Victorian
There was a time, many years ago, when one of every householder’s yearly rituals was to get out a ladder and start cleaning out the gutters. This was a late autumn task, when almost all the leaves had come down, hopefully before November rain was falling. Yes, it was an English task: arriving in Australia, not only are the seasons six months out, but leaves fall in Spring as well as in the Autumn (many eucalypts seem to lose their leaves just as the weather warms up). There’s a lot to do. Just recently I watched a neighbour’s son up on the roof clearing gutters, and I knew I should be outside doing the same.
While I was meditating on the passing of the seasons, there was a great deal of noise as a ‘Supasuk’ came up the road to begin removing all the leaves from another neighbour’s house gutters, the mechanism using a powerful vacuum system. Hickman’s Supasuk has been in business for more than 20 years, and it’s been, well, sucking up stuff. A local firm, I discovered it was strategically located between the Teaporium and Good Earth Garden Supplies. The day after another neighbour had an alternative vacuum system visit to clean out his gutters. It was gutter cleaning season. Nowadays the task’s accompanied by a great deal of noise: forget climbing up ladders with a garden hose and broom – Supasuk rules!!
Cleaning gutters is just one of the many services available today. Companies to look after gardening, lawn-mowing and house painting have been around for years, but they are one small part of a growing range of activities where people are happy to help you, for a fee of course. Among the well-established I’ve noticed pet shampooing vans for a long time, but now as I wander around neighbourhood streets, I see a profusion of people ready to come over and help. On recent walks I’ve noticed mobile service provers offering home chiropody, exercise, meditation, and yoga. I’m certain there are beauticians on call, and even hair cuts available. There are personal shoppers to buy clothes for you, or to advise on fashion choices. Food services are everywhere, as we’ve graduated from ordering pizzas to restaurants supplying whole meals, or, if preferred, pre-prepared meals to heat, set out and serve. These options are accompanied by videos on the internet providing guidelines on how to create a mouth-watering dish, some with an online help service should you get in trouble!
Another area where services flourish has to do with your dwelling. House painting, house repairs, new gutters, heating and air-conditioning overhauls, alongside furniture advice and deliveries (‘we’ll deliver a new bed and take away the old one at no extra cost’). For those who would like it, there’s car cleaning and servicing at you place, tyre changes, even new car batteries to your door. You might need to call up the company that enlarges home driveways to make room for all these people, and I’ve scarcely started.
Next up, leisure. Not only can you find guides for nature walks when you are travelling, both people and handouts, but there are even guides for walks around your neighbourhood. There are guides that tell you places to go; guides to tell you what you can see; even guides specific to your interests, from wildflowers to birds and historic places. You don’t have to go outside, of course, as there are bookshops to send you the next items by your favourite author, as well as book advisers, ready to curate your reading program for the future. Need financial advice on how to manage paying for all these goodies or to help you in preparing your tax return? There’s an online advisor waiting! Thinking of a holiday? Many experts offer advice on where to go, what to pack, and even help in getting to the airport, looking after your bags, passport and itinerary: perhaps you should take that adviser with you, as they can show you where to visit, when and how to tip the locals, where to find the best food, and so much more.
Do I need to continue? For everyone who has the money there are dozens, even hundreds of people ready to assist and support you. So many services on call. Of course, the people who provide these services aren’t ‘servants’: they are independent businesspeople, running their own operations. But looking at it more closely, they seem a little similar. Service providers and servants both serve you, and they do so for financial reward: the scale is considerable, from a cheap Vietnamese nail and cuticle service to those sophisticated personal shoppers. It is as if you are living in the manor house, surrounded people working for your benefit.
The service sector is the largest part of most ‘post-industrial’ societies, dominating the . economy. It sits alongside the primary sector, which comprises farming, mining, and agricultural business activities, and the secondary sector covering manufacturing and business activities that create a host of goods from the raw materials produced in the primary sector. Using the US as an example, in 2018, the primary sector contributed around 1% to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 19% percent came from industry, while the service sector contributed close to 80%. Services rule!
Back in 1880, things looked very different, with agriculture dominant, accounting for nearly 70% of the workforce and around half the output; services employed about 20%, contributing 31% to the economy, and manufacturing employed 12% and contributed 21%. Seventy years later, manufacturing was at its height, with about 40% of the workforce and output, although the service sector employed more people (just over half) and contributed more. Agriculture was dropping, and by 2010, that decline reached the point where it contributed just 2% to the economy, with a mere 3% of the workforce. Manufacturing had been in decline over the years, too, dropping to one fifth of the workforce, and a quarter of economic activity. Services dominated, with most of the workforce and three quarters of the output.
I guess that’s an old story. However, returning to 1880, the Industrial Revolution had changed both the work people did and the distribution of wealth in society. Inequalities had become more obvious. The rich grew richer in terms of income, personal wealth and land ownership. In fact, wealth disparities had always been the case, but the growth of the manufacturing sector and the massive migration of people to towns and factories made those differences starker. For people at the bottom of this system, especially women, working for the rich capitalists and landowners became essential for survival: this was the domestic servant era: they were the ones living ‘downstairs’ working for the affluent family ‘upstairs’.
By the beginning of the 20th Century, this began to change. Manufacturing required more skilled employees, and salaries began to increase. Alongside this, the professionalisation of the service sector also saw incomes there improve, too. Slowly, the massive inequalities of Victorian life began to erode. However, shifts in manufacturing and industry had other consequences, particularly evident in comparing the periods before and after World War II.
Basically, before World War II, the service sector grew because people got wealthier. In America, as the economy and average incomes rose, more and more people sought prepared meals, house and vehicle repairs, as well as grooming and financial services. After World War II, driven by many new technologies developed during the war years, industrial productivity grew rapidly, even faster than the demand for products, while service sector productivity grew far more slowly. As society continued to become wealthier overall, the demand for a growing range of services increased, fortuitously creating jobs which managed to soak up many of those no longer employed in manufacturing.
Today we are living with yet another change, which is the emergence of the product-service system. An easy example is a car. Once, we bought a car, drove it, repaired it, and looked after its mechanics (even I did this, regrinding the pistons for my first car). Now, the car is in the centre of a whole range of service activities. As a mechanical and electrical system, the car communicates with the driver, supported by a whole range of service agencies who can repair and upgrade components and computerised processes. An in-built GPS device advises the driver of the route to taking, and warns about weather conditions, accidents, and even police radar checkpoints! Cars are cleaned by robot systems or young gig-economy workers.
There’s more – there always is! Car interiors (and outside paint work) can be curated by experts, who will even help you program the radio stations you want, the link to your hands-free mobile telephone system, and the collection of music in the cloud. For everyone other than the driver there are screens to provide entertainment, while the driver is kept alert by lane and breaking warning stems. And so the list goes on. The car has become the locus for a vast ‘family’ of service systems.
Two technologies have conspired to achieve this, not just in motor cars but in so many other areas of life and work. Computers can process and analyse huge quantities of data, and wireless systems allow data to be shared. Living in the ‘information revolution’ is living in a world where smart devices provide the data which enable IT-enabled services to flourish. Smart televisions, smart fridges, the list of devices keeps growing, each smart item creating opportunities for new service activities to be provided. Even watching the screen is now assisted. Finished that film, then Netflix will recommend others you might enjoy; if you’re half-way through a series, there’s reminder when the next episodes become available.
Smart devices are the centre of this growing economy of advice and support. Foolishly use your smartphone to check out hotels in Melbourne, wine in California, or an external hard drive to store data: your searches will be remembered, analysed, and without you’re knowing it, they will inform the websites to which you’ll be directed when you next make a query, as well as the promotions you receive from Woolworths or Amazon. On a bad day, this seems like manipulation rather than service, but most days we simply don’t notice!
Today, the Information Revolution is wreaking the same havoc on comparative incomes that the Industrial Revolution did. With those new technologies creating new businesses after World War II incomes differentials began to lessen, but it was short-lived. At the start of the 21st Century we’ve returned to the familiar world in which the rich get richer while those less well-off are finding their incomes hardly changing. For some, in real terms, they’re shrinking. As a recent report, the US Congressional Budget Office noted:
“In 2018, household income was unevenly distributed among the roughly 129 million households in the United States, which received a total of about $14.8 trillion in annual income, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. The agency also estimates that the average income among households in the highest quintile (or fifth) of the distribution was more than 14 times the average income of households in the lowest quintile:
- Average income before means-tested transfers and federal taxes among households in the lowest quintile of the income distribution was about $22,500.
- Average income before transfers and taxes among households in the highest quintile was about $321,700.
Furthermore, income within the highest quintile was skewed toward the very top of the distribution: Average income before transfers and taxes among households in the bottom half of the highest quintile (the 81st to 90th percentiles) was about $172,400; average income among the 1.2 million households in the top 1 percent of the distribution was about $2.0 million; and average income among the approximately 13,000 households in the top 0.01 percent of the distribution was about $44.5 million.”
I won’t keep quoting figures, but simply reinforce the key point: income for most people in the US has declined in real terms over the past 20 years, except for those at the top.
If the latter part of the 19th Century was a time of great wealth disparities, it was also a time when many people had servants. Being a servant was the most common form of female employment, with an estimated 40% of working women employed as domestic servants. Initially, the affluent had employed roughly comparable numbers of men and women, but, as more opportunities for men arose, they became expensive, and women occupied the majority of positions. As innumerable television series remind us, these servants were unique in their close contact with their employers. This was personal service.
There had been changes over the preceding century. In the past, it was the landed upper class who had servants, in some cases numbering fifty or more. As the 19th century progressed, there was a marked decline in the number of servants employed by the nobility and an increase in the number employed by the middle classes as their wealth began to grow, resulting in the rapid increase in the number of single-servant households. For the aristocracy in the late eighteenth century the numbers employed had dropped to around twenty or less.
At the beginning of the 21st Century, with massive disparities in wealth reappearing, very few people employ a servant, and certainly that term is unlikely to be applied to a chef, a chauffeur or some other ‘support person’. However, I wonder if our world is that different. Affluent people have many specialists working directly for them, looking after their spouses, children, houses, vehicles, gardens, meals, clothing, and so much more. Most of these helpers are self-employed, and often provide a service to many clients. The affluent middle class is little different: they have a smaller number of service workers they regularly employ, but they still might have as many as a dozen people coming to their homes each week.
It is an obvious response to say that self-employed service workers are not in the same situation as the servants of the past. Whether it is regular lawn mowing, house painting or providing tax and financial advice, the bevy of individuals working to assist the affluent today are independent, running their own businesses, and often earn quite considerable salaries. However, I wonder if the present is so very different from 150 years ago?
From another perspective, in both eras we are looking at an income redistribution system. In late Victoria England or the US, the rich upper class employed many people to work for them, and while the wages were low, in many cases they were supplemented by board and lodging, meagre though it often was. The income received by servants was used to buy both necessities and occasional luxuries, and so their income flowed out to a vast work of retailers. In the US and UK today, the very affluent pay for a wide variety of services, although providing board and lodging is rather rare. Those workers then use their income to purchase their necessities and luxuries, thereby keeping the retail system afloat. I keep asking myself the same question: in terms of the economics, how different is society today from the Victorian era. The rich pay for the services provided by a large proportion of the working population. The rich keep getting richer, and the great majority of the rest see their limited salaries growing slightly, and often declining. Service providers depend on the rich for their survival. Their lifestyles may have improved, but … welcome to the new Victorian world.
