Summer School 2: The golden ages of labor and looms
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Welcome back, everyone, to Planet Money Summer School, economic history of the world. Don't worry, you won't have to spend these sunny days in a dark basement studying a dusty tome. You can just relax as we hit the historical highlights, the big questions, the mysterious players, and, as we'll see today, the revolutions, moments when the world order gets overturned. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Lesson 2, The Rise of the Worker.

Every Wednesday till Labor Day, we are meeting here in your ears to explain the world of today with stories from the world of yore. Last week, we explained what money really is and where it comes from. Today, we look at power through the eyes of the workers and the bosses. Two stories today that show you how the balance between employer and employee, rich and poor, can change. So, let's get started.

suddenly, and how we can all prepare for, and maybe even push for, changes happening today. Rejoining us as our guest professor for this lesson is Rebecca Spang from the University of Indiana, Bloomington. Thanks for coming back. Oh, of course. It's so much fun. So,

Why study labor history now? Like, what challenges are we facing in the economy that make these stories particularly relevant? I think the question that everybody's asking is, is AI going to take my job? We know the machines have already taken manufacturing jobs. The United States is overwhelmingly a service economy, a creative economy. What if it turns out the machines can do that too? What are we going to do? One...

One interesting thing when you start to look at the actual economics, there is this question, right? Who gets the value first?

Yes, that's right. I mean, that is a classic way to think about history is a struggle between those who do the work and those who own the so-called means of production. Karl Marx has entered the chat.

And we should say that this balance is not a static thing. Sometimes dramatic things happen that do shift the power to the worker. How to put it? It's not all a tale of things getting worse or a tale of things always getting better. Okay. After the break, we'll have the first of our historical case studies. It's about the wild, wild party after the end of the world.

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The year is 1347. The location, a bustling port in Sicily. Ships are coming in from around the globe carrying spices and silk. They're also carrying stowaways, little rats. On the back of the rats are a different kind of stowaway, fleas. And in the belly of the fleas are bacteria. Bacteria that caused the bubonic plague.

We will spare you the harrowing details of the pandemic known as the Black Death. It was a health disaster unequaled in human history. 30 to 50 percent of the population of Europe died. Horror beyond imagining. We made European society in countless different ways. But the one we're going to zero in on is the silver lining, the economic shifts that followed the plague.

We'll have Keith Romer and Alexi Horowitz-Gazi pick up the story from here in this episode from 2020.

The economic transformation that came about after the Black Death was only possible because of the very specific way the pandemic attacked the European economy. The plague destroys human capital. That is to say, it destroys human beings. But it does not destroy physical capital. That's Anne McCants, a historian from MIT. You know, good farmland...

The crop may rot in the field for one or two years, but if the land was fertile before, it's going to be fertile again. So if you're a big landowner, the good news is you still have a bunch of land that can make you a bunch of money. The bad news? Half your serfs are dead. There's no one to till the soil. All the tools in the shoemaker's shop? Those are still there. But if all the shoemakers were wiped out by the plague, how are shoes supposed to get made?

From a strictly economic perspective, there is suddenly a huge shortage of labor. And that means the workers who are left have more power now. And this allows workers

to negotiate effectively for higher wages. That's Guido Alfani, an economic historian at the University of Bocconi in Milan. Guido says that in Florence, between 1350 and the early 1400s, wages doubled. And you see versions of the same thing all over Europe. It wasn't just wages either. Workers were able to demand better working conditions too.

Guido says you can actually see this in some of the employment contracts in Tuscany from the years right after the Black Death. People who were employed to work the land required to be given oxen as part of the contract. And oxen are very costly. So this is kind of a shift. So in Italy, workers were sort of saying, like, I'm only going to work here if you give me an ox to work the field otherwise. Yes, exactly. Because they had the knife and...

They had the knife in the hand in the sense that they had all the negotiating power? Exactly. The people on the other side of that negotiation, the nobles and big landowners, they were not all that happy about this new state of affairs. Like, a peasant is trying to tell me how much I'm going to pay him?

There's almost immediate pushback. In England, to take just one example, they pass a law called the Ordinance of Laborers in 1349, still in the middle of the plague. This is a law that actually punishes both the laborer themself for taking too high of a wage or, you know, in the language of the day, demanding too high a wage.

And the landowner, let's say, or employer, who overpays. Anne McCance says instead of a minimum wage law, medieval England had a maximum wage law. Their wages were capped. Parliament also passes a law forbidding the free movement of workers around the country in order to stop people from shopping for higher wages in, say, the neighboring shire.

But for the most part, the English government just isn't able to enforce these laws. It's really clearly a failure. The workers were just too powerful. And, you know, sort of one of the nicknames for this period is the golden age of labor. It's hard to overstate what a big deal this was. And it didn't just stop at higher wages. There were these new forms of social mobility. Like, up until this moment, jobs were passed down from generation to generation within particular families.

Whether that was a good job or a bad job, the job you had was almost certainly going to be the same job your father had and his father had as far back as anyone could remember. A lot of the good jobs, shoemaker, wheelwright, weaver, tanner, fletcher, scrivener, farrier, salter, chandler, girdler. The point is... Cordwainer. The...

The point is these jobs were controlled by guilds. If you weren't in the guild, you weren't allowed to do them. But suddenly, half of the guild members were dead. So the folks who ran the guilds had to start thinking about letting in some new members, people whose families had never been shoemakers before. Don't want to harvest barley anymore? Become a loriner. Make some stirrups and harnesses. Or you could become a poulter. That's a poulchy salesman. So for a moment...

It's possible to move up. It's possible to change things. And to start accumulating wealth, which in medieval Europe means essentially one thing. In this society, the largest part of wealth is basically real estate. It's basically land. In the wake of the Black Death, some of the largest estates are broken apart when their owners die and the land gets split evenly among multiple descendants.

Many of those plots are then put up for sale. For a period, you have kind of a bias market and you have people who had little or no property who managed to acquire property. So there's like a little island of lower inequality for 100 or so years? Absolutely, absolutely. And this is quite exceptional because after that, the only other island would be that associated to the world wars.

It was one of only three times that the rate of inequality has dropped in the past 700 years. And you could see that change in people's everyday lives and the stuff they owned. But this isn't happy news for everybody. All the nobles and landlords on the rich side of that medieval wealth gap see these former peasants eating mutton chops and trying on fancy silks from East Asia. And they're like, no.

Not okay. Because this is a moment in history where this economic change starts to feel like it's threatening the social order in this fundamental way. What's the point of being a noble if all the people who used to be peasants can now just buy their way into the noble lifestyle?

So a new round of laws start getting passed. Sumptuary laws, which put limits not just on how much workers can get paid, but even on how they're allowed to spend their money. The sumptuary laws say things like, peasants, you're not allowed to eat guinea fowl.

Or wear the color purple. That's our color. You guys, you wear brown. And yes, this sounds kind of silly, a little bit petty maybe, but Ann says this new peasant purchasing power was kind of without precedent.

Poor people hadn't ever suddenly just stopped being poor before. For hundreds of years, people's station in life had basically never changed, kind of by design. So I think the post-plague moment has to be at least as much about that sort of sense that, you know, sort of everything is wrong in the world. And one of the ways you know that everything is wrong in the world is because, you know, your peasant is wearing a color they shouldn't be wearing. Right.

The world had changed. And Anne McCann says that if you're looking for a silver lining in these awful moments in human history, that is the silver lining, the chance to remake the world. The human toll of these things is staggering. But, you know, they're also an opportunity to think about things from a new angle. Why is it that only nobles should eat, you know, guinea fowl? And that seems trivial, right?

But it's possible that that kind of open thinking leads to something else that's not trivial. The world can surprise us, so it's good for us to be prepared to be surprised. Global pandemics, these giant shocks to society, can represent these really rare opportunities to change how the economy works and who it serves.

Alexi Horowitz-Gazi and Keith Romer from an episode published in the midst of our own pandemic in 2020. Let's bring back our professor today, Rebecca Spang, who wrote the book Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution. I don't know which word is more exciting, stuff, money, revolution. You missed time. Time is pretty exciting. Time is because we're, of course, all learning to be economic historians here.

Turning to our story of the day about the Black Death, we can really see how supply and demand, which we normally think about for the stuff we buy, also clearly applies to the labor force. You know, we're all selling ourselves, our hours every day. And when the supply of workers goes down, as we saw in the story, it's

the price goes up. And we're seeing it after our own pandemic, right? Oh, yes, certainly. One industry I happen to know a little bit about is the restaurant industry. And in sort of the immediate aftermath of peak pandemic, restaurateurs could not

staff. They ended up having to pay higher wages, and then they were also having to pay more for food, and so prices went up in restaurants. So it's definitely a factor. And we saw this to some extent in the whole economy. Unemployment hit the lowest level in like 54 years, meaning fewer people were out there looking for work, a smaller supply of labor. And wages went up. So when else in history have we seen unemployment?

these golden moments for workers, when workers sort of had all the power or a lot of power? I don't know.

I don't know if workers have ever had all the power or even a lot of the power, but there have been times in history when workers, people, were in a somewhat more equal position. The period that comes to my mind immediately is the aftermath of World War II, what is known in France as the 30 Glorious Years, and that language is used in German as well. So from sort of 1945 to the OPEC oil crisis—

There's really a time when labor, generally organized labor, is in a strong bargaining position and also where there's a lot of productivity, a lot of economic growth, and also, incidentally, a pretty hefty tax on the highest income, which means reinvestment in public goods like roads and schools. So that does it for the moments when the workers of the world got more power, flexed their muscles. ♪

But the bosses were not taking all this sitting down. They were about to get something that could radically alter the supply and demand for workers. We call it the Industrial Revolution. Coming up after the break, what happens when men with very sharp scissors get pissed off about the machines coming to replace them? It's the story of the Luddites.

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All right, class, welcome back to Planet Money Summer School. I'm Robert Smith. I think about this next historical episode all the time. Now that artificial intelligence can write and even host podcasts like this one, I do wonder what would happen if all of us audio workers got together in a pub somewhere and started to make a plan to fight back.

That's what happened one Saturday night around 200 years ago in England. A bunch of large, angry men gathered for a pint of beer and they brought weapons. Pikes, those long spears, and sledgehammers. They were the followers of a mysterious general named Ned Ludd. They were the Luddites. And around midnight, they set out, about 150 of them, to attack the factory where they worked, to smash the machines that were taking their jobs.

Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum produced this episode in 2015. The Luddite story is really the first time that lots and lots of jobs were replaced by machines. The machines were making cloth.

Cloth was big. It was really expensive. Most people had one, maybe two sets of clothes. And England at this time was selling cloth to its colonies all around the world. It was big business and it required lots of workers. There were lots of jobs. Women would take raw wool and spin it into yarn. Then these guys would weave it into a fabric on these looms. And then there were these other guys, the, what are they called, croppers? Croppers. They had these giant...

basically 50-pound scissors to cut the fuzz off these big bolts of cloth. They were shears. They were shears. But sure, let's call them giant scissors. The jobs they did, they required skill. These people had a, for the time, at least by the standards of the time, a good and fairly prosperous life.

This is Joel Mokyr, an economic historian. He says these cloth workers, these people who are going to become the Luddites, he says they had real skills. They were in demand. They had a lot of freedom. They really worked whenever they felt like it and didn't work when they didn't feel like it. They had an institution, for instance, called St. Monday, or that's what it was called. And basically what happened was that at the weekend, particularly on Sunday,

They celebrated and drank themselves into a stupor. And then on Monday they were all hungover and didn't work. And that was known as Saint Monday.

Why Saint Monday? I think there used to be all these different saints days, like religious holidays, you know? And so, like, it'd be Monday morning. I'm so hungover. Is it a holiday today? I mean, let's call it Saint Monday, you know? Let's take the day off. It's a good job, but you can invent your own holidays. It was a good job. Weaving, in particular, was a great job. The weavers at this time were famous for walking into the pub with five-pound notes stuck in their hats.

Showing off. Yeah, showing off. Basically saying, like, look how much money I got. I can put a five-pound, you know, bill in my hat. These jobs were kind of like working in, say, I don't know, say, in the auto industry in the U.S. in the 50s. You know, they were solid jobs, and they paid well. The fact that they paid well, that ended up being their undoing. Because if you're a worker getting paid a good wage, that's great. But if you're the person paying those weavers and the spinners and the guys with the big scissors, that's

At some point, you start thinking there has got to be a better way to do this. There's got to be a cheaper way to do this, a way that does not require so many people.

And this is a moment in England when people are building all these different machines that do all these different things. Somebody made a spinning machine that was Cartwright's weaving machine, and somebody else made a machine that basically ran those giant 50-pound scissors. One inventor came up with a machine to make ribbed stockings, and this big industrialist comes along and says, I'll buy that from you. And the deal is that he gives him a hat with a big feather, and he pays his bar bill for the rest of his life. Wait, wait, wait.

So it's a hat and all the beer you can drink, basically? Forever. He gets a lifetime of free beer, yeah. And so he can go to the pub and wear the hat and have a drink every day. I assume that was a raw deal for the inventor.

Yeah, probably. I mean, unless the guy drank an incredible amount or was a really nice hat. Yeah, it was a really nice hat. I mean, what we do know is for a lot of inventors, the machine age was a great time, you know, a great time to be inventing machines. It was also for a lot of workers a bad time. You know, this is the first time that you have this massive, massive change on such a big scale. I mean, this is the industrial revolution. And the cloth workers, they are right in the center of it.

Today, when some new technology comes along, we just assume like it's there. It's going to happen. There's no stopping it. But back then, it was not clear. These guys looked around and they saw these machines making cloth faster and cheaper than they could do it.

And the workers think, you know, this is wrong. Maybe we can stop it. So they launched a kind of underground war against these machines. In 1811, these mysterious letters start appearing. You know, they get like posted on the wall at the village market. They get published in the local newspapers. I actually printed one of them out here. I printed us both copies. Okay. It says, to Mr. Smith, shearing frame holder at Hill End, Yorkshire.

Shearing frames, by the way, those are the machines that replace the guys with the shears, with the giant scissors. It says, Sir, you are a holder of those detestable shearing frames, and I was desired by my men to write to you and give you fair warning to pull them down. If they are not taken down by the end of next week, I will detach one of my lieutenants with at least 300 men to destroy them. If you shoot at us, quote, they have orders to murder you and burn all your housing.

And then at the very bottom, the letter is signed by the general of the Army of Redressers, Ned Ludd. There he is. Finally, the mastermind, the founder of the Luddite movement. Turns out Ned Ludd, not a real guy. Sorry to disappoint you. Again, this is Joel Mokyr. He never existed, apparently. There are some...

Stories that there was a man like that in the 1780s who broke a few machines, but it's very poorly documented. And most people who specialize in the area think he was just about as historical a figure as Robin Hood. As Robin Hood. Yeah. And just like Robin Hood, the story goes, Ned Ludd was hanging out in Sherwood Forest and he had this army with him. Somehow having this non-existent general in charge...

actually helped a lot. You know, people had been writing angry letters before. Sometimes they'd even been burning down factories before. But the invention of Ned Ludd made the whole thing seem, made it seem bigger. You know, it's not just like random workers here and there acting out. It's like there is this secret army, this secret army called the Luddites. And they were not like an anti-machine cult or anything. I mean, I think they were fine with steam engines. They just hated the machines that were taking their jobs. That's what they were attacking.

And by attacking machines, we actually mean attacking machines. I think they would have some people with rather primitive rifles. Many of them would have knives. Quite a few of them carried sledgehammers, and they would break into a factory, overpower any guards anywhere there. They would basically break the machinery and leave.

Ned Ludd is everywhere. He's destroying stocking frames in Nottinghamshire, burning down factories in Manchester. There are dozens of Luddite attacks in just a few months. And at this moment, people are thinking, maybe this is going to be a revolution. People are singing songs about this Ned Ludd guy in pubs. Some of the attacks, awesomely, are done in drag. Guys dress up as Ned Ludd's wife. There's this one factory owner, and when he walks down the street, kids shout at him, I'm Ned Ludd. No, I'm Ned Ludd.

Government officials get letters from somebody claiming to be Ned Ludd's solicitor general, who's filing charges against him in Ludd court in Sherwood Forest. If the whole thing sounds a little silly, it was not. These were serious riots. And it seemed possible that the Luddites could beat the machines. Because over in France, there were similar uprisings. They were in factories making rifles. And the people who used to make firearms, known as armorers...

basically rebelled against that and they broke some of the factories and they went on strike and the government needed rifles now and so eventually the mechanization process was stopped. The workers won. France shut down those new factories. And the Luddites, that's basically what they want to happen in England, right? They want Parliament to pass laws that ban the new machines or they want rules that require higher payments for work that's done by hand. Instead,

Instead, Parliament passes a law that makes destroying machines punishable by death. The army sends out thousands of soldiers into the area where the Luddites are active, and the factory owners, they start arming themselves.

And that brings us to that night, that Saturday night 200 years ago with the angry guys in the bar, right? So these guys, they leave the bar. They start marching out to the edge of town. Out in this field, they meet up with a bunch of other guys. There's about 150 of them in all. And they march on this factory.

When they get there, the armed guards see them and they start firing. And there's this battle. The guys with the sledgehammers get up to the factory. They start pounding on the door, but they can't get through it. People break the windows. The Luddites at some point have to pull back. There's gunfire. They charge again, but they cannot get past that door and they end up retreating. Two of the Luddites are shot dead outside the factory. A couple others get captured. And a bunch of people involved in this attack get arrested, rounded up and thrown in this castle.

The government holds a mass trial, finds a bunch of people guilty, and some of these guys get executed. They get hanged. These people were hanged in public.

In fact, they made the scaffolds doubly high so that everybody could see them. It's one thing to fight the machines. It's another to fight the machines and the factory owners and the army and the British government. Ned Ludd pops up here and there for a little while longer, but basically that is the end. The last we hear from Ned Ludd is this apocalyptic letter in 1816, a letter that says there is about to be this one climactic battle between

Quick quote, the last die will be cast and either the Luddites or the military will have the command. But that battle never happens. Of course, the Luddites lost. Once again, here's Bob Allen. And the number of handloom weavers goes from 250,000 to zero.

To zero. In the space of a couple of decades. Yeah. To zero. There's nobody does it by hand in 1850. That world of 1800, the world where cloth workers had St. Mondays and five-pound notes in their hats at the pub, that world was gone. Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum from 2015. Coming up after the break, we'll invite our professor back and find out what the Luddites got right and what they missed. Does anyone these days have scissors large enough to stop progress? No.

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Back with us is our professor for this episode, Rebecca Spang from Indiana University. You know, you just want to tell the Luddites. You want to send them like a letter back through a time machine that says, you know...

It's okay. Like things will get better eventually in the economy, even though there's no one with giant shears anymore and machines are doing your labor. Like eventually people will get other jobs that are better jobs.

Yes, yes, eventually. I think the struggle, the pain is when we see that in these immediate moments of acute transition, things do have a habit of getting worse before they get better. And living standards for the ordinary worker in Britain definitely declined in the first years, first decades of the Industrial Revolution.

The 1840s, 1850s, there's definitely a rebound. And certainly I would not want to live in a world that hadn't had an industrial revolution. But it was pretty terrible to live through it. Yeah, because for decades there are people whose skills no longer match what's needed in their jobs, in the factories. Right.

And for generations, there are employers who are keen to figure out how they can get the most work out of people and pay them the least money. And there are governments that aren't particularly concerned about this. Once you have governments that are concerned about this, you get better labor conditions,

and you get a working class that can actually afford to be consumers as well. And that's pretty important if you're going to have a functioning consumer society. Somebody's got to buy the stuff that you're making. Right. So after the Industrial Revolution, you see things like the 40-hour workweek and child labor laws and minimum wages, essentially government stepping in so that the workers don't want to pick up the sledgehammers and break everything into a million pieces.

One of the things that fascinated me about both of these stories that we told in this episode is that the relationship between labor and the people who employ them is never static. It feels like there can be these giant swings in either direction in terms of who has the power at any given moment. Yes, yes, I think that's right. And it's a little bit difficult to see that today, but...

Because it seems like the employers, like who are the biggest employers in most states in the United States today? Walmart? Some hospital corporation? It's like you hardly really even know who the boss is. And so that could seem a much more murky situation.

You don't know who to address the letter to when you send a threatening letter from Ned Ludd's solicitor general. That's right. That's right. Who is Ned Ludd going to write to? And it clearly makes it more difficult to organize into labor unions. We saw union membership rates peak in the 1940s and 1950s and slowly drop since then. But recently we have seen lots of news of people starting to organize again.

We've seen on college campuses a great energy among graduate students to unionize. Starbucks, Amazon warehouses. And podcasting, I will say. There's a number of our friendly colleagues at podcasts who have been recently unionizing.

Right, right, right, right. But I do think the big lesson for today is that in the long run, things do get better for workers. No matter how good it was, you would not want to swap places with a peasant after the Black Death, even if you did get extra meat and higher wages. You wouldn't want to be working a loom in pre-industrial Britain, even if you did get that five-pound note you could wear in your hat and the unlimited beer. But

that said, it does make sense to be aware of these moments, these golden moments when labor has some power and try to keep a little bit of that power because those moments, it seems to me, do not last forever. These golden moments don't last, but there's nothing to say that we don't have another one ahead of us. There's nothing to lose but our chains. Professor Rebecca Spang, thanks so much for coming in. You're very welcome.

At the end of each summer school, we like to provide a study guide recap of what we've learned. Remember, there will be an online quiz at the end of this summer and a diploma-like document if you pass.

Today we talked about labor supply and labor demand and how the price of labor, i.e. your wages, goes up when there are fewer workers and a high demand for those workers. And we also learned about something called, oh, this big one, capital labor substitution. That's when machines, capital, replace workers. It also tends to happen when labor gets more expensive or when technology makes capital cheaper.

Next time someone brings up AI, you can shake your head and mumble, capital labor substitution.

Next week on Summer School, we travel back to the birth of stocks and bonds and modern finance and show you how they unleashed a demon we face to this very day. If you have an unexcused absence, you can catch up on this and other seasons of Planet Money Summer School at npr.org slash summer school. Dozens of episodes about economics, investing, and how to thrive in business are just sitting and waiting for you.

And if you learn better through scrolling aimlessly through TikTok, why not take aim and search for Planet Money? Every summer school lesson, we'll have an entertaining TikTok up about the lessons we learned today.

Planet Money Summer School is produced by Audrey Dilling. Our project manager is Devin Meller. This episode was fact-checked by Sophia Shukina and engineered by Sina Lafreda. It was edited by Planet Money executive producer Alex Goldmark. Special thanks to Jane Humphries of Oxford University and Kevin Binfield of Murray State for providing some of the more compelling details in the Luddite episode. I'm Robert Smith. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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