Henry Mayhew Quotes
The costermongers' boys will, I am informed, cheat their employers, but they do not steal from them.
Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. Vol. 1, Griffin, Bohn, and Company, 1861, p. 40.
While it was true that wages did not increase beyond inflation, the enormous increase in productivity—about a doubling—was not only due to the workers but was also due to the capital investment that the companies made in computers, robots, job restructuring, advanced training, and other management initiatives. Historically, when there are substantial productivity increases, the benefit is shared between the workers and the company as both were necessary to produce the increase in productivity. But since 1980, the workers have not obtained any significant share of the productivity increase.
She was writing about the textile mills of Manchester, England in the Industrial Revolution. Workers’ wages were so low that many of them could not feed themselves and their family decently
This is not a common quotation from Thoreau. The great man for whom the establishment had so much respect had a very anti-capitalist streak. His view is that the employer will generally never pay his laborers a fair wage. Instead he will pay the laborer the lowest rate for which he can obtain the laborers services. If the laborer generates added value for his wage, the employer is in a zero sum game with the laborer. If part of the added value—the profit is paid to the laborer, the employer does not have it for himself (or his stockholders). In most cases, the laborer is forced to work for his and his family’s subsistence. This theory argues that they only way the laborer will get a fair wage is if there is a labor shortage (assuming no government laws or union pressure is in the picture. Many capitalists argue that a “fair” wage is what a free man is willing to work for and a free employer is willing to pay. So economics is like politics in general with respect to fairness—there is no universally accepted definition of what is fair.
Henry Mayhew was a journalist, playwright, and advocate of reform. He was one of the co-founders of the satirical magazine Punch in 1841, and was the magazine's joint editor, with Mark Lemon, in its early days. He is also known for his work as a social researcher, publishing an extensive series of newspaper articles in the Morning Chronicle that was later compiled into the book series London Labour and the London Poor (1851), a groundbreaking and influential survey of the city's poor.
