From Clio Infrastructure
Global Labour Relations
Of central importance to the question of economic performance and (in)equality are the institutions of the labour market. There is a wide variety of labour relations, ranging from wage labour to slavery, from family subsistence labour to debt bondage. Workers’ agency or producers’ incentives to increase production is linked to the labour relations prevalent in a given society. This collaboratory, initiated by the IISH (and funded by NWO-internationalisering, and the Henkel-Stiftung) focuses on putting together a global dataset covering aspects of labour relations (visit the site). Its output are estimates, by country or macro-region, tracing developments in labour relations worldwide for five survey years: 1500, 1650, 1800, 1900 and 2000. Presently the hub is gathering data on the occurrence of all types of labour relations with the help of a large group of regional experts from different disciplines. With the input of this group a taxonomy of labour relations and a set of definitions have been put together. The participants are sharing data and its critical annotations in a collaboratory working space and during meetings. Click on the link for an overview of the type of data gathered. Data has been collected for a number of European countries, the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, North America and Spanish America, India, Indonesia, China, Taiwan and Korea. Data on Russia/USSR, the Middle East, Northern Africa and sub-Sahara Africa will be added in the future. The target here is the group of 100+ countries. Bringing together the data on labour relations typically involves, as an intermediate step, collecting data on occupational structure. These will also be made available.
By the end of 2010, 85 % of the data on labour relations for males or for the whole labour force will be collected, but there will be a large gap in the data where gender differences and age groups are concerned. Thus, we want to add gender and age-specific data in a second stage of the project, since no serious explanation of major shifts in labour relations can be made without including the share of female and child labour. We know that it is possible for some countries to extrapolate from data produced by detailed cases studies the share of female and child labour in larger areas. In a pilot study, we will examine to what extent it is possible to produce a dataset with estimates of the share of female and child labour worldwide over the last 500 years.
