Preliminary Programme

At the end of the Second World War, coal miners were considered heroes of work and were granted a number of social rights and benefits (the "Statute of the Miner” in 1946) to ensure the stability of their situation and the attractiveness of the profession. 15 years later, however, the situation of coal miners seemed to become very ambiguous: while some observers considered them still privileged, others insisted on their poverty and the gap between their way of life and that of other working classes, already more integrated into the affluent society. In these circumstances, we will try to explain these contradictory representations and the debates they generate. In this perspective, we will cross several types of sources and several types of approaches. We will thus seek to understand what makes the specificity of lifestyles and home economics in mining communities so far, and why they can convey sometimes very divergent images to outside observers. At the same time, it will be sought to understand why this issue of the precariousness and/or stability of coal miners' daily lives is likely to become a subject of national debate at certain times - particularly in the early 1960s. (Show less)

This paper will study how France developed a minimum wage policy after World War II, in order to conciliate international economic constraints (control of the currency) and internal political and social order. Economic and social policies were supposed to go hand in hand in an equation which directly connected moderate wage increase, and rise of productivity. We will examine how the Sate, the employers, the unions and various organizations from the civil society, bargained and fought against this arrangement, which also made sense in the Cold War context.
Through this issue, what will be at stake is the way how the management of minimal wage by the State dealt with the issue of “precariousness” in post-war France. This word, “precariousness”, is anachronistic for this period. It is deliberately used here as a heuristic tool, in order to put into light socio-economic dynamics which have tended to remain in the background in the historical literature.
“Precariousness” is definitely an expression which only emerged in the 1980s. Since that period, “job precariousness”, or the “precarization of societies”, are used to express the fact that job relationships have become or are becoming less stable. They capture the overall feeling that under the effect of globalization, Western societies are losing their ability to promise their citizens a more or less predictible job perspective over the life course – and, to start with, their ability to ensure full employment. Such expressions make a priori no sense for the previous period, the post-war “boom”, called in France the “Trente Glorieuses” (Thirty Glorious [Years]) that we will call here TGY. More than that, one can say that the “precarization of society” is a process whose consistency depends on the more or less implicit comparison with the TGY.
In the present communication, we would like to question this dual vision. Were the TGY exempt of any “job precariousness”? If not, which form dit it take? Was it linked to a fragile job status, as today, or dit it take a different content?
Another aspect of the question is the way how “precariousness” – if such a word made sense – was politically handled. Contemporary “job precariousness” is supposed to be associated with the deregulation of labor relationships in a globalizing economic market. What about the TGY, a period where State regulation was developing in many Western countries. From that standpoint, France, which under various forms implemented economic and social “planning” and nationalized key industries, is a particularly relevant case test, at the corner between socialist and liberal economies of the time. (Show less)

There has been argument about to what extent in income
inequality socially acceptable. Since, the standard approach to
measure income inequality haven't distinct fair and unfair.

Recent literature proposes an inequality measuring
structure that allows for alternative viewpoints of what is fair
income distribution. Such as Arneson(1989), Cohen(1989), Roemer(1993),
Fleurbaey(1994), they recognize that responsibility factor within the
control of individuals as “effort” and non-responsibility factor
beyond the control of individuals as “circumstance”. This theory is
called as “Responsibility-sensitive egalitarian theory.”
This research challenges to clarify the roots of
Japanese self-responsibility-mentality by economic history approach by
using “Responsibility-sensitive egalitarian theory.”
From economic historical view, Japanese are too unmerciful to the poor
who was considered to be poor because of his/her lazy.


By using Japanese governmental longitudinal survey "Public Opinion
Survey on the Life of the People", this research sheds the light on
historical transition of gap between actual inequality and perceived
scales, i.e. status identification.
In Japanese case actual inequality doesn’t correspond perceived
inequality. This study found there is probability it is due to how
people consider social success is determined by luck/effort. High economic growth has a power to conceal perceived inequality among society. Especially analyzing high growth period duration would be useful to
understand Japanese self-responsibility-mentality under this current tardy economic growth (Show less)

Mining labor, coalfield communities and the households that make up them have been subjected to a process of radical modernization and rationalization since the 1920s. However, in the aftermath of the 1945 defeat, mining communities are in need of complete reconstruction. The government technologies developed during the interwar period and the war are mobilized to measure and raise the standard of living of miners and their families. Budget surveys and research based on labor sciences are flourishing. However, at the same time, miners remain subject to extreme productivist logic, with coal production being the key to national reconstruction. In addition, Japanese coal, from the mid-1950s onwards, is increasingly competing with foreign coal and oil. Surveys of the unemployed and documents that the miners -interviewed through an oral history methodology- allowed us to consult, reveal daily wage systems that plunge miners and their families into chronic economic insecurity. (Show less)