Documents found
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2671.
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2672.More information
This article analyzes the day-labourer job allocation system in the United States, whose workforce is often made up of undocumented Hispanic migrants. Using five case studies, it compares informal hiring carried out in parking lots or in front of large stores, with day labour formally organized by commercial agencies on the one hand, and hiring through self-governed community centres on the other. The study of alternative services offered by community intermediaries shows that they are subjected to the same constraints as commercial intermediaries and reproduce certain of the latter's traits, but at the same time, they provide key services to day labourers and build a solid base for their legal and political mobilization, whether it is for the right to seek employment in a public area, recover unpaid salaries, or demand reforms that would allow them to regularize their migratory status.
Keywords: travail journalier, précarité, États-Unis, travailleurs sans papiers, worker centers, day labour, insecurity, United States, undocumented workers, worker centres, Trabajo jornalero, precariedad, Estados Unidos, trabajadores indocumentados, centros para el trabajador
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2674.More information
As newcomers to Montreal, young single, working women were often subject to low salaries, poor housing options, and unknown dangers—both real and imagined—of a big city. This article considers the Julia Drummond Residence as a place of intersection for two groups of women: the middle-class volunteers who ran the residence and the young, single working women who lived there. While meeting a need in society by providing shelter and food for women earning small salaries, the women running the residence were just as concerned with shaping the femininity and moral fibre of the residents. The practices and ideology of these women, who used the language of reform and renewal, resembled closely those of social reformers of the previous generation, echoing judgment of femininity based on understandings of race, class, religion, and sexuality. This article explores what it was like to live at the residence, how some women found the residence a “home away from home” while others were less comfortable in the unfamiliar and seemingly cold middle-class institution. Positioning themselves as independent citizens of Montreal, at a time when affordable housing became increasingly available, many young, single women asserted their freedom and independence in the years following the Second World War by challenging the regulations imposed on them, and, in so doing, rejected the structured femininity offered to them by institutions such as the Julia Drummond Residence.
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2676.More information
This paper is a preliminary attempt to examine demographic and economic aspects of widowhood in 19th-century Montreal and the ways working-class widows in particular could survive. Although men and women lost spouses in roughly equal proportions, widows remarried much less frequently than widowers. In the reconstruction of their family economy that followed the loss of the main wage earner, some of these women sought work themselves, mostly in the sewing trades or as domestics or washerwomen. A few had already been involved in small shops, and some used their dower, inheritance, or insurance policies to set up a shop, a saloon, or a boarding-house. Children were the most valuable asset of a widow, and they were more likely to work and to stay at home through their teens and twenties than in father-headed families. Additional strategies, including sharing housing with other families, raising animals, or trading on the streets, were drawn upon; they established an economy of makeshift arrangements that characterized the world of many working-class widows.
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2677.More information
The cycles of depression and expansion in the history of capitalist countries can also be studied at the level of the industrial city.Sherbrooke's tax rolls — which are as accurate as any annual municipal census — make it possible to trace the irregular growth pattern of a burgeoning city. This article looks at how employment, housing, material and social living conditions and tendencies toward residential permanency or transience changed from 1875 to 1913 with the unequal and combined movement of long-term trends and short economic cycles.The study of eleven neighbourhoods makes it possible to identify different growth development rhythms in relation to ethnic or socio-professional traits and by residential sector.
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2678.
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2679.
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2680.