London Labour Research Articles

Keeping London working: global cities, the British state and London's new migrant division of labour

This paper explores the emergence of a new ‘migrant division of labour’ in London. In contrast to a vision of ‘professionalization’, it shows that London's labour market has been characterized by processes of occupational polarization and that a disproportionate number of London's low‐paid jobs are now filled by foreign‐born workers. Drawing on original survey data, the paper explores the pay and conditions of London's low‐paid migrant workers and develops a framework for understanding the emergence of a new migrant division of labour in London. In particular, the paper stresses the role of the British state in shaping this divide. The paper concludes that the emergence of such a divide in London necessitates a re‐conceptualization of the place of migrant workers in the ‘global city’ and of the processes shaping global city labour markets, and outlines what this new division of labour might mean for politics and policy in London.

Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire (review)

Reviewed by: Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire Elizabeth Gargano (bio) Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire. By Troy Boone . New York: Routledge, 2005. In 1890, the same year that Henry Morton Stanley's best-selling memoir In Darkest Africa thrilled the English reading public, William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, published his own account of a metaphorical journey of exploration, In Darkest England, And the Way Out. Paraphrasing Stanley's title, Booth drew the same parallels that so many English writers—from reformers like Henry Mayhew to popular novelists like Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins—found persuasive: the urban slums of industrialized England (what Mayhew called the "undiscovered country of the poor") were as foreign, and possibly as frightening, to the middle-class English observer as the exoticized terrain of colonial Africa. Depicting the lives of the poor, particularly children, in lurid terms, Booth lamented the case of a prostitute's daughter "suckled on [End Page 99] gin," as well as the "thousands" of boys "who may be said to have sucked in a taste for strong drink with their mothers' milk." As he strove to help poor children, Booth clearly found much amiss with impoverished parents and their child-raising practices. While Booth saw a cure for urban poverty in the charitable activities, moral uplift, and militaristic regimentation of the Salvation Army, Henry Mayhew, the author of the voluminous London Labour and the London Poor, pursued a less directive but equally problematic agenda, hoping to shed light on London's impoverished citizens through an exhaustive catalogue of their activities, habits, and private lives. Mayhew's massive compendium included separate sections on "The Street Sellers of Ham Sandwiches" and "Cats' and Dogs'-Meat Dealers," on "Mud-Larks" (who scavenged articles from the muddy banks of the Thames) and "Crossing-Sweepers," as well as on such popular entertainers as "The Street Conjurer" and "The Penny-Gaff Clown." In recent decades, literary scholars have mined the rich, provocative, and often troubling literature of Victorian social analysis and reform, uncovering striking parallels between the imperial impulse at home and abroad. Over a decade ago, Anne McClintock's influential Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest documented the extent to which such self-styled urban explorers as Mayhew and Arthur Munby chose to see the urban poor as uncivilized "primitives," metaphorical colonial subjects at the heart of industrialized England. Drawing on the critical tradition epitomized by McClintock's work, Troy Boone's Youth of Darkest England focuses more specifically on efforts to indoctrinate working-class children and adolescents in middle-class values while drawing them into the British imperial project. Thus, it makes a valuable contribution to the study of Victorian and Edwardian children's culture. Deftly analyzing the rhetoric employed by Mayhew, Booth, and Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, Boone illuminates the paradoxical dynamic by which they appeared to offer working-class youth a valued place in imperial England while also maintaining subtle class distinctions. Such reformers hoped that a sense of empire would instill pride and patriotism in the working classes, muffling the growing class consciousness that had fueled the Chartist and working men's movements. Peripheralized as they might feel within the context of British society, working-class young people could supposedly imagine themselves to be at the heart of a fur-flung constellation of colonies that paid homage to England. As Boone demonstrates, however, the proponents of class unification through a celebration of empire purveyed mixed messages that revealed their own profound ambivalence. If their often hortatory writings appeared to elide class differences in the service of empire, they also employed rhetorical tropes that undermined solidarity and equality between classes. Since much of Boone's book focuses on unpacking the rhetoric of empire, he is especially attentive to two analogies that permeate the diverse literature [End Page 100] of reform. As he argues, such "social imperialist texts" (8) tend to portray the poor as children or adolescents not yet capable of governing or taking full responsibility for themselves; in addition, they repeatedly represent "the middle classes...

Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture Ross G. Forman (bio) Martha Stoddard Holmes , Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004); xiv+ 228 pages, hardback, $65 (ISBN 0 472 09841 1). A few years ago, I visited Cambodia on holiday. My hotel advertised an in-house massage service, carried out by an organization called Krousar Thmey. This charity was established to provide an education to local children blinded by landmines and to train them for employment in the tourist industry. These were children who would otherwise end up as a burden to their relatives, or as beggars. The experience of having my flesh kneaded by a blind young man was, of course, a 'feel-good' one in [End Page 360] all senses of the word. Not only was the massage relaxing, it was also a self-congratulatory exercise in sympathizing with the handicapped. The incident also invoked many of the feelings that Martha Stoddard Holmes shows, in Fictions of Affliction:Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, became characteristic of the way in which able-bodied people have dealt with the disabled from the nineteenth century to the present. Bringing together fiction and life narratives, Stoddard Holmes's work probes the origin of the connection between disability and emotion. The book begins by reviewing the conventions of melodrama, historicizing the imbrication of melodrama and disability on the Victorian stage. Although the extensive critical corpus around melodrama and early film might have provided her with some tools to make this analysis more theoretical, nevertheless, Stoddard Holmes convincingly shows how melodrama came to frame disability both in literary and non-literary texts and in society more generally. She then offers an analysis of representations of disabled people in the work of novelists such as Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Dinah Craik, and Charlotte M. Yonge. This section of the book focuses largely on depictions of women and their relation to conventional and unconventional marriage plots. Fictions of Afflictions moves on to deal with Victorian imaginings of disabled boys and men, drawing a distinction between innocent, child-like sufferers and those who use their disability – or counterfeit disability – in order to escape work. Here, Stoddard Holmes draws effective contrasts between Victorian moral censure of begging and historical information showing just how difficult it was for disabled men to remain independent, especially if they hailed from the working classes. Examining the administrators of the Poor Laws and the philosophy guiding organizations such as the Charity Organization Society, Stoddard Holmes uncovers the class biases that made them see disabled people of humble social origins as, in effect, guilty of their own destitution – if not their disability itself. She foregrounds the need for Victorian sympathizers to see disability in terms of the productive economy and to gain pleasure from charitable acts, just as I did in supporting, on a minute scale, the disabled poor of Cambodia. Stoddard then contrasts these views with a chapter reading biographies and autobiographies of Victorians with disabilities (principally the blind and the deaf). This chapter balances narratives of the lower-class disabled as recorded by Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor (1861-2) with life writings by Harriet Martineau, John Kitto, Henry Fawcett, and Elizabeth Gilbert. This material, while fascinating, is also undertheorized, and it ignores many of the insights of recent work on subjectivity and life writing in Victorian studies scholarship. [End Page 361] Fictions of Affliction concludes by reminding readers that it is a rare person indeed who will not experience disability during their lifetime – either their own or that of a friend or relative. She appeals to scholars to incorporate disability into 'our taxonomies of "difference" and our concomitant training of students as critical, questioning readers of literature and culture. These are not intellectual games but essential learning for anyone who has a body' (195). It is therefore all the more striking that her analysis ignores what my experience with the blind masseur in Cambodia reveals: that the continuity between Victorian attitudes towards disability and the West's own often lies in the way we treat the developing world, 'stuck' as it is in what...

Book review: Working capital: life and labour in contemporary London

Book review: Working capital: life and labour in contemporary London

A brief statistical sketch of the child labour market in mid-nineteenth-century London

The profusion of small trades and services that characterized the nineteenth-century London labour market makes it extremely difficult to arrive at any general understanding of the work of children and juveniles. This brief study employs published statistical materials and compares children's occupations in the metropolis with the national picture. It argues that London contained exceptionally low levels of children's employment compared with the rest of England and Wales. The preoccupation of metropolitan social observers with working children may have resulted from the fact that child employment in mid-nineteenth-century London was a marginal activity associated chiefly with the very poor.

Herbert Morrison's London Labour Party in the Interwar Years and the SPD: Problems of Transferring German Socialist Practices to Britain

Herbert Morrison's rebuilding of the London Labour Party (LLP) in the interwar years was consciously modelled on the organizational success of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which Morrison knew and admired from several visits before and after the First World War. The article discusses what aspects of the SPD's organization Morrison tried to transfer to the British capital and why his considerable success in transforming the LLP German-style had its limits. Morrison not only aimed to build an efficient electoral machine, but he also wanted to copy the SPD's vast cultural and educational associations, which catered for Social Democrats ‘from cradle to grave’. However, as the article suggests, differences in political culture between Britain and Germany impacted significantly on Morrison's efforts. A more developed and more vibrant mass culture as well as the greater gulf between labour movement culture and working-class culture in Britain undermined the successful transfer of German party-political models. Other factors, such as the different organization of party funding, the different organization of civil society in Britain and Germany and the lack of a federal tradition in Britain also help to explain the limited success of this instance of political transfer. Re´sume´: La reconstruction par Herbert Morrison du London Labour Party (LLP) durant l'entre-deux-guerres se modela sur le succès du parti social démocrate allemand (SPD), que Morrison connaissait et admirait depuis ses visites avant et après la première guerre mondiale. Cet article se penche sur ce que Morrison voulut transférer du SPD et sur les limites de ce transfert pourtant plutôt réussi dans la transformation du LLP à l'allemande. Morrison souhaitait créer une machine électorale puissante mais il voulait aussi copier les organisations culturelles du SPD qui entouraient les démocrates sociaux du berceau à la tombe. Cependant, comme l'article le suggère les différences dans la culture politique impactèrent sur les efforts de Morrison. Une culture populaire plus développée ainsi qu'un plus grand écart entre la culture populaire et le parti travailliste en Grande Bretagne s'opposaient au transfert des modèles allemands. De plus une organisation différente du financement du parti ainsi que l'organisation différente de la culture civique et l'absence de culture fédérale jouèrent pour limiter cet exemple de transfert politique.

“Those Who Cannot Work”

This paper considers how Henry Mayhew, a nineteenth-century social investigator and reformer, explicates the ideal of “Christian manliness” through the metaphoric body of the disabled man. In particular, it assesses how Mayhew's desire to “grapple manfully” with the uneasy classification of crippled, blind, or otherwise disabled men, indirectly makes visible a crisis in Victorian masculinity.2 This crisis, which reflected the insecurity brought about by social and industrial changes in the new urban centers, was undergirded by a fear that the working classes, if not checked, had the potential to become the dangerous classes. In the face of this fear, middle-class Victorian men united in an attempt to articulate a “moral” masculinity and the corresponding, all-encompassing concept of the “Universal Brotherhood” of man, (London Labour, IV: xiv). In order to reveal and establish this “new” masculinity and render it unproblematic, it was necessary to eliminate, as far as possible, any difference between men while, at the same time, clearly and hegemonically defining a masculine identity suitable for articulating a coherent capitalist and Christian utilitarian ethics appropriate to the growing nation and the growing modern metropolis. In Mayhew's classificatory system, the disabled man is assigned no intrinsic value and, consequently, remains a mere object for middle-class scrutiny. He “who will or who can work” becomes a convenient vehicle for the promotion of a self-reliant, Christian masculinity, while he “who cannot work” represents a monstrous masculinity, and a danger to the future well-being of the human race. This study argues that this nineteenth-century classification and construction of manhood foreshadows disability prejudices that are still somewhat prevalent in the twenty-first century. 1. An earlier version of this article was published in Culture and the State, Vol, IV, ed. James Gifford and Gabrielle Mailloux-Zezulka (Edmonton: CRC Humanities Studio, 2004).”

Tableau statistique du marché du travail des enfants à Londres au XIXe siècle

The profusion of services and small trades that characterised the nineteenth-century London labour market makes it extremely difficult to arrive at any general understanding of the work of children and juveniles. This brief study employs published statistical materials and compares children’s occupations in the metropolis with the national picture. It argues that London contained exceptionally low levels of children’s employment compared with the rest of England and Wales. The preoccupation of metropolitan social observers with working children arose from the fact that child employment in mid-nineteenth century London was a marginal activity associated chiefly with the very poor.

Conservative Reform of Metropolitan Counties: Abolition of the GLC and MCCs in Retrospect

This article examines the views of the Conservatives in London local government, and Conservative and Labour councillors outside London, during the abolition of theGreater London Council-(GLC) and the Metropolitan County Councils-(MCCs) in 1985. The official reasons of the Conservative government for the abolition are assessed, as well as the alleged political reasons causing the demise of these metropolitan tiers. It is argued that the views of the Conservative boroughs in London and the attitude of Conservative and Labour districts outside London created an environment in which the government could achieve its goal; the government's official arguments for the abolition were based on assertion and assumptions rather than evidence or competent research; and the government was mainly motivated by partypolitical reasons or partisan advantage in this controversial policy.

Conservative Reform of Metropolitan Counties: Abolition of the GLC and MCCs in Retrospect

This article examines the views of the Conservatives in London local government, and Conservative and Labour councillors outside London, during the abolition of the Greater London Council - (GLC) and the Metropolitan County Councils - (MCCs) in 1985. The official reasons of the Conservative government for the abolition are assessed, as well as the alleged political reasons causing the demise of these metropolitan tiers. It is argued that the views of the Conservative boroughs in London and the attitude of Conservative and Labour districts outside London created an environment in which the government could achieve its goal; the government's official arguments for the abolition were based on assertion and assumptions rather than evidence or competent research; and the government was mainly motivated by partypolitical reasons or partisan advantage in this controversial policy.

Street life in London and the organization of labour

In the preface to their book Street Life in London, published in 1877, the authors, photographer John Thomson and journalist Adolphe Smith, propose to present the public with ‘the result of careful observations among the poor of London … a subject which has already been amply and ably treated’.1 As they hasten to point out to readers, however, their work is different from previous literature on the conditions of the city's lowest classes, such as Henry Mayhew's well-known London Labour and the London Poor of 1851. In contrast with that influential work, which presented statistical evidence of the conditions of poverty together with woodcuts based on daguerreotypes, Thomson and Smith claim that they are ‘bringing to bear the precision of photography in illustration of our subject’.2 Here, photographic imagery is described as hard social evidence.3 Drawing attention to their use of the newest means of photomechanical reproduction, the authors assert, ‘The unquestionable accuracy of this testimony will enable us to present true types of the London Poor and shield us from the accusation of either underrating or exaggerating individual peculiarities of appearance’.4 By positioning photography as an objective recorder of reality, therefore, the authors promote their book as unbiased documentation of a specific social group.

Mapping Rich and Poor: Putting Charles Booth's Enquiry into London Life and Labour Online

(2002). Mapping Rich and Poor: Putting Charles Booth's Enquiry into London Life and Labour Online. The Cartographic Journal: Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 81-85.

Mapping Rich and Poor: Putting Charles Booth's <I>Enquiry into London Life and Labour</I> Online

Mapping Rich and Poor: Putting Charles Booth's <I>Enquiry into London Life and Labour</I> Online

Globalization, polarization and the informal sector: the case of paid domestic workers in London

Considerable debate has occurred over whether ‘global cities’ are witnessing polarization of their labour forces into highly paid professionals and low paid personal service workers. This paper offers evidence on paid domestic labour in London, some of which occurs in the informal sector, and considers its potential significance for the polarization debate.

Natives and migrants in the London labour market, 1929–1931

Natives and migrants in the London labour market, 1929–1931

Racialization, Capitalism, and Aesthetics in Stoker's "Dracula"

Henry Mayhew introduces his survey of London Labour and London Poor (1851) by identifying throughout world two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., wanderers and settlers. This division also distinguishes, as races, outsider and insider, the vagabond and citizen. When he compares poor in England to Bushmen, Lappes, and Arabian Bedouins, Mayhew effectively locates these wandering tribes in imaginary spaces outside bounds of national life. Mayhew further depicts this vagabond class preying nation's citizens, whose movements-as tourists and imperialists, for example-he ignores (1). In Dracula, published in 1897, Bram Stoker complicates Mayhew's social order when he suggests that at end of century modern citizen claimed no settled identity, but a mobility even more extensive than that of Mayhew's wandering races. The vampire Dracula, who in novel is identified as primitive and alien and who certainly preys upon citizens, is a wanderer, according to peculiar logic of undead. But those in novel who eventually defeat Dracula are characterized by unsettled behavior as well. Not quite insiders, they comprise a group of Western citizens who belong within no single nation or social class and who are experienced travellers. What endows movements of these characters with cultural privilege is their power to capitalize upon mobility, to convert changes of place into opportunities for investment.

Creating the Charles Booth Online Archive: from nineteenth century London poverty to twenty‐first century digital riches

The Charles Booth Online Archive from the library of the London School of Economics gives free access to materials from Booth’s survey into life and labour in London 1886‐1903. The content of the archive is described and the funding arrangements for the project outlined. Cataloguing and text digitisation arrangements are discussed and the method digitising the 12 maps from the survey explained. Details are presented of how the Web‐site was created.

The Boyd Orr Survey of the Nutrition of Children in Great Britain 1937–9

If the first great social question of interwar Britain was unemployment then the second, closely related, was poverty: how to define it, and where to draw the 'poverty line'. This was an intensely political issue. Moving the line five shillings up increased the numbers of people considered poor, heaped criticism on government and brought pressure for reform. Moving it five shillings the other way evidenced progress from the dark days of the late Victorians and made state benefits look bearable, if not generous. So the debate over the minimum income needed to maintain a family at a tolerable level of existence was fiercely fought. The emerging science of nutrition, which came of age during this same period, played an ever-larger part in the poverty debate, especially in the 1930s. Arguments within nutritional science over what represented a diet necessary to sustain a person in health fed back into the poverty line question. When the New Survey of London Life and Labour in 1929 revisited the great poverty survey of Charles Booth, who had published his first findings some forty years before, it concluded that the proportion of Londoners in poverty had fallen from 30.7% in Booth's day to just 6.6%. But that reassuring picture was quickly disturbed. In November 1933 the British Medical Association (BMA) published its own estimates of the nutritional needs of individuals and the minimum weekly expenditure needed to satisfy them. When this new component of the poverty line was worked back into the New Survey's findings, researchers concluded that 9.3% had an income insufficient for health, enlarging the numbers of Londoners in poverty by forty per cent.' So nutrition thrust the medical profession into prominence in the poverty debate. In general, they were pessimists, decrying the inadequacy of income to purchase a proper diet, especially in childhood, when poor nutrition constrained the life chances of the adult to come. They recognized, too, that poverty was not the only obstacle to healthy nutrition, and discovered that even families with comfortable incomes had an unsatisfactory diet through ignorance and tradition. And they were critical of their own colleagues, especially in the public service, who complacently characterized over ninety-five per cent of schoolchildren as having 'normal' nutrition, when 'normal' meant one thing in Hoxton, say, and something very different in

The restructuring of London's labour force: migration and shifting opportunities, 1971–91

Summary The links between migration in and out of London and intergenerational social mobility are explored. Opportunities to enter high‐grade jobs are greater in London, but so is the competition. The selectivity of migration explains the high social mobility associated with both in‐ and out‐migration; those who stay in London are much less mobile, be they male or female. Black migrants to London do not share the fast escalator with white migrants, and London stayers come disproportionately from ethnic minority backgrounds. Socially mobile Londoners of both sexes leave far faster than the non‐mobile, but women are less often ‘creamed off’. Women with high‐level jobs rarely leave; when they stay, they are less likely to leave the labour force. The selectivity of both types of migration concentrates ‘under‐achievement’ on London stayers; racial discrimination may contribute to this outcome.

Immigration and occupational status: A study of Bangladeshi and Turkish fathers and sons in the London labour market

This paper examines the labour market experience of 300 fathers and 300 of their sons in the Bangladeshi and Turkish immigrant communities in various London boroughs in 1988. Probit estimates are made in relation to employment and unemployment, self-employment and employment, and upward mobility or lack of it. Human capital regressions are also run for each of the four groups and for the combined sample. The evidence is consistent with distinctive labour market experience among the various groups.