Timeline: History of work

• Hunting and gathering society: Cavemen hunted for food.
• Neanderthals invented crude tools, making work a bit easier.
• Fire was discovered. Cooking was discovered.
• The wheel was invented. Transport became easier.
• 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, people learned to plant and became subsistence farmers or peasants. In this settlement, agriculture was born. The concept of work (the “conscious striving now…to accrue a future benefit”), worker, or a working day began.
• The exchange of goods through barter and money gave birth to capitalism and the hiring of workers.
• Slavery, or the buying, selling, and total ownership of human beings as objects or personal property, began.
• The rise of the city-state and the conception of a citizen with rights gave workers an awareness of their human rights.
• Machines were invented, making work a lot easier and faster.
• Slavery was abolished in the United States.
• The idea of division of labor was born, making the production flow more efficient.
• In a more sophisticated society, specialized skills (or specialization) became necessary, particularly for people who opt out of the food production business. Soon, trade-based guilds were formed.
• Most workers were men, and they were the family breadwinner.
• Machines helped increase productivity and the country’s income, or more accurately, the major shareholder’s profit/earnings.
• Mass manufacture resulted in the First Industrial Revolution – in short, the advent of the industrial age.
• However, machines displaced many workers.
• Machines (robots) to make machines (automobiles, etc.) were invented.
• At the beginning of the 19th century, however, farming, often manual, remained the major occupation.
• By the 1850s, agriculture was modernized, thanks to the tractor, steel plow, reaper, etc., reducing the number of farm workers.
• Formation of companies by capitalists often meant regularization of work contracts and lifetime careers, with compensation package, including fringe benefits.
• Women joined the workforce out of the necessity to have two-income households, leaving children alone at home.
• Communism snatched the tools of production from the hands of the capitalist to the proletariat or the working class.
• In 1850, the idea of a two-day no-work weekend was born. In England, because of religious motivation, the British Factory Act eventually led to the five-and-a-half-day work week.
• Technology created new forms of work, so farm workers migrated en masse to other industries.
• By the 1900s, workers swelled the factories/manufacturing plants (automobile, appliance, power, etc.).
• Between 1960 and 1990, however, manufacturing output rose, but technology halved the number of workers.
• The idea of a trade union or a workers' union (to advance and protect tradesmen's and workers’ rights) caught on.
• The first strike occurred.
• Corporate bargaining agreement was conceptualized.
• Between 19th and 20th centuries, a new (third) sector arose to take up the slack: the service sector. Thanks to the typewriter and the telephone, this sector was able to employ teachers, lawyers, doctors, nurses, maids, baby-sitters, sales people, government workers, and other service providers.
• “More complex society meant more efficient food production, which equated to increase in professionals (professional specialists). Circumscribed livelihoods such as professional football, commercial airline pilot, real estate agent, television presenter, and management consultant can be accommodated because of plentiful supply of food.”
• In 1981, Pope John Paul II penned the encyclical “Laborem Exercens” (“On Human Work”), which talks about labor taking precedence over capital and the dignity of man taking precedence over things. He built on earlier encyclicals on the Catholic Church’s social doctrine, starting from “Rerum Novarum.”
• The computer was invented, further simplifying a lot of work and streamlining, then ushering in the demise of many forms of work in the agrarian, manufacturing, and service economies.
• The communist mode of production waned in most of the socialist world. 
• Contractual labor was conceived "to keep companies competitive," while dropping the security of tenure of hordes of contractuals and workers with temp jobs.
• Together with unemployment emerged the sob stories of underemployment and overseas contractual work, the latter fragmenting families in unprecedented scale but keeping them financially afloat.
• Globalization and trade liberalization came, erasing national boundaries in business. Massive business integration brought about the selling of products abroad, particularly in places where the company has no full-time employees, resulting in “jobless growth” (high gross domestic product + high unemployment rate) in those places. 
• Business process outsourcing or BPO became rampant.
• Telecommuting and online home-based work became possible.

What holds in store for work in the future? As many jobs vanish in some places, or farmed out to other places, will new jobs be created under the new order (globalization and trade liberalization) and after?


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The above is mostly excerpted (with permission from the author) and paraphrased from: Cecilia, Ernie O. 2013. “The future world of work,” Philippine Daily Inquirer. Job Market Section. P. J6. Sept. 15-21, 2013.

Other references:

Heilbroner, Robert. 1963. The making of economic society, Prentice Hall. As cited in Cecilia, 2013.
“History of work.” Reader’s Digest. http://www.readersdigest.com.au/history-of-work?page=2#sthash.KshaUbyj.dpuf
AFL-CIO. “Labor history timeline.” http://www.aflcio.org/About/Our-History/Labor-History-Timeline
Pope John Paul II. 1981. “Laborem Exercens.” Encyclical. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens_en.html
"Work labor history timeline." http://www.timetoast.com/timelines/work-labor-history-timeline

Wikipedia. "Timeline of labor issues and events. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_labor_issues_and_events

See: The evolution of work: Daniel Kraft at TEDxRheinMainChange

Hello!

I am putting up this blog to re-publish old posts that I thought would remain relevant and helpful to a lot of people.

This new weblog is called The Urban Hermit Online because that is currently my state of life.

Here, I will be like monks of the medieval ages who took up the task of archiving and thus preserving and promoting useful knowledge. In my case, the work will come in bits and pieces, that is to say, bite-size knowledge, in between daily prayer and reflection.

Stay tuned.