The Casual and Seasonal Workforce

Abstract

Some types of farming, particularly arable agriculture, meant high seasonal labour demands that could not be met by regularly employed staff. Groups of additional workers, engaged on a short-term basis, filled the need and are the focus of this chapter. Women and children were an important component of the casual workforce, which, in eastern counties, resulted in the widespread use of gang labour. Migrant workers, such as the skilled Irish harvesters, were a feature of mid-Victorian agriculture, and groups of English men also traversed well-known routes within and across county boundaries to take on mowing, shearing, threshing and hedging contracts. This chapter explores how much economic depression, new agricultural technologies, state intervention and migration stymied demand and regulated the supply of casual and seasonal workers before 1914.