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Frederich Engels (18201895) was a German businessman and political theorist renowned as one of the intellectual founders of communism. In 1842 Engels was sent to Manchester to oversee his father's textile business, and he lived in the city until 1844. This volume, first published in German in 1845, contains his classic and highly influential account of working-class life in Manchester at the height of its industrial supremacy. Engels' highly detailed descriptions of urban conditions and contrasts between the different classes in Manchester were informed from both his own observations and his contacts with local labour activists and Chartists. Extensively researched and written with sympathy for the working class, this volume is one Engels' best known works and remains a vivid portrait of contemporary urban England. This volume is reissued from the English edition of 1892, which was translated by noted social activist Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky (18591932)

Edited excerpt of the AFL-CIO's petition filed on Mar. 16, 2004 with the US government asking that the US trade representative take action to promote the human rights of China's factory workers. Also available on the Internet.

Following a description of miserable working conditions for Chinese factory workers & the implications of this unremitting repression of labor rights for global industry, the unprecedented, artificial, & steep reduction of the People's Republic of China's labor costs below the baseline of comparative advantage as defined by standard trade theory is challenged. The economic development model embodied in section 301(d) of the Trade Act of 1974 is discussed in terms of the protection of workers' rights before arguing that China's state-engineered subcaste of factory workers flies in the face of any free labor market & classical trade theory. It is asserted that factory workers' supply curve is artificially shifted downward, ie, they provide labor for lower wages, by virtue of four sets of government policies. This subcaste of rural migrant factory workers holds rural hukou, a system that involves these workers in bonded labor that results in lower wages & excessively long hours. This discussion occurs in the context of the AFL-CIO's petition with the US government requesting that the US trade representative to take action to protect workers' rights. The US president & the USTR are urged to enforce section 301(d) to protect workers around the world; complying with the covenants of the International Labor Organization should be a precondition for WTO membership. J. Zendejas

Following a description of miserable working conditions for Chinese factory workers & the implications of this unremitting repression of labor rights for global industry, the unprecedented, artificial, & steep reduction of the People's Republic of China's labor costs below the baseline of comparative advantage as defined by standard trade theory is challenged. The economic development model embodied in section 301(d) of the Trade Act of 1974 is discussed in terms of the protection of workers' rights before arguing that China's state-engineered subcaste of factory workers flies in the face of any free labor market & classical trade theory. It is asserted that factory workers' supply curve is artificially shifted downward, ie, they provide labor for lower wages, by virtue of four sets of government policies. This subcaste of rural migrant factory workers holds rural hukou, a system that involves these workers in bonded labor that results in lower wages & excessively long hours. This discussion occurs in the context of the AFL-CIO's petition with the US government requesting that the US trade representative to take action to protect workers' rights. The US president & the USTR are urged to enforce section 301(d) to protect workers around the world; complying with the covenants of the International Labor Organization should be a precondition for WTO membership. J. Zendejas

By focusing on the rise of the bourgeoisie rather than the rise of the working class, David Burley offers a new perspective on industrial capitalism and class formation in Canada. Using Brantford, Ontario, as a case study, he provides a cultural analysis of the business community during the mid-nineteenth century and shows that, because self-employment was so pervasive, the impact of industrialization was particularly striking. Self-employed businessmen were forced to try to locate themselves in an emerging class system that often contradicted traditional Victorian social ideals of independence and manliness. Burley's exploration of the tensions behind these conflicting values - tensions both between myth and reality and within the bourgeois world view itself - is an important addition to the literature on business behaviour and Victorian cultural history.