By about 1830 these investments were making the mechanically augmented labor of each dirty, malnourished, ill-educated “hand” so profitable that bosses often preferred cutting deals with strikers to firing them and competing with other bosses to find new ones. For the next fifty years wages grew as fast as profits, and in 1848, when Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, British workers’ pay was finally regaining the heights it had reached after the Black Death.
