Seeking to historicize the 2007-2009 Great Recession, this volume
of essays situates the current economic crisis and its impact on
workers in the context of previous abrupt shifts in the modern-day
capitalist marketplace. Contributors use examples from
industrialized North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and
Australia to demonstrate how workers and states have responded to
those shifts and to their disempowering effects on labor. 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.
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