The Working Class and the Labour Market

Abstract

The labour market is a central area of capitalist society. It has also been of crucial importance in the development of theory in both sociology and economics. Yet, apart from economists’ studies of wage-rates, there has been a remarkable dearth of empirical research on the labour market. In this book we hope to go some way towards remedying this by presenting the findings of the most comprehensive empirical study of a labour market yet undertaken. In the period 1970–2 we conducted a cross-sectional study of a large and varied urban labour market — the town of Peterborough in the East Midlands of England. Concentrating on non-apprenticed male manual workers, we interviewed almost 1,000 workers, collected extensive background data on wages, conditions of employment, etc., and observed at length all of the individual jobs they were doing. It is our ability to relate together the “subjective” and the “objective” aspects of the labour market — the workers’ experience and the actual structure of the market — that has enabled us to make a substantial contribution to knowledge in this area. Our major findings are summarised at the beginning of Chapter 10. We recommend the reader who is anxious to know our result to turn there now.