Preliminary Programme

The paper is about implications of decline 1980s – 1990s in a small Swedish community located in the rural industrial heartland Bergslagen, for the most part of the 20th century considered as a relatively prosperous and economically important region. Nevertheless, when the Steel crisis in the 1970s hit Sweden harder than most countries, consequently a decline began in the region, which fundamentally affected this mono-industrial community. Initially the crisis perceived as temporary and the companies avoided redundancies. However, by the early 1990s, over a thousand industrial workers in the community had lost their jobs due to the long-time effects of deindustrialization. Local political leaders then focused on different types of cultural and aesthetic initiatives with intentions to change public memory regarding industrial culture and working class mentality. Traditional values and mentalities as well as proven experiences and past patterns of action suddenly appeared obsolete in the local public sphere dominated by a postindustrial narrative. The aim of the paper is to contribute perspectives on localised processes of deindustrialization and postindustrialization and by extension indicate how to understand mechanisms and consequences of altered working-class heritage and culture. (Show less)

This paper will discuss the worldwide known pattern of child labour at the brickmaking sector. I will especially concentrate on the case of Athens, Greece, where a notable conglomeration of more than 150 artisanal brickworks was developed between 1900 and 1940. There, children had an important role into the process of making handmade bricks and tiles.
I will focus on two particular issues:
a. Firstly, I will bring light at the role of boys (from the age of ten), as members of the team engaged especially with the formation of bricks and tiles, known all over the world as “the gang” or “the table”. It is an apparent case of labour division (where children had a specific role), rather than a subject of substitute of adult labour. Additionally, I will comment, shortly, on matters like: a. other duties of children into the brickyards, b. correlation of child labour with the institution of familial brickworks, and c. the circumstances under which the end of the boys’ involvement took place.
b. Then I will proceed to the study of the female child labour. I will support that girls in the brickyards in Athens, in contrast with what is widely known, had been given the same arduous tasks, as boys, but only until 1925. The end of female child labour, earlier than that of male children, is related with certain phenomena as the growing of the units, as well as urbanization and up wording mobility. It seems that the more far the brickyards were established from the city (in rural areas), the more the labour of girls lasted. On the other hand, the growing of the units and the enrichment of brickmakers caused the withdrawal of girls from the brickyards.

The sources I am using are:
a. Interviews (more than 60) with old brickmakers or their descendants from the area of Athens
b. Dated photos from personal archives (as well as publications) which depict the male and female child labour at brickyards in, around and far away from Athens
c. Documents from open archives (not many, as the matter of child labour is most underdocumented by state authorities)
d. Bibliography (Show less)

Although handmade lace was a luxury product, the women who made it were among the poorest workers in the nineteenth century. Their dire condition was a matter of public comment and occasional public action across the century. Interventionism was justified at the time because lacemakers were unable to combat their poverty themselves: they were too dispersed to form trade unions; because they had spent their youth in lace-schools they were too ill-educated to agitate; they were too dependent on merchants and go-betweens not just for orders but for raw materials and patterns. They did not strike, they did not riot. However, lacemakers were aware of their own poverty. As nineteenth-century lacemakers were mostly illiterate they wrote no memoirs or other testimonies, but their voices were recorded in another kind of source: their songs. Lacemakers were taught to sing while they worked in the lace schools and many continued the practice into adult life. These were noted down, from the mid nineteenth century, by folk song collectors. For Flanders, France and England alone we have hundreds of song texts from dozens of named lacemakers. To an extent lacemakers across all three countries had a common repertoire if not of songs then of themes. Some lacemakers' songs commented directly on lace production and the circumstances of their lives; even those that do not often reflect on their misery and vulnerability, and the inequalities, of age and gender as much as wealth, that so shaped their lives. Singing together, and the bonds of community that were nursed through this practice, was itself a response to poverty. Lace songs sometimes articulate anger and resistance; however, they are more likely to depict a society in which poverty is comprehensible, and even morally valuable. Poverty can be a position from which to make an appeal to those that can assist; it could be a religious choice, a situation that leads to salvation. But perhaps most striking is the tragic vision proposed in these songs in which the poor were destined to be the lead protagonists in the drama of inequality and injustice. Tragic heroism might offer an emotional outlet from the experience of poverty. (Show less)