When discussing wages, historians have traditionally concentrated on the level of wages, much less on how people were paid for their work. Important aspects were thus ignored such as how frequently were wages actually paid, how much of the wage was paid in non-monetary form - whether as traditional perquisites or community relief - especially when there was often insufficient coinage available to pay wages. Covering a wide geographical area, ranging from Spain to Finland, and time span, ranging from the sixteenth century to the 1930s, this volume offers fresh perspectives on key areas in social and economic history such as the relationship between customs, moral economy, wages and the market, changing pay and wage forms and the relationship between age, gender and wages.
Belman and Wolfson perform a meta-analysis on scores of published studies on the effects of the minimum wage to determine its impacts on employment, wages, poverty, and more.
Praise for previous editions of The State of Working America: "The State of Working America remains unrivaled as the most-trusted source for a comprehensive understanding of how working Americans and their families are faring in today's economy."--Robert B. Reich"It is the inequality of wealth, argue the authors, rather than new technology (as some would have it), that is responsible for the failure of America's workplace to keep pace with the country's economic growth. The State of Working America is a well-written, soundly argued, and important reference book."--Library Journal "If you want to know what happened to the economic well-being of the average American in the past decade or so, this is the book for you. It should be required reading for Americans of all political persuasions."--Richard Freeman, Harvard University "A truly comprehensive and useful book that provides a reality check on loose statements about U.S. labor markets. It should be cheered by all Americans who earn their living from work."--William Wolman, former chief economist, CNBC's Business Week "The State of Working America provides very valuable factual and analytic material on the economic conditions of American workers. It is the very best source of information on this important subject."--Ray Marshall, University of Texas, former U.S. Secretary of Labor"An indispensable work . . . on family income, wages, taxes, employment, and the distribution of wealth."--Simon Head, The New York Review of Books "No matter what political camp you're in, this is the single most valuable book I know of about the state of America, period. It is the most referenced, most influential resource book of its kind."--Jeff Madrick, author, The End of Affluence "This book is the single best yardstick for measuring whether or not our economic policies are doing enough to ensure that our economy can, once again, grow for everybody."--Richard A. Gephardt "The best place to review the latest developments in changes in the distribution of income and wealth."--Lester ThurowThe State of Working America, prepared biennially since 1988 by the Economic Policy Institute, includes a wide variety of data on family incomes, wages, taxes, unemployment, wealth, and poverty-data that enable the authors to closely examine the effect of the economy on the living standards of the American people.
The Social Topography of a Rural Community is a micro-history of an exceptionally well-documented seventeenth-century English village: Chilvers Coton in north-eastern Warwickshire. Drawing on a rich archive of sources, including an occupational census, detailed estate maps, account books, private journals, and hundreds of deeds and wills, and employing a novel micro-spatial methodology, it reconstructs the life experience of some 780 inhabitants spread across 176 households. This offers a unique opportunity to visualize members of an English rural community as they responded to, and in turn initiated, changes in social and economic activity, making their own history on their own terms. In so doing the book brings to the fore the social, economic, and spatial lives of people who have been marginalized from conventional historical discourse, and offers an unusual level of detail relating to the spatial and demographic details of local life. Each of the substantive chapters focuses on the contributions and experiences of a particular household in the parish-the mill, the vicarage, the alehouse, the blacksmith's forge, the hovels of the labourers and coalminers, the cottages of the nail-smiths and ribbon-weavers, the farms of the yeomen and craftsmen, and the manor house of Arbury Hall itself-locating them precisely on specific sites in the landscape and the built environment; and sketching the evolving 'taskscapes' in which the inhabitants dwelled. A novel contribution to spatial history, as well as early modern material, social and economic history more generally, this study represents a highly original analysis of the significance of place, space, and flow in the history of English rural communities.
