8 - Survival Struggles and Everyday Resistance

Summary

This chapter deals with the struggles of urban laborers to reappropriate their overexploited labor in everyday life. The historical studies on working-class politics during the early republic focused on the organizational, ideological working-class movements, strikes and open protests, mostly by industrial workers. Therefore, what happened in everyday life and in other segments of the working class has been ignored. This chapter reveals the forms of laborers’ struggles to seek their rights, to minimize their losses and to maximize their gains. Their ways to struggle varied from petitioning, suing and changing jobs to violating workplace rules by slowing down on the job, working perfunctorily, reducing work productivity and engaging in workplace theft. This chapter shows how the artisans, as the most neglected group in the republican working-class history, instead of submitting to the industry and importation, struggled for survival. Moreover, it also shows how all of these small and daily behaviors led to bigger consequences, which alarmed both employers and the government, causing them to consider social measures to ensure a stable and productive working class.