Missing work: absenteeism at Pepperell Manufacturing Co. in 1883
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Missing work: absenteeism at Pepperell Manufacturing Co. in 1883 Joyce Burnette1 Received: 15 June 2020 / Accepted: 23 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract While factories are usually thought to have disciplined workers, I find that absence rates at a US textile factory in 1883 were fairly high—9% if breaks up to 4 weeks are considered absences. Women’s absence rates were about 50% higher than those of men. While I find only weak support for economic motives, I find strong support for leisure-related motives for absences. Absences were high near weekends and holidays, and for special events, and absences were less likely when it rained. When studying how much people worked, we should not assume that days worked by employees matched days of operation for the employer. Keywords Work intensity · Textile factory · Absence · Weavers · Absenteeism · Days of work JEL Classification J22 · N31
1 Introduction Generally, economists have paid little attention to absenteeism. There is a literature on absences (Allen 1981; Brown and Sessions 1996; Barmby et al. 2002; Treble and Barmby 2011), but the topic does not appear in the Handbook of Labor Economics or in major textbooks, and absences are poorly measured in the US (Allen 1983).1 Employers, by contrast, are quite interested in absenteeism.2 Absences cost firms 1 Recently, interest in absenteeism has increased in development economics, where experiments have helped to determine what incentives work best for encouraging work attendance (Chaudhury et al. 2006; Banerjee and Duflo 2006). 2 Manufacturing employers complain about high rates of absenteeism. "The Workforce: The Human Resources Perspective", a workshop presented by the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County and the Montgomery County Community Foundation, April 9, 2019, in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Montgomery County Community Foundation, April 9, 2019, in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
* Joyce Burnette [email protected] 1
Department of Economics, Wabash College, Crawfordsville, IN, USA
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money if they cause capital to stand idle or if tasks are complementary, so that the absence of one worker makes another worker less productive (Weiss 1985; Coles and Treble 1996). Unfortunately, neglecting absences may cause us to mis-measure historical labor. The number of days worked per year is important for economic history, both for measuring the standard of living and for understanding work intensity. We need to know the number of days worked per year to convert daily wages into annual income; Allen (2001) assumes 250 days of work per year when calculating his welfare ratios, but other historians have questioned this assumption (Hatcher 2018). Often the number of days worked is assumed to be all available days minus Sundays and holidays, as if workers were always at work on non-holidays (Hamilton 1936 p. 174; Huberman 2004; DeVries 2008 p. 88). Huberman and Minns (2007, pp. 545–546) estimate annual hours worked based on the assumption
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