Skill and deskilling in the English building trades in the nineteenth-century

Many traditional handcraft skills were duplicated or superseded by machine technology during the course of the Industrial Revolution in England in the nineteenth century, but recent historical analysis has revealed that many industries continued to employ skilled handcraft labor because a large, trained labor pool made using those workers more economical than the installation of expensive and often erratic machinery, or because there was little technological innovation within the industry. The building trades were among those which remained largely immune to widespread substitution of machinery, but they nevertheless suffered a significant loss of skill during this period. These trades were part of the "labor aristocracy", and the status and independence customarily associated with this group derived in part from the building workers' responsibility for the design and construction of buildings, which gave their jobs creativity and control. In the course of the nineteenth century, changes in the structure of the building industry and the re-orientation of society towards capitalist methods of production substantially reduced the workers' role and position in the building process, and caused often radical de-skilling of previously craft-skilled trades.