Before Careers: Experiences of Wage Growth among Late Nineteenth-Century Swedish Cigar Workers

Maria Stanfors and Joyce Burnette ()
Additional contact information
Joyce Burnette: Wabash College, Postal: Department of Economics , Wabash College, Crawfordsville, IN 47933, USA, http://persweb.wabash.edu/facstaff/burnettj/homepage.html

No 121, Lund Papers in Economic History from Lund University, Department of Economic History

Abstract: This article uses a new and detailed survey of cigar-making employers and employees to investigate male and female wage growth in the late nineteenth century. Swedish cigar workers in 1898 did not have careers like workers today do; instead, labor markets were more flexible, and workers were not much penalized for time out of the labor force. Job tenure was short, and firm-specific human capital was not significant. Women benefited from these flexible labor markets and, unlike today, were not penalized for childbearing. While cigar workers experienced some significant earnings growth, this was confined to the first few years in the industry. Men and women had similar earnings growth at first, but male earnings growth continued longer than female earnings growth, creating a gender earnings gap.

Keywords: Earnings; gender; employment; household; piece rates; motherhood; family gap; late nineteenth century (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J10 J12 J16 J22 J31 J33 N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2012-12-17
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published as Stanfors, Maria and Joyce Burnette, 'Before Careers: Experiences of Wage Growth among Late Nineteenth-Century Swedish Cigar Workers' in Historical Methods, 2015, pages 35-51.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ekh.lu.se/media/ekh/forskning/lund_papers_in_ecomonic_history/121.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:luekhi:0121

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Lund Papers in Economic History from Lund University, Department of Economic History Department of Economic History, Lund University, Box 7083, S-220 07 Lund, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tobias Karlsson () and Benny Carlsson ().