scholarly journals Rethinking Working-class Politics: Organising Informal Workers in Argentina

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maisa Bascuas ◽  
Ruth Felder ◽  
Ana Logiudice ◽  
Viviana Patroni
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Assistance ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Self Employment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Popular Economy

Our article engages with discussions about the implications of precarious work and its impact on workers’ capacity to organise by analysing the case of Argentina’s Confederation of Popular Economy Workers (CTEP, Confederación de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular). The organisation was created in 2011 with the aim of representing a broad and heterogeneous group of workers in varying conditions of informality, precarious self-employment and workfare programmes. We trace the history of the organisation and analyse its development by focusing on the role of social assistance as a crucial expression of the changing relations between precarious workers and the state. Social assistance has provided some resources for addressing the reproduction needs of precarious workers and of the territories in which they live, and also the material means through which an organisation like CTEP has sought to consolidate its political work among precarious workers. Nonetheless, social assistance has also worked as a means to circumscribe broader demands for change into issues to be addressed through social policy. Our argument is that central to CTEP’s trajectory as an organisation of precarious workers was its attempt to break away from the narrow confines of social assistance, pushing for changes that would allow its members to gain some autonomy both materially and institutionally. KEYWORDS: Argentina; precarious worker organisations; CTEP; social assistance policy

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

Labor Movements in Latin America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico M. Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Relational Approach ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Labor

The history of Latin America cannot be understood without analyzing the role played by labor movements in organizing formal and informal workers across urban and rural contexts.This chapter analyzes the history of labor movements in Latin America from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. After debating the distinction between “working class” and “popular sectors,” the chapter proposes that labor movements encompass more than trade unions. The history of labor movements is analyzed through the dynamics of globalization, incorporation waves, revolutions, authoritarian breakdowns, and democratization. Taking a relational approach, these macro-dynamics are studied in connection with the main revolutionary and reformist strategic disputes of the Latin American labor movements.

Informality, Class Structure, and Class Identity in Contemporary Argentina

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodolfo Elbert
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Significant Proportion ◽  
Preliminary Evidence ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
Self Employment ◽  
America Latina ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Los Grupos

The dynamics of peripheral capitalism in Latin America includes the employment or self-employment of a significant proportion of the working class under informal arrangements. The neoliberal transformations of the 1990s deepened this feature of Latin American labor markets, and it was not reversed during the period of economic growth that followed the collapse of neoliberalism. In this context, sociological debates have focused on the relationship between the formal and the informal fractions of the working class. Examination of the biographical and family linkages between formal and informal workers in Argentina and the effect of these connections on the patterns of class self-identification of individuals shows that lived experience across the informality boundary makes formal workers similar to informal workers in terms of class self-identification. This research provides preliminary evidence that the two kinds of workers belong to the same social class because of the fluidity of the boundary that separates them. Instead of a class cleavage, this boundary is better defined as the separation between fractions of the working class. La dinámica del capitalismo periférico en América Latina implica la informalidad laboral (sea entre trabajadores contratados o autónomos) de una sustancial parte de la clase obrera. Las transformaciones neoliberales de los años noventa profundizaron esta característica de los mercados de trabajo latinoamericanos, y el problema no se revirtió durante el período de crecimiento económico que siguió al colapso del neoliberalismo. En este contexto, los debates sociológicos se han centrado en la relación entre los grupos formales e informales de la clase obrera. Un análisis de los vínculos biográficos y familiares entre los trabajadores formales e informales en Argentina y el efecto de dichas conexiones en los patrones individuales de autoidentificación de clase muestra que la experiencia vivida en los límites de la informalidad hace que los trabajadores formales se consideren similares a los informales en términos de identificación de clase. Esta investigación brinda evidencia preliminar de que los dos tipos de trabajadores pertenecen a la misma clase social.

Retrieving Prostitutes' Live Source Materials and an Approach for Writing the History of the Ah Ku and Karayuki-San of Singapore

Itinerario ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Warren
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Social History ◽  
Critical Importance ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
The City ◽  
Gender Specific ◽  
Source Materials

A new found interest in social history, recent developments in historical thought and methodology and a fresh awareness of the importance of gender-specific experience have led historians to question an ‘ordinary woman's place’ in Singa- pore's past. In the historiography of Singapore, there is a need to foreground the critical importance of the ah ku and karayuki-san in the sex,politics and society of the city, stressing not only alterations in their life and circumstance, but also variations in the role of the colonial government, and changes in the ideology of sex and social policy.

scholarly journals From Class Solidarity to Revolution: The Radicalization of Arsenal Workers in the Late Ottoman Empire

2013 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akın Sefer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
The Revolution

AbstractThis article introduces a bottom-up perspective to the history of the Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire by focusing on the experiences of workers in the Imperial Naval Arsenal (Tersâne-i Âmire) in Istanbul. Drawing mainly on primary documents, the article explores, from a class-formation perspective, the struggles and relations of Arsenal workers from the second half of the nineteenth century until the revolution. The Arsenal workers’ involvement in the revolution was rooted in their class solidarity, which was revealed in a number of ways throughout this period. The workers’ immediate embrace of the revolution was spurred by their radicalization against the state; such radicalization stemmed from the state's failure to solve the workers’ persistent economic problems, and its attempts to discharge them and replace them with military labor. The case of the Arsenal workers thus points to the role of working-class discontent in the history of the revolution, a dimension that has thus far been only minimally addressed in Ottoman historiography.

Rethinking the Twentieth-Century History of Mumbai

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 1435-1449 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOUGLAS E. HAYNES
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Planning ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Linear Models ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

AbstractThis review examines three major books on the history of Bombay. Historians of the city have tended to focus primarily on the period before 1930; this tendency has seriously limited our understanding of the dramatic transformations that have taken place in Bombay over the course of the twentieth century. Each of the studies reviewed here devotes considerable attention to developments since the 1920s. Collectively these works make a significant contribution to the appreciation of such matters as working-class politics, the changing character of workers’ neighbourhoods, land use, urban planning, and the ways the city has been imagined and experienced by its citizens. At the same time, these works all shift their analytic frameworks as they approach more contemporary periods and this restricts the authors' ability to assess fully the character of urban change. This paper calls upon historians to continue to apply the tools of social history, particularly its reliance on close microcosmic studies of particular places and groups over long periods of time, as they try to bridge the gap between the early twentieth century and the later twentieth century. At the same time, it suggests that historians need to consider Gyan Prakash's view of cities as ‘patched-up societies’ whose entirety cannot be understood through single, linear models of change.

scholarly journals Revisiting White Labourism: New Debates on Working-Class Whiteness in Twentieth-Century Southern Africa

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Duncan Money ◽  
Danelle van Zyl-Hermann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
White Workers

Abstract This article is a contribution to and reassessment of the debate about the concept of ‘white labourism’ hosted in this journal in 2010. White labourism is a concept formulated by Jonathan Hyslop to describe an ideology combining an anti-capitalist critique with racial segregation that he argued was dominant in a transnational white working class in the British Empire in the early twentieth century. The debate about this concept has focused on the appeal and extent of this ideology in South Africa during the early twentieth century. In light of recent scholarship on Southern Africa, we take a longer-term perspective to critically examine the concept and the debate. Specifically, we make three interventions into this debate: we consider the role of white workers outside British imperial networks; we examine how radical and revolutionary ideas disappeared from white-working class politics in the mid-twentieth century; and we reassess the connection between transnational flows of people and ideas. Racial divisions in the working class and labour movement in Southern Africa were persistent and enduring. We argue that racial segregation had an enduring appeal to white workers in Southern Africa, and the sources of this appeal were more varied and locally rooted than simply transnational migration to the region.

scholarly journals “The History of all Hitherto Existing Society:” Class Struggle and the Current Wave of Resistance

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 577-587
Author(s):  
Todd Wolfson ◽  
Peter Funke
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Class Analysis ◽  
Current Wave ◽  
History Of

Across the last decade we have witnessed a growing wave of resistance across the globe. In this article we argue that it is critical to utilise class analysis to understand contemporary social movements. We maintain that class analysis begins with understanding class as a series of relations and/or processes that condition both the objective and subjective dimensions of class. Following this, we illustrate how sectors of the contemporary working class are in struggle, yet struggle differently, based on their structural location as well as differing nature of their resistance. In taking this approach to class and social movements, we argue that scholars can begin to unmask the central role of capitalism and the attending regimes of accumulation in the current wave of resistance even when they appear disconnected.

The Religious Life of the Industrial Working Class in the Czech Lands?

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Jakub Štofaník
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Church History ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Czech Lands ◽  
Historic Change ◽  
Role Of Religion

The article focuses on the role of religion among working-class inhabitants of two industrial towns in the Czech lands, Ostrava and Kladno, during the first half of twentieth century. It analyses the enormous conversion movement, the position of new actors of religious life, and the religious behavior of workers. Looking at the history of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the study understands religion as one of the constituent factors of society and its historic change. Traditional, new, and nonconformist religious actors appear as active agents in the private and public life of industrial towns. They mobilized workers, young people, and women, and they produced the major arena in which social, cultural, and church history come together.

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