Division of labour

“ Just as a certain number of simultaneously employed labourers are the material pre-requisites for division of labour in manufacture, so are the number and density of the population, which here correspond to the agglomeration in one workshop, a necessary condition for the division of labour in society. ”

“ We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking; the labour that is divided; but the men:—Divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; ”

“ With Bücher and others we may distinguish between several kinds of division of labour; we must clearly recognise that the injurious effects of division of labour are largely dependent upon the undue length of the working day, and so on. ”

“ It is the same with Scientific Science also. Division of Labour is the condition of the life of organisms and of human societies; but what have we to consider in these human societies as an organic division of labour? ”

“ The division of labour, however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour. ”

“ In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations ”

“ The division of labour, which has played so great a part in furthering competitive commerce, till it has become a machine with powers both reproductive and destructive, which few dare to resist, and none can control or foresee the result of, has pressed specially hard on that part of the field of human culture in which I was born to labour. ”

“ As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital. ”

“ The different kinds of labour, such as tillage, cattle tending, spinning, weaving and making clothes, which result in the various products, are in themselves, and such as they are, direct social functions, because functions of the family, which just as much as a society based on the production of commodities, possesses a spontaneously developed system of division of labour. ”

“ And thus when the division of labour is fairly inaugurated and, instead of each attempting to satisfy all of his wants by direct resort to nature, one fishes, another hunts, a third picks berries, a fourth gathers fruit, a fifth makes tools, a sixth builds huts, and a seventh prepares clothing - each one to the extent he exchanges the direct product of his own labour for the direct product of the labour of others is really applying his own labour to the production of the things he uses. ”

“ There is not only a territorial extension of the division of labour in the sense of being spread over a larger area and a greatly more numerous population, but the physical resources, the natural agents of wealth themselves, as found in various countries and places, are brought into the general organization as they could be by no other means, and made to yield in due harmony with each other all their special and relative superiorities. ”

“ But if this policy is wise and just, as applicable to each natural division of labour, because hardly one covers a majority of the people, it is still more forcible when applied to the artificial divisions of labour. These are more personal and local, than the former. They do not supply objects of consumption more necessary nor more universal than their comrades. ”

“ The great function of slavery can be no other than a division of labour13. Division of labour is taken here in the widest sense, as including not only a qualitative division, by which one man does one kind of work and another a different kind, but also a quantitative one, by which one man’s wants are provided for not by his own work only, but by another’s, A society without any division of labour would be one, in which each man worked for his own wants, and nobody for another’s ”

“ The division of labour thus becomes established, as reciprocally advantageous to all. This principle soon extends itself: new wants arise: the number of different employments is multiplied. Smiths, carpenters, and other artisans, find a place: also shepherds and herdsmen, to provide oxen for the farmer, wool and hides for the weaver and the shoemaker. ”

“ The first application of this principle must have been made in a very early stage of society; for it must soon have been apparent, that a larger number of comforts and conveniences could be acquired by each individual, if one man restricted his occupation to the art of making bows, another to that of building houses, a third boats, and so on. This division of labour into trades was not, however, the result of an opinion that the general riches of the community would be increased by such an arrangement; ”

“ We have already mentioned what may, perhaps, appear paradoxical to some of our readers that the division of labour can be applied with equal success to mental as to mechanical operations, and that it ensures in both the same economy of time. ”

“ When, division of labour having been carried to a considerable extent and means of communication made easy, there arises a marked localization of industries, the relative growths of the populations devoted to them may be interpreted on the same principle. The influx of people to each industrial centre, as well as the rate of multiplication of those already inhabiting it, is determined by the payment for labour ”

“ The severance of these offices successively would arrive sooner or later, according as the progress made in numbers and wealth was rapid or slow. Concentration of employments in a single hand marks the primitive condition or retarded movement of society, while the division of labour is the sign of more speedy and more advanced development. ”

“ But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it. ”

“ Side by side with the great majority, exclusively bond slaves to labor, arises a class freed from directly productive labor, which looks after the general affairs of society.; the direction of labor, State business, law, science, art, etc. It is, therefore, the law of division of labor that lies at the basis of the division into classes. ”

“ The effect of the vocations and the division of labor is to produce, in the first instance, not social groups, but vocational types, the actor, the plumber, and the lumber-jack. The organizations, like the trade and labor unions, which men of the same trade or profession form are based on common interests. ”

“ Labor is never an end in itself; it is always a means to an end, and this end is the satisfaction of human demands.
The simple and complex forms of division of labor. Division of Labor.—In applying their labor to natural resources men soon found that the best results could be obtained by apportioning different tasks to different workers. This is called the division of labor and it has been one of the great factors in the progress of production. ”

“ In this, I have not assumed that the produce of the labour is to be equally divided, but merely, that all are equally interested in it, so long as it is unknown how it will be divided; and, therefore, that each person will view the future consequences, expected to result from an increase or relaxation of his own exertions, in the same light as he would any other benefit or injury extending indifferently to the whole community. ”

“ Some of the greatest economic restrictions are not legislative but are what have grown out of customs and practices, especially of labor unions. I shall not here discuss the effect of labor unions upon wages, except in a general way. Wages spring from production and represent the division thereof among capital, management and labor. The aggregate of their shares of the three parties can exceed 100 per cent by no possibility. The conditions of modern civilization are too complex to permit a division of produce in kind. ”

“ That not, as in former times, the individual works alone and for his own account, but dozens, hundreds and thousands of men work together in shops, in mines, on huge farms and lands, coöperating according to the most efficient division of labor, while the fruits of this cööperative labor are not reaped by the workers themselves, but are in a great measure appropriated by the owners of the means of production. ”

“ Division of labor is the law of all existing things, and, therefore, it should be present in human societies. It is very possible that this is so; but still the question remains, Of what nature is that division of labor which I behold in my human society? is it that division of labor which should exist? And if people regard a certain division of labor as unreasonable and unjust, then no science whatever can convince men that that should exist which they regard as unreasonable and unjust. ”

“ We do not look upon the labour union as an ultimate conception of labour, but we believe that whatever progress has been made in the lot of the labourer has been due wholly to the organization of the wage-workers! ”