Good Jobs and Bad Jobs in History

This paper argues that the quality of employment—whether workers are employed in ‘good jobs’—is an important aspect of wellbeing, and constructs an index to measure historical occupational quality. The paper begins by explaining why work quality should be included as a measure of living standards. It describes the literature on present-day job quality, the ‘work gap’ in our knowledge of historical wellbeing, and uses historical workers’ perspectives about the aspects of jobs they valued to derive components of job quality in the past. It then suggests sources that provide information about the components, outlines how to measure the components and combine them in a Historical Occupational Quality Index (HOQI), and sets out the analytical narrative approach to describe work-related wellbeing that underpins quantification. The HOQI enables comparisons of job quality across time and space using many types of historical evidence. The second half of the paper applies the index to the mechanization of spinning in Britain during the late 18th and early 19th century. The paper combines data on hand spinning wages from Humphries & Schneider (2020) with a new dataset of more than 5000 observations of wages and working time in the early factory system and extensive qualitative evidence. Most spinning jobs changed from low-pay, high-control, low-risk work to higher-paid but low-control and more dangerous occupations. The best factory jobs, with high pay, control, and lower occupational risks, were claimed by men, which produced male-biased technological change. The case study illustrates how job quality measurement enables systematic analysis of non-wage dimensions of wellbeing. It also shows that these components of good work became more unequal during the First Industrial Revolution. The paper concludes by suggesting further possible applications of the HOQI.