Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town founded in the 1940s by dictator Getulio Vargas on an ex-coffee valley as a powerful symbol of Brazilian modernization. The city's economy, and consequently its citizen's lives, revolves around the Companha Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), the biggest...

"Men Is Cheap shows how the concepts of military and domestic necessity were connected in white northerners' minds and clarifies what they thought the war was fought over. In the process of winning the war, white northerners were forced to grapple with the frauds of free labor. Labor brokers, by...

Foreword / Don Kalb -- Socialist primitive accumulation in Cluj -- Productive state apparatuses : taking over the factories, 1944-1948 -- "More precious than gold" : labour instability and the stickyness of everyday life -- "Workers," "proletarians," and the struggle for cheap labour -- Time and...

"The distribution of food played a considerable yet largely unrecognized role in the economic history of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. In the midst of rapid urbanization and industrialization, retail competition intensified and the channels by which food made it to the market became vital to...

"The labor movement has been under attack for decades; by understanding the nature of the right-wing attack, activists and scholars can analyze ways to build a working-class movement in the United States."

"From the ongoing issues of poverty, health, housing and employment to the recent upsurge of lethal police-community relations, the black working class stands at the center of perceptions of social and racial conflict today. Journalists and public policy analysts often discuss the black poor as...

This book offers a rich ethnographic account of blue-collar workers' everyday life in a central Russian industrial town coping with simultaneous decline and the arrival of transnational corporations. 'Everyday Post-Socialism' demonstrates how people manage to remain satisfied, despite the crisis...

This book poses a major revisionist challenge to 20th century British labour history, aiming to look beyond the Marxist and Fabian exclusion of working class experience, notably religion and self-help, in order to exaggerate "labour movement" class cohesion. Instead of a "forward march" to...

In this paper, we take up the burgeoning debate about the underrepresentation of the working class in politics. In the literature section we discuss theories of group representation and look at recent empirical studies of responsiveness that have begun to disaggregate public opinion by...

"This new research investigates socio-political and ethnic-cultural conflicts over wage gaps in Israel during the 1950s. The Academic Middle-Class Rebellion exposes the struggle of the Ashkenazi (European) professional elite to capitalize on its advantages during the first decade of Israeli...

David H. Webber shines a light on labor's most potent remaining weapon: its multitrillion-dollar pension funds. Outmaneuvered at the bargaining table and in the courts, state houses, and Washington, worker organizations are beginning to exercise muscle through markets. Shareholder activism is a...

Introduction / Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt -- Section 1. The early republic and the Old South -- Origins of the Charleston Mechanic Society: white labor activism and slave competition in Charleston, South Carolina in the early national era / Thomas Brown -- "Vagrant negroes": the...

A few clarifications -- Industrialization and proletarianization -- The Jewish working class and immigration -- Russian industrialization and the size of the Jewish working class -- External and internal migration and its limits -- Overview of Jewish workers in various branches of production --...

Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth? provides a fresh account of the International Working Men?s Association. Founded in London in 1864, the First International gathered trade unions, associations, co-operatives, and individual workers across Europe and the Americas. The IWMA struggled for the...

"Starting in the late 1970s, tens of thousands of American industrial workers lost jobs in factories and mines. Deindustrialization had dramatic effects on those workers and their communities, but its longterm effects continue to ripple through working-class culture. Economic restructuring...

One of the country's leading scholars on economics and social policy, Isabel Sawhill addresses the enormous divisions in American society--economic, cultural, and political--and what might be done to bridge them. Widening inequality and the loss of jobs to trade and technology has left a...