Divisions of Labor: The Splintered Geography of Labor Markets and Movements in Industrializing America, 1790–1930

Any synthesis of the sort attempted here does a disservice to the Literatures on which it depends for the simple reason that space precludes comprehensive citation. I trust, therefore, that my abridged set of references offers a hint of the richness of this literature and of my rather sizable debt to historians, sociologists, economists, and geographers, cited and not.

¹ Giddens, Anthony, “Structuration Theory: Past, Present and Future”, in Bryant, Christopher G.A. and Jary, David (eds.), Giddens' Theory of Structuration: A Critical Appreciation (London, 1991) pp. 201–221.

² Among others, Gutman, Herbert, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York, 1976); Montgomery, David, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, 1979); and Commons, John R., History of Labor in the United States (4 vols.; New York, 1935).

³ Brody, David, “The Old Labor History and the New: In Search of an American Working Class”, Labor History 20 (1979), pp. 111–126. On scales of analysis, various essays in Alexander, Jeffrey C. et al. (eds.), The Micro-Macro Link (Berkeley, 1987); Tilly, Charles, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York, 1984).

⁴ Shorter, Edward and Tilly, Charles, Strikes in France, 1830–1968 (New York, 1974); Hobsbawn, E.J. and Rudé, George, Captain Swing: A Social History of the Great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 (New York, 1968); and Gutman, Herbert, “The Workers' Search for Power: Labor in the Gilded Age”, in Morgan, H. Wayne (ed.), The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal (Syracuse, N.Y., 1963), pp. 38–68.

⁵ Carville Earle and Leonard Hochberg, “Varieties of Geohistorical Social Science”, in Geographical Perspectives on Social Change (Stanford, forthcming).

⁶ Gutman, “The Workers' Search for Power”, pp. 38–68.

⁷ Giddens, “Structuration Theory”, pp. 20–21; Pred, Allan, Place, Practice and Structure: Social and Spatial Transformation in Southern Sweden, 1750–1850 (Totowa, 1986), pp. 5–31; Gregory, Derek, “Contours of Crisis? Sketches for a Geography of Class Struggle in the Early Industrial Revolution in England”, in Baker, A.R.H. and Gregory, D. (eds.), Explorations in Historical Geography: Interpretative Essays (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 68–117.

⁸ The spatial lessons of the general strike are examined in some detail later in the essay; citations are reserved to that discussion.

⁹ On the limits of cross-scalar inference, see Rose, Gillian, “Locality Studies and Waged Labour: An Historical Critique”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, N.S. 14 (1989), pp. 317–328.

¹⁰ Giddens, “Structuation Theory”, pp. 201–221; idem, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the History of Structuration (Berkeley, 1984); John Urry, “Time and Space in Giddens' Social Theory”, in Giddens' Theory of Structuration, pp. 160–175. On markets and the rise of capitalism, Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, 1957), pp. 163–219; North, Douglass C. and Thomas, Robert P., The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge, 1973).

¹¹ On early-modern markets and their contemporary analogues, Earle, Carville, Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems (Stanford, 1992), pp. 173–235; Lebergott, Stanley, Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record Since 1800 (New York, 1964); Lewis, W. Arthus, “Reflections on Unlimited Labour”, in DiMarco, Luis Eugenio (ed.), International Economics and Development: Essays in Honor of Raull Prebisch (New York, 1972), pp. 75–96. And more generally, Lenger, Friedrich, “Beyond Exceptionalism: Notes on the Artisanal Phase of the Labour Movement in France, England, Germany, and The United States”, International Review of Social History 36 (1991), pp. 1–23.

¹² Of the several stages of labor-market evolution, the second is the least well known. This story of unskilled labor's golden age therefore is pieced together from a variety of sources later cited in full.

¹³ I am prepared to argue that labor markets were transformed by the advent of new managerial practices in response to large-scale industrial production; that does not imply assent, however, to a model of societal transition from industrial to monopoly capitalism. See Edwards, Richard, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1979); Noble, David F., America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977).

^14. These imperfections in product and labor markets are standard fare in neoclassical microeconomics and are discussed in most texts introducing that field.

¹⁵ Taylor, George Rogers, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York, 1951); North, Douglass C., The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1961); Carville Earle and Changyong Cap, “The Rate of Frontier Expansion in American History, 1650–1890”, in Geographic Information Systems and the Social Sciences: A Handbook, in Carville Earle, Leonard Hochberg, and David Miller (Basil Blackwell, forthcoming).

¹⁶ On the macrohistorical paradox of protectionism in this period, see Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 455–459. Paul A. David makes the neoclassical case against the benefits of tariff protection, albeit after 1824 when the foundations for industrialization were already in place; in “Learning by Doing and Tariff Protection: A Reconsideration of the Case of the AnteBellum United States Cotton Textile Industry”, in Technical Choice Innovation and Economic Growth: Essays in American and British Experience in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1975), pp. 95–173.

¹⁷ Nettles, Curtis P., The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (New York, 1962); Lindstrom, Diane, Economic Development in the Philadelphia Region, 1810–1850 (New York, 1978).

¹⁸ McKee, Samuel Jr, (ed.), Alexander Hamilton's Papers on Public Credit, Commerce and Finance (New York, 1934), pp. 177–276, esp. pp. 206–208.

¹⁹ On the debate over cheap labor or dear, see Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 173–236, 325–328, and 406–416; David, Technical Choice Innovation, pp. 19–91. For the social and political implications of wage structure, see the acute observations of Montgomery, David, “The Working Classes of the Pre-industrial American City, 1780–1830”, Labor History 9 (1968), pp. 3–22.

²⁰ Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 173–236, 315–328, and 406–416.

²¹ Montgomery. “The Working Classes”, pp. 3–22; Historical Statistics of the United States from Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1 (2 parts; Washington, 1975), pp. 24–37; U.S. State Department, Digest of Accounts of Manufacturing Establishments in the United States, and of Their Manufacture (Washington, 1823); Allen, Zachariah, The Science of Mechanics (Providence, R.L., 1829), p. 347; Field, Alexander J., “Sectoral Shift in Antebellum Massachusetts: A Reconsideration”, Explorations in Economic History 15 (1978), pp. 146–171; Dublin, Thomas, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York, 1979); and Prude, Jonathan, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).

²² Historical Statistics, Part 1, pp. 24–37.

²³ Groves, Paul A., “The Northeast and Regional Integration, 1880–1860”, in Mitchell, Robert D. and Groves, Paul A. (eds.), North America: The Historical Geography of a Changing Continent (Totowa, N.J., 1987), pp. 198–217.

²⁴ On the fragility of skilled-unskilled alliances into the 1820s, see Shelton, Cynthia J., The Mills of Manayunk: Industrialization and Social Conflict in the Philadelphia Region, 1787–1837 (Baltimore, 1986); Lenger, “Beyond Exceptionalism”, pp. 9–10; Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 400–445. More durable coalitions emerged in the 1830s (signaling, I suspect, the transition from asymmetric to autonomous labor markets); see Montgomery, “The Working Classes”, pp. 21–22.

²⁵ Earle, Carvilte and Cao, Changyong, “Frontier Gosure and the Involution of American Society, 1840–1890”, Journal of the Early Republic 13 (1993), pp. 163–180.

²⁶ Bensel, Richard F., Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge, 1990); Niemi, Albert W. Jr, State and Regional Patterns in American Manufacturing, 1860–1900 (Westport, Conn., 1974).

²⁷ On the agrarian involution of the Southern economy after 1840, see Earle, Carville, “The Price of Precocity: Technical Choice and Ecological Constraint in the Cotton South, 1840–1890”, Agricultural History 66 (1992), pp. 25–60.

²⁸ Historical Statistics, Part 1, pp. 24–37, 134, 139; U.S., Census of Population: 1950, Vol.1: Number of Inhabitants (Washington, 1952), pp. 32–33.

²⁹ The process of labor-market segmentation has its American origins in the rise of autonomous urban labor markets in the period 1840–1890; after 1890, segmentation involves the qualitatively different process of internalization of labor markets within the firm. See Edwards, Contested Terrain; Doeringer, Peter and Piore, Michael, Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis (Lexington, Mass., 1971); and Scott, Allen J., Metropolis: From the Division of Labor to Urban Form (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 27–35.

³⁰ On lagged responses to labor markets, see Hobsbawn, E.J., “Custom, Wages, and WorkLoad in Nineteenth-Century Industry”, in his Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (New York, 1964), pp. 244–270.

³¹ It is ironic that the post-1870 advance in unskilled wages, rooted as it was in competitive labor markets, has generally eluded neoclassical economists who dwell instead on unionization, wage levelling, and the free rider. See, for examples, Ulman, Lloyd, The Rise of the National Trade Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1955); Eichengreen, Barry, “The Impact of Late Nineteenth-Century Unions on Labor Earnings and Hours: Iowa in 1894”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review 40 (1987), pp. 501–515; and Douglas, Paul H., Real Wages in the United States, 1890–1926 (Boston, 1930).

³² On strikes, see Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 417–423; on unions and Gompers' remarks, Commons, History of Labour, 2, pp. 175–181.

³³ The elimination of seasonal wage differentials and the convergence of skilled and unskilled wages in the 1870s are suggestive of labor-market transition from rural hegemony to urban autonomy and subsidiary markets more (unskilled) or less (skilled) competitive. Ozanne, Robert, Wages in Practice and Theory: McCormick and Internal Harvester, 1860–1960 (Madison, Wisc., 1968), pp. 3–21; Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 414–416, 440–441. On the advance and retreat of labor's united front between 1860 and 1878, see Ware, Norman J., The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860–1895: A Study in Democracy (Gloucester, Mass., 1959), pp. 1–21. One source of the front's fragility was the exotic mixture of ideologies which included, among others, a healthy dose of nineteenth-century market “liberalism” a view not unappealing for unskilled workers in increasingly competitive labor markets. Rogers, Daniel T., The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Chicago, 1974), pp. 40–46, 156–157. Sheftner, Martin nibbles at the edge of these issues in “Trade Unions and Political Machines: The Organization and Disorganization of the American Working Class in the Late Nineteenth Century”, in Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide R. (eds.), Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986), pp. 197–276; and Olssen, Erik, “The Case of the Socialist Party that Failed, or Further Reflections on an American Dream”, Labor History 29 (1988), pp. 416–449. The quiescence of the unskilled after 1873 has more to do with rising wages and market power than with the “peasant-like” impotence ascribed to them by Graziosi, Andrea, “Common Laborers, Unskilled Workers, 1880–1915”, Labor History 22 (1981), pp. 512–544, esp. 519, 525–527.

³⁴ This section on Gilded Age worker protest is based on Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 346–377.

³⁵ Gutman's thesis of the declension of labor power is inverted in the large cities of industrializing America, Gutman, “The Workers' Search for Power”, pp. 38–68. The simultaneous ascension of marginalist economics and autonomous, if variably competitive, labor markets seems not altogether fortuitous. Bell, Daniel, “Models and Reality in Economic Discourse”, in Bell, Daniel and Kristol, Irving (eds.), The Crisis in Economic Theory (New York, 1981), pp. 46–80, esp. 47–52.

³⁶ Douglas, Real Wages in the United States, pp. 174–184.

³⁷ Ozanne, Wages in Theory and Practice, pp. 26–33, esp. 32.

³⁸ On oligopsonistic conditions in Chicago's farm implements industry, see Ozanne, Wages in Theory and Practice, p. 32. On the adoption of McCormick's wage strategies in other industries, ibid., pp. 26–33.

³⁹ For more details and sources of the general strike, see Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 378–399.

⁴⁰ Weibe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967), pp. 11–43.

⁴¹ Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States; Garloch, Jonathan E., “A Structural Analysis of the Knights of Labor: A Prolegomenon to the History of the Producing Classes” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Rochester, 1974); Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 428–432.

⁴² Ibid., pp. 432–445; Weinstein, James, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (New York, 1967).

⁴³ Bennett, Sari, “Continuity and Change in the Geography of American Socialism, 1900–1912”, Social Science History 7 (1983), pp. 267–288.

⁴⁴ Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism', Kolko, Gabriel, “The Decline of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century”, in Weinstein, James and Eakins, David W. (eds.), For a New America: Essays in History and Politics from Studies on the Left, 1959–1967 (New York, 1970), pp. 197–220.

⁴⁵ Dillon, Patricia and Gang, Ira, “Earnings Effects of Labor Organizations in 1890”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review 40 (1987), pp. 516–527; Eichengreen, “The Impact of Late Nineteenth-Century Unions”, pp. 501–515. These essays suggest that wage leveling across classes of skill is indicative of union impact on unskilled free-riders, but leveling could just as easily have resulted from competitive markets for unskilled labor.

⁴⁶ Among others, Nelson, Daniel, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison, Wise, 1975); Noble, America by Design; and David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America.

⁴⁷ Korver, Ton, The Fictitious Commodity: A Study of the U.S. Labor Market, 1880–1940 (Westport, Conn., 1990), pp. 23–42, 107–122, esp. 38. Edwards, Contested Terrain; and Graziosi, “Common Laborers, Unskilled Workers”, pp. 1–21.

⁴⁸ Thompson, C. Bertrand, The Theory and Practice of Scientific Management (Boston, 1917), pp. 37–40; Nelson, Managers and Workers, pp. 68–78.

⁴⁹ Historical Statistics, Part 1, pp. 143–145; Graziosi, “Common Laborers, Unskilled Workers”, pp. 533–534.

⁵⁰ Noble, America by Design, esp. p. 300; Korver, The Fictitious Commodity, p. 74.

⁵¹ On manufacturing wages and market imperfections in the 1950s, see Gottsehalk, Peter, “A Comparison of Marginal Productivity and Earnings by Occupation”. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 31 (1978), pp. 368–378.

⁵² Historical Statistics, Part 1, pp. 143–145.

⁵³ Earle, Carville and Bennett, Sari, “The Geography of Worker Protest in the United States”, Journal of Geography 82 (1983), pp. 15–21. On the intraurban geography of segmented labor markets, see Allen J. Scott, Metropolis.

⁵⁴ The scalar instantiation of labor markets might also be regarded as a version of transactional behavior in which firms internalize transactions until their marginal costs equal the transaction costs on the open market – or, in unvarnished prose, until the savings from labor exploitation are exhausted. See Coase, Ronald, “The Nature of the Firm”, Economica 4 (1937), pp. 386–405; Scott, Metropolis, pp. 27–35. Transactional-cost models tell us very little, however, about the historical preconditions for the internalization of transaction costs within firms (after 1900) or within cities (after 1840) – that is, about scalar transition.