In light of automation and a globalised economy, Jon Sunnerfjell presents a study that explores how a once-flourishing industrial community seeks to manage the challenges of post-industrial society and flexible capitalism.[Bokinfo]

This paper examines the saving decisions of a large sample of turn-of-the-century working-class American families. We decompose each family's reported income into permanent and transitory components and then estimate marginal propensities to save from each component. Marginal propensities to...

This paper examines whether the saving decisions of a large sample of working-class American families around the turn of the twentieth century are consistent with consumption smoothing tendencies in the spirit of the permanent income hypothesis. We develop two econometric models to decompose...

"Shannon, Wally, and John built their lives around their place of work. Shannon, a white single mother, became the first woman to run the factory's dangerous furnaces at the Rexnord manufacturing plant in Indianapolis and was proud of producing one of the world's top brands of steel bearings....

In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 34,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for half a century. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour,...

"This groundbreaking book explores China's Minimum Livelihood Guarantee program, which was extended in the hopes of quieting the protests of millions of laid-off workers. Solinger replays the duet that unfolded between the state and the ranks of the proletariat and documents the progressively...