Payday: A History

 

The twenty-fifth rolls around again, and ain’t that a son of a bitch? All across this great land of ours, millions of folks are checking their bank accounts with that familiar itch of anticipation mixed with dread. You know the feeling I’m talking about—that moment when your phone buzzes and the notification appears, telling you the money’s there. Relief washes over you like cool water on a hot August afternoon in a dusty diner parking lot off Route 66. Another month survived. Another thirty days of fluorescent lights and forced smiles paid for in full.

They call it “salary”—a tidy little word for the blood and tears and pieces of your soul you trade away. Forty hours a week (if you’re lucky), fifty weeks a year (if you’re luckier), until your back gives out or your mind snaps like a dry twig in December.

But it wasn’t always like this. Oh no. The history of how we came to this monthly dance with the paycheck demon is a long and twisted road, my friends.

Long before direct deposits and tax withholdings, before time clocks and HR departments, there were slaves in ancient Babylon, circa 2300 B.C. Poor bastards were sold with written contracts like you’d sell a lawn mower on Craigslist. No wages. No benefits. No pension plan. Just the hard certainty of labor until death.

(And you thought YOUR boss was a hardass.)

In Ancient Egypt, things got a bit more civilized—if you want to call it that. They had actual wage payments, housing provisions, even regulations about when a fella could take a day off. A researcher named Ibrahim Zulkarnain dug up evidence of what might be the first labor strike in recorded history back in 1170 B.C. Imagine that—workers standing up and saying “enough’s enough” while the goddamn pyramids were still practically new construction.

Fast forward to pre-industrial England, before the 1800s. Cities like Liverpool and Manchester—names that even now carry the gritty taste of coal dust and desperation—became what they called “centers of domestic industry.” Sounds cozy, don’t it? Like maybe folks were knitting tea cozies by the hearth. The reality was different. Whole families, from grandpa down to little Timmy who should’ve been out playing stickball, worked themselves half to death in their own homes.

They called it the “cottage industry,” but don’t let that quaint name fool you. There wasn’t anything charming about it. Workers took raw materials from the fat cats, turned them into finished goods, and got paid by the piece. No pieces, no pay. Simple as that and twice as cruel.

You think the Sunday night blues are bad now? Imagine watching your kids go hungry because the market for whatever tchotchkes you were making suddenly dried up. These people didn’t know from one day to the next what their income would be. Planning for the future? That’s a good one. Might as well try planning which way the wind would blow.

Then came the Industrial Revolution, steamrolling through society like one of those nightmares where you can’t run fast enough. The machine age. The iron age. The age when humanity first heard the soul-crushing rhythm of gears turning and never quite stopped hearing it.

Factories rose like modern-day fortresses. The cottage workers threw down their hand tools and shuffled into these dark, belching monuments to progress. And inside those walls, a new social order emerged: the working class (poor suckers) and the owner class (lucky bastards).

The hours were long enough to make a man forget his own name—sixteen hours a day sometimes, with breaks that wouldn’t give you enough time to finish a cigarette. Women and children weren’t spared either. Tiny hands were perfect for reaching into the dangerous parts of machines where adult hands wouldn’t fit. Little Charlie might lose a finger or two, but hey, that’s the price of progress, ain’t it?

The owners needed regularity, see? Can’t have the machines sitting idle. So the pay changed from piece-rate to time-based. Daily at first, then weekly, and finally—because God knows it’s easier to keep the books that way—monthly.

Monthly pay. Thirty days between drinks, as my father used to say. It became the norm, spreading across continents faster than a virus in an airplane cabin.

In Indonesia—Christ, halfway around the world from Manchester’s smokestacks—they had their own special brand of wage slavery. The Dutch colonial bastards implemented forced labor they called rodi or heerendiensten. Then in 1880, they cooked up something called the Koeli Ordonantie—the Coolie Ordinance. Makes it sound official, doesn’t it? Makes it sound almost respectable.

Under this tidy little arrangement, contract laborers (mostly from Java, China, and South India) were shipped off to plantations. Break your contract? That’ll earn you the poenale sanctie—physical punishment that would make your skin crawl.

According to a fella named Zainal C. Airlangga from the Bank Indonesia Museum, male coolies earned 42 cents per day. The white workers? They pulled down between 250 and 1,000 guilders per month. Do the math. It’ll turn your stomach.

Some plantations even had their own currency—tokens you could only spend at the company store, where they charged you an arm and a leg for basic necessities. The money went from the company to you and right back to the company again, like a demonic carousel you couldn’t get off.

After Indonesia’s independence, the minimum wage concept showed up in 1956, with a formal system in ‘69. They even developed unique compensation systems like the Holiday Allowance—Tunjangan Hari Raya or THR—and the 13th-month salary during Soeharto’s time. Small comforts in the ongoing nightmare of trading time for money.

America? We like to do things different, don’t we always? While most of Europe and Asia settled into the monthly payment groove, the U.S. of A. went with bi-weekly paychecks. Every two weeks, like clockwork. Some poor souls even get paid weekly—a small mercy in a merciless system.

From Babylon to Birmingham to Boston, the story’s the same underneath all the window dressing. We trade our precious hours—the only true currency any of us ever really have—for pieces of paper or digital numbers in an account. And we wait. We wait for that notification, that deposit, that moment of temporary salvation when we can breathe again… until the bills come due and the whole sick cycle starts over.

And on the 25th or the 1st or whatever day your particular paymaster has decided is yours, you feel that brief surge of relief. You’ve made it another month in the machine.

Until next time.

(And there’s always a next time, isn’t there? As sure as nightmares, taxes, and death.)