Perhaps it’s no surprise that one of the earliest known examples of writing features two basic human concerns: alcohol and work. About 5000 years ago, the people living in the city of Uruk, in modern day Iraq, wrote in a picture language called cuneiform. On one tablet excavated from the area we can see a human head eating from a bowl, meaning “ration”, and a conical vessel, meaning “beer”. Scattered around are scratches recording the amount of beer for a particular worker. It’s the world’s oldest known payslip, implying that the concept of worker and employer was familiar five millennia ago.
It was not ever thus. Çatalhöyük in what is now Turkey was one of the first towns. Houses and human remains dating from its foundation some 9000 years ago are all very similar, suggesting equality. “Everyone was involved in small-scale farming or hunting,” says , an anthropologist at Stanford University in California who has excavated at Çatalhöyük since 1993. No one owned the land, and produce was shared. The residents of this city are unlikely to have considered their daily chores “work”, says Hodder. “My view is that they would see it as just part of their daily activities, along with cooking, rituals and feasts that were such an important part of their lives.”
Change came a few thousand years later. The trigger seems to have been an agricultural revolution in which new methods of cultivation and animal domestication increased food production and allowed some individuals to build up wealth. The surplus food freed some from toiling in the fields to focus on specialised tasks such as carpentry or pottery. By the time our beer ration card was written, a professional class had been born, a transition that seems to mark the beginning of what we know as work.
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These same conditions set the scene for other working practices that still endure. “There was a change from social sharing to hierarchies,” says Hodder. “This was an inevitable consequence of living in large communities and intensifying agricultural production.” Throughout the Middle East and China between 6000 and 4000 BC, as towns became bigger, a powerful elite commandeered not only resources, but labour.
Back then you didn’t work for money, but rather food, shelter and protection. Since then work has slowly morphed into the employment we have today. Our human needs, for food and shelter, haven’t changed — but the way we get them has.
How work came to be
AD 80 A Roman encyclopedia mentions soldiers being paid in salt, a valuable commodity. To begin with, workers were rarely paid in money – Roman slaves, for instance, entered all sorts of professions, including accounting and medicine, but weren’t remunerated
1000s Feudalism begins to take hold in Europe. Under this system, a select few own land and allow peasants to subsistence farm it in return for their work
1100s Royal charters issued in England contain the first mention of guilds, collections of tradespeople that regulated a craft in a particular region. It illustrates a wider diversity of jobs that began to emerge across Europe in the middle ages: in 15th century Hamburg there were 102 different guilds
1400s Surnames became widely used and usually reflected a person’s trade. People were beginning to define themselves by their job rather than just ancestry, location or religion
1776 Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations. Seen as the fundamental work of classical economics, it introduced ideas such as economies of scale – large groups of workers being more cost-effective
1860s The first company pensions appear among railway companies in the UK and shortly after in the US and Canada. As large employers became more common they began competing to attract workers
1850 The concept of a weekend began to emerge. The Factory Act of 1850 mandated a 2pm finish on Saturdays, although the working week was still 60 hours long
1863 Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, which signalled the end of slavery in the US
1880s Otto von Bismarck introduced the first welfare system in Germany. The idea was to make sure people weren’t impoverished when they were too sick or elderly to work
1929 A five-day week becomes common following the Wall Street crash and ensuing depression.
1992 Sociologist Juliet Schor published The Overworked American, revealing that people in the US worked the equivalent of a month more in 1987 than they did in 1969
1999 Minimum wage is introduced in the UK. It is now ÂŁ7.20 an hour for those aged over 25. The policy was designed to protect pay in the face of declining trade union membership
2003 European Union’s Working Time Directive enacted. The rules say that, to protect people’s health, no firm can force an employee to work more than 48 hours a week. The same year saw the release of the Blackberry 6210, the first widely used mobile phone to let people to check email anywhere
