‘skill’, but all notions of ‘skilled’ and ‘un-skilled’ workers, or even more or less
skill, are determined as much by social attitudes as by levels of technology or
The urban labour market
2
A. Miles, Social Mobility in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England (Basingstoke, ),
ch. .
3
S. Webb and B. Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (London, ), pp. –; H. A. Clegg, A.
Fox and A. F. Thompson, A History of British Trade Unions since , vol. : – (Oxford,
), pp. –.
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expertise. The bricklayer’s skill lies in the speed and quality of the resulting con-
struction while his hod carrier’s skill lies in carrying heavy loads over his shoul-
der for hour after hour and year after year; but only the former was classed as
‘skilled’ by society, and this was reflected in earnings. Similarly, women have
almost always been denied the title of ‘skilled worker’, despite the obvious tech-
nical difficulty of tasks such as short-hand typing. The final section of the chapter
examines the interactions between these labour market processes and the form
of the urban system, concentrating on spatial divisions of labour and the ways in
which economic fluctuations altered the relationships between different sectors
of the labour market and transformed the geography of towns and cities.
(i)
Labour markets in their most visible and least structured form were to be found
in the stereotypical casual trades of Victorian Britain: men presenting themselves
in hiring halls or at the dock gates for hire by the day, and being selected mainly
on the basis of physical strength, not skill. Elements in this stereotype are mis-
leading, in particular the association between casual labour and the docks, par-
ticularly the London docks. Dock labour must be discussed, both because of the
abundant evidence provided by contemporary social surveys and because of its
association with a particular type of town, but this section also investigates the
less well-defined informal sector and ‘boy labour’.
Some aspects of dock work were far from unskilled, and two groups in par-
ticular had many of the characteristics of artisans, including their well-developed
trade unions: the lightermen, who often owned their own boats; and the ste-
vedores, responsible for arranging the cargo within ships’ holds and therefore for
ensuring the balance and stability of the vessel. Further, moving heavy cargo cer-
tainly demanded physical strength but it also required a particular kind of skill,
knowing how repeatedly to lift and move heavy objects without straining
muscles. In consequence, there were significant groups within the dock labour
force who had relatively steady employment based on relationships with partic-
ular employers. Tom Mann suggested in that to per cent of the labour
force earned s. per week or more, and this fraction probably rose during the
s and s as many employers instituted a system of ‘permanent’ and ‘pref-
erence’ men.
4
The real locus of casual labour was not in the docks but at the dock gates and
in the streets beyond. The numbers daily seeking work were most visible to
middle-class observers in London’s East India Dock Road, or at the hiring stands
along the dock wall in Liverpool, because there was always some chance of
finding work on the basis of strength alone. The comings and goings of ships
David Gilbert and Humphrey Southall
4
G. Phillips and N. Whiteside, Casual Labour (Oxford, ), pp. –.
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coupled with the near impossibility of six full days a week at such physically
demanding work meant that foremen relatively often had to hire beyond their
circle of ‘pals’, and then all was confusion and luck played a role. One foreman
in the s described the experience of taking-on: ‘a great roar went up from
hundreds of throats calling my name . . . A great mass of faces and hands . . .
appeared before me, fighting and struggling, so much so, that it was difficult to
detect which face the hand belonged to.’
5
However, this very public hiring
process was unusual. The army of casual workers employed in other parts of the
transport sector, as porters, messengers and so on, were hired in their ones and
twos, and not necessarily for the day. A whole series of factors explained the
existence and size of this part of the labour market.
First, the seasonality of demand for labour was clearly a factor in casualisation,
especially in the docks: in London, timber from the Baltic arrived mainly in the
autumn and was absent in the ice-bound spring;
6
in Liverpool, cotton was a key
commodity and most came in between October and May.
7
Outside the docks,
winter weather and limited daylight had an obvious impact on building and
affected many other sectors, much work being done outdoors and artificial light-
ing being ineffective. Another source of seasonality in London was increased
demand during the fashionable ‘season’ between April and July, while in
Warwick in a compositor, Paul Evett, noted: ‘Several other fresh compos-
itors started work soon after I arrived. They were of the travelling fraternity, who
had learnt by experience where seasonal work was to be found, and here they
knew that the Autumn County Voters’ Lists were to be printed; also the
Warwickshire County Directory.’
8
In an economy where such small-scale
fluctuations mattered, transitory employment was endemic and many workers
organised their lives around it through ‘dove-tailing’: gas workers such as Will
Thorne moving to the Bedfordshire brickfields in summer;
9
building workers
going to the docks in winter, and so on.
10
Secondly, as discussed in the conclusion, deep recessions every eight to ten
years were almost as regular a feature of the Victorian economy as was season-
ality. Here a whole locality and, increasingly, the whole nation was affected
equally and there was limited scope for ‘dovetailing’. However, many workers
had secondary occupations, less lucrative, they could fall back on; and in the
process they might push other workers out. Hence, musical instrument makers
became cabinet makers, and cabinet makers became carpenters. Those at the
The urban labour market
5
Charity Organisation Society, Special Committee on Unskilled Labour (), Qq. ; as cited
by D. W. Gray, ‘Entry to the metropolitan labour market in Victorian and Edwardian Britain’ (PhD
thesis, Queen Mary College, University of London, ), p. .
6
G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, ), p. .
7
E. Taplin, The Dockers’ Union:A Study of the National Union of Dock Labourers – (Leicester,
), p. .
8
P. Evett, ‘My life in and out of print’ (typescript, Brunel University Library, ), p. .
9
W. Thorne, My Life’s Battles (London, ), p. .
10
Stedman Jones, Outcast London, p.
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bottom of the chain could seek work at the dock gates, if they were strong
enough, or be forced into street trading or criminality. In such an unstable
economy, with such a limited safety net for the unemployed, it was inevitable
that large numbers of people would move between occupations rather than
simply accept unemployment. One measure of the privileged status of the better
paid among the artisans, such as the engineers, is that they could afford to pay
themselves sufficiently generous welfare benefits through their unions that they
could afford to be unemployed; most workers had to find some source of income,
however inadequate.
Thirdly, although the economy as a whole was growing some groups experi-
enced severe long-run decline. In London, substantial numbers of casual workers
had begun as silk weavers and, later, as shipbuilders.
11
Across the country, agri-
cultural depression in the s and s forced large numbers of labourers off
the land, with few skills. One indicator of the linkage between urban and rural
unskilled labour markets comes from industrial organising: in the early s the
dockers’ unions worked to establish agricultural unions in Lincolnshire and
Oxfordshire, ‘for they and the agricultural labourer were continually competing
with one another. It was easy for the town labourers to frustrate a strike in the
country, and for the countrymen to frustrate another in the town.’
12
Finally, in most families living standards depended heavily on how many
worked, and particularly on how many children were in waged work while still
young enough to be living at home: we lack large-scale surveys of earnings in
nineteenth-century towns, but in interwar London the earnings of household
heads peaked at age thirty-five, but those of households as a whole peaked when
their heads were aged fifty-five, mainly because of the additional earnings of
other household members;
13
analysing several hundred autobiographies, Andy
Miles concludes that until the late nineteenth century ‘the overriding force
behind movement into the labour market was the demand of the family
economy’.
14
In consequence, only well-paid artisans could invest heavily in their
children through training and apprenticeship; in textile and mining towns there
was work for adolescents in the mills and pits; but in the great cities and partic-
ularly in London large numbers of children crowded into the so-called ‘Boy
Labour’ occupations. This happened to Walter Southgate: despite an excellent
school record and the offer of a seven-year apprenticeship which would have
developed his interest in art and drawing, his father was unwilling to keep him
David Gilbert and Humphrey Southall
11
Ibid.,pp.–.
12
W. Hasbach, A History of the English Agricultural Labourer (London, ), pp. –.
13
D. Baines and P. Johnson, ‘Did they jump or were they pushed? The exit of older men from the
London labour market, –’, Journal of Economic History, (), –. For more limited
nineteenth-century evidence see, for example, the discussion of household budgets in J. Foster,
Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London, ), pp. –.
14
Miles, Social Mobility, p. .
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so long: ‘There was now nothing for it but to take the first situation, pot luck,
that offered itself. It might be as a messenger boy, a van boy, a shop boy or any
other dead-end job. The main consideration was that I had to bring a little cash
into the home each week to feed myself.’
15
As Table . shows, very large
numbers of London school-leavers in the s went into ‘transport’, covering
running messages, acting as a van driver’s assistant, and so on. This was a problem
in itself as such jobs were insecure with a high turnover of workers, most van
boys being hired by the day. However, the larger problem was that they seldom
led into adult jobs, the Post Office, for example, employing hundreds of tele-
graph boys but dismissing almost all at age sixteen. As a result, large numbers of
workers found themselves entering adulthood with no real skills and little option
but to seek work as general labourers.
The Education Act established a network of school boards funded from
The urban labour market
15
W. Southgate, That’s the Way it Was: A Working-Class Autobiography – (London, ); as
cited by Gray, ‘Entry to the metropolitan labour market’, p. . The treatment here of boy labour
as a whole is largely based on Gray’s work.
Table . Occupations of children on leaving school in London and in large urban
manufacturing districts in England and Wales in the s
London Manufacturing
Occupation (%) districts (%)
Building trades ..
Woodworking ..
Metals, engineering and shipbuilding ..
Mining and quarrying — .
Textiles ..
Clothing ..
Printing and allied trades ..
Clerical ..
In shops ..
Transport ..
Newsboys and street vendors ..
Domestic service ..
Miscellaneous ..
No reported occupation ..
Source: Report on the Number of Children Attending Elementary Schools Who Are Known to be
Working for Wages, with the Different Classes of Employment into Which the Boys and Girls
Attending Elementary Schools in England and Wales Went on Leaving Schools during Each
Complete Year, PP .. Figures are percentages of the total number of
responses: , for London, , for the manufacturing districts.
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rates and taxes, and gave boards the power to make education between five and
ten compulsory. The act removed the boards’ discretion, and the act
introduced free education; the act ended local exemptions, and established
a national minimum leaving age of fourteen.
16
Unlike earlier legislation limit-
ing children’s involvement in particular types of workplace, compulsory atten-
dance was enforceable through both registers in schools and checking school-age
children on the streets. The London School Board appointed attendance officers
for each division of the city soon after its creation in . Initially, magistrates
were sympathetic to poor parents dependent on their children’s earnings, but by
per cent of the , summonses led to convictions, and attendance at
board schools rose from per cent in to per cent in , although
work by children outside school hours remained a concern.
17
This is one of the
clearest instances of successful state intervention into labour markets; for
example, an estimated , juveniles were removed from the London labour
market in just by raising the minimum age at which exemption from com-
pulsory schooling could be granted from eleven to twelve.
What were the consequences of casualism for urban society? Arguably, the
most important consequence was simply the poverty that went with it. The
squalor and congestion of so much of the Victorian city was not due, ultimately,
to a failure of government or the housing market, but to the inhabitants’ lack of
resources, and this was due not simply to low wages but to the intermittent
nature of so much of their income. For most working-class households, once
again excluding artisans, having multiple earners was essential, as in the complex
economies of the great cities there was a good chance that at least one of them
would find work.
Beyond this, the key consequence of the casual labour market was that indi-
viduals and households had to organise their lives so as routinely to find work,
and routinely to survive without it; and this led to an intense localism. We tend
to explain the compact nature of the nineteenth-century city by poor transport
prior to the railways but in Dickens’ London, it was perfectly possible for
Wemmick, Jaggers’ clerk in Great Expectations, to work in the City and walk
home to the then-greenery of Walworth; for Wemmick, already, ‘the office is
one thing, and private life is another’.
18
What prevented such a separation for
the poor, and kept them penned into crowded slums, was not lack of transport
but poverty and insecurity: a family that must often depend on the generosity of
others cannot afford to live among strangers. Highly localised contact networks
were crucial to survival: for the worker, contacts with foremen and sources of
information about vacancies, rarely formally advertised; for the housewife, shop-
David Gilbert and Humphrey Southall
16
Gray, ‘Entry to the metropolitan labour market’, pp. –.
17
Final Report of the London School Board, –, pp. – (as cited by Gray, ‘Entry to the
metropolitan labour market’, pp. –).
18
C. Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. M. Cardwell (Clarendon Dickens edn, Oxford, ), p. .
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keepers who will provide goods on unsecured credit and neighbours who will
lend a cup of sugar.
Social reformers of the late nineteenth century saw casualisation as the root
of most of the evils of ‘Outcast London’, and in the twentieth century a series
of legal measures sought to ‘decasualise’the docks, despite significant opposition
from the dockers themselves. In practice, the state sought to create a clear divide
between registered dockers, who were then to be guaranteed employment, and
the casual tail. However, in practice the mechanisation of cargo handling and
eventually containerisation drastically changed the nature of dock work,
employers seeking a more permanent and skilled but far smaller workforce.
19
A whole series of social changes, many of them based on legislation, reduced
casual labour in the wider economy. First, the most marginal workers were
removed through compulsory education and state pensions, both changes with
vast but little appreciated consequences for the labour market. Whether or not
compulsory school attendance did much for skill levels among the urban poor,
it eliminated much of the ‘boy labour’ problem at a stroke. Similarly, the most
infrequently employed had tended to be the most elderly, and the introduction
of comprehensive state pensions and an increasingly universal male retirement
age of sixty-five removed this stratum; state disability benefits had a similar effect.
Secondly, the operation of the National Insurance system, introduced in
but only becoming comprehensive in the s, served to regulate many aspects
of the labour market and in particular promoted a clearer distinction between
the employed and the unemployed: rules requiring everyone to pay into the fund
but denying benefits to those unemployed for less than four consecutive days
penalised both casual and short-time working. Many other changes in employ-
ment and tax law made the labour market either less flexible or more secure,
according to viewpoint, and casual workers had either to transform themselves
into self-employed freelancers or to operate on or beyond the margins of the law.
Thirdly, employers arguably found a greater need for a stable workforce. Firms
were becoming larger and more complex, making it harder for casual workers
to be slotted in and made productive in a short time. More and more roles were
hard or impossible to monitor, and the easiest way to create trustworthy employ-
ees was through rewarding loyalty, impossible with casuals; interestingly, recent
technological changes have simplified surveillance and may promote a return to
casualisation. Lastly, the growth of the service sector meant that many employ-
ees were the public face of an organisation, dealing with customers, and again it
was hard to employ casuals in such a role. This list excludes rising skill levels in
a crude sense, as nineteenth-century skilled artisans were often no more perma-
nently linked to an employer than the unskilled labourer, and it is to them that
we now turn.
The urban labour market
19
Phillips and Whiteside, Casual Labour, pp. –.
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(ii)
The artisan trades sought to identify themselves by an emphasis on formal train-
ing: it was only possible to become a millwright or a stonemason by serving an
apprenticeship. These rules had originally been enforced by the guild system, but
by the early nineteenth century the traditional guilds had either disappeared or
become organisations solely for employers, as with the livery companies of the
City of London. The earliest trade unions appeared in the artisan trades and pre-
sented themselves as successors to the journeymen’s organisations that had
existed within the old guilds. In practice, their memberships were relatively
small: in an estimated per cent of stonemasons, to per cent of car-
penters and joiners, under per cent of plasterers.
20
What mattered far more
was the extent to which most trained men and many of the employers took
certain principles for granted.
The most basic principle was a clear divide between the skilled and the
unskilled: becoming ‘skilled’ required training during adolescence, and access to
the latter depended heavily on family resources and contacts; but the use of
family contacts did not necessarily mean boys following their father’s trade, and
even then the ‘inheritance’ of skill was not necessarily achieved through a formal
apprenticeship. Our knowledge of these processes is inevitably partial but, for
example, per cent of all working-class autobiographers obtained their first
jobs through their fathers, and another per cent through broader family net-
works.
21
However, in interwar London precise occupational continuity between
fathers and sons was far lower than this suggests: only . per cent of sons inter-
viewed by the New Survey of London had exactly the same occupation as their
father, and . per cent were in the same broad occupational order. These
figures may of course reflect a long-run decline in occupational continuity,
which is often assumed but for which there is limited evidence, or the peculiar
diversity of the London labour market.
22
Nineteenth-century artisans certainly placed great emphasis on obtaining
‘places’for their sons, and such sponsorship often served as a substitute for formal
apprenticeships. George Howell suggested in the s that under per cent
of union members had served a formal apprenticeship, which required an inden-
ture of five or seven years to be completed by age twenty-one.
23
For example,
the Liverpool Typographic Society’s rules of defined a journeyman as ‘a
person who has served seven years in the business of a Printer or the eldest son
David Gilbert and Humphrey Southall
20
R. Price, Masters, Unions and Men (Cambridge, ), p. .
21
Miles, Social Mobility, pp. –.
22
D. E. Baines and P. Johnson, ‘In search of the “traditional”working class: social mobility and occu-
pational continuity in inter-war London’, Ec.HR, nd series, (), –.
23
G. Howell, ‘Trade unions, apprentices and technical education’, Contemporary Review, (),
.
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of a Printer and brought up to that business’,
24
and even in one of the main
complaints of the workers at a Lincoln engineering firm was that it employed
‘strange boys instead of the workmen’s sons’.
25
Artisans could enforce such rules
and preferences first because hiring decisions were made by foremen who had
come up through the trade and would only hire ‘time-served’ men, and secondly
because training was carried out ‘on the job’ by the most experienced hands and
they could refuse to train ‘strange boys’. Many unions also sought to limit the
total number of apprentices in a given shop.
These limitations on entry had various consequences. First and most obvi-
ously, for most of the nineteenth century artisans were able to maintain large
pay differentials relative to the unskilled. In the early s farm labourers were
struggling to raise weekly wages from as little as s. or s. per week,
26
but car-
penters and joiners in towns such as Northampton and Cardiff earnt s. or
s.
27
In , the dockers fought for their ‘tanner’, meaning d. per hour, but
the ‘standard rate’ for London engineers was s. per week. Without progres-
sive taxation these differentials were reflected in living standards so that an estab-
lished artisan could hope to employ a servant girl. Secondly, apprenticeships
whether formal or informal meant low wages during adolescence and only rel-
atively well-off households could afford to forgo the higher earnings of dead-
end ‘boy labour’ jobs. Coupled with the preferential hiring of artisans’ sons, this
made artisan trades self-reproducing – although statistical evidence from the
census and marriage registers suggests that while artisans’ sons were generally in
an artisan occupation of some kind inheritance of a specific craft was far from
the norm.
A third consequence was that the exclusivity of artisans within a working-class
community, often reflected in superior housing and sometimes by geographical
segregation, was matched by a geographically wider inclusivity. Artisans were
forced to move between towns by the very specialisation of their occupations,
by the operation of limits on apprenticeship and by custom, and this promoted
links between their communities and the development of national organisations.
Most artisan trades were scattered around the country in small groups, so if one
employer was laying men off there would be few local alternatives; as early as
the Liverpool Society of ‘Carpenters’ was encouraging jobless members to
look elsewhere:
That if any member...shall happen to be discharged from his place of work
upon honourable terms and cannot get employment . . . at his own art trade or
business within the Corporation of Liverpool for the space of one month such
The urban labour market
24
PRO, FS/, Lancaster : Liverpool Typographic Society, Rules (), rule .
25
Modern Records Centre, Warwick, MSS ///, minute of Apr. .
26
A. Armstrong, Farmworkers:A Social and Economic History – (London, ), pp. –.
27
Board of Trade Labour Department, ‘Rates of wages and hours of labour in various industries in
the United Kingdom for a series of years’ (unpublished, ).
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