How Work has Changed and its e essays

How Work has Changed and its e essays Employment and employees have changed a great deal since the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century most employees didnt punch a time clock, get their time card electronically stamped, at the beginning and end of their work shift. They also didnt have a supervisor monitoring the work produced throughout the entire workday and they didnt get paid at an hourly rate. Unlike today, work was usually paid by the number of products or items a person could produce, resulting in what is known as piecework. This allowed employees to work at their own pace and gave them the ability to usually set their own work schedule by choosing the time of day they wanted to work. Some were able to even work at home where they werent supervised by anyone. These early workers were very skilled and respected by their customers and employers. Their type of trade could easily take years of apprenticeship to learn, making them valuable and hard to replace. However, the nineteenth century and the Industrial Revolution brought changes to the way the average employee viewed their work and how they worked. New ways of acquiring power were invented such as steam engines, the internal combustion engine, and electricity. The skilled workers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, who made a product on their own, were now making just one piece to the whole product. Another important difference was that the one piece was not made when and where the employee wanted. Instead, the employee, who was supervised by a manager, had to report to a factory where the product was split up into pieces and divided among several employees in order to be made. Managers or supervisors controlled what was being produced, who made the product and the speed at which the work was made. This made it easier to train an employee to perform tasks and it also cut the learning curve from years to weeks...