ABSTRACT
Employer-employee reciprocal trust relationships were akin to and a component of the social contract. In return for a ‘fair’ amount of effort, workers expected their masters to provide ‘fair’ wages and working conditions. If these were unforthcoming and the trust contract was unilaterally broken, employees, in retaliation, would restrict effort, withdraw their labour and, in extreme cases, riot. Before industrialisation, there supposedly existed a ‘community feeling between’ workers and their masters, which arose ‘from long connection and the remembrance of kind offices received and faithful services performed’ and that took the form of ‘an inheritance transmitted from parent to son’. Certainly, the state and some employers tried to ensure the establishment of a virtuous relationship with workers. The Statute of Artificers of 1563 sought the enforcement of apprenticeship regulations and thus the survival of the guilds, which limited competition and upheld ethical behaviour through rules, fines and even imprisonment. It also attempted to secure ‘unto the hired person, both in time of scarcity and plenty, a convenient proportion of wages’ by requiring local magistrates, after taking the advice of ‘discrete and grave persons’, considering the level of prices and ‘conferring together’, to set appropriate wage rates, which were enforced by local constables through fines. Other legislation sought to dampen economic change that threatened the employer-employee reciprocal contract. Statutes, for example, sought to limit the number of looms owned by individuals outside the corporate towns and to prohibit the gig mill, which was thought to lead to unemployment.1
