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In the footsteps of their fathers? Occupational following among Swedish tobacco workers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2011

TOBIAS KARLSSON  and
MARIA STANFORS
TOBIAS KARLSSON
Affiliation:
Both of the Department of Economic History and Centre for Economic Demography, Lund University.
MARIA STANFORS
Affiliation:
Both of the Department of Economic History and Centre for Economic Demography, Lund University.
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Abstract

This article explores the role of kinship in the Swedish tobacco industry of 1898, making use of rich data that cover the entire industry and include both men and women. The focus is on the role of families in labour recruitment, which is often claimed to have been important. In this case, however, it was not the norm to have a father in the same industry. Occupational following was clearly a gendered phenomenon. To follow in the footsteps of fathers was more common among young men than among other groups of workers, and occupational following was associated with higher earnings for male but not for female workers.

Dans les pas de leurs pères? comment on continue le métier chez les ouvriers du tabac, en suède

Dans cet article, les auteurs explorent le rôle de la parenté dans le milieu de l'industrie suédoise du tabac, en 1898, exploitant les très riches données disponibles sur l'ensemble de cette activité, comprenant les hommes aussi bien que les femmes. L'intérêt principal s'attache au rôle des familles dans le recrutement des travailleurs, rôle que l'on proclame souvent avoir été important. Cependant, dans le cas présent, il n'était pas normal d'avoir un père dans la même profession. Continuer le métier était par contre clairement une affaire genrée. C'était dans leur jeunesse que les fils s'engageaient communément pour continuer le métier sur les traces de leur père. Pour les hommes (mais non pour les femmes), la continuité dans la profession était alors associée à de meilleures rémunérations.

In den fußstapfen ihrer väter? berufliche nachfolge bei schwedischen tabakarbeitern

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Rolle der Verwandtschaft in der schwedischen Tabakindustrie im Jahre 1898 und benutzt dazu reichhaltiges Datenmaterial, das die gesamte Industrie abdeckt und sowohl Männer wie Frauen einschließt. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt der Rolle der Familie für die Rekrutierung von Arbeitskräften, die häufig als besonders wichtig angesehen wird. In diesem Fall jedoch war es nicht zwingend, einen Vater in derselben Industrie zu haben, denn berufliche Nachfolge war eindeutig eine geschlechtsspezifische Angelegenheit. In die Fußstapfen des Vaters zu treten, war unter jungen Tabakarbeitern weiter verbreitet als in anderen Gruppen von Arbeitern, und die berufliche Nachfolge war nur für männliche, aber nicht für weibliche Arbeiter mit höheren Verdiensten verbunden.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , May 2011 , pp. 45 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

ENDNOTES

1 Neil J. Smelser, Social change in the industrial revolution: an application of theory to the Lancashire cotton industry 1770–1840 (London, 1959); Wally Seccombe, Weathering the storm: working-class families from the industrial revolution to the fertility decline (London, 1993).

2 Tamara K. Hareven, Family time and industrial time: the relationship between the family and work in a New England industrial community (Cambridge, 1982).

3 With the nineteenth-century family wage economy, Wall argues, the family became more flexible with respect to work and residence, especially in societies where wage labour blended with other activities, and where the place of work and residence did not necessarily coincide. See Richard Wall, ‘Work, welfare and the family: an illustration of the adaptive family economy’, in Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith and Keith Wrightson eds., The world we have gained: histories of population and social structures (Oxford, 1986).

4 Anderson states that workers often could obtain places for their children. He refers to British Parliamentary Papers of 1833 and writes that ‘in cotton, where the father was not in a trade where he could directly employ his children, it was “customary upon the part of a father that you employ to make application to you, when a child is of the age of eight or nine years, to take him into a factory”’ (Michael Anderson, Family structure in nineteenth century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971), 119). See also Smelser, Social change, 189.

5 We prefer to use the more basic concept ‘reputation’ rather than the expressions ‘brand loyalty-capital’ and ‘name brand legacy’, which Laband and Lentz use. See Laband, David N. and Lentz, Bernard F., ‘Like father, like son: toward an economic theory of occupational following’, Southern Economic Journal 50, 2 (1983), 474–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Laband and Lentz, ‘Like father’, 478.

7 Laband and Lentz, ‘Like father’, 482–3.

8 Shaffer, John W., ‘Family, class, and young women: occupational expectations in nineteenth-century Paris’, Journal of Family History 3, 1 (1978), 62–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Ivy Pinchbeck, Women workers and the industrial revolution 1750–1850 (London, 1930).

10 Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and progress: social mobility in a nineteenth century city (Cambridge, 1964), and The other Bostonians: poverty and progress in the American metropolis, 1880–1970 (Cambridge, 1973); Andrew Miles and David Vincent eds., Building European society: occupational change and social mobility in Europe, 1840–1940 (Manchester, 1993); Dribe, Martin and Svensson, Patrick, ‘Social mobility in nineteenth century rural Sweden: a micro level analysis’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 56, 2 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Anderson, Family structure, 121.

12 Wall, ‘Work, welfare and the family’, 265.

13 Peter N. Stearns, Lives of labour: work in a maturing industrial society (London, 1975).

14 Stearns, Lives of labour, 47.

15 Stearns, Lives of labour, 49–51. Cf. Wall, ‘Work, welfare and the family’.

16 Anderson, Family structure, 121–2; Smelser, Social change, 190.

17 Stearns, Lives of labour, 69.

18 Hareven, Family time and industrial time, 100–1.

19 Hareven, Family time and industrial time, 101.

20 Smelser, Social change, 189.

21 Anderson, Family structure, 119–20.

22 Anderson, Family structure, 119–20. A recent study on apprenticeship and the role of kinship in Britain on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, however, qualifies this picture with results indicating that kinship mattered but was not crucial for becoming an apprentice. It is to be seen as an extra avenue, or a bonus, rather than a requirement. See Tim Leunig, Chris Minns and Patrick Wallis, ‘Networks in the premodern economy: the market for London apprenticeships, 1600–1749’ (Centre for Economic Performance discussion paper, 2009; available at http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0956.pdf).

23 Stearns, Lives of labour, 49; Seccombe, Weathering the storm, 95.

24 Henning Elmquist, Undersökning af tobaksindustrien i Sverige (Stockholm, 1899), 61; Ulf af Trolle, ‘Femtio år av monopol och konkurrens’, in Ulf af Trolle ed., Om tobak i Sverige (Stockholm, 1965), 39; Anita Göransson, Från familj till fabrik: teknik, arbetsdelning och skiktning i svenska fabriker 1830–1877 (Lund, 1988), 121–2.

25 Elmquist, Undersökning af tobaksindustrien; Tage Lindbom and Evert Kuhm, Tobaksarbetarnas förbund 1889–1939 (Stockholm, 1940), 38; Kristina Rossland, ‘Hantverk för män blir fabriksarbete för kvinnor: en studie från tobaksindustrin 1850–1915’, in Daedalus: tekniska museets årsbok (Stockholm, 1995), 79. See also Edith Abbott, , ‘Employment of women in industries: cigar-making: its history and present tendencies’, Journal of Political Economy 15, 1 (1907), 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lina Gálvez Muñoz, ‘Gender, cigars and cigarettes: technological change and national patterns’ (paper presented at the XIVth International Economic History Congress, Helsinki, 2006; available at http://www.helsinki.fi/iehc2006/papers1/Galvez.pdf).

26 Lindbom and Kuhm, Tobaksarbetarnas förbund, 38.

27 Lars Olsson, Då barn var lönsamma: om arbetsdelning, barnarbete och teknologiska förändringar inom några svenska industrier under 1800-talet och början av 1900-talet (Stockholm, 1980).

28 In 1898, only 65 individuals working in the tobacco industry were under 14. At the time, more than 90 per cent of the age group 7–14 were enrolled in schooling, the proportion being somewhat higher in cities than in the countryside. See Elmquist, Undersökning af tobaksindustrien, 78.

29 Elmquist, Undersökning af tobaksindustrien, 179–82; Arne Svensson, ‘Ur den svenska tobaksodlingens historia’, in af Trolle ed., Om tobak i Sverige, 289–328.

30 Elmquist, Undersökning af tobaksindustrien, 106.

31 Specialundersökningar Tobaksindustrien 1898, Statistiska avdelningen, HIII b:1, Kommerskollegiets arkiv, Riksarkivet, Stockholm.

32 In cases where it was established that a parent, spouse or child was employed in the industry, it was recorded whether the relative in question was employed at the same factory or not.

33 From the primary survey material we retrieved a comment from one of the major employers in Stockholm that ‘the workers stay for long and typically work until they die’, in contrast to the white-collar employees who typically retired in their late sixties. Moreover, the features of stable employment in the tobacco industry became very apparent when the industry was nationalized in 1915. Many contemporary observers then emphasized the difficulties for male tobacco workers in finding jobs in other trades. See Tobias Karlsson, Downsizing: personnel reductions in the Swedish Tobacco Monopoly, 1915–1939 (Lund, 2008).

34 The first part of our account in this section (including Tables 1 and 2) is based on published data from Elmquist's survey of 1899. Thereafter we make use of the primary material from the same survey (see Tables 3, 4 and 5).

35 Creighton, Colin, ‘The rise of the male breadwinner family: a reappraisal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, 2 (1996), 310–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Angelique Janssens ed., The rise and decline of the male breadwinner family? (Cambridge, 1998).

36 Anderson, Family structure, 121; Laband and Lentz, ‘Like father’, 487; Maths Isacson and Lars Magnusson, Vägen till fabrikerna: industriell tradition och yrkeskunnande i Sverige under 1800-talet (Stockholm, 1983), 22-3.

37 That is to say, Scania and parts of Blekinge county.

38 Maria Stanfors and Tobias Karlsson, ‘Gender and the role of unions: earnings differentials among Swedish tobacco workers in 1898’ (paper presented at the Social Science History Association Annual Meeting, Miami, October, 2008; available from the authors on request).

39 Mary Corcoran, Jencks, Christopher and Olneck, Michael, ‘The effects of family background on earnings’, American Economic Review 66, 2 (1976), 430–5Google Scholar; Mary Corcoran, Roger Gordon, Laren, Deborah and Solon, Gary, ‘Effects of family and community background on economic status’, American Economic Review 80, 2 (1990), 362–6Google Scholar; David Lam and Schoeni, Robert F., ‘Effects of family background on earnings and return to schooling: evidence from Brazil’, Journal of Political Economy 101, 4 (1993), 710–40Google Scholar; Jin-Tan Liu, James K. Hammitt and Lin, Chyongchiou, ‘Family background and returns to schooling in Taiwan’, Economics of Education Review 19, 1 (2000), 113–25Google Scholar; Ermisch, John and Francesconi, Marco, ‘Family matters: impacts of family background on educational attainments’, Economica 68, 270 (2001), 137–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 For example, family background is rarely included in earnings regressions based on data from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

41 See Jacob Mincer, Schooling, experience, and earnings (New York, 1974), and Willis, Robert J., ‘Wage determinants: a survey and reinterpretation of human capital earnings functions’, Handbook of Labor Economics 1 (1986), 525–602CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 In the case of workplace location, the percentage effects are actually 12.1 for men and 5.0 for women. In an ordinary least squares regression in which the outcome is the natural log of wages, the percentage effect of a dummy variable is derived from the formula: 100 ∗ (exp(b)−1), according to Halvorsen, Robert and Palmquist, Raymond, in ‘The interpretation of dummy variables in semilogarithmic equation’, American Economic Review 70, (1980), 474–5Google Scholar. All percentage effects referred to are the result of dummy coefficients having been recalculated according to the above cited formula to get marginal effects, although the differences are very small in several cases.

43 See, for example, Joyce Burnette, Gender, work and wages in Industrial Revolution Britain (Cambridge, 2008), and Goldin, Claudia, ‘Monitoring costs and occupational segregation by sex: a historical analysis’, Journal of Labor Economics 4, 1–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Stanfors and Karlsson, 'Gender and the role of unions'.