"Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869) is today a largely unknown figure, sometimes considered to be a forerunner of Karl Marx. Yet a closer look at Hodgskin's works reveals that he was actually a committed advocate of laissez-faire economics and enthusiastic about labor-saving machinery and the...

This paper re-examines energy and nutritional available to British working-class households in the 1930s using the individual household expenditure and consumption data derived from the 1937/8 Ministry of Labour household expenditure survey and the 1938/9 individual dietary data collected by the...

The article deals with the question why in many European countries as well as in the USA significant parts of the working classes today support nationalistic and xenophobic political parties and movements. It reviews two different answers which are currently hotly debated in the political left....

The article deals with the question why in many European countries as well as in the USA significant parts of the working classes today support nationalistic and xenophobic political parties and movements. It reviews two different answers which are currently hotly debated in the political left....

This paper re-examines energy and nutritional available to British working-class households in the 1930s using the individual household expenditure and consumption data derived from the 1937/8 Ministry of Labour household expenditure survey and the 1938/9 individual dietary data collected by the...

Introduction : capitalists and immigrants in historical perspective, 1865- -- Harmonic dissidence : immigrants and the onset of industrial strife -- No danger among them : Asian immigrants as industrial workers -- Alien anarchism : immigrants and industrial unrest in the 1880s -- Confronting the...

"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...

"As was the case in many other countries, it was only in the early years of this century that Greek and Turkish labour historians began to systematically look beyond national borders to investigate their intricately interrelated histories. The studies in Working in Greece and Turkey provide an...

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...

A delegation of labour scholars and practitioners first came to our university, the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, in 2006, to engage with colleagues about establishing the Global Labour University on our campus. It was to be the second site after Germany, and we were all...

The 1990s and 2000s were a gloomy period for Germany's working class, hit by mass unemployment, welfare retrenchment and wage stagnation. We examine whether the growing economic disparity between the top and the bottom of Germany's class structure was accompanied by a widening class gap in life...

The 1990s and 2000s were a gloomy period for Germany's working class, hit by mass unemployment, welfare retrenchment and wage stagnation. We examine whether the growing economic disparity between the top and the bottom of Germany's class structure was accompanied by a widening class gap in life...

The budget offers no programme for job creation or any substantive policy measures to contain inflation that continues to erode the real wage while it commits itself to cash transfers and cuts in subsidies all of which will contribute to further worsening the economic condition of the working...

"Paul Cockshott, using the dual lenses of Marxist economics and technological advance, provides a critical perspective of human history, from pre-agricultural societies to the present. In "How the World Works," Cockshott connects scientific, economic, and societal strands to produce a detailed...

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."