Working Lives

This very useful and balanced book by Arthur McIvor is, in effect, a successor to his A History of Work in Britain, 1880–1950 (2001; rev. ante, cxvii [2002], 1002–3), and describes a change in patterns of occupation and work no less significant. Between the mid-nineteenth century and 1914, Britain became the most urban society in history, with a proportion of its workforce employed in industrial manufacture which also had (and has had) no historical equivalent. With that came an industrial-urban culture which most of the rest of the world did not experience until the later twentieth century—if then. Those patterns remained relatively stable until the late 1960s, though the relative size of the manual working class declined gently. Since the 1970s, however, and particularly since the 1980s, such patterns have changed with astonishing speed. Whole industries which lay at the heart of the British economy—coal, shipbuilding and heavy engineering, and textiles—have largely vanished, and within a generation. Those elements that have survived have done so largely at the luxury or specialised end of the market. By 2000, as a consequence, only about 37 per cent of the workforce was ‘manual’. In 1951 it was 70 per cent. Simultaneously, there has been a huge expansion in the tertiary sector of the economy—finance, banking and ‘services’. Britain, in fact, always had, by international standards, a large service sector. It was able to support this and an immense industrial working class because, by such standards, only a small proportion of its population was employed in agriculture. In the last forty years, however, the growth of the tertiary sector has been at the expense of industrial Britain

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