[This passage has been excerpted from Dale H. Porter's The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London, which is reviewed eleswhere in the Victorian Web —GPL.]
he wages paid to workingmen on the Thames Embankment varied
slightly from year to year, or from project to project, but the difference between skilled and unskilled was very clear. For the first section of the Victoria Embankment, the MBW [Metropolitan
Board of Works] specified that bricklayers, masons, carpenters, and smiths should be paid 6s. 6d. for a ten-hour day, and engineers
7s. 6d. Excavators wearing their own "long water boots" earned 4s. 6d. and
common laborers 3s. ad. The same wages obtained in the 1865 contracts
for the Albert Embankment, and in the 1871 contracts for the Chelsea Embankment, except that day laborers earned 3s. 6d. in 1865, and bricklayers
got 7s. 6d. in l87l. If an engineer worked a ten-hour day (and not the
eleven-and-a-half-hour day common among builders before the 1860
strikes) six days a week, with the usual lapses for illness or weather, he
could earn about £110 per year, equalling the wages of a young civil engineering clerk of the white-collar variety. Imagine the trials of a newly
minted "clerk of the works" sent out by the MBW to supervise a sewer or
Embankment construction site, when he encountered his unionized and
experienced "engineer" counterpart, who not only knew more about the
practice of construction than he did, but earned higher wages.
References
Dale H. Porter, The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London. Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1998.
Last modified 1999