An interesting feature of the recent scholarship on preindustrial wages is that its heated debates do not fall neatly along disciplinary lines. Economists disagree on what information about compensation of manual labor should be included in indexes of living standards. Historians, for their part, can be more or less skeptical about all wage series. My paper sidesteps these debates and argues for the need to focus on wage differentials rather than modal or median wages. It analyses a series of hiring contracts signed in Murano (Venice) between 1638 and 1696 in order to interpret the role of individual productivity and collective bargaining in producing the remarkable wage differentials observed among highly skilled workers employed in the glass industry of the period.

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