'Twas ever thus, see after the jump.
From City AM:Staff at the Bank of England will strike tomorrow for the first time in more than 50 years.An April 2011 post:
The central bank's maintenance, hospitality and security staff are staging a three-day walkout over their most recent pay review.
The Bank of England held talks with union Unite today via the conciliation service Acas, but talks broke down and staff will protest on Threadneedle Street tomorrow morning.
Unite has accused the Bank of giving staff "derisory" pay rises which are not in line with inflation, and has said up to a third of staff will get no pay rise this year.
The Bank said Unite had balloted two per cent of its workforce over the strike action.
A Bank of England spokesperson said:
The Bank has plans in place so that all essential business will continue to operate as normal during this period....MORE
Wage Slaves at the 18th Century Bank of England
From the WSJ Europe's The Source blog:
The Bank of England has stood on more or less the same spot on Threadneedle Street in the City of London since 1734, about 40 years after its founders set up shop on nearby Cheapside with a £1.2 million IOU from a cash-strapped and grateful government.
A paper by Anne Murphy of the University of Hertfordshire, presented over the weekend at a meeting of the Economic History Society, sheds light on the daily activities of the bank’s clerks at the end of the eighteenth century. Their routine will be depressingly familiar to many City workers today. The clerks got in early, rarely had time for lunch and were still there when the place shut down at night.
In 1783 the bank appointed a Committee of Inspection to examine its working practices and recommend improvements, Ms. Murphy writes. Unlike the layabouts at the Treasury or the East India Company, for junior Bank of England clerks “the working day was long and left little time for idleness or large breakfasts.”The bank was unlocked at 6.00am (7.00am in winter) and its gates closed at 11.00pm. Clocks were everywhere, marking time for staff and customers alike....MOREDr. Murphy has apparently been working on this subject for a while. According to VoxEU the instant paper will be part of a larger work, ‘The Grand Palladium of Public Credit: the Bank of England during the later eighteenth century’.
Here are her comments on the paper presented to the Society...MORE
