In this Book
- Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises
- Book
- 2014
- Published by: University of Illinois Press
- Series: The Working Class in American History
Since the Industrial Revolution, contributors argue, factors such as race, sex, and state intervention have mediated both the effect of economic depressions on workers' lives and workers' responses to those depressions. Contributors also posit a varying dynamic between political upheaval and economic crises, and between workers and the welfare state.
The volume ends with an examination of today's "Great Recession": its historical distinctiveness, its connection to neoliberalism, and its attendant expressions of worker status and agency around the world. A sobering conclusion lays out a likely future for workers--one not far removed from the instability and privation of the nineteenth century.
The essays in this volume offer up no easy solutions to the challenges facing today's workers. Nevertheless, they make clear that cogent historical thinking is crucial to understanding those challenges, and they push us toward a rethinking of the relationship between capital and labor, the waged and unwaged, and the employed and jobless.
Contributors are Sven Beckert, Sean Cadigan, Leon Fink, Alvin Finkel, Wendy Goldman, Gaetan Heroux, Joseph A. McCartin, David Montgomery, Edward Montgomery, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Melanie Nolan, Bryan D. Palmer, Joan Sangster, Judith Stein, Hilary Wainright, and Lu Zhang.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- pp. 1-16
- Part I. Depressions and Working-Class Lives
- Part II. Economic Dislocation as Political Crisis
- Part III. Social-Welfare Struggles from the Liberal to the Neoliberal State
- Part IV. Workers and the Shakeup of the New World Order
- Contributors
- pp. 289-292
- Other Works in the Series, Production Notes
- pp. 305-310
Additional Information
Copyright
2020