Search

The article presents an essay which focuses on the experiences of the first Mexican guest workers and the development of the first Mexican guest worker program in the U.S. According to the article, the temporary work program was instituted by the U.S. Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson after he found a loophole in the Immigration Act of 1917. It mentions the economic and living conditions of Mexican foreign workers and their families who worked in the sugar beet and cotton industries.

The article focuses on Royal Economic Society of Guatemala, Maya farmers, and the struggle over Enlightenment-era agricultural science and Chinese cotton trade. It mentions finished cotton goods and cultural observations about the people wearing cotton garments and cotton plants meant editing a complex colonial system. It also mentions history of science, social history, and ethnohistory allows for an exploration of these complex intersections.

Edgar Degas's stay in New Orleans in 1872–73, which marked his only visit to the New World, resulted in two remarkable paintings of a cotton office. Linking Southern cotton to the French textiles he frequently depicted and to his works' paper supports demonstrates the centrality of the material to the artist's corpus. More broadly, Degas's cotton office paintings, as well as drawings and letters produced during his time abroad, reflect his meditation on the connections that bound the Old and New Worlds together and the transportation technology that facilitated the global circulation of people, goods, and communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occupational health is the study of effect of work and the working environment on the health of the worker. Occupational diseases are those diseases, which arise out of or during working at employment place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following World War II millions of cotton workers, especially African-Americans, left the fields forever, and farmers mechanized the cotton harvest. Prevailing empirical studies argue that high factory wages lured farmhands away. Based on newly reconstructed data, we estimate the causes of the demise of harvest employment in 12 major cotton-producing states from 1949-1964 and find important roles for mechanization, government farm programs, higher nonagricultural wages, and falling cotton prices. On net, our estimates indicate that factors affecting farm labor demand, not labor-supply influences, caused the disappearance of hand-picked cotton—results that reverse the best econometric work to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lancashire women cotton workers were the best paid, most highly unionized female manual workers in Britain whose non-domestic way of life contravened Victorian domesticity. The paper examines the conditions that made possible their mobilization. It analyses how during early industrialism these women breached men's job monopolies, participated in communal protests and established unconventional family arrangements; how late nineteenth-century material and cultural ameliorations amplified their resources; and how interaction with middle-class women organizers then helped spark their own confrontation with gender inequities. Their experience illustrates a paradox in employed women's activism: the least dependent female workers were the ones to claim women's right to work and vote; those with the lowest fertility sought reproductive self-determination; and the sector with de facto equivalent wages to men's were the staunch advocates of 'equal pay'. The conjunction of partial emancipation from Victorian domesticity and patriarchal subjugation as working-class women determined this group's course of action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comparative study of the evolution of management in the mule spinning factories of the United States and Great Britain. The issue of workers' autonomy and technological change is one of growing concern. In Labor and Monopoly Capital Harry Braverman demonstrated how the introduction of improved machinery diluted the craft status of skilled workers. A recent book by David Montgomery covers a topic much neglected by Braverman: The Craft Unions' resistance to technological change. Two major technologies marked the transformation of the domestic cotton industry into a factory industry: throstle spinning and mule spinning. Both technologies were first developed in Britain and only later adapted with some modifications by American manufacturers. Skill, market demand, productivity, and power were responsible for the triumph of the mule over the throstle in Britain. The overwhelming dependency of Great Britain on craft technology was an important element in the spinners' success in retaining their craft status during the last part of the 19th century. In the United States the self actor transformed the social organization of mule spinning in two fundamental ways. First, it drastically reduced the number of helpers. Second, employers transferred the authority over helpers from mule spinner to overseers, placing the spinner himself under close supervision.

The article deals with trade union organization and skill in the cotton and engineering in industries in Great Britain from 1850 to 1960. There has been a growing awareness of the significance of skill within the manual working class for an understanding of the historical development of class relations in the region. Events in the British engineering industry have illustrated the continuing importance of differences around the axis of skill for an understanding of the manual working class. The cotton and engineering industries between 1850 and 1960 is known for its persistence of the skilled divide within the manual working class and its close connection with the structure of trade unionization.

The article draws inferences about levels of skill, the costs of acquiring skill, and the returns to skill among British factory workers at the end of the classical phase of the industrial revolution. Industrialization may have called for a more adaptable and eventually a more literate workforce, but until the 1830s changes in rates of literacy in Great Britain, as well as their links to the process of industrialization, are uncertain both in direction and in pace. The simplest way to think about human capital is that it is the quality of labor or the set of skills which enables a worker to perform at a higher standard. In Great Britain almost all pay structures contained elements of artificiality which hindered the freedom of earnings to reflect levels of skill and productivity. Deliberate restrictions on entry, prejudice, custom, a sense of fair play or a just wage, and ideas that certain classes of work should be restricted to persons from particular social classes and be accorded an income appropriate to the class, were all forces which affected wages but had little to do with the skill or productivity of a worker.

This article, which is illustrated by photographs, cites a number of cases of needless effort, uncomfortable posture and danger associated with machines in general use in the cotton industry. Improvements, designed to reduce these disadvantages, are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports the presence of cytotoxic oxygenated derivatives of oleic acid from post-mortem lungs of cotton workers. Establishment of a possible etiologic role of cytotoxic keto fatty acids in bronchitis development; Analysis of the keto acid structure via mass spectral analysis; Estimation of the plasma membrane potential.