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• Introduction
• Audio accounts of young steel workers
• Age: How old was I when I started work
• Clothes: What I wear at work
• Conditions: What it's like where we work
• Hours: How many hours I work each week
• Leisure: What I do after work
• Lunch: What I eat for my lunch
• Pay: How much I get paid each week
• Training: How I learn to do my job
• Travel: How I get to work
• Viewpoint: What I think about my work
• Booking a session/ acknowledgements

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A Day in the Life of a Young Sheffield Steel Worker

Pay: How much I get paid each week

2000s:

“About one hundred and fifty pounds we end up for forty hours on week. I went an’ bought lots o’ sweets actually.  Lots and lots o’ sugar."

1950s:

"...Then it was something like £11 a week, and then all I used to spend my money on were new suits because in them days you’d got a tailor on, a tailor shop on every corner and we all used to like suits, didn’t we, whether it were Italian style, or teddy boy style, or…"

Victorian times:

"It will be sufficient to say that in the large works, generally the wages are very good. Few boys get less than three shillings a week and some up to five shillings. The clergy and schoolmasters complain that great moral injury results from the high wages earned at an early age making children independent of the control of their home. However, in some branches of work such as cheap cutlery, where there is competition between the Small Masters, the wages are much lower, as low as one shilling a week."

Questions:

• Which image matches each time period?
• In which time period would the steel worker be most likely to buy a suit with their pay?
• How did the pay compare in Victorian times between those in the large works and those is in the smaller 'cheap cutlery' works?
• How much does a young steel worker today earn in a 40 hour week?