The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated government mandated shutdowns caused a historic shock to the U.S. economy and a disproportionate job loss concentrated among the working class. While an unprecedented social safety net policy response successfully offset earnings loses among lower-wage...

A delegation of labour scholars and practitioners first came to our university, the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, in 2006, to engage with colleagues about establishing the Global Labour University on our campus. It was to be the second site after Germany, and we were all...

The article deals with the question why in many European countries as well as in the USA significant parts of the working classes today support nationalistic and xenophobic political parties and movements. It reviews two different answers which are currently hotly debated in the political left....

This paper re-examines energy and nutritional available to British working-class households in the 1930s using the individual household expenditure and consumption data derived from the 1937/8 Ministry of Labour household expenditure survey and the 1938/9 individual dietary data collected by the...

Until now there have been no national estimates of the extent of poverty in Britain at the turn of the 20th century. This paper introduces a newly-discovered household budget data set for the early 1900s. These data are more representative of urban working households in Britain in the period...

Much has been written about 19th century African American and white statures and body mass index values. However, little is known about their physical activity and calories required to sustain height and weight. This paper considers two alternative measures for biological conditions that address...