Mid-nineteenth-century Britain employed only a quarter of its workers full-time

Evidence

[E]stimating the working classes as being between four and five million in number, I think we may safely assert—considering … particular times, seasons, fashions, and accidents, and the vast quantity of over-work and scamp-work… the number of women and children … continually drafted into the different handicrafts … there is barely sufficient work for the regular employment of half of our labourers, so that only 1,500,000 are fully and constantly employed, while 1,500,000 more are employed only half their time, and the remaining 1,500,000 wholly unemployed, obtaining a day’s work occasionally by the displacement of some of the others. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 226

Categorization

• CANDY: Mayhew’s three-way split of the workforce into thirds is a vivid, tweetable stat.