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Working Men features fourteen stories in as many different voices: of men and women, young and old, blue collar and middle class, salesmen and craftsmen, vets and draft dodgers. They are the voices of Native Americans, New England Yankees, southern gentlewomen, by turns serious and comic, gay and straight, playful and sad. Masterfully spun and compellingly crafted, these stories comprise a diverse gallery of characters, written with an almost magical ability to bring each one achingly, vividly, truthfully to life.
This novel of Mississippi hill country life depicts some of the more troubling and unpublicized aspects of the New Deal by tracing the fortunes of the Taylor family, sharecroppers who move to town to work for the "WP and A," the Works Progress Administration. John Faulkner, a one-time WPA project engineer, has much to satirize in this broadly comic novel. First and foremost are the Taylors: exasperating and unemployable, they are unaccountably abiding; hopelessly destitute, they place a higher premium on a new radio than on food and shelter. Faulkner also casts a sardonic eye on the town merchants, who extend credit to WPA workers as quickly as they inflate prices, and, of course, on the WPA itself, an agency that entices naive, desperate country folk with the promise of a dole--only to lay them off and then ignore them. In his foreword, Trent Watts establishes the singularity of Men Working while noting in it echoes of Tobacco Road, As I Lay Dying, and The Grapes of Wrath. Watts also identifies in John Faulkner's tone an ambivalence shared by many southerners who witnessed the changes wrought by "progress" upon their traditional way of life.
Michèle Lamont takes us into the world inhabited by working-class men--the world as they understand it. Interviewing black and white working-class men who, because they are not college graduates, have limited access to high-paying jobs and other social benefits, she constructs a revealing portrait of how they see themselves and the rest of society. Morality is at the center of these workers' worlds. They find their identity and self-worth in their ability to discipline themselves and conduct responsible but caring lives. These moral standards function as an alternative to economic definitions of success, offering them a way to maintain dignity in an out-of-reach American dreamland. But these standards also enable them to draw class boundaries toward the poor and, to a lesser extent, the upper half. Workers also draw rigid racial boundaries, with white workers placing emphasis on the "disciplined self" and blacks on the "caring self." Whites thereby often construe blacks as morally inferior because they are lazy, while blacks depict whites as domineering, uncaring, and overly disciplined. This book also opens up a wider perspective by examining American workers in comparison with French workers, who take the poor as "part of us" and are far less critical of blacks than they are of upper-middle-class people and immigrants. By singling out different "moral offenders" in the two societies, workers reveal contrasting definitions of "cultural membership" that help us understand and challenge the forms of inequality found in both societies.
In Working Women, Working Men, Joel Wolfe traces the complex historical development of the working class in Sào Paulo, Brazil, Latin America's largest industrial center. He studies the way in which Sào Paulo's working men and women experienced Brazil's industrialization, their struggles to gain control over their lives within a highly authoritarian political system, and their rise to political prominence in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on a diverse range of sources--oral histories along with union, industry, and government archival materials--Wolfe's account focuses not only on labor leaders and formal Left groups, but considers the impact of grassroots workers' movements as well. He pays particular attention to the role of gender in the often-contested relations between leadership groups and thee rank and file. Wolfe's analysis illuminates how various class and gender ideologies influenced the development of unions, industrialists' strategies, and rank-and-file organizing and protest activities. This study reveals how workers in Sào Paulo maintained a local grassroots social movement that, by the mid-1950s, succeeded in seizing control of Brazil's state-run official unions. By examining the actions of these workers in their rise to political prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, this book provides a new understanding of the sources and development of populist politics in Brazil.
By one reading, things look pretty good for Americans today: the country is richer than ever before and the unemployment rate is down by half since the Great Recession—lower today, in fact, than for most of the postwar era. But a closer look shows that something is going seriously wrong. This is the collapse of work—most especially among America’s men. Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist who holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, shows that while “unemployment” has gone down, America’s work rate is also lower today than a generation ago—and that the work rate for US men has been spiraling downward for half a century. Astonishingly, the work rate for American males aged twenty-five to fifty-four—or “men of prime working age”—was actually slightly lower in 2015 than it had been in 1940: before the War, and at the tail end of the Great Depression. Today, nearly one in six prime working age men has no paid work at all—and nearly one in eight is out of the labor force entirely, neither working nor even looking for work. This new normal of “men without work,” argues Eberstadt, is “America’s invisible crisis.” So who are these men? How did they get there? What are they doing with their time? And what are the implications of this exit from work for American society? Nicholas Eberstadt lays out the issue and Jared Bernstein from the left and Henry Olsen from the right offer their responses to this national crisis. For more information, please visit http://menwithoutwork.com.
Capitalism has become strange. Ironically, while the ‘age of work’ seems to have come to an end, working has assumed a total presence – a ‘worker’s society’ in the worst sense of the term – where everyone finds themselves obsessed with it. So what does the worker tell us today? "I feel drained, empty… dead." This book tells the story of the dead man working. It follows this figure through the daily tedium of the office, to the humiliating mandatory team building exercise, to awkward encounters with the funky boss who pretends to hate capitalism and tells you to be authentic. In this society, the experience of work is not of dying...but neither of living. It is one of a living death. And yet, the dead man working is nevertheless compelled to wear the exterior signs of life, to throw a pretty smile, feign enthusiasm and make a half-baked joke. When the corporation has colonized life itself, even our dreams, the question of escape becomes ever more pressing, ever more desperate… ,
"Focusing on the unique opportunities and challenges associated with counseling men, this book examines a variety of critical issues pertaining to the psychology of men and masculinity and presents successful, evidence-based strategies for treatment. Nationally recognized scholars and clinicians with expertise in treating men show how to break down barriers to connecting with male clients and give them the help they need"--Back cover.
In Women's Work, Men's Work, Betty Wood examines the struggle of bondpeople to secure and retain for themselves recognized rights as producers and consumers in the context of the brutal, formal slave economy sanctified by law. Wood examines this struggle in the Georgia lowcountry over a period of eighty years, from the 1750s to the 1830s, when, she argues, the evolution of the system of informal slave economies had reached the point that it would henceforth dominate Savannah's political agenda until the Civil War and emancipation. The daily battles of bondpeople to secure rights as producers and consumers reflected and reinforced the integrity of the private lives they were determined to fashion for themselves, Wood posits. Their families formed the essential base upon which, and for which, they organized their informal economies. An expanding market in Savannah provided opportunities for them to negotiate terms for the sale of their labor and produce, and for them to purchase the goods and services they sought. In considering the quasi-autonomous economic activities of bondpeople, Wood outlines the equally significant, but quite different, roles of bondwomen and bondmen in organizing these economies. She also analyzes the influence of evangelical Protestant Christianity on bondpeople, and the effects of the fusion of religious and economic morality on their circumstances. For a combination of practical and religious reasons, Wood finds, informal slave economies, with their impact on whites, became the single most important issue in Savannah politics. She contends that, by the 1820s, bondpeople were instrumental in defining the political agenda of a divided city--a significant, if unintentional, achievement.
Originally published in 1954, this is the first full-length account of the history of the Working Men’s College in St.Pancras, London. One hundred and fifty years on from its foundation in 1854, it is the oldest adult educational institute in the country. Self-governing and self-financing, it is a rich part of London’s social history. The college stands out as a distinctive monument of the voluntary social service founded by the Victorians, unchanged in all its essentials yet adapting itself to the demands of each generation of students and finding voluntary and unpaid teachers to continue its tradition.