Labour needs – Historic evolution

Feudal system
If we travel back to medieval Europe where most people were peasants (camponeses), farming
land controlled by feudal lords. In England, as early as the 1500s the lords began to fence off
communal lands this process of enclosures made some peasants into dependent workers who
relied almost exclusively on wages. The government always made sure that employers had the
upper hand. Restrictions prevented workers from leaving to seek better wages or conditions.
Masters and servants acts required workers to contract for long periods and made workers
resistance criminal offenses. Employers could dismiss workers for many reasons, but workers
accused of violating their contract were often arrested and brought before hostile magistrates.

In the late 1700s most people worked in the fields on land they did not own. Those who owned
the land, called aristocrats lived refined lives in elegant manor houses. Servants raised their
children and did their housework. The landowners and the people who worked for them depended
upon each other, it was a system that had existed for centuries.

Industrial labour

In towns across England and the United States, a series of extraordinary innovations would alter
the way people lived and worked for the next 150 years.
Inventors had found new ways to harness nature's energy, they built new kinds of machine
powered by water, steam and coal. The new machines replaced hand powered tools, they did the
same work only cheaper and faster. Much of the work was done outside the home in specially
designed buildings, the first factories. Mechanization began in the textile mills of England, where
one machine attached to a spinning wheel could do the work of 50 people. Fuel, clothing and food
all became more affordable.
With the development of locomotives and steamboats, manufactured goods could now be sold
halfway around the world. Families moved from the villages of their ancestors to new industrial
towns and a new class of people emerged, workers who produced goods. Industrialists, the people
who owned the factories, employed hundreds, sometimes thousands of people and they made
enormous profits in their industrial centers. But while the Industrial Revolution brought wealth
to some and jobs for others, it came with a price tag. Pollution from coal powered factories turned
the city's black. Lack of housing created the first urban slums (favelas/ bairros) and the demand
for more and more goods and higher profits brought the exploitation of workers, including
children. Some of the worst conditions were seen in the textile mills of New England. In the 1830s
a ten-year-old mill girl described her life “we're paid two dollars a week and the working hours
of all the girls extended from five o'clock in the morning till 7:00 in the evening, with one half-
hour for breakfast and for dinner”.
It was the hiring of children some as young as five years old throughout the 1800s and early 1900s
that outraged the public. Workers and reformers protested, they formed unions and associations
and fought for government regulations to limit the workday and protect children. These laws
helped address many of the abuses brought on by the Industrial Revolution.

Additional info
Gradually the economic system change and capitalism first emerged in Britain and the
Netherlands. Long distance trade and new technologies dramatically increased production. This
process of industrialization required large numbers of workers to toil in the first manufactories.
The factory owners began breaking down jobs into distinct parts that could be done by untrained
workers, some even hired women and children because they always prefer to employ the cheapest
labor possible. Employers exploited workers in ways that would be considered intolerable today,
leading to frequent injury and early death. The new class of capitalists gained vast profits and put
this money back into more machinery and their own luxurious consumption. Only property
owners could vote and basic rights to speak out or organize did not exist.

Service labour
Today we are in the middle of another revolution, a technological revolution. We live in what's
called the global village, because we can connect with people around the world as if they lived
next door and we can now work anytime and anywhere.