Basic income experiments tend to show some decline in work hours, but less is known about how that nonwork time is spent. This article uses data from a randomized controlled trial of a guaranteed annual income to examine the activities of recipients who left the labor force for some amount of time. In particular, we analyze the reasons respondents gave for not working. We find that the intervention led to growth in care work activities and education, especially among women, moderate growth in self-employment, relatively strong growth in the portion of men and women simply reporting that they did not want to work, and the strongest growth in nonemployment connected to dissatisfaction with work/job conditions. Finally, the sole nonemployment category that declines as a result of the experiment is health-related reasons for not working.

Since 1950, the world’s urban labor force has expanded dramatically, a process that has been accompanied by a large increase in informal employment. Accounts of these phenomena generally assume that urban workers without formal work are mostly recent migrants from the countryside. This article shows that outside of China, most of the growth of the world’s urban workforce has been the consequence of demographic expansion rather than rural-to-urban migration. A large portion of the world’s growing urban-born workforce has ended up in informal employment. I develop a concept of demographic dispossession to explain the relatively autonomous role demographic growth has played, first, in the proletarianization of the global population and, second, in the informalization of the urban workforce. I then explore the reasons why demographic growth in low- and medium-income countries tended to be more rapid and urban than demographic growth had been historically in the high-income countries.

In recent decades, dramatic increases in Americans’ obesity rates have led some nutrition activists to call for a return to the dietary norms of earlier times when homemakers spent more time in meal preparation. Using archival data from unique survey records gathered in Upstate New York in 1936 and 1952, we provide descriptive information on the quality of the diets using measures of the variety of foods served and a modified version of U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Healthy Eating Index. Our multivariate analyses focus in on the relationships between diet quality and sociodemographics, homemakers’ time use, and household technology. We conclude that the typical Upstate New York diet of the 1930s was not of high quality, but improvements had occurred by the early 1950s. Our multivariate analyses reveal that access to modern kitchen technology had a strong, positive association with diet quality while homemakers’ time devoted to food-related activities was only weakly linked.

The Gilded Age was a tumultuous period for US labor and capital: the labor movement grew in size and intensity, strikes mushroomed, and women’s labor force and strike participation grew in tandem. Yet little is known about how women’s participation influenced strike efficacy. On the one hand, women may have added numerical force, militant energy for gendered solidarity and therefore contributed to strike success. On the other hand, women’s participation may have hindered the cause by delegitimizing it or by producing harmful internal factionalism. In this article, we ask: How did women’s participation in Gilded Age strikes influence strike success? We use a unique data source to test the impact of women’s participation relative to men on the success of every strike that took place in the Northeastern United States from 1881 to 1886. We find that striking gender composition ratios matter and are reflected in a nonlinear pattern: for male-dominated and female-dominated strikes, greater numbers of female strikers reduce the chances of success. However, when gender composition approaches approximate parity, the effect of female strikers enhances strike success. We suggest that in approximate proportional parity range, women were more likely to participate and also be taken more seriously by male co-workers. We supplement quantitative findings with qualitative accounts from specific strikes. Our findings have important implications for diversity in contentious collective action in general and strike success in particular.

By applying data from the 1930 Reichstag election we test whether the German National Socialist Worker’s Party (NSDAP) was a workers, bourgeois, or a catch-all party. We argue that the degree to which the different groups in society voted NSDAP is dependent on the proportion of Protestants and Catholics in their respective Kreis. We build on two important works on the Nazi electorate, Jürgen Falter’s Hitlers Wähler (1991) and King et al. (2008). We specifically make one important change to Falter and King et al.’s models whereby we include new social groups in our study of the interaction between religious affiliation and social groups as an explanation of the Nazi vote. Similar arguments have been made by other historians, yet this has not been tested on data for the whole of Germany until Falter’s work in 1991. We find significant explanatory power in the interaction between religion and social groups on the propensity to vote for the Nazi party.

This study focuses on Jewish refugee children who fled the Third Reich after the Kristallnacht in November 1938 either using the so-called Kindertransport (Children’s Transport) or by crossing the border illegally. Many parents, desperate after the Kristallnacht, sent their children abroad alone. About 1,800 arrived in the Netherlands. While for some the Netherlands was an intermediate stop, many stayed. We use a mixed-method approach with the aim of providing a better understanding of the survival rates of refugee children using information from several sources. The qualitative research provides illustrative individual experiences of child refugees and facilitates the formulation of hypotheses of settlement trajectories on risks of deportation and being killed, which are then tested using a quantitative approach. Gathering information into a database allows us to estimate the risk associated the living situation and place in the Netherlands. Among 863 Kindertransport children staying in the Netherlands in July 1942, 74 percent were deported and of those deported 81 percent were killed. Differences in settlement trajectories resulted in different risks of deportation and death. Children living with family or relatives had a higher risk of being deported than those living with foster parents or in institutions. Children living with foster parents had a similar risk of deportation to those living in institutions. Changing household type did not alter risk of deportation, while moving places increased this risk. Children deported from foster parents’ households had an increased risk of death after deportation compared to those deported from institutions, indicating an enduring effect of household type.

This work examines the creation and development of the Monte Pío Militar, a permanent public pension system that was established for the widows and other relatives of deceased naval officers who had been in the Spanish Navy. This system was not a mutualist experiment, but rather constitutes an innovative example of an institutional protective organization that was based on objective principles and supported by an impersonal agent: the state. The article is divided into three parts. The first section studies the formal organization of the Monte Pío Militar between 1761, when the system was instituted, and 1900, when the welfare state truly began to take shape in Spain. The second part focuses on the rudimentary protection system that the navy had operated during the previous period (c. 1730–61) and the first steps of the Monte Pío Militar (1761–1800); this section is particularly interesting, for it examines how the previous system was superseded by new measures, criteria, and values. The third part examines both how the pension system was applied and its impact on the families that benefited from it during the nineteenth century. This will illustrate how the families soon internalized the idea that pensions were a reflection of the state’s duty to protect them, while the legal principles behind the system and the bureaucratic protocol built around it were progressively consolidated.