Twenty-first century workers can be based just as easily in Grimsby as Guildford.
"In the 19th century, workers banded together to create burial societies that evolved into mutual aid societies," he said.
For a century, workers poured waste water containing heavy metals from cleaning solvents into the building's drainage system.
As Daniel H. Pink makes clear in "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us," 21st-century workers are motivated by three things: autonomy, mastery and purpose.
For much of the 20th century, workers from other parts of Mexico were attracted to the city by its relatively high wages and its proximity to the U.S. border.
It may date back to ancient Greece and was also known in the Far East, where eighth-century workers gilding the giant statue of the Buddha of Nara in Japan were poisoned by mercury fumes.
Ever since the Luddites started smashing textile machines in the 19th century, workers have, as a whole, done rather well adapting to new technologies, retooling to find new jobs in other industries.
He co-authored Captain Swing (1969) on the English agrarian uprising of 1830 and reopened the "standard of living debate" by challenging labour historians who claimed industrialisation was benign for 19th-century workers.
If Crawford is correct about the decline of America's information economy, we should brace ourselves for a series of mournful, indignant books that eulogize the modern office — a highly networked, quasi-social, semi-autonomous refuge, where turn-of-the-century workers spent their pleasant days solving problems, exploring the limits of coöperation, and wasting valuable company time on the Internet.
Nothing was automatic about the rise of the working class, he argued: 19th-century workers had courageously forged their own collective identity through a difficult and precarious process in which the initiative, moral conviction, and imaginative efforts of individual activists had made a crucial difference.
