The supply of quality workers and the demand for quality in jobs in Japan's early industrialization

Abstract

In the West, historical treatments of the rise of the factory system have always stressed the attitudes, pressures, and discontents of the workers. Despite this historical interest most economic analysis of early European and American industrialization has stressed changes not in the supply but in the demand for labor, particularly technological developments, capital accumulation, and the opening of markets. Not surprisingly, the few systematic international historical comparisons of labor supply which have been made have come up with widely diverse conclusions. Morris (1960) concludes explicitly that labor supply was a “slack variable” and extends this assertion not only to India (1855-1914) but to Great Britain (17701830) and remarkably to New England (17921840): “In no case did the shortage of skilled labor . . . inhibit the pace at which the industry would otherwise have expanded . . . I think it is safe to say that the supply of raw unskilled labor was never an inhibiting factor in economic growth.” In contrast Gerschenkron (1%2) has made the inelasticity of the supply of such labor in the early stages of development, regardless of national demographics, a foundation block in his understanding of the industrial development of the various continental European countries. Lacking the traits of stability, reliability, and discipline, it is argued the underemployed peasants and urban poor of nineteenth-century Central and Eastern Europe did not necessarily translate into a ready supply of labor for the newly borrowed Western European factory system. For Japan, quite unlike the experience of Europe and the United States, historical economists and economic historians have not neglected the description and economic analysis of the supply of labor in early industrialization. Drawing on an already venerable Marxist tradition in the 1920s and 193Os, academic members of the two Marxist factions, the