Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in MassachusettsCambridge University Press, 1986 M03 31 - 469 pages Out of Work chronicles the history of unemployment in the United States. It traces the evolution of the problem of joblessness from the early decades of the nineteenth-century to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Challenging the widely held notion that the United States was a labour-scarce society in which jobs were plentiful, it argues that unemployment played a major role in American history long before the crash of the stock market in 1929. Focusing on the state of Massachusetts, Professor Kevssar analyses the economic and social changes that gave birth to the prevalent concept of unemployment. Drawing on previously untapped sources - including richly detailed statistics and vivid verbatim testimony - he demonstrates that joblessness was a pervasive feature of working-class life from the 1870s to the 1920s. The book describes the ingenious, yet quite costly, strategies that unemployed workers devised to cope with the joblessness in the absence of formal governmental assistance. It also explores the many dimensions of working-class life that were profoundly affected by recurrent layoffs and the chronic uncertainty of work. Finally, it demonstrates that the fundamental contours of the Massachusetts experience were repeated, sooner or later, throughout the United States. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
The social origins of unemployment | 9 |
Early shelters | 10 |
The great transformation | 14 |
Different paths | 22 |
A lengthening shadow | 31 |
Daily earnings and daily wants | 36 |
The era of uncertainty | 39 |
Anxiety and despair | 166 |
Aftereffects | 172 |
Organizing labor | 177 |
The collective problem | 178 |
Helping ones own | 186 |
Shorter hours | 191 |
Protecting turf | 202 |
Voluntarism and involuntary idleness | 211 |
Growth and dependence | 40 |
Panics and depressions | 47 |
Idleness in good times | 57 |
The reserve army of the unemployed | 69 |
Sharing the burden | 77 |
Boys and men | 90 |
Women without work | 96 |
Segmented competition | 109 |
From place to place | 111 |
Cities and towns | 112 |
Unemployment and mobility | 123 |
Tramps | 130 |
Coping | 143 |
A spectrum of needs | 144 |
Institutional relief | 150 |
Selfinsurance snowfalls kin and grocers | 155 |
The fruits of their labor | 216 |
From the Common to the State House | 222 |
Capitalists Are the Cause of the Unemployed | 225 |
Lift Up Your Hearts | 237 |
Confrontation and redemption | 246 |
The greatest evil of our competitive industrial system | 250 |
18701907 | 251 |
Reformers and businessmen | 262 |
Two steps forward one step back | 272 |
Toward a new political economy | 285 |
Epilogue the Bay State and the nation | 299 |
Supplementary tables | 308 |
About the numbers unemployment statistics before the Great Depression | 342 |
Notes | 359 |
453 | |
Common terms and phrases
AC-B American annual unemployment BISU Hearings BISU Report blue-collar Boston Globe Boston Herald Brockton Bulletin business cycle Cambridge Carpenter Chapter cities commonwealth communities decades demand depression downturns economic eight-hour eight-hour day employed employees Fall River families federal female figures household immigrants involuntary idleness jobless workers labor force Labor Leader labor market labor movement layoffs Ledoux Leiserson less living Lynn makers males manufacturing Mass MBSL mean duration ment mill operatives months nineteenth century occupations officials organized labor percent ployed ployment political population problem of unemployment produced programs Progressive era reformers regarding relief sample seasonal Sept shoe industry shoe workers social sources spells Springfield state's statistics steady strategies survey Swift Table textile tion towns trade union trade unionists tramps Twelfth U.S. Census twentieth century unem unemployed unemployment frequencies unemployment levels unemployment rates United USBLS wage earners Whitesmiths women working-class York