Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty level wages. Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them in order to find out how anyone survives on six dollars an hour. So began a gruelling, hair-raising and darkly funny odyssey though the underworld of working America.

Shows how the English working class emerged through the degradations of the industrial revolution to create a culture and political consciousness of enormous vitality.

Reprints the 1974 classic that became the standard text for such areas of sociology as the science of managerial control, the relationship of technological innovation to social class, and the eradication of skill from work under capitalism. Having worked at a number of crafts in the metal industry,

Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis and the labor history pioneered by E P Thompson and Herbert Gutman, this book provides a study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. It surveys scholarship on whiteness, and discusses the changing face of labor in the twenty-first century.

Explores three prominent and little understood features of globalisation: drugs, pornography and migrant labour. This work traces the history of the contemporary war on drugs from its origins in Reagan's social conservatism to its profound impact on civil society. It features tales such as An Empire of the Obscene and In the Strawberry Fields .

This account of US history from the bottom up tells the real story of the people, rather than the flag-waving official story.

Explores the links between Hollywood and the fast food trade, and the tactics used to target ever younger consumers. This title is a meticulously researched account.

Examines how ordinary factory workers became unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s.

Set against the background of dust bowl Oklahoma and Californian migrant life, this novel tells the story of the Joad family, who, like thousands of others, are forced to travel West in search of the promised land.

The stories of the hard-rock miners' shooting wars, young Elizabeth Gurly Flynn (the Rebel Girl of contemporary sheet music), the first sit-down strikes and Free Speech fights, Emma Goldman and the struggle for birth control access, the Pageant for Paterson orchestrated in Madison Square Garden, bohemian radicals John Reed.

The changing ways in which American industrial workers mobilised concerted action.

The Story of Class Violence in America 1830-1930.

The internationally bestselling author updates his classic work to show how the global economy and technological revolution are undermining employment.

Work and Revolution in France is particularly appropriate for students of French history interested in the crucial revolutions that took place in 1789, 1830, and 1848.

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and ...

Considering humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable, this text addresses diminishing human agency and political freedom - the paradox that as human powers increase through technology and inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions.