Our daily bread

Mobilizing labor

One of the oldest problems of economics is how to mobilize labor. Biological evolution has provided humans the system of signals and incentives for self-motivation. I get hungry and so I seek food. I get thirsty and I seek water. I get cold and I seek shelter and clothing.

Motivating others reflects cultural evolution. Human infants are born helpless and require protection and sustenance. Marriage and family practices, including division of labor between marriage partners and among family members, evolved to provide these. The payoff is the survival and continuation of the family line. Cultures that develop effective practices survive; those that don’t don’t.

The nature of the underlying economy matters. In hunting-gathering societies, groups of hunters are more productive than solitary hunters, especially when the targets of the hunt include mastodons, bison and other large and dangerous animals. The groups apportion roles in the hunt and divide up the meat.

Agriculture adds a twist. Storable grain allows the accumulation of surpluses, which in turn support individuals and classes that don’t labor in the fields themselves. Soldiers specialize in protecting the society (and its surpluses) from enemies. Priests channel knowledge and converse with gods. Kings and princes set the laws.

This stratification transforms the problem of labor mobilization. Many or most workers don’t directly receive the fruits of their labors and so have to be motivated by other means. Such means fall into two categories: enticements and compulsion. The enticements are typically payments, in money or in kind. In premodern societies, money was rare and often hard to come by. In-kind payments had to be bartered for other necessities of life, which exacted costs of its own. 

Compulsion was often more effective. And in an era before the recognition of human rights, it offended few scruples. Workers could be forcibly enlisted for limited periods or for life.  Governments forced farmers to devote time outside the growing season to building roads or other public works. Feudal lords required vassals to work certain days on the lords’ estates. Slaves, often acquired in war, provided a permanent workforce to those who claimed their labor. In both cases—time-limited and permanent—the compulsion was ultimately physical. Work-dodging farmers, slacking vassals and fugitive slaves were beaten, whipped or otherwise made to feel physical pain. Some might be killed as an example to others, but if done too often this defeated the labor-mobilizing purpose. 

Compulsory labor spread. Slavery became ubiquitous. At first, apparently, slaves were a side-effect of wars; before long slaves became an objective of wars. Tribes raided one another for slaves, including women and girls taken for the purpose of sex and procreation. Slaves were trafficked over short distances and then across oceans. With the development of cash crops such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, rubber and spices, slaves became part of a global nexus of production and trade.

Serfs were slaves of a particular sort. These unfree workers were tied to particular parcels of agricultural land. When title to the land changed hands, the serfs conveyed as well. Precisely because of this limitation, traffic in serfs never developed, especially compared to the traffic in unattached, or chattel, slaves.

Questions of morality aside—and these were very large questions, though slow to dawn on most people—slavery suffered from two drawbacks. First, slave workers had little incentive to be productive. They worked hard enough to avoid the overseer’s lash, but effort beyond that was wasted. The slaves had no incentive to improve their skills, for the same reason.

Some slave owners, recognizing this, modified the terms of enslavement. They hired out their slaves to other employers and gave the slaves part of the proceeds. To increase the value of this cash payment, the owners might let the slaves buy their freedom over time.

The second drawback of slavery was that it saddled employers—that is, the slaveowners—with large fixed costs. Roughly speaking, the cost of a slave was the expected surplus the slave would produce over his or her life beyond the slave’s cost of subsistence. In a stable industry with predictable demand and prices, paying up front for labor might not entail unreasonable risks. But as the pace of economic change increased, this practice became a drag on economic development.

Which was what ultimately led to the demise of slavery. It was no coincidence that laws forbidding slavery followed the advancing wave of development triggered by the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution began in England in the mid-eighteenth century; English courts shortly ruled that slavery in England was incompatible with English law. In the United States, the industrial revolution commenced in the northern states, which phased out slavery by the early nineteenth century.

The dynamics of development didn’t play out in a vacuum. As slavery became less essential, and then counterproductive, to the economies of Britain and the American north, its immorality became easier to act on. Abolitionism, a fringe movement until then, emerged as a powerful force. It frightened southern slaveholders sufficiently that a majority of them made a break for independence from the United States. The war that followed began as an effort by the Union to prevent secession; it ended by freeing the rest of America’s slaves.

Yet the economic forces at work were the most important. Russia experienced no civil war, but in the same decade when America ended slavery, Czar Alexander II decreed the freedom of his country’s serfs. Brazil clung to slavery longest in the Americas, but in the 1880s the country that had imported more slaves than any other in the Western Hemisphere consigned the institution to its national dustbin.

Strikingly, and illustrative of the role of economic development, slavery was most durable in parts of Africa and Asia, where modernization was slowest to arrive. Slavery remained legal in much of the Sahel until the 1910s, and in Ethiopia until the 1930s. Mauritania didn’t criminalize slavery until the twenty-first century. Slavery remained legal in Siam (Thailand) until the early twentieth century. Slavery persists even today in the underground economy of domestic service and sex trafficking of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and some other places as well.

Black markets aside, the economies of the world have shifted from compelled labor to paid labor. This comports better with the human-rights sensibilities of modern times; more consequentially, it reflects the spread of rapidly developing modern economies. Management officers today wouldn’t dream of locking themselves into lifetime contracts for workers—which was what the purchase of slaves represented, even if the slaves themselves didn’t receive the money that changed hands. In America most workers can be fired at the slightest hint of a fall in demand. By the same token, workers can leave their jobs at will. No one is locked into anything.

Yet some things haven’t changed. Lucky workers like their jobs, but most toil for the same reasons our earliest ancestors did, to acquire the necessities of life. They might purchase dinner rather than kill it, and they might wear suits rather than animal skins, but beneath their own skins the same compulsions apply. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” God said to Adam and Eve on expelling them from Eden for tasting the forbidden fruit.

Thanks a lot, guys.