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Labor History Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Labor History

“Men Of Good Timber”: An Archaeological Investigation Of Labor In Michigan’S Upper Peninsula, Aaron Howe Dec 2015

“Men Of Good Timber”: An Archaeological Investigation Of Labor In Michigan’S Upper Peninsula, Aaron Howe

Masters Theses

This study approaches the material assemblage of Coalwood, a cordwood camp that operated from 1900-1912 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with a dialectal method and a theory of internal relations in order to understand how daily life was produced and reproduced. Common sense notions often see home and work as separate entities that only relate to one another externally. My archaeological and historical research abstracts domestic labor as a set of social relations that are dialectically and internally connected to the processes of capital accumulation. My archaeological analysis concludes that both productive and reproductive labor was conducted within the home and …


"Who's Hiring The Indochinese Worker? Your Competition, Probably": Work, Welfare Dependency, And Southeast Asian Refugee Resettlement In Lowell, Massachusetts, 1975-1985, Janelle Bourgeois Jul 2015

"Who's Hiring The Indochinese Worker? Your Competition, Probably": Work, Welfare Dependency, And Southeast Asian Refugee Resettlement In Lowell, Massachusetts, 1975-1985, Janelle Bourgeois

Masters Theses

This Master’s thesis uses the Indochinese Refugee Foundation of Lowell, Massachusetts, a federally funded social service provider, as a case study in the local politics of Southeast Asian refugee resettlement. I argue that the Foundation’s archives offered an opportunity to study the local implementation of the “economic self-sufficiency” mandate of the 1980 Refugee Act, which led the Foundation to increasingly scramble to get refugees off of the welfare rolls and in the labor market as quickly as possible. I conclude that this served to push refugees into low-wage, unskilled, insecure positions such as electronics assembly, and also led to an …