Preliminary Programme

Abstract:
During the last two decades of the nineteenth century Spain experienced a growing social instability. The impact of the international economic crisis caused unemployment, starvation and emigration. The worsening conditions of work -elongation working hours, unsanitary workshops, increased labor accidents and occupational diseases, shortage of wages, high infant mortality ... - stimulated social conflict and the rise of the labor movement, particularly the anarchist movement. In this context the first voices in favor of a State intervention in conflicts between capital and labor arise between reformist intellectual elite. One of the first social policy measures undertaken by the State was the creation in 1883 of the Comisión de Reformas Sociales [Commission of Social Reforms] as a consultative and advisory institution of the Government on social issues. From 1890 on, it was also responsible for preparing draft laws, on its own iniciative or of the state itself. Thus, the creation of the CRS was one of the first steps in the institutionalization of social reform in Spain. The commission was created with the purpose of collecting data, information and opinions that contributed to the design of social policies. This orientation is evident in its initial name as a Commission to study the issues that concern the improvement and welfare of the working classes, both agricultural and industrial, and affect the relations between capital and labor, at a time of intense social conflict. The influence of Positivists and Krausists introduced the methods of empirical sociology in the work of CRS. The amount of studies and analysis of the situation of the workers and popular classes conducted by the commission was enormous, encompassing a wide range of issues. One of the first initiatives taken by the Commission was preparing a survey based on the method of "open questionnaire" or "opinion poll" to enable the preparation of a report on the situation of the working classes. The survey consisted of 232 questions organized into 32 sections covering various issues of working conditions and daily life of the working classes -housing, food, wages, working conditions, savings, pensions ... .Two issues closely related to the topic of this session, coalesced a number of questions: a) the crisis and reorganization of the sexual division of labor in the new industrial society b) the re-definition of working time (either for the market or non paid domestic work for the family), rest and leisure. The objective of this paper is to analyze the new discourses about the uses of time by men and women, contained both in the questions as in the answers given by workers and representatives of the bourgeoisie, technicians, and social reformers. The survey can also be used to gather empirical evidence on uses of time of women in different sectors and in (Show less)

Between 1870 and 2000, the standard workweek faced by an industrial worker in the manufacturing sector of industrialized nations was nearly halved, dropping from 64 hours to 38 hours. The majority of this change occurred in the first half of the twentieth century, when the work week declined from roughly 62 hours to 47 hours. This major decline has major significance for any attempt to assess human welfare, output and productivity for this period. However, currently the data on working time for the period 1900-1950 is rather poor. This paper will present and analyse a new dataset on industrial working hours.

There are currently two datasets that cover industrial working time between 1900 and 1950. The most widely used data on this topic is Maddison's data, which provide four data points pre-1950. Two of these (1900 and 1913) are interpolations based on questionable assumptions, the other two (1929 and 1938) draw on International Labour Organisation (ILO) data. A more recent dataset is that provided by Huberman and Minns (2007). However, Huberman and Minns only update Maddison's data with more reliable estimates for 1900 and 1913. They do not provide consistent data for the entire period. There is therefore no reliable international dataset on working hours for the period 1900-1950.

This paper will draw on a wide array of existing national level data, covering twelve countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S., to provide a new data set for industrial working time internationally for the period 1900-1950.

Using this dataset, this paper will look in particular at the post-WWI period, when working hours fell most dramatically. By Huberman and Minns’ (2007) estimation, hours fell by 11 hours in the fifteen years between 1913 and 1928. This alone accounts for 42% of the overall decline in weekly working hours between 1870-2000. This rapid decline in hours internationally is every more striking as much of it is thought to have happened in the 2-3 year period following the founding of the ILO in 1919.

This new dataset will also facilitate a better understanding of comparative economic development in the first half of the twentieth century. It has been claimed by Broadberry (1986, 1990) that the decline in hours in Britain affected British competitiveness significantly in the interwar period. However, Scott and Spadavecchia (2011) have argued that the decline in hours was not a major contributing factor to Britain losing its position as the world’s leading economy. With the development of a new international dataset on working hours, it will be possible to provide an improved comparative understanding of national trends in labour productivity in the interwar period. This paper will present an analysis of this issue.

Finally, the dataset will be merged with Michael Huberman’s data (1870-1900) and with data from the ILO (1950-2000). This will provide for the first time a reliable international dataset on working hours for the period 1870-2000. (Show less)

In a previous study, I analysed the labour trajectories of a group of women between 1920 and 2004. These women, born within 1905 and 1944, were all metallurgical workers at some point of their lives and belonged to immigrant families with low socioeconomic status. The analysis pointed out that, throughout the period, their employment experienced a precariousness process as a consequence of two main factors. The first one was a strategy of metallurgical employers in hiring only very young women in order to save labour costs after the civil war (1936-1939). The second was the low labour skills obtained by them, which, in the context of tertiarization of the Barcelona’s labour market, led them to engage in jobs –as cleaning– characterised by precarious working conditions, temporality, low wages, etc.
This new paper is a second step in a wider research about changes on employment and labour market in Barcelona, specially observing what occurred in the transition from the Second Republic (1936-39) to Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975) and from the dictatorial regime to the current democracy. The aim is exploring the labour trajectories in a group of men - who shared the same sociodemographic features of the previously analysed women- in terms of duration, stability and quality of the occupations. Specifically, I will check if in the males’ case there had a similar process of work precariousness and determinate which were the factors behind it or, on the contrary, if these male workers participated in the employment pattern considered general during the Francoism: an stable job, with promotion systems and highly regulated.
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