Wage-earning Class Research Articles

A Gilded-Age Social Media: John Swinton, Joseph Buchanan, and the Late Nineteenth-Century Labor Press

The years following the Civil War saw the rise of a nationwide network of independent local weekly labor papers that exchanged news, economic analysis, political ideas, and labor market information. Although its roots may be traced back to the 1820s, the rapid growth of this press in the 1880s was propelled by the working-class upheaval of that decade. It was composed of scores of weekly labor-oriented newspapers and formed a social network within America’s new wage-earning class. Among its most influential journalists were John Swinton and Joseph Buchanan, who helped shape the combative labor journalism of the Gilded Age.

A class analytic approach to the Gezi Park events: Challenging the ‘middle class’ myth

On 31 May 2013, what began as a localised demonstration against the demolition of a public park in Istanbul escalated into anti-government protests of unprecedented form and scale in Turkey’s modern history. The class configuration of the Gezi Park events occupied the forefront of discussions within and outside the Turkish left. Mainstream accounts branded the events as an uprising of ‘middle classes’ concerned almost exclusively with secularism. Drawing on a Poulantzasian/Wrightian framework, we argue that the Gezi Park events can be reduced neither to a middle-class nor a secularism-centered uprising. They represent, instead, an initiative of various wage-earning class fractions led by service-sector employees and the educated youth, which rests on socioeconomic grievances of proletarianisation under neoliberalism.

Sickness and the Depression1: A Preliminary Report upon a Survey of Wage‐Earning Families in Birmingham, Detroit, and Pittsburgh

The ordinary barometers of ill health—death rates and reports of communicable diseases—do not indicate that harmful effects of the depression upon the health of the population as a whole have taken place. The comfortable conclusion is drawn by many that the physical well-being of the American people not only has not suffered but, in view of the continued decline in mortality, may have been benefited, by the economic catastrophe. Such a conclusion, based upon mortality statistics alone, obviously is open to question. Death rates are not sensitive indices of the immediate effects of deleterious conditions. Even if they were, existing mortality and population records are not available in such form as to yield the very essential information as to whether any economic group has experienced a higher mortality than other groups. What we need, in appraising the depression's cost in ill health, are more efficient indices of physical and mental impairment in order to determine whether or not population groups whose economic status was most severely affected are suffering damages to health and what the nature and extent of these damages are. Only in this way can reasonably accurate appraisal be made. Among the now well recognized indices of ill health are records of sickness. When properly obtained and analyzed, they reveal some of the reactions of human beings to immediate environmental factors in a far more sensitive degree than the gross death rate or even mortality by cause can possibly do. Since no national system for the registration of sickness exists, special records must be collected, a difficulty not without its advantages since it permits information to be obtained for such groups and in such detail as may be desired. One phase of the study of health and the depression by the United States Public Health Service and the Milbank Memorial Fund utilized this method extensively. A sickness and mortality survey was made in 1933 of some 12,000 wage-earning families which had suffered from the depression in varying degrees of severity. Among the more important specific purposes of the survey were the following: To ascertain whether or not there is any association between income changes during the depression and ill health as measured by morbidity and mortality. If such an association exists, to discover what kinds of sickness and causes of death are chiefly responsible for the association. To determine the amount and kinds of medical care received by various economic classes of the people. Ten localities were included in the survey. The present paper gives some of the preliminary results for the first three cities for which tabulations have been made—Birmingham, Detroit, and Pittsburgh.

Medical Care during the Depression1: A Preliminary Report upon a Survey of Wage‐Earning Families in Seven Large Cities2

The problem of giving services free has faced the doctor and the hospital during the depression to an extent unknown in any other field. A factory manager was able to economize during hard times by eliminating unproductive departments, by introducing labor-saving devices, or, as a last resort, by closing his plant until the return of prosperity. No such expedients were available to the doctor or the hospital director. Business had to continue as usual in spite of the decrease of paying patients and the tremendous increase of free care. While the writers of this paper offer no solution for these economic problems, they do have pertinent data to present on the amount of physician's, hospital, and nursing care, both pay and free, received by a group of nearly 7,000 families in seven large cities surveyed early in 1933 by the United States Public Health Service in cooperation with the Milbank Memorial Fund. The reader is referred to previous papers3 for details, method, and scope of the survey. Briefly, it consisted of a house-to-house canvass of some 12,000 white families in the poorer districts of eight large cities, one group of coal-mining communities, and a group of cotton-mill villages. The records obtained by the canvasses included (a) the economic history of the family in sufficient detail for computing family income for each year from 1929 through 1932, and (b) a record of all illness during the three months immediately preceding the date of the enumerator's visit, in the spring of 1933, with the extent of disability and of medical care for each case. The sample population discussed in the present paper comprised 28,959 individuals in 6,686 families for which the data were sufficiently complete for computing the actual income for each of the four years from 1929 to 1932. The population was largely of the wage-earning class, a considerable proportion of which had experienced loss of income due to unemployment and wage reductions. In 1929, 10 per cent of the persons surveyed were in families with an annual per capita income of $149 or less; by 1932, 43 per cent were in this class. On the other side of the picture, 42 per cent of the persons were in families with an annual per capita income of $425 or more in 1929, but by 1932 this figure had decreased to 14 per cent.

Coping with Work Stress, Work Satisfaction, and Social Support: An Interpretive Study of Life Insurance Agents

The life insurance industry began in England as early as 1756, yet agents as an occupation to sell insurance directly to the public did not appear until 1840, and mostly in the United States (Leigh-Bennett, 1936:59; Kessler, 1985:14). The agent was not invented by the industry as a marketing device but was, rather, a response to the strong and powerful resistance of soci ety (Zelizer, 1983:17). The industry in the United States expanded con siderably in the late nineteenth century due to rapid economic growth, urbanization and popular education; one saw keen competition among companies and agents for the client dollar. Some agents resorted to unfair and sometimes illegal sales tactics that resulted in further public hostility, rejection and distrust of life insurance agents. Such public stigmatization was recorded in the United States as early as 1870. Zelizer (1983:146) wrote, Illegitimate practices were abolished, codes of ethics were pub lished, professional associations organized and agents better trained. Yet the stigma endured. Since its diffusion into Singapore in 1908 (Neo, 1996:37), the life insur ance industry has relied on agents to negotiate the cultural resistance to discussing the proposition of death and its implications, especially among the Chinese (Neo, 1996:37; Lee, 1994:6; Leong, 1985:178). Han (1979:44) wrote, . . everyone needs life assurance, but very few people do anything on their own to buy it. The agent was thus invented to deal with the public rejecting life insurance as a concept and as a commodity; in doing this work, agents were given a share of the profit: commissions (Chua, 1971:42; Neo, 1996:38). Hundreds of workers were lured into the life insur ance industry, and away from the wage-earning class, whereby an agent's work offers the rather attractive prospect of self-employment and its promise of work autonomy and potentially high monetary rewards -— a sort of flight from the proletariat class. In her autobiography, Chen (1998), a well-known agent in the life insurance industry of Singapore, singled out one stressor factor associated with her work: rejection by prospective clients and avoidance by close friends. In the book, she wrote of her husband, also an agent, being chased

Règles ? normes

L'entrepreunariat est à la mode. Du pouvoir politique à l'université en passant par l'entreprise, tout le monde prêche le nouvel évangile de la création d'entreprise. Avec ce nouveau credo de la création d'entreprise à tout prix, n'importe quel prix, à coté de quelques réussites que l'on doit saluer se préparent des lendemains qui déchantent. Pour bien des créateurs le rêve pourrait se terminer en cauchemar les voyant rejoindre les rangs des travailleurs pauvres. Ils en viendraient à regretter amèrement le temps heureux où ils étaient salariés et bénéficiaient des protections sociales qu'ils ont perdues en étant artificiellement chassés du salariat par la création de "leur" entreprise

Critique de l'économisme et économisme chez Marx

Jean-Marie Vincent, Critique of Economic Determinism and Economic Determinism in the Work of Marx In spite of ideas to the contrary, Marx was highly critical of the economic determinism typical of capitalist society. This is especially clear in the critique he made of the wage-earning class and of productive relations. However, Marx did at times lapse into economic determinism, most notably when in debate with classical political economy.

Maternal health among working women: A case study in the Mexican-U.S. border

This work is a description of the differences in maternal health among women of the wage-earning class along the Mexican/United States border in Tijuana, Baja California. The study analyzes the specific case of women using the services of the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS), breaking up the sample according to their employment and level of physical labor on the job in industrial, business, and service sectors. The study is based on information from a survey titled, "Social Conditions of Women and Reproductive Health in Tijuana".This was a post-partum survey administered to a total of 2,596 obstetrical patients seen at the Gynecology-. Obstetrics hospital of the Tijuana IMSSoffice during the spring of 1993.The results indicate differing maternal health oonditions among workers, in relation to some of the factors considered risks for infant and maternal health.

La même crise, de l'Est à l'Ouest ? Essai sur Pierre Naville

Pierre Rolle, From East to West, the Same Crisis ? Essay on Pierre Naville Well before the fall of the USSR, Pierre Naville proposed an interpretation of the communist world and its history in the context of his analysis of productive relations in contemporary societies. For him, the creation of the USSR cannot be explained as the result of a political will or decision or as the effect of a strict determinism. The Soviet system appeared to him as a source of contradictory tensions which made its demise inevitable. The Russian Revolutions were important events in the evolution of the wage-earning class on a global level. Contemporary changes in the East as well as the West stem from the same profound crisis of productive relations, modes of mobilization and the exploitation of labor.

Liberty and Fraternities in the English Revolution: The Politics of London Artisans' Protests, 1635–1659

SummaryA series of artisan revolts in the London corporations between 1635 and 1659 found both radical ideas of individual liberty and the guild ethos of fraternity relevant to their aims. The apparent paradox of democratic demands combined with calls for stricter economic regulation can be explained only by examining the participants' concrete grievances and specific demands. The protesters were neither rising industrial capitalists nor a new wage-earning class, but small masters attempting to restrain competition, the use of cheap labour, and the enlargement of enterprises. Their concerns had something in common with those of the Levellers, but the movements diverged in significant ways.

Economic Consciousness and Reform of the Employment Sphere

The transition to a market economy is closely connected with profound changes in the economic consciousness and economic culture of the entire population. The discussion in Russia today concerns not only the formation of an entrepreneurial class with the ethic characteristic of this social group, but also involves the formation of a full-fledged wage-earning class. The myth of the worker-manager of that existed during the years of developed socialism was transformed during perestroika into the idea that the Soviet worker was merely a wage laborer. This idea is also divorced from reality. The definition of this worker as state-dependent,1 with an essentially traditionalist work ethic, seems more accurate. In his definition of this concept (state-dependent worker), Victor Zaslavsky wrote that it the one hand… relates to a complex of specific work habits and to a production ethic based more on the avoidance of work than on discipline and productivity, on a general scorn for work...

Peasants and protest: agricultural workers, politics, and unions in the Aude, 1850-1914

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the sleepy vineyard towns of the Aude department of southern France exploded with strikes and protests. Agricultural workers joined labor unions, the Socialist party established a base among peasant vinegrowers, and the largest peasant uprising of twentieth-century France, the great vinegrowers' revolt of 1907, shook the entire south with massive demonstrations. In this study, Laura Levine Frader explains how left-wing politics and labor radicalism in the Aude emerged from the economic and social transformation of rural society between 1850 and 1914. She describes the formation of an agricultural wage-earning class, and discusses how socialism and a revolutionary syndicalist labor movement together forged working-class identity. Frader's focus on the making of the rural proletariat takes the study of class formation out of the towns and cities and into the countryside. Frader emphasizes the complexity of social structure and political life in the Aude, describing the interaction of productive relations, the gender division of labor, community solidarities, and class alliances. Her analysis raises questions about the applicability of an urban, industrial model of class formation to rural society. This study will be of interest to French social historians, agricultural historians, and those interested in the relationship between capitalism, class formation, and labor militancy.

Research on the Marxist Theory of Rate of Surplus Value and the Wage-earning Class (1896–1980)

Research on the Marxist Theory of Rate of Surplus Value and the Wage-earning Class (1896–1980)

Rising Needs And Falling Family Size: Implications From Marx On Demographic Transition

The author analyzes the decline in fertility and growing preference for smaller families that has occurred during the course of the demographic transition in todays industrialized countries. The analysis is based on an interpretation of Marxs views on population and wage labor and concentrates on the reproductive behavior of the wage-earning class. The author concludes that workers reduced their family size as part of a survival strategy in order to maintain the value of their labor power. (ANNOTATION)

Le temps présent : la crise (II). Pesanteur et potentialité des années quatre-vingt

Le premier des deux articles consacrés à la présente crise a plaidé en faveur d'une fécondation réciproque des approches historique et économique pour rendre compte de la spécificité de la période actuelle. En s'appuyant sur le résultat de recherches plus systématiques menées dans cette perspective, le précédent article a permis de dégager trois points principaux.— En premier lieu, la crise actuelle n'est ni un accident passager (33 *)» ni la conséquence de l'abandon des préceptes keynésiens par des gouvernements séduits par le monétarisme (38), encore moins la phase descendante d'un cycle de Kondratieff prévisible de longue date (40) ; elle traduit plutôt l'arrivée à ses limites d'un mode de croissance original dont les succès, depuis la seconde guerre principalement, ont tenu à la conjonction d'un régime d'accumulation (” de type fordiste » pour être bref) et d'une forme de la régulation d'ensemble (” de type administrée »).

Connell and Irving I

We have had to wait some time for this book.* Draft chapters were circulating in roneoed form more than five years ago and whetting the appetites of those who read them. They promised a readable, theoretically informed and constructively synthetic class interpretation of Australian history. All these qualities are evident in the completed work and now, instead of harping on the deficiencies of the standard texts, we can at last put a coherent left-wing overview in the students' hands. Not since the days of Fitzpatrick has this been possible. And if a reading of Class Structure in Australian History leaves some sense of anti-climax, that is surely because its protracted gestation permitted an unduly high level of expectation. For this reason alone it is appropriate to begin with an acknowledgement of the book's merits. First of all, the book possesses an unusual breadth of scope. The meaning and effects of class are explored, not just in their institutional and political manifestations but in the workplace and the boardroom, in the home, in the courts and in the creative imagination. We receive a vivid impression of class formation and class relations, of the ways in which a landowning pastoral class, an industrial capitalist class or a wage-earning class, do not issue forth ready-made onto the historical stage; rather, they are 'present at their own making', to use Thompson's phrase, and are actively shaped and constructed by their effects on each other. Connell and Irving understand class structure as defining a field of possibilities on which the historical actualities are then worked out, and their choice of four large chronological divisions, while it also raises problems of periodisation, allows full scope for their sense of change and development. Then too the arrangement of the book makes it particularly useful for teaching purposes. Within each of the four chronological divisions? 1788-1840, 1840-1890, 1890-1930, 1930-1975?there are three strands: the main text, extended footnotes and documentary extracts. The text is thus freed from the scholarly exegesis that deters many readers (though this freedom is bought at considerable cost), while the footnotes for each chapter constitute a sort of critical bibliography of the period that will guide those who wish to read further to the most profitable sources. The documentary extracts are a particularly successful feature of the book. They range from minutes of official bodies, records of court proceedings, rules of organisations and financial accounts to descriptive excerpts, memoirs, journals and personal letters. There are 82 of them, varying in length between 500 and 2,000 words, and amounting to 130 pages in all. They are well-chosen and give the reader an excellent sense of contemporary material. The main text also employs more than a score of black-and-white illustrations which are incorporated at appropriate points and make a real contribution to the reader's comprehension. Why then am I disappointed? First of all, the book is less well written than I expected. Some of the chapters are clearer than others,

The cons of black capitalism: Will this policy cure urban ills?

From the 1880's on, the Negro masses, urged by their leaders, were led to place increasing faith in business and property as a means of escaping poverty and achieving economic independence. Although ostensibly sponsored as the means of self-help or racial cooperation, as it was sometimes called, through which the masses were to be economically emancipated, Negro business enterprise was motivated primarily by the desire for private profit and looked toward the establishment of a Negro capitalism employer class. One of the clearest expressions of the growing tendency to look upon the development of Negro capitalism and business enterprise as the basis of racial economic advancement is found in the proceedings of the Fourth Atlanta University Conference (1898) on “The Negro in Business.” In his paper, “The Meaning of Business,” John Hope, the late president of the new Atlanta University, called upon the Negro to escape the wage-earning class and to become his own employer.

Poverty: A Study of Town Life.

Introduction Preface Jonathan Bradshaw General characteristics of the City of York Social and economic condition of the wage-earning class in York The standard of life The poverty line The immediate causes of poverty in York Housing The relation of poverty to the standard of health Family budgets: a study on the expenditure and diet of working classes Summary and conclusion.