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Reviewed by:
  • Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises ed. by Leon Fink, Joseph A. McCartin, Joan Sangster
  • Kim Phillips-Fein
Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises
Edited by Leon Fink, Joseph A. McCartin, and Joan Sangster
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014
304pp., $50.00 (cloth)

In a 2011 essay published in Political Concepts, Janet Roitman writes that the concept of crisis has become “the defining category of our contemporary situation” (Janet Roitman, “Crisis,” Political Concepts, Issue 1). Expressing skepticism about this notion, she argues that we need to rethink the concept of crisis, even though “crises” seem to be everywhere and unending. Roitman’s piece is an interesting backdrop to the essays in Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises, which grew out of papers presented at a September 2011 Georgetown conference sponsored in part by this journal. The authors in this collection invest in the idea of crises as moments of acute historical change, when one set of norms and expectations is forced to give way to another. But their depictions of economic crisis in modern life fit with Roitman’s uncertainty about the category itself. Crises, as these essays show, do not necessarily lead to historical transformation or mark a breaking point between past and future. Instead, they can be, and often are, contained within the present. [End Page 108]

The contrast between the moment of the Georgetown conference and the present is a case in point. At the time of the conference, it was still not clear what the meaning of the recession that began in 2008 would be. Several years later, the United States is still grappling with the legacy of that downturn. Yet it is now clear—perhaps even more so than in 2011—that the crisis of 2008 changed little. Still, the probing, thoughtful essays in this intriguing collection go far beyond their overt subject matter to raise questions about class and power, agency and structure, crisis and the nature of historical change itself. They reveal that present- day concerns can stimulate rich historical thinking.

Labor economist Edward Montgomery (son of the late labor historian David Montgomery) sums up the book’s central problem in the insightful final essay. Prosperity, Montgomery observes, is often seen as the American norm, yet this image is contradicted by the fact that the National Bureau of Economic Research reported thirty-three business cycles in the United States since 1854. The American economy has endured recession roughly every five and a half years since then, destroying businesses and throwing workers out of jobs and households into their own miniature crises. “Severe downturns in the economy were filtered through daily life as degraded work, less work, no work, making do through the household economy, intensified work, informal labor, bartering, forced public labor, charity, relocating, and, at the extreme end of the spectrum, illness and starvation,” the editors write in their introduction of the experience of economic crisis before the expansion of the social safety net (2). Such was the case, Montgomery points out, during the twentieth century even after the creation of some rudimentary welfare-state provisions and even during the post–World War II “golden years.” While recessions were shorter and milder over that time than before or since, it is a misperception to see even those years as a stable expansion. In other words, the experience of crisis is so widespread and recurrent that it seems as much the norm as the exception.

The editors suggest that economic crises pose a special set of issues for labor historians. Like all economic upheavals, the impact of these periodic recessions is most profound for those who have the least—whose financial security is the most tenuous and whose cushion of savings is the smallest. Yet the issues taken up in this book not only concern the question of how working-class people have managed to survive economic crisis but also the problem of how to think about working-class agency in the context of crises. The whole category of crisis seems to invoke structural economic tensions, which unfold according to their own logic independent of the people they...

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