IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cmh/wpaper/24.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The pay of labourers and unskilled men on London building sites, 1660 – 1770

Author

Abstract

This paper presents evidence of pay to workers at the lower end of the building trades in long eighteenth century London. Traditionally, the pay of labourers has been recorded as a proxy for unskilled workers. In fact, the labourers whose charge-out rates have been recorded were mostly semi-skilled. There were many who earned far less than ‘labourers’ by day rate or by other means. Using the records of large London construction projects over the long term I propose a new taxonomy, and provide a new working wage series for both semi-skilled labourers and unskilled men for London for the eighteenth century.

Suggested Citation

  • Judy Z. Stephenson, 2016. "The pay of labourers and unskilled men on London building sites, 1660 – 1770," Working Papers 24, Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Cambridge.
    • Handle: RePEc:cmh:wpaper:24
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.econsoc.hist.cam.ac.uk/docs/CWPESHnumber24June2016.pdf
    File Function: None.
    Download Restriction: None.
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Judy Stephenson, 2018. "Looking for work? Or looking for workers? Days and hours of work in London construction in the eighteenth century," Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers _162, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    2. Robert C. Allen, 2019. "Real wages once more: a response to Judy Stephenson," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 72(2), pages 738-754, May.
    3. Rota, Mauro & Weisdorf, Jacob, 2020. "Italy and the Little Divergence in Wages and Prices: New Data, New Results," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 80(4), pages 931-960, December.
    4. Richard J. Blakemore, 2017. "Pieces of eight, pieces of eight: seamen's earnings and the venture economy of early modern seafaring," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 70(4), pages 1153-1184, November.
    5. Rota, Mauro & Weisdorf, Jacob, 2019. "Why was the First Industrial Revolution English? Roman Real Wages and the Little Divergence within Europe Reconsidered," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 400, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Wages; Building trades; Skill; Eighteenth-century England;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • N0 - Economic History - - General
    • N33 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • N93 - Economic History - - Regional and Urban History - - - Europe: Pre-1913

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cmh:wpaper:24. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Amy Price (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dhcamuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.