The great escape: how a field survived hard times

Abstracts

The article presents a balance of the American historiography on workers. After detecting moments of crisis within this field of research, it points out recovery and vitality paths, with new themes and approaches.

work; United States of America; historiography

O artigo apresenta um balanço da historiografia norte-americana sobre trabalhadores. Após detectar momentos de crise dentro desse campo de pesquisa, aponta os caminhos de recuperação e vitalidade, com novas temáticas e abordagens.

trabalho; Estados Unidos da América; historiografia

Industrial spaces and workers' communities: the Portuguese case study and the European historiographical tradition

Joana Vidal de Azevedo Dias Pereira

Doctoral Student and Reseacher, Instituto de História Contemporânea da Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Av. de Berna, 26 C. 1069-061 Lisboa - Portugal, [e-mail]

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an analysis of the formation of industrial and worker social spaces in three local councils on the outskirts of Lisbon between 1890 and 1910. Based on the European historiographical tradition, increasingly marked by interdisciplinary, it is sought to highlight the analytical validity of concepts such as social production, strategies and resources to assess socio-spatial trajectories of the working classes. This perspective allows different phenomena - the territorialization of production units, labor market formation and stratification, geographic and social mobility, and social networks - to be related under the banner of a global social process.

Keywords: mobility; strategies; social networks.

Object, theoretical focus and problematic

More than half a century ago, E. P. Thompson, when starting a new social history, induced a notable scientific investment in the diachronic analysis of complex social relations within and outside production, in workplaces and leisure areas, in formal and informal networks of help and welfare. An astonishing production of monographic studies would illustrate working class spaces and sociabilities during the long, irregular and heterogeneous process of the development of capitalism.

A comparison of the data collected in different European and American contexts leads to the following conclusion: from the final decade of the nineteenth century the movement of industry to the periphery was not accompanied by a sufficiently rapid progress of urban transport, giving rise to industrial areas and working class neighborhoods which became centers of an intense communitarian life, developed from the physical overlapping of the spheres of production, consumption, leisure and collective action.¹

In reaction to this perspective, various authors focused on the mobility and stratification of the working classes, seeking to demonstrate the diversity of itineraries of those who participated in this process. Studies of mobility have become a real historiographical fashion since the second half of the 1980s, questioning the formation of socially and culturally homogenous communities.²

In recent decades, however, taking into account both the impact of capitalist concentration on the lives of large parts of the European population and the human agency in this process, historians have analyzed the individual and, more importantly, collective strategies which industries and workers respectively used to modernize productive processes and deal with wage labor.

It was in the scale of place and in social relations that the diversity of individual trajectories, the stratification of labor markets, and the consequent heterogeneity of working classes and their strategies for survival were most clearly seen. However, there were also monographic studies which illustrated with greater eloquence the ties of formal and informal solidarity which pierced the local communities in which factories, workshops, railway stations, river and marine ports were located, and where large contingent of employed workers were concentrated.

In this article we will look at the relations between the social production of industrial space, the social construction of working class populations, the strategies produced and the resources³ constructed by individuals, families and professional groups involved in these processes. Using this interpretative framework we will present the results of research carried out in a case study of Setúbal Peninsula - the oldest industrial suburb of the Portuguese capital -, in a comparative perspective with other spaces where the slow and late economic and social modernization of Southern Europe was territorialized.

Michael Hanagan, adapting the model of Ira Katznelson,⁴ defines the phenomenon co-implicated in the formation of the working class as interests, social organization, interaction, and arena. Interests refer first to the satisfaction of the vital needs of a group in the economic structure, in other words, obtaining resources - capacities, information, knowledge, - in the labor market. To achieve this individuals are obliged to be part of more or less formal social networks - migration and trade union networks, amongst others.⁵ In determined contexts and scenarios these resources are appropriated in process of mobilization for collective action.

The central thesis of this article is that structural transformations at the foundations of the process of working class mobilization in the second decade of the twentieth century are tied, as has been argued, to the spatial and demographic phenomenon co-implicated in the processes of industrialization and urbanization. The social networks resulting from family and professional strategies to resist and deal with the spread of wage labor are conceptualized here as resources which were progressively formalized, constituting the embryo of organized labor movements.

The production of space and the construction of populations

In Southern Europe industrialization and urbanization were interlinked processes. However, the rural exodus was not synonymous with massive access to the working class or to the city. On the one hand, the diffusion of wage labor had occurred in a previous period and on a much greater scale in the countryside than in the cities.⁶ On the other hand, cities exercised a great power of attraction, but at the same time induced the development of their semi-rural areas of influence. In effect the formation of industrial areas generically resulted from the interaction between one or more cities and their hinterlands, creating a large agglomerate, where at the turn of the century the first metropolitan areas germinated.⁷

These labor markets were under pressure from increasing demand. The 'agrarian revolution' - the opening of new markets, the elimination of fallow land, the utilization and intensification of new crops, etc. - implied a profound transformation of rural social structures, especially the concentration of land and the bankruptcy of many small landholders. The impoverishment of rural populations induced, in turn, large dislocations of workers in search of work during the different seasonal tasks required on large plantations. Fixed workers became increasingly unnecessary. These processes created an excess population, which increased urban labor markets, but also those of developing rural industries.⁸

Various actors were involved in the production of new spaces and industrial populations, most notably the state. Construction and transport were sectors which decisively contributed to the expansion of the urban labor market and its areas of dependence.⁹ During the nineteenth century all of Europe was the stage for public works programs, which although limited in their scope had a determinant impact on the organization of space - reordering the urban fabric, constructing railways, port structures, etc.

However, excluded these large constructions, official urbanism was not concerned with the suburban areas with an industrial vocation. Even on the outskirts of the city of Haussmann, the individual landowner practically met no constraints to his initiative. The urban periphery developed in a tolerated clandestine manner. The advantages of the location, the prices, the spaces available, and the accidents of the property market were left to develop freely. Defective equipment, lack of equipment, topographic incoherence, and confusion between public and private, multiplied.¹⁰

Refusing determinism and centering on human agency, including in administration or the pressurizing of the state apparatus, historians have long since observed in the strategies of the dominant classes a process which induces not only profound transformations in the organization of labor, but also the mobility of working classes groups in the physical and social space. However, the strategies of subordinate classes also played their role.¹¹

Various authors have emphasized the resistance of the organizational structures of artisans and skilled laborers in cities as one of the factors which induced industrial investment in peripheral areas. In addition, in certain contexts it has been found that family strategies condition the options of capital regarding the type of investment to make - in the southern region, the hereditary transmission of qualifications and the use of the entire family group in domestic work or in workshops inhibited large investments in technology and training.¹²

Yves Lequim, in his detailed examination of workers in the Lyon region, demonstrated how their concentration followed different and apparently contradictory paths, during what he does not dare call industrialization, preferring to designate the process as a mobilization. The author argues that these cities without frontiers attracted population, but above all projected their dynamism in dependent agglomerations. These agglomerations became docile labor markets, often trained in traditional industries, and were taken advantage of by industries, which rather than technological modernization intended to implement a new organization of work.¹³

Similarly Barbara Curli justified the investment of one of the largest Italian factories -Pirelli - in an area between the city and the countryside four kilometers from Milan, because of to the rapid and massive densification of a new and mixed population on the vast periphery of the city, guaranteeing the intermittent needs of a company which required a small fraction of stable and specialized labor and an undifferentiated proletarian mass which it could periodically enlist and dismiss.¹⁴

In the Portuguese context, the largest zones of industrial development were equally a network of industrial towns around the two principal cities.¹⁵ From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, the traditional industrial centers in Lisbon - Beato-Sacavém and Alcântara-Junqueira - both semi-peripheral, added to the development of modern industrial spaces in a continuous strip along the southern bank of the Tejo, peopled by rural and fishing communities, but where there already existed an paleo-industrial belt - with abundant sea mills, ceramic furnaces, wineries and cooperages, amongst other rural industries. It should be emphasized that in the second largest Portuguese city -Porto - manufacturing units were also initially set up on the central periphery of the city, progressively moving during the first decades of the twentieth century to the peripheral districts and to the basin of the Ave and Vizela rivers, clearly rural areas.¹⁶

In 1861 it was decided to locate the terminus of the railway which crosses the south of Portugal in Barreiro - a small rural fishing village on the southern bank of the Tejo Estuary, around seven kilometers from Lisbon, which would become the largest industrial complex in the country. This political decision was determinant for the industrial destiny of the entire southern bank of the Tejo, strategically located between the Alentejo mountains, the location of the raw material for one of the most important Portuguese industries - cork making -, and one of the largest commercial ports in Southern Europe - Lisbon.

The urbanistic planning on the southern bank of the Tejo also only received attention from the state almost one hundred years after the opening of the Southern and Southeastern railways. During the twentieth century Portuguese municipal councils' actions were restricted to following in the wake of private interests. At the turn of the century, benefitting new transport facilities, the principal cork companies, most owned by foreign capital and well established in the south of Portugal, appropriated the best areas for docking on the southern bank facing Lisbon - Almada, Seixal and Barreiro -, transferring their factories there and building numerous private docks, making agreements with local authorities. In 1908 Companhia União Fabril (CUF), one of the largest national industries, acquired land at the source of the Barreiro, incessantly expanding its empire in exchange for small local improvements. It constructed a private wharf, branch line and station.¹⁷

The establishment of large companies induced an unstoppable dynamic of development - the quintas and agricultural land around small rural enclaves and fishing villages were used to build more factories and fabricos - names given to small production units which subcontracted work for the large foreign companies. At the backs and in the basements of nineteenth century buildings workshops and warehouses multiplied.¹⁸

The expansion of the labor market and the growing weight of the industrial sector led to successive cycles of migration and the transformation of the regional social structure. Between 1864 and 1930 the population of these concelhos (districts) rose from 4543 to 21,042 in Barreiro, from 4715 to 10,337 in Seixal and from 10,203 to 23,994 in Almada. The weight of the population working in industry grew exponentially, reaching 62% in Barreiro, 57% in Seixal and 45% of the active population of Almada. The rates of wage labor among the active population are proportional to the percentage of the working class population ᇭ% in Barreiro, 86% in Seixal and 79% in Almada. In the Setúbal peninsula, however, 32% of wage earners were designated as "family members helping the heads of their families" - which corresponded to female work, paid at half or less of the male rate.¹⁹

Residential areas developed close to production areas. As James Cronin emphasized, as cited above, collective metropolitan transports were still far from being able to allow pendular movements of the metropolitan population. The steam trains which linked the capital to the outra banda (other bank of the Tejo), due to the price of travel, were aimed at the classes in Lisbon who wanted leisure and later at students from the middles classes. They were totally inaccessible for the daily use of the working classes.²⁰

CUF built accommodation to house the most skilled sectors of their labor, while the best paid workers with greater stability, such as railway workers, induced investments from enterprises in Lisbon. However, in most cases it was landowners who built "small brick and wood houses, like shacks, behind their houses (or beyond the walls marking their property), building minuscule patios with access to the street."²¹

Occupying the residual or surplus spaces among production units, the backs of pre-existing dwellings and the vast space which ran from riverside industrial centers to the interior, 'chaotic' and 'disorderly' neighborhoods emerged, formed by 'numerous alleys' which "rose and fell in all directions, serving houses which appeared to be built on top of each other."²²

What in the middle of the nineteenth century were small rural settlements and fishing villages, surrounded by quintas and linked by secondary roads and lanes, became urban fabrics, obstructed by factories with various sizes, ranging from the tiny fabrico to the CUF manufacturing complex, which in 1932 covered one million square meters and had 25 kilometers of private railway lines.²³

The production of strategies and the construction of resources

Southern systems of population mobility at the dawn of the twentieth century were intimately related to the characteristics of industrial development and the consequent slow and fragmented formation of national labor markets, especially in Southern Europe. Workers' itineraries were not inserted in a linear trajectory between work in the fields and in the cities or rural industries. In this period labor markets in urban areas and their annexes were composed of various segments, amongst which workers fluctuated cyclically - domestic work, unskilled labor, skilled labor or craft work, and also seasonal agricultural work.

The deepening of mobility studies has illustrated the fluid character of the working class world in the period being looked at here and have called attention to the variety of trajectories of the families involved in these processes. The most significant phenomenon illustrated by the study of migration cycles and the integration of populations, however, was the process of recreating the working classes on the scale of place. In the analysis of different family itineraries of the population of San Paolo, one of the most important working class neighborhoods in Turin, Maurizio Gribaudi observed various families "gathered in the same spaces due to the common need to guarantee the family and the individual the use of the emotional and economic resources which local relations networks supply them...".²⁴

Worker strategies were, thus, diversified, and related to the transformations in labor markets and the relations of production and fundamentally distinguished in accordance with the position of individuals in the productive process.²⁵ Skilled workers benefitted from the existence of pre-industrial professional solidarities and built organizational resources - specifically mutual assistance societies, cooperatives and class associations, which inherited the social capital of guilds, fraternities and brotherhoods.²⁶

Unskilled workers used social networks, resorting to traditional family and community solidarities. The empirical evidence provided by various monographical studies shows that widened kinship networks of communities with rural origins gave moral and material support to the recent arrivals, as a determining condition for access to local labor markets. In an article dealing specifically with compadrio - the relationship between godparents and godchildren- Frédéric Vidal reflects on the character and role of these networks, arguing that despite their increasingly informal nature in urban environments these relations are guided. Often the choice of these protagonists is intended to accumulate social capital, "a potential resource which parents could mobilize throughout their lives."²⁷ Agustín Galan García, finding that 50.2% of those who got work in the Rio Tinto mining company between 1873 and 1936 had relatives there, demonstrates how expanded kinship relations played a fundamental role in access to work.²⁸

According to Yves Lequim, it is possible to see a temporal evolution in relation to the connection of these two worlds -of skilled and unskilled workers. For a long time the world of work consisted of two layers which did not intermix and which slid over each other - the most numerous were the workers with trades, whose savoir faire was inherited; the rest were nomadic workers from the city necessary for production at a specific period. Segregation to the suburbs, however, expressed new working conditions which caused the renewal of hierarchies and mobility - the force of heredity and homogamy declined and trades opened wider to the recent arrivals.²⁹

The dynamics of social networks in Portuguese industrial contexts are little studied, however the pioneering work of Frédéric Vidal on Alcântara - one of the first industrial neighborhoods in Lisbon - describes unstable and heterogeneous populations, but demonstrates that these cannot be reduced to a sum of individual presences - "it is possible to operate a re-approximation between the individuals who have in common, not so much positions as behaviors, trajectories, ways of acting, tactics or strategies." The life of the residents of Alcântara as a group illustrates different modes of social integration. The practices listed are based on the original location, kinship, professional identities, or the superimposition of these factors.³⁰

The multifaceted and interdependent nature of informal social networks which germinated in these places would be reproduced in formalized relations in associations. The Portefaix case in Toulon can be highlighted. To belong to this association it was necessary: "for the candidate to be presented by a member of the community who officially guaranteed the morality of the new member. The assumption of responsibility was linked to the role of a particular guarantor and jointly motivated by a kinship relationship, or at least of daily knowledge of the new member."³¹

Theoretical debates about the composition and identity of the associations has called attention to this 'dual determination' - classist and territorial - which is manifested in a linked and differentiated manner in space and time.³² Studies of the development of solidarities in nineteenth century Europe have demonstrated how this linkage can be glimpsed in the local communities where waged workers were concentrated.

The interception of communitarian networks with trade based networks was essential to expand the corporate ties inherited from the ancien regime, and, based on new solidarities with territorial foundations, permit a relative and progressive integration of the factory based proletariat in the organized working class movement. The role of the local community emerges particularly "in countries in which modern industry was a relatively late phenomenon, but where a capillary network of longstanding urban settlements with an extremely diversified and articulated social stratification, was available for a broad popular base and for artisans in any case of workers who were not exactly manual workers, for this type of associationism."³³

According to investigations carried out in a Spanish context, the community is "a powerful element which hierarchizes the associative universe through the belonging to social sets which can be defined on the basis of economic activities, by trade, or by similar labor or social conditions which also have a reduced territory."³⁴ The local community and its structuring capacity are equally perceptible in a number of French studies, in which the dual nature of their social identity is emphasized, influenced by the links constructed in works places and residential spaces in a neighborhood such as Saint-Étienne or in towns such as Thiers.³⁵

Recent studies have equally stressed the role of territorially based associationism in the re-composition of the fragmentation and diversification of the southern world of labor in its phase of greatest development - in the final decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. Understood as a movement, a powerful dynamic can be seen which links the different forms of organization of the working classes, both in geographic terms and in relation to objectives and content - interlining welfare and assistance with culture, breaks and sport, as well trade union and cooperative functions. These studies illustrated how this process intercepted the political trajectory of the working class movement, creating an incubation period for guidance and practices which preceded policies. The empirical evidence that has been collected discovered "that the network of interests and relations being created provided an essential substrate … for the formation of resources, experience, members, of absolute relevance for the entire working class movement."

This social capital was produced and accumulated by the democratic practice of members, imposed by statues and state inspection which demanded constant control and symbolically materialized in the buildings which housed these associations and in the vaults which sustained them. Luigi Tomassini argues that the leggero character of southern associations, in comparison, for example, with the 'heavy' British organizations, favored greater participation and consequently social cohesion. This light structure rather than determining a tight ambit of action was compatible with the assumption of multiple functions - teaching, culture, recreation, etc. - which allowed diffuse and informal socialization. At a later period the development of these societies and the acquisition of their own buildings allowed them a fundamental space for aggregation. The socializing functions of these associations - large collective meetings in assemblies and other recreational activities and permanent contact of members - gave them an important role of social integration (Tomassini, 1999, p.8-9).

However, while the leading role of the middle classes is clear in British associationalism, the same cannot be said in relation to southern contexts. In this context the complex mechanisms of associative dynamics allowed the glimpse of an attempt at inter-class adaptation, but still show the cementing of class, or class fraction, solidarity. It is empirically proven that in various Spanish socio-spatial contexts, specifically in Catalonia, popular associationalism had a leading role as a platform for the development of more markedly classist and politicized formulas, in the same way that the latter coexisted and were intimately related with other politically neutral groupings (Uria, 1998, p.347).

Manuel Morales Munõz's recent study of Andalusian communities equally illustrates the historic role of popular associationalism in relation to the integration of recent arrivals, the overcoming of material needs, the organization of leisure, and also resistance, specifically during outbreaks of strikes.³⁶

The case study of the Setúbal Peninsula

As has already been mentioned, the empirical basis for this study was the marriage registers for parishes on the Outra Banda of Lisbon - one per parish in the concelhos of Barreiro, Seixal and Almada. Two temporal periods were analyzed, 1890-1892 and 1908-1910, in order to discover if, in addition to spatial differentiation, there was a temporal evolution.

Around eight individuals were involved in the matrimonial act, in addition to the bridal couple and their parents, there were at least two witnesses. After discovering the profession, nationality and place of residence of each of these actors, the geographic and social mobility of individuals can be glimpsed, in addition to the connection of different typologies of social networks.

The patterns of mobility and relationships of these individuals, far from reflecting an instable and atomized world, prove the persistence of definitive cycles of migration and integration, organized in successive places coming from specific communities, and the re-composition of family and trade networks in accordance with the scale of the place.

Focusing on the geographic mobility of the actors, we can observe the systematic settlement of those from the provinces, with standardized origins - specific concelhos from the Beira, Alentejo and Algarve. It is rare to find any alteration of residence of individuals or their descendants after the migratory movement. In unions between people whose parents had outside origins, the latter lived in the same place where they baptized their children, who in turn lived in the same freguesia (district) where they were baptized.

In relation to social mobility, this was found to be limited. What was most observed were oscillations between the final levels in the scheme of classes proposed by the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (Hisco)³⁷ - unskilled rural workers, unskilled workers and skilled workers. Occasionally, fluctuations were found among skilled workers and low level state employees and small business owners - involving above all employees from the Sul and Sueste railways, a strata of workers with high status thanks to stability and career progression.

Regarding the articulation of relationship networks of these social strata, as well as between the latter and family and community networks, a temporal evolution was observed which was related most especially to the mitigation of the segregation of locally born from new arrivals, on the one hand, and between skilled and unskilled workers on the other. In fact between 1890 and 1910 a generalized pattern can be found: the weight of marriages involving only locals or new arrivals fell progressively against those which united local and outside families, who in 1910 became the majority in most parishes. The same was found in relation to matrimonial acts which connected families linked to skilled workers and unskilled workers, the weight of which grew over these two decades.

The worlds of skilled and unskilled workers, of locals and migrants were intersected to the extent that family networks and networks of place of origin were diluted in trade networks and vice-versa - a skilled worker tended to marry his daughter to a worker with the same or better position in the productive process, even if this person was not from his area - in this case the trade network prevailed. However, during the cycles of migration, we can see that it was common from skilled workers coming from the provinces to marry their daughters to unskilled workers from their community of origin - the reason for this choice was related to the weight which family and community networks assumed in the migration project.³⁸

In short, the analysis of the evolution of relationship networks established and developed on the southern bank of the Tejo estuary shows the intersection of different strata of the working classes, with distinct origin and socio-spatial trajectories.

The intersection of relationship networks at the heart of these populations in construction and these spaces of production similarly occurs in the foundations of the development of an extensive associative universe with a popular heterogeneous working class base. One of the most significant evolutions in associationism germinated under the legacy of the old trades guilds - mutual aid societies, class associations - the ever more frequent option for the territorial base. This transition allowing the inclusion of large strata of the working classes - unskilled workers - in the organized working class movement.³⁹

However, in the same period of the opening of professional associations to local communities, there was a growing involvement of community based associations in class based collective action. Even when its origin was the philanthropy of the upper and middle classes, which commonly happened with collectivities related to culture, recreation and sports, these did not stop organizing and participating in numerous initiatives which revealed an increasing disposition to class based collective action - a considerable number of shows were held to benefit unemployed workers, those unable to work, and widows and orphans of workers; during cycles of social agitation many of these groups participated in the parades on Mayday and in working class demonstrations, as well as morally and materially supporting strikes.⁴⁰

It should be noted that this region had been since the final decade of the nineteenth century and during the first decades of the twentieth, the site of numerous local strikes, mobilizing various groups of professionals, with a corporate or professional nature, stretching through the different communities in the region. In the 1910s, the Working Class Trade Unions (Uniões de Sindicatos Operários - USOs) founded in Almada, Seixal, Barreiro and Setúbal, were responsible for organizing several local general strikes, which fully paralyzed these industrial complexes demanding pay increases and reduction in working hours and against the cost of living, amongst other general demands. The articulated and massive nature of this movement surprised Portuguese society.⁴¹

Final Considerations

The case study of the southern bank of the Tejo, looked at from a comparative perspective, emphasizes human agency, specifically that of the lower classes in the social production of space and the social construction of populations - showing the relevance of the concepts of strategies and resources.

By analyzing these long term process it is possible to comprehend the heterogeneity of the origin and the socio-spatial trajectories of their protagonists - particularly the stratification found among skilled and unskilled workers and between stable and migrant families ­-, as well as the diversity of their strategies and resources: the former drawing on the social capital accumulated by secular organizational structures based on trade, the latter making their knowledge networks available which were based on family and communities of origin.

Furthermore, by applying network theory to the analysis of wedding registers and to lists of members of local associations, it was possible to prove that these individuals had intimate and daily contacts. More than the demographic formation of the working class, difficult to prove due to the late and incipient southern industrialization, on the Outra Banda of Lisbon the existence of dense and extensive ties were found which strengthened the formation of communal and solidarity based identities during cycles of migration and the integration of these spaces, which added to the formalization of these relations in the form of an equally dense and extensive associative fabric.

Furthermore, as Michael Savage argues, socially produced space and populations had a conditioning role in this process. It was found that the different places in this spatial selection were not only passive scenarios in the social process, but were actively involved in the construction of these ties, since they became habitats of specific social groups, social and spatially segregated, which strengthened the density of local contacts. In addition, the establishment of similar social groups along the southern riverside, through the regional diffusion of a limited set of economic activities in which the cork industry had a remarkable weight, allowed the expansion of working class ties over broader spatial areas than just communities of place. This expansion also benefitted from the participation of the employees from the Sul and Sueste railways in the community networks, particularly in Barreiro, where the general workshops were located.⁴²

The observation of the slow production of industrial and working class socio-spaces on the southern bank of the Tejo Estuary was fundamental in understanding the construction of the organizational resources used during the mobilization process of the working classes which marked the 1910s.

This interpretative scenario has been of extreme use in analyzing the structural transformation on which the dynamics of contestation of the working class on the Outra Banda of Lisbon were based. Although this article did not focus on collective action, it was the research approach developed by Doug MacAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly⁴³ which deepened the investigation referring to the long-term process which preceded the large cycles of social agitation of 1910-1913 and 1917-1920, specifically to identify the origin of the resources used by revolutionary trade unionists to mobilize the working classes.

It was the formal and informal social networks cemented between the working classes of these communities from the final decade of the nineteenth century, resulting from diversified strategies to deal with the transformations that occurred in markets and in the organization of labor, which allowed the diffusion and massification of outbreaks of strikes, which shook the First Portuguese Republic.

NOTES

Article received on 15 August 2012. Approved on 26 October 2012.

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• ⁶ GREEN, Laurie B. Battling the plantation mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle [Guerreando contra a mentalidade de Plantation: Memphis e a luta pela liberdade negra]. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2007;
• BOEHM, Lisa Krissoff. Making a Way Out of No Way: African American Women and the Second Great Migration [Criando um caminho para sair de lugar nenhum: as mulheres afro-americanas e a segunda grande migração]. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009;
• LEVENSTEIN, Lisa. A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Post-war Philadelphia [Um movimento sem marchas: as mulheres afro-americanas e as políticas de pobreza no pós-guerra em Filadélfia]. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2009;
• BORIS, Eileen; KLEIN, Jennifer. Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State [Cuidando da América: trabalhadores domiciliares de saúde nas sombras do Estado de Bem-Estar]. New York: Oxford, 2011.
• ⁸ HAVERTY-STACKE, Donna; WALKOWITZ, Daniel J., na Introdução de Rethinking U.S. Labor History: Essays on the Working-Class Experience, 1756-2009 [Repensando a história do trabalho norte-americana: ensaios sobre a experiência da classe trabalhadora, 1756-2009]. Continuum Companion to United States Labor History, 2011.
• ¹⁰ As exceções aqui incluem KORSTAD, Robert Rodgers. Civil rights unionism: tobacco workers and the struggle for democracy in the mid-twentieth-century South [Sindicalismo de direitos civis: os trabalhadores do tabaco e a luta por democracia no Sul de meados do século XX], 2003;
• PAWEL, Miriam. The union of their dreams: power, hope, and struggle in Cesar Chavez's farm worker movement [O sindicato dos seus sonhos: Poder, esperança e luta no movimento dos trabalhadores rurais de Cesar Chavez], 2009;
• e FINK, Leon; GREENBERG, Brian. Upheaval in the quiet zone: 1199SEIU and the politics of health care unionism [Levante na zona quieta: A sessão 1199 do Sindicato Internacional dos Empregados em Serviços e as políticas do sindicalismo dos trabalhadores da saúde], 2009.

1

CRONIN, James. Labor Insurgency and Class formation: comparative perspectives on the crisis of 1917-1920 in Europe. In:

Work, community and power. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983. p.36.

2

MAGRI, Susanna; TOPALOV, Christian (Org.).

Villes Ouvrières: 1900-1950. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1989.

3

Socially produced spaces, socially constructed populations, familial strategies and organizational resources are concepts analytically borrowed from sociology and human geography which have been widely used in European historiography, both to reconstruct processes of industrialization and urbanization and to analyze the collective action of working classes. See, for example: DUBY, Georges (Dir.).

Histoire de la France Urbaine. v.IV. Paris: Seuil, 1983; SAVAGE, Michael. Space, networks and class formation. In:

Social Class and Marxism. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996. p.58-86.

4

Ira Katznelson divides the process of the formation of the working class into four levels: "the structuration of class relations at a macro-economic level; the experience of class experienced in places of work and communities of residence; groups of persons willing to act in terms of class; class based collective action." KATZNELSON, Ira. Constructing cases and comparisons. In:

Working class formation. Princeton: University Press, 1986. p.21.

5

HANAGAN, Michael; STEPHENSON, Charles.

Confrontation, class consciousness and the labor process: studies in proletarian formation. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986. p.1-2.

6

According to Charles Tilly, between 1500 and 1900 the number of proletarians in European cities grew from one million to 75 million, while those in the countryside rose from 16 to 125 million. TILLY, Charles. Demographic origin of the European proletariat. In:

Proletarianization and family history. New York: Academic Press, 1984. p.36.

7

CIUFFETTI, Augusto.

La Città Industriale: un percorso storiografico. Perugia: Crace, 2002. p.70.

8

MIKKELSEN, Flemming.

Working-class formation in Europe: in search of a synthesis. International Institute of Social History: Digital Publications, 1996. p.10-11.

9

MARTINS, Conceição Andrade. Trabalho e condições de vida em Portugal (1850-1913).

Análise Social, Lisboa: ICS, v.xxxii, n.142, p.497-498, 1997.

10

RONCAYOLO, Marcel. Une croissance non maîtrisée. In:

Histoire de la France Urbaine. v.IV. Paris: Seuil, 1983. p.119ss.

11

It is worth noting that classical sociological studies interpreted the transformations in the lives of the individuals and groups involved, whether in the conversion of the economy or in the migratory cycles of countryside to city, as a radical rupture in social organization and specifically in its fundamental element - the family. Migration would lead to isolation in the face of the widened network of relatives and neighbors.

12

BREULLY, John Breully.

Labour and liberalism in nineteenth-century Europe: essays in comparative history. Manchester: University Press, 1992. p.84-85.

13

LEQUIN, Yves.

Les ouvriers de la region Lyonnaise (1848-1914). Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1977. p.43-45.

14

CURLI, Barbara. Gli operai della Pirelli Bicocca, 1908-1919.

Annali dela Fondazione Feltrinelli, v.XXXIII, p.434, 1999.

15

PEREIRA, Miriam Halpern.

Diversidade e assimetrias: Portugal nos séculos XIX e XX. Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2001. p.62.

16

ALVES, Jorge Fernandes. A Indústria Têxtil do Vale do Ave. In:

Património e Indústria no Vale do Ave. Vila Nova de Famalicão: Adrave, 2002. p.372-382.

17

BARATA, Ana Reis; GAUTIER, Rosa.

O Barreiro na transição do século XIX para o século XX. Barreiro: Câmara Municipal, 2005. p.50-58.

18

Câmara Municipal de Almada - Estudo dos núcleos históricos de Almada. Mimeogr., 1983.

19

Calculations made based on the 1930 General Census of the Portuguese Population, p.44-58.

20

PINHEIRO, Magda. Transportes e urbanização na margem Sul do Estuário do Tejo: o concelho de Almada.

Ler História, v.43, p.157ss, 2002.

21

PAIS, Armando da Silva.

O Barreiro Contemporâneo. Barreiro: Câmara Municipal, 1968. p.306.

22

GRÖER, Etienne. Plano Geral de Urbanização e Expansão de Lisboa, 1948. Published in

Anais de Almada, v.7-8, p.215, 2006.

23

First survey of the region at the 1:2000 scale, 1942. Arquivo Histórico do Ministério das Obras Públicas.

24

GRIBAUDI, Maurizio.

Itinéraires ouvriers: espaces et groupes sociaux à Turin au début du XX siècle. Paris: EHESS, 1987. p.234-235.

25

BREULLY, John. Artisan economy, ideology and politics. In:

Labour and liberalism in nineteenth-century Europe: essays in comparative history. Manchester: University Press, 1992. p.84-85.

26

ROTBERG, Robert I.

Patterns of social capital: stability and change in historical perspective. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press, 2000. p.5ss.

27

VIDAL, Frédéric. As relações de compadrio na cidade: tradição ou rede?

Ler História, v.46, p.223-238, 2004.

28

GARCÍA, Agustín Galán. Estratégia familiar y mercado de trabalho en Rio Tinto, 1873-1936. In:

El Trabajo a traves de la historia. UGT: Centros de Estudios Históricos, Asociación de Historia Social, 1996. p.420.

29

LEQUIM, Yves. Le monde des travailleurs manuels. In:

Histoire de la France Urbaine. v.IV. Paris: Seuil, 1983.

30

VIDAL, Frédéric.

Les habitants d'Alcântara au début du XX siècle: identités, proximités et distances sociales dans un quartier industrialisé de Lisbonne. Doctoral Dissertation (History) - Université Lumière Lyon. Lyon, 2003. p.35 e 350.

31

MAIULLARI, Maria Teresa. L'evoluzione dei portefaix a tolone. In:

Storiografia francese ed italiana a confronto sul fenómeno associativo durante XVIII e XIX secolo. Torino: Fondazione L. Einaudi, 1990. p.257.

32

VIEGAS, José Manuel Leite. Associativismo e dinâmica cultural.

Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas, v.1, p.103-121, 1986.

33

TOMASSINI, Luigi. L'associazionismo operaio: il mutualismo nell'Italia liberale.

Annali dela Fondazione Feltrinelli, v.XXXIII, p.17, 1999.

34

URIA, Jorge. En torno a las comunicaciones presentadas: Asociacionismo. In:

Estado, protesta y movimentos sociales: actas del III Congreso de Historia Social de España: Vitoria-Gasteiz, jul. 1997. Universidade del Pais Vasco, 1998, p.344.

35

Espaces françaises.

Le Mouvement Social, n.157, p.106ss, 1991.

36

LARRUBUA, Teresa Mirri.

El proceso de formación del proletariado en un barrio industrial: el caso de San Marti de Provençals. Integración e diferenciación social. 1862-1925. Doctoral Dissertation - Universidad de Barcelona, 1994; MUNÕZ, Manuel Morales. Un espacio próprio, sociabilidad e identidad obrera en Andalucía.

História Social, n.56, 2006.

37

See Historyofwork.iisg.nl/.

38

Research carried out in all parishes whose records stated the profession of the bridal couple and their parents (the profession of women is never referred to, it is always

domestic worker), between 1890 and 1910.

39

In the scope of research project more than four hundred groupings were inventories, including mutual aid societies, cooperatives, class associations, cultural, recreational and sporting collectivities and voluntary firemen groups. The analysis of the lists of members kept in the Historical Archive of Public Works (

Arquivo Histórico das Obras Públicas), in municipal archives, and in the private collections of the associations that still exist reveal the participation of different social strata, with the majority being paid labor.

40

Exhaustive research of the associational initiatives in the region in the regional press between 1890 and 1930.

41

Exhaustive research in working class and trade union press -

O Sindicalista, published in Lisbon between 1910 and 1916, owned by the Executive Commission of the Trade Union Congress (

Comissão Executiva do Congresso Sindicalista), and

A Batalha, central organ of the General Confederation of Labor (

Confederação Geral do Trabalho), published in Lisbon between 1919 and 1927 - but also in the regional press along the southern bank of the Tejo, between 1890 and 1930, with a total of 272 titles.

42

SAVAGE, Michael. Space, networks and class formation. In:

Social Class and Marxism. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996. p.58-86.

43

McADAM, Doug; TARROW, Sidney; TILLY, Charles.

Dynamics of contention. Cambridge: University Press, 2001.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  16 Jan 2013
• Date of issue
  Dec 2012

History

• Received
  03 Sept 2012
• Accepted
  17 Sept 2012