[PDF] From Manual Workers To Wage Laborers eBook

Author : Robert Castel
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 497 pages
File Size : 39,30 MB
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1351518623

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In this monumental book, sociologist Robert Castel reconstructs the history of what he calls "the social question," or the ways in which both labor and social welfare have been organized from the Middle Ages onward to contemporary industrial society. Throughout, the author identifies two constants bearing directly on the question of who is entitled to relief and who can be excluded: the degree of embeddedness in any given community and the ability to work. Along this dual axis the author locates virtually the entire history of social welfare in early-modern and contemporary Europe.This work is a systematic defense of the meaningfulness of the category of "the social," written in the tradition of Foucault, Durkheim, and Marx. Castel imaginatively builds on Durkheim's insight into the essentially social basis of work and welfare. Castel populates his sociological framework with vivid characterizations of the transient lives of the "disaffiliated": those colorful itinerants whose very existence proved such a threat to the social fabric of early-modern Europe. Not surprisingly, he discovers that the cruel and punitive measures often directed against these marginal figures are deeply implicated in the techniques and institutions of power and social control.The author also treats the flipside of the problem of social assistance: namely, matters of work and wage-labor. Castel brilliantly reveals how the seemingly objective line of demarcation between able-bodied beggars those who are capable of work but who chose not to do so and those who are truly disabled becomes stretched in modernity to make room for the category of the "working poor." It is the novel crisis posed by those masses of population who are unable to maintain themselves by their labor alone that most deeply challenges modern societies and forges recognizably modern policies of social assistance.The author's gloss on the social question also offers us valuable perspectives on contempo

Author : Robert Castel
Publisher :
Page : 468 pages
File Size : 31,17 MB
Release : 2003
Category : Electronic books
ISBN : 9780203791301

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"In this monumental book, sociologist Robert Castel reconstructs the history of what he calls "the social question," or the ways in which both labor and social welfare have been organized from the Middle Ages onward to contemporary industrial society. Throughout, the author identifies two constants bearing directly on the question of who is entitled to relief and who can be excluded: the degree of embeddedness in any given community and the ability to work. Along this dual axis the author locates virtually the entire history of social welfare in early-modern and contemporary Europe.This work is a systematic defense of the meaningfulness of the category of "the social," written in the tradition of Foucault, Durkheim, and Marx. Castel imaginatively builds on Durkheim's insight into the essentially social basis of work and welfare. Castel populates his sociological framework with vivid characterizations of the transient lives of the "disaffiliated": those colorful itinerants whose very existence proved such a threat to the social fabric of early-modern Europe. Not surprisingly, he discovers that the cruel and punitive measures often directed against these marginal figures are deeply implicated in the techniques and institutions of power and social control.The author also treats the flipside of the problem of social assistance: namely, matters of work and wage-labor. Castel brilliantly reveals how the seemingly objective line of demarcation between able-bodied beggars'those who are capable of work but who chose not to do so'and those who are truly disabled becomes stretched in modernity to make room for the category of the "working poor." It is the novel crisis posed by those masses of population who are unable to maintain themselves by their labor alone that most deeply challenges modern societies and forges recognizably modern policies of social assistance.The author's gloss on the social question also offers us valuable perspectives on contempo"--Provided by publisher.

Author : John Cameron Simonds
Publisher : Wentworth Press
Page : 718 pages
File Size : 12,90 MB
Release : 2019-03-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9781011093236

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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Author : Celeste Monforton
Publisher : The New Press
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 35,15 MB
Release : 2021-05-04
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1620976633

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The inspiring story of worker centers that are cropping up across the country and leading the fight for today's workers For over 60 million people, work in America has been a story of declining wages, insecurity, and unsafe conditions, especially amid the coronavirus epidemic. This new and troubling reality has galvanized media and policymakers, but all the while a different and little-known story of rebirth and struggle has percolated just below the surface. On the Job is the first account of a new kind of labor movement, one that is happening locally, quietly, and among our country's most vulnerable—but essential—workers. Noted public health expert Celeste Monforton and award-winning journalist Jane M. Von Bergen crisscrossed the country, speaking with workers of all backgrounds and uncovering the stories of hundreds of new, worker-led organizations (often simply called worker centers) that have successfully achieved higher wages, safer working conditions and on-the-job dignity for their members. On the Job describes ordinary people finding their voice and challenging power: from housekeepers in Chicago and Houston; to poultry workers in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Springdale, Arkansas; and construction workers across the state of Texas. An inspiring book for dark times, On the Job reveals that labor activism is actually alive and growing—and holds the key to a different future for all working people.

Author : Seth Rockman
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 16,85 MB
Release : 2009-01-29
Category : History
ISBN : 0801899990

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Co-winner, 2010 Merle Curti Award, Organization of American HistoriansWinner, 2010 Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, ILR School at Cornell University and the Labor and Working-Class History AssociationWinner, 2010 H. L. Mitchell Award, Southern Historical Association Enslaved mariners, white seamstresses, Irish dockhands, free black domestic servants, and native-born street sweepers all navigated the low-end labor market in post-Revolutionary Baltimore. Seth Rockman considers this diverse workforce, exploring how race, sex, nativity, and legal status determined the economic opportunities and vulnerabilities of working families in the early republic. In the era of Frederick Douglass, Baltimore's distinctive economy featured many slaves who earned wages and white workers who performed backbreaking labor. By focusing his study on this boomtown, Rockman reassesses the roles of race and region and rewrites the history of class and capitalism in the United States during this time. Rockman describes the material experiences of low-wage workers—how they found work, translated labor into food, fuel, and rent, and navigated underground economies and social welfare systems. He also explores what happened if they failed to find work or lost their jobs. Rockman argues that the American working class emerged from the everyday struggles of these low-wage workers. Their labor was indispensable to the early republic’s market revolution, and it was central to the transformation of the United States into the wealthiest society in the Western world. Rockman’s research includes construction site payrolls, employment advertisements, almshouse records, court petitions, and the nation’s first “living wage” campaign. These rich accounts of day laborers and domestic servants illuminate the history of early republic capitalism and its consequences for working families.

Author : Sophie Duvernoy
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 26,61 MB
Release : 2023-10-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1501391496

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Using Germany as a national case study, this volume examines the historical genesis of precarity, its evolution from 19th-century industrial modernity to the present, and its reflections and reconfigurations in artistic production, in particular with relation to work, gender, and sexuality. “Precarity is everywhere now,” sociologist Pierre Bourdieu declared almost thirty years ago. Not only declining middle-class standards of living, but also debt, drug addiction, housing and food insecurity, depression, and “deaths of despair” are now being recognized as symptoms of the downward pull of social precarity. Although these and similar ills have been attributed to neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization, and willful neglect of the common good, precarization has accompanied the booms and busts of industrial modernity from its beginnings. Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film explores how German and Austrian literature, film, and social history have engaged with social precarity, from the period of Romanticism and early industrialization to the present. The chapters in this volume deal with precarity as both an objective phenomenon reflected in literary and filmic representations and as a subjective phenomenon that gives these representations their particular shape. Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film opens new critical perspectives on diverse forms of lived precarity and their creative manifestations by reflecting on the history of capitalist modernity from the vantage points of weakness, vulnerability, marginality, impoverishment, and otherness.

Author : Robert A. Margo
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 214 pages
File Size : 14,96 MB
Release : 2009-02-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0226505022

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Research by economists and economic historians has greatly expanded our knowledge of labor markets and real wages in the United States since the Civil War, but the period from 1820 to 1860 has been far less studied. Robert Margo fills this gap by collecting and analyzing the payroll records of civilians hired by the United States Army and the 1850 and 1860 manuscript federal Censuses of Social Statistics. New wage series are constructed for three occupational groups—common laborers, artisans, and white-collar workers—in each of the four major census regions—Northeast, Midwest, South Atlantic, and South Central—over the period 1820 to 1860, and also for California between 1847 and 1860. Margo uses these data, along with previously collected evidence on prices, to explore a variety of issues central to antebellum economic development. This volume makes a significant contribution to economic history by presenting a vast amount of previously unexamined data to advance the understanding of the history of wages and labor markets in the antebellum economy.

Author : Jane L. Collins
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 50,98 MB
Release : 2010-05-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0226114074

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Both Hands Tied studies the working poor in the United States, focusing in particular on the relation between welfare and low-wage earnings among working mothers. Grounded in the experience of thirty-three women living in Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin, it tells the story of their struggle to balance child care and wage-earning in poorly paying and often state-funded jobs with inflexible schedules—and the moments when these jobs failed them and they turned to the state for additional aid. Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer here examine the situations of these women in light of the 1996 national Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and other like-minded reforms—laws that ended the entitlement to welfare for those in need and provided an incentive for them to return to work. Arguing that this reform came at a time of gendered change in the labor force and profound shifts in the responsibilities of family, firms, and the state, Both Hands Tied provides a stark but poignant portrait of how welfare reform afflicted poor, single-parent families, ultimately eroding the participants’ economic rights and affecting their ability to care for themselves and their children.