Search results
3 Work When the Emigré research project team published its final report on contemporary Irish emigration, it noted a surprising finding. ‘Contrary to what many people might expect’, it wrote, ‘47% of today’s emigrants were in fact employed in full-time jobs before they left’ (Glynn et al. 2013: II). This finding ran counter to common beliefs in Ireland about the relationship between migration and employment, which framed migration both to and from Ireland as a job-seeking strategy. This belief is not restricted to the Irish context: academic research, policy
myth and materiality in a woman’s world 4 Work Q: Do you do anything else in the way of working for your living than by knitting these articles? Andrina Simpson: Yes, I am married. (Commission to Inquire into the Truck System, Second Report (Shetland), 1872, Evidence, line 326) Producing he deceptively simple reply given by the Lerwick knitter Andrina Simpson upon being asked whether she did anything else in addition to knitting to make a living speaks volumes. For Shetland women marriage meant induction into a fishing-crofting household wherein their role was
Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work (1976) has proven challenging since its publication because readers and critics have trouble classifying it. The challenge may be related to a common feature of Baldwin criticism, namely a tendency to compare late career works to early ones and to find them lacking: the experimental nature of later works of nonfiction like No Name in the Street (1972), The Devil Finds Work, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) does not square easily with the more conventional essays that made Baldwin famous in his early years. I attempt to reframe The Devil Finds Work not through a comparison to other Baldwin essays, but rather through a comparison to his fiction, specifically the novel Giovanni’s Room. I posit that a greater appreciation for Devil can result from thinking of it as a story, specifically the story of a failed love affair.
This book provides the first history of how we have imagined and used time since 1700. It traces the history of the relationship between work and leisure, from the 'leisure preference' of male workers in the eighteenth century, through the increase in working hours in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to their progressive decline from 1830 to 1970. It examines how trade union action was critical in achieving the decline; how class structured the experience of leisure; how male identity was shaped by both work and leisure; how, in a society that placed high value on work, a 'leisured class' was nevertheless at the apex of political and social power – until it became thought of as 'the idle rich'. Coinciding with the decline in working hours, two further tranches of time were marked out as properly without work: childhood and retirement.
By the mid-twentieth century married men had achieved a work- leisure balance. In the 1960s and 1970s it was argued that leisure time would increase at a rapid rate. This false prediction coincided with the entry of married women into the labour market and a halt to the decline in working hours and in sectors of the economy a reversal of it. These two developments radically changed the experience of time and thinking about it. Time became equated with achieving a 'work-life balance' where 'life' was often unpaid childcare and domestic work.
Introduction In an increasingly mediated society, the importance of discovery and questioning of the mundane becomes vital to ground actions, individually and collectively, in alternative ways. Memory Work is an approach developed to help explore the mundane by problematising the things we take for granted. Through recalling and documenting stories of memories and experiences, participants, researchers and research-subjects are invited to look for variety – in one's own stories as well as in relation to the stories of the others – regarding
This book challenges influential accounts about gender and the novel by revealing the complex ways in which labour informed the lives and writing of a number of middling and genteel women authors publishing between 1750 and 1830. It provides a seam of texts for exploring the vexed relationship between gender, work and writing. The four chapters that follow contain contextualised case studies of the treatment of manual, intellectual and domestic labour in the work and careers of Sarah Scott, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft and women applicants to the writers' charity, the Literary Fund. By making women's work visible in our studies of female-authored fiction of the period, the book reveals the crucial role that these women played in articulating debates about the gendered division of labour, the (in)compatibility of women's domestic and professional lives, and the status and true value of women's work, which shaped eighteenth-century culture as surely as they do our own.
This book presents new theories and international empirical evidence on the state of work and employment around the world. Changes in production systems, economic conditions and regulatory conditions are posing new questions about the growing use by employers of precarious forms of work, the contradictory approaches of governments towards employment and social policy, and the ability of trade unions to improve the distribution of decent employment conditions. Designed as a tribute to the highly influential contributions of Jill Rubery, the book proposes a ‘new labour market segmentation approach’ for the investigation of issues of job quality, employment inequalities, and precarious work. This approach is distinctive in seeking to place the changing international patterns and experiences of labour market inequalities in the wider context of shifting gender relations, regulatory regimes and production structures.
6 Globalisation at work: unheard voices and invisible agency T he contemporary problematic of globalisation has encouraged a particular mode of knowledge to dominate explanations of social change. Academic and popular discussion of all matters ‘global’ have predominantly asked ‘what is happening’ type questions. It has become almost common sense to seek to explain the nature of the beast itself, making reference to technological and market structures as the driving forces of change. In this formulation the everyday lives of people are positioned passively
4883 Social Change PT bjl.qxd 13/6/07 11:07 Page 24 2 Non-agricultural work Introduction There was some development of non-agricultural employment in Ireland between 1851 and 1922, but this does not mean that there was work for everyone. Emigration masked the true extent of unemployment, millions of people moving from the country and sending home money to those who could not survive on the wages paid for the work they described themselves as doing to the census. Any discussion of ‘gains’ must bear this firmly in mind. There was, however, an increase in the
Conclusion – Understanding work camps Memory and context For some sixty years, work camp movements flourished in Britain. But Britain’s work camps were far from unique. We have already seen the international nature of the labour colony movement, but there were similar debates and exchanges, on an even larger scale, between the wards. In 1935 the International Labour Organisation’s officers detailed camp systems in Austria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Germany, Poland and South Africa; in the following year, they added Estonia, France, Japan and Switzerland to