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A country like ours, with 1,500,000 unemployed, ceases to be a free country. If you are elected, unemployment will rise due to the measures you will take and which will weigh down upon businesses. Between 1981 and 1995, the Socialist President, François Mitterrand, and his various governments ruled except for two periods when the Right dominated the legislature, during 1986 to 1988 (when Jacques Chirac served as Prime Minister), and during 1993 to 1995 (when Edouard Balladur was Prime Minister). President Chirac took power in 1995, and ruled with Prime Minister Alain Juppé until 1997. The Left, led by Lionel Jospin, regained the prime minister's office during 1997. Since 2002, Prime Minister Raffarin has ruled with a large conservative legislative majority. Although the Socialists ruled France for fifteen years between 1981 and 2002, it would be too simple to lay the blame for France's economic problems solely on their doorstep. When Chirac was Prime Minister in 1986 to 1988, unemployment hovered at around 10%. Chirac's policies to remedy this situation were not substantially different than those of Prime Minister Fabius before him. Both leaders attempted to relieve some of the barriers to private sector expansion but they also raised taxes in order to pay (partially) for more social spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This story begins and ends at the gates to the working class. These “gates” have served as a metaphor for policy, or, more specifically, for the state's attempts to define and control the size, composition, and behavior of the working class. By dividing those who were permitted to enter from those who would remain outside, the state used the gates to construct the working class from above. The gates were not, however, maintained by the state alone. Put up in the 1920s to exclude women and peasants, the gates also privileged and revived an older “kadrovye” working class that had all but disappeared during the civil war. The gates were staunchly defended by the unions and contested by the Zhenotdel. In 1930, they were toppled by a vast and mobile crowd of peasants, women, and other unemployed people in search of work. As job opportunities opened up and managers everywhere faced severe labor shortages, new workers streamed into jobs and onto construction sites, forming a new working class that now encompassed formerly excluded elements. The Party struggled to keep pace with a labor-market expansion that its own industrial policies had created. Veterans of the Zhenotdel, organizers from KUTB, and female members of the planning brigades cheered as the gates fell and women edged forward toward the best of the once-protected working-class positions: production jobs in heavy industry. The unions, labor exchanges, and local labor organizations all lost their place as gatekeepers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have, even now, no methodology for accounting for women or calculating the demand for them. There is no system and no plan. Work proceeds samotek. In the Leningrad electrical factory, Elektroapparat, the “door to the production shop was closed to women.” They could always be found outdoors, however, hauling heavy loads in the freezing, dirty yard that surrounded the factory. Male workers joked that the yard was “the women's shop.” By the beginning of 1931, the state had developed extensive plans for involving women in the labor force. NKT (the Commissariat of Labor) and Gosplan had drafted a five-year plan for female labor, the Party had launched a campaign to employ 1.6 million women, the government had published long lists of jobs reserved primarily or exclusively for women, and women's brigades had visited factories throughout the country to determine which jobs women could fill. Yet all of these plans, lists, and recommendations still existed only on paper. For the central authorities and KUTB (the Committee to Improve the Labor and Life of Women), the key question in 1931 was how to move plans from paper to reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fulfillment of the plan in 1931 and the following years demands a series of maneuvers from the labor force: a group of men must leave work, and women must replace them. Men, after retraining in their positions, will be sent to jobs that would be harmful to the female organism. In the summer of 1930, as hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers, peasants, and women poured through the tumbled gates to the working class, planners quietly tucked away a set of elaborate blueprints for the deployment of women in the files of the Commissariat of Labor (NKT), the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), and the Council of People's Commissars (SNK). The plans, redrafted many times, had resulted in a final, detailed document entitled “The Five-Year Plan for Female Labor.” Never published or publicly discussed, this plan had emerged from countless meetings of NKT, Gosplan, the Committee to Improve the Labor and Life of Women (KUTB), and other commissariats and departments throughout the spring and summer of 1930. Planners based their plan for female labor on intensive research into Soviet industry in 1930. Surveying the advances of rationalization and mechanization in various industries, they set target figures and training quotas for women throughout the economy, specifying their numbers and placement in various sectors, industries, shops, and jobs. The plans, preserved in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), are fully revealed and analyzed for the first time in this chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We must broaden the circle of registration of the unemployed to include those who have not had the right to register with the organs of labor up to this time. We need to spend the minimum on housing to guarantee the maximum tempo of industrialization. This can be done only if we maximize the labor resources of the present urban population and those in the new towns. This means the maximum involvement of women. Throughout 1930 and 1931, labor officials struggled to apprehend and gain control of the vast changes taking place in the economy. Employees in the labor exchanges (birzhi truda) stood in the front line of the transformation, desperately trying to create order out of chaos. Caught between the insistent demands of managers for labor and the hordes of incoming workers on the one hand, and an increasingly obsolete labor policy on the other, they were largely ineffective in their efforts to direct and deploy the labor force. As labor shortages rapidly replaced unemployment, the state was forced to replace a policy based on exclusion with a scheme for recruitment. The Commissariat of Labor (NKT) was confronted with the new and difficult tasks of understanding, directing, and mastering the roiling waves of movement and migration stirred up by collectivization, the socialization of retail trade, and industrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millions of women – wives and family members of workers and employees, servants, women in handicrafts and artels, landless women, poor peasants, collective farmers, eastern tribal women – this entire mass, once occupied with exhausting and dulling household labor, is now joining the great socialist construction of the country. The composition of the new working class takes its shape in large measure from unused reserves in the working-class family. In the spring of 1929, the Party adopted the first five-year plan. The plan, taking up three volumes and more than two thousand pages, allocated 64.5 billion rubles to investment, 78 percent of which was targeted for heavy industry and 50 percent for new construction. Adoption of the plan, in the words of one economist, was “tantamount to turning the country into a vast construction site.” After a decade of unemployment and exclusion, the gates to the working class came tumbling down. Almost 2.3 million people entered the waged labor force in 1930, followed by 6.3 million more in 1931. Party leaders, labor officials, and planners critically noted at the time that this mass influx of new workers occurred “samotek,” or independent of any state plan or policy. The building of huge new industrial complexes and hydroelectric stations such as Magnitostroi, Kuznetsstroi, and Dneprostroi drew thousands of workers. Hungry town dwellers and dispossessed peasants massed at new construction sites and factory gates in search of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Zhenotdel has already ceased to be a progressive force and has become a hindrance. Throughout the 1920s, the Party's exclusionary labor policy was strongly contested by women. Many of their objections and complaints were articulated by the Zhenotdel (women's department), an organization created in 1919 by the Central Committee in response to strong pressure coming from both inside and outside the Party. The Zhenotdel struggled to broaden the definition of the working class by highlighting the problems faced by women, including unemployment, prostitution, low-waged work, and lack of skills. Although the Central Committee backed the Zhenotdel, the department's activists still came into sharp conflict with uneducated male rank-and-file Party members whose attitudes toward women did not differ substantially from those of their peasant fathers and grandfathers. From its very inception, the Zhenotdel was at loggerheads with the unions over how to organize women. Despite its difficulties, however, it represented a genuine “proletarian women's movement.” In the period before World War I, Europe's social democratic parties, including the Bolsheviks, embraced the notions of women's equality and emancipation more wholeheartedly than any other political parties. When the Bolsheviks came to power, they immediately passed progressive legislation concerning marriage, divorce, abortion, property, illegitimacy, and equality – legislative programs that many capitalist countries have yet to adopt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain's myriad of small towns remained at the heart of economic and social life into the early Victorian era, bridging the urban and rural worlds. Diaries like that of the Sussex shopkeeper Thomas Turner of East Hoathly reveal an almost constant interaction between villagers and small towns. Turner records how he went to the nearby town of Lewes to buy cottons and cheese, to attend property sales, pay debts, get a doctor, scotch rumours about the disharmony between him and his wife, to participate in church events, to ‘see the finest horse-race that ever I see run’ and as often as not to get drunk and come rolling home. While the traditional open market, the nucleus of most small towns since their inception, was often in decline after 1700, these communities consolidated their position in Georgian provincial society, growing in population and prosperity, as they acquired retail shops and specialist crafts, as well as new leisure activities. The transformation did not occur overnight. In the 1720s the antiquarian and polymath William Stukeley, fresh from London, was dismayed at the small town of Stamford in Lincolnshire, where there was ‘not one person … that had any taste or love of learning’ but within a few years things began to improve, as music making and club life blossomed, and he concluded eventually that this ‘is true life, not the stink and noise and nonsense of London’. By the 1760s Fanny Burney could talk of the ‘perpetual round of constrained civilities … unavoidable in a country town’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘A mercate town [Guildford] is well frequented and full of faire inns.’ (W. Camden, Britannia, 1607, 1977 edn, Surrey and Sussex) ‘[Canterbury is] a flourishing town, good trading in the Weaving of Silks … There is fine walks and seates [for] the Company; there is a large Market house and a town Hall over it … [and] the Cathedral.’ (C. Morris, ed., The Illustrated Journeys of Celia Fiennes c. 1682–1712, 1984) ‘In the reign of George II, Brighton began to rise into consideration as a bathing-place … and it ultimately obtained the very high rank which it now enjoys as a fashionable watering-place, and its grandeur and importance, under the auspices of George IV … Steam vessels sail from this place to Dieppe … The principal branch of trade is that of the fishery.’ (Lewis, Topographical Dictionary of England, 1840) ‘[Portsmouth is] a seaport, borough, market-town; [Portsea is] now the principal naval arsenal of Great Britain.’ Lewis, ibid.) ‘Lewisham is a most respectable village and parish … inhabited by a great number of opulent merchants and tradesmen who have selected this pleasant and healthful neighbourhood as a place of retirement from business.’ (Pigot and Co.&s National Commercial Directory, 1839, Kent, Surrey and Sussex) The special features of the towns of the Home Counties and adjoining shires which these quotations illustrate were the result of several factors. Unlike much of the Midlands communications were good except in the Weald. Essex, Kent, Sussex and Hampshire had a big coastal traffic which was more sheltered than that of North-East England. Inland counties were tied by the Thames and a growing number of navigable tributaries, and the Ouse linked Bedfordshire to the Wash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing home to the Doge and Senate, those crusty patricians ensconced in their colonnaded palace on St Mark's Square, Venetian ambassadors to the Tudor Court hymned the praises of London as one of the principal cities of Europe, but ignored or dismissed almost all the remaining English towns. Other sixteenth-century visitors from the great continental states were equally critical. Only travellers from the more remote central European countries found anything remarkable in English provincial towns. Scottish and Welsh towns barely figure in foreign reports: Edinburgh on one occasion was compared to a French country town. Yet by the late eighteenth century British towns – not just London but provincial towns – were the envy of the civilised world, admired in the many travellers' accounts which rehearsed details of their affluence, manufactures, vigorous club life, bustling, friendly shops, well-lit, orderly streets, and much else. Whereas at the start of our period only a minority of English people, maybe 15 per cent or so (and a much lower proportion in Scotland and Wales) resided in cities and towns, by the accession of Queen Victoria nearly half the British population was urban. Not only was there an increasingly integrated national system of towns, but British towns became notable as centres of economic and social innovation, of political discourse and cultural enlightenment, their advance having a growing impact on national society and beyond. Hitherto located on the European periphery in terms of urban development, analogous to regions like Scandinavia and central Europe with their low urban populations and localised towns, from the eighteenth century Britain emerged as the chief laboratory of a modernising world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long after all participants have passed on, the Victorian economy continues to exercise powerful influences, both open and concealed, over economic policy and attitudes, as well as through the legacy of economic structure. Perceptions of how the economy worked and how well, form the background to a number of present-day concerns. Economists allude to the Victorian economy as a period of competition in opposition to today's oligopolistic industry, social commentators contrast the provisions of the modern welfare state with the inequalities generated by Victorian laissez-faire, and Mrs Thatcher appeals to Victorian values to provide the social cement necessary to bind society together. The later Victorians were more prone to question their society than their mid-century forebears. British industry was more often described as uncompetitive (Williams 1896, Stead 1901) and social reformers (Mearns 1883, Booth 1902, Rowntree 1902) provided evidence for criticising the distribution of the gains from their expanding industrial society. Criticism has continued ever since. On the side of production, the Victorians have been blamed for dissipating the head start of the industrial revolution, and neglecting opportunities to lay the foundation for an advanced, technological, competitive British economy in the twentieth century. Inadequate attention to education and industry and too much concern with class, leisure and empire slowed economic progress, while the more vigorous Germany and the United States overtook Britain (Wiener 1981, Barnett 1986). Victorian and Edwardian economic structure was a poor inheritance for the later twentieth century (Crafts 1985). An increasing commitment to the world economy concentrated the British economy on the production of goods from a few sectors, the market and technological prospects for which were not bright. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]