By
Adam Smith
The greatest improvement in the productive powers of
labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which
it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the
division of labour.
The effects of the division of labour, in the general business of society, will be more easily understood, by considering in what manner it operates in some particular manufactures. It is commonly supposed to be carried furthest in some very trifling ones…
To take an example, therefore, from a
very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has been
often taken notice of, the trade of the pin maker; a workman not educated to
this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor
acquainted with the use if the machinery employed in it (to the invention of
which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce,
perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin a day, and certainly could not
make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only
the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of
branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws
out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a
fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head required
two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten
the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper;
and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into
about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all
performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes
perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind
where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed
two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore
but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when
they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day.
There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins in a middling size. Those
ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand
pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight
hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and
independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar
business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not
one pin in a day; that is, certainly not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps
not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable
of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their
different operations.