Paid employment is mentioned a in the Bible (for example, Ruth 2) in the context of day laborers. And of course, we know that the Pyramids were built not by slaves, but by paid laborers – but I asume their emplyment was strictly ad hoc and that the builders were not employees, as a person in 2025 would understand the concept of employment, of ACME Pyramid Building LLC, but rather people who were expected to do the job until it was done (independent contractors, if you will). Skilled tradespeople existed, such as Jesus of Nazareth (carpenter) or Paul of Tarsus (leatherworker), but I imagine their system consisted of masters and apprentices and not bosses and employees as we would understand them. And of course in those days, slaves did most of the grunt work, including, I assume, housekeeping and such.
Do we know when the concept of indefinite, paid employment became a thing? Define “paid employment” as you would your own job – you show up so many days per week to do a job that is expected of you, you get paid a certain rate at certain intervals, and you and your employer both understand that the relationship is voluntary (you are neither a conscript nor a slave). The relationship lasts for as long as you are both happy with it (or until you are no longer needed or whatever).
Were I to hazard a guess, I would say that the first paid employees who were neither day laborers nor slaves were probably household help (of the very wealthy, obviously), who likely got paid a pittance and who likely were treated horribly, but they weren’t slaves and they still had a job waiting for them when they woke up the next day. Chattel slavery in Western Europe largely went away in the fifth-sixth century, so I’m guessing around that time???
What do Economics and History textbooks say about this?
I think it was the industrial revolution that created modern wage jobs.
A factory isn’t like a field. A field only needs work during certain times of the year and that amount of work varies. So if you’re hiring people to work in a field, you want to be able to hire them by the day.
But a factory always needs the same amount of work, day after day. So you want a steady work force that will show up each day. So you hire people on an ongoing basis and expect them to do the same work every day.
I think the situation here is different. Servants evolved out of household staff. If you were a noble, you had a bunch of people in your household that did the work. In exchange, you were expected to provide for their needs. House servants derived from this idea. Your butlers and maids and gardeners were part of your household not just hired employees.
I think once the idea of being a paid employee emerged in factories it then filtered back into other areas like house servants.
Medieval apprentices (and presumably assistants) for tradesmen probably fall in the same category - it’s an ongoing business. It may need certain help. An apprentice may hav been treated like a member of the family (small shop) or servant (larger shop). But the concept of permanent work/employment probably evolved with the businesses that had steady functions rather than seasonal ones. Pay by the day (or week) would be logical in the days before computers and literacy.
Probably civil service, as in various functionaries carrying out assigned tasks in the administration for a regular allowance or salary. I’d say as far back as Sumer or old kingdom Egypt.
I would think it became a think when the Industrial Age blossomed into being. Factories, assembly lines, mass production, etc wasn’t seasonal, it was steady and ongoing.
My understanding is that the economic view back then was different than what we have now. The basic idea in medieval society was that everyone had a place where they fit in and a society was seen as a system which worked because every individual was doing their piece of it.
For artisans, this was expressed through the guild system. The economic ideal back then was not that individuals were competing to make the best products for the best prices and consumers would reward those who did the best job. The guild ideal was that society needed a certain amount of products on an ongoing basis and therefore you needed an amount of artisans who would produce that amount of products. Guilds existed to regulate the amount of artisans working in a business, the amount of products they each produced, the way they made those products, and the amount they sold them for.
Without machines production is labor-limited, and without transport markets are limited even if you could produce more. So although there are a handful of precedents (pottery for export by ship was made assembly-line in the Greco-Roman era), the idea of being able to expand your widget business indefinitely is a distinctly Industrial Era innovation.
Even academics have difficulty discerning the line between servants and apprentices and true paid laborers with rights and powers.
In the period between the 13th and 18th centuries the wage-earning population was, among others, employed as servants (in households, husbandry and work shops), apprentices and journeymen in crafts, mercenaries, migratory workers, and more or less proletarianised wage labourers. For the historian it is often not easy to distinguish wage labour from labour service based on feudal or domanial relations, from bonded (‘indentured’) labour or from self-employment. The ‘freedom’ of labour may sometimes have been restricted to the act of entry into an institutionally defined relationship, but may in other cases have resulted in real bargaining power in what, at a certain stage of development, might be called a ‘labour market’. The restrictions on the market character of relations are, for instance, apparent in the curious ‘stickiness’ of wages during a large part of the indicated period.
Literature:
Bavel, B. J.P., van 'Rural wage labour in the sixteenth-century Low Countries: an assessment of the importance and nature of wage labour in the countryside of Holland, Guelders and Flanders, Continuity and Change 21:1 (2006) 37-72 Blondé, Bruno, Eric Vanhaute & Michèle Gland (eds), Labour and labour markets between town and countryside (Middle Ages - 19th century) (Turnhout 2001) Dyer, C., An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005) Klatt, Wolfgang, Treuepflichten im Arbeitsverhältnis (Pfaffenweilier 1990) Prak, Maarten (ed), Early Modern Capitalism: Economic and Social Change in Europe, 1400-1800. (London & New York 2001) Steinfeld, Robert J., The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill & London 1991) Vries, J. de, ‘How did pre-industrial labour markets function?’, in: George Grantham en Mary MacKinnon (eds.), Labour market evolution. The economic history of market integration, wage flexibility and the employment relation (Londen 1994) 39-63 Woodward, D., Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern England, 1450-1750, (Cambridge 1995)
No question that as everyone is saying the Industrial Revolution drew a large and visible line. It did not create a labor market from scratch, however, but drew on earlier precedents over centuries.
On the other hand if indentured servants who receive a stipend don’t count, then soldiers who are definitely not free to quit whenever they want probably don’t either.
I think the key divide is over what obligations the employer has to the workers.
If you were a general, you weren’t just paying your soldiers. You were assuming an obligation to feed them and shelter them and provide them with goods they needed to live. The same was true for a home owner employing a house servant.
Modern employers don’t have this relationship with their workers. The transaction here if the employer pays the worker a given amount of money to preform a given amount of work. And that’s it. The worker is expected to provide for themselves with the money they’re given. There is no sense of obligation put upon the employer to take care of their workers.
One of the most notable historical applications of “stickiness” is in economics, specifically regarding “sticky wages” and “sticky prices.” This concept explains why certain prices and wages do not immediately adjust to new market conditions, such as during a recession.
19th-century origins: The foundations of sticky wages can be traced to economic observations in the 19th century, though the term was formalized later. Economists noted that nominal wages—the wage paid in dollar terms—tend to be “downwardly rigid,” meaning workers resist any pay cuts, even if the real wage (the purchasing power of that wage) increases due to falling prices.
Soldiers come to mind - maybe not all but a base of them, as well as tax collectors. Sailors in the business of trade too would seem to be more of what we consider employees which seems to go way back. (biblically Jonah’s boarding the ship comes to mind). Jesus tells a parable about a servant who can negotiate contracts on behold of his master.
Sailors historically were paid from the profits on the voyage, so at the end of the trip not at regular intervals. And then they had to find another captain to take them on. Essentially they were contract workers on specific projects, even the ones who regularly worked with one captain.
And traditionally they were contracted for the length of the voyage round-trip; jumping ship was a crime. To the point that before reform legislation was passed, the US Supreme Court ruled that forcibly returning a sailor to his ship was a grandfathered exception to the ban on slavery!
My guess is also soldiers - not necessarily regular military, but rather mercenaries, especially of the “personal retainer” type: bodyguards, security guards, castle men-at-arms and so on. Permanently hired muscle.
Several of Jesus’ parables in the Bible, particularly in the gospel of Matthew, mention servants, and sometimes there are servants who oversee other servants. A few of the parables explicitly state that the servants handle money. This implies that some of the servants must have had a long-term relationship with their employer and built up a level of trust that an ordinary day laborer wouldn’t have.