Changing Patterns of Employment: Part 1 — Implications of the Industrial Society

Abstract

PRE‐INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY was bottom‐heavy. The majority of workers were muscle‐men, hewers of wood and drawers of water. Their jobs consisted of lifting, shoving, carrying and generally providing motive power. Society did not need these members for their manual skills, let alone their mental skills: it was their muscles that society was after. Above this brute mass there existed a thin upper crust of worker‐aristocrats — masons, carpenters — and above this, in turn, an even thinner skin of managers, administrators, priests, and generals. But because there was no mechanically‐produced power, a high proportion of society's members were condemned to spend the whole of their lives pumping power into the economy from their own bodies. That is why slaves were such a necessity in primitive economies.

Citation

Wellens, J. (1962), "Changing Patterns of Employment: Part 1 — Implications of the Industrial Society", Education + Training, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 4-8. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb015085