Unemployment in 20th-Century Chile

FAIN: HB-251162-17

Angela Vergara-Marshall
California State Los Angeles University Auxiliary Services, Inc. (Los Angeles, CA 90032-4226)

Completion of a book on the history of unemployment in Chile from the Great Depression through the 1980s.

In this project, I examine how social, racial, and gender categories shaped public efforts to regulate the labor market and selectively protect workers facing unemployment in Chile throughout the twentieth century. I argue that traditional efforts to distinguish between vagrants and the “real” unemployed, social fears toward the non-working poor, legal definitions of formal work and people’s own expectations about work influenced the experience, protections, and rights of unemployed and non-formally employed men and women in modern Chile. More generally, I contribute to the humanities by looking at unemployment beyond exclusively class and economic analyses and outside traditional industrial countries. Using the tools of social history and based on a wide range of archival and periodical sources, I narrate the story of the unemployed and the efforts of the State to define and control the labor market in Chile from the 1930s-Great Depression to the Debt/Oil crisis of the early 1980s.

Associated Products

Fighting Unemployment in Twentieth-Century Chile (Book)
Title: Fighting Unemployment in Twentieth-Century Chile
Author: Angela Vergara
Abstract: In Fighting Unemployment in Twentieth-Century Chile, Ángela Vergara narrates the story of how industrial and mine workers, peasants and day laborers, as well as blue-collar and white-collar employees earned a living through periods of economic, political, and social instability in twentieth-century Chile. The Great Depression transformed how Chileans viewed work and welfare rights and how they related to public institutions. Influenced by global and regional debates, the state put modern agencies in place to count and assist the poor and expand their social and economic rights. Weaving together bottom-up and transnational approaches, Vergara underscores the limits of these policies and demonstrates how the benefits and protections of wage labor became central to people’s lives and culture, and how global economic recessions, political oppression, and abusive employers threatened their working-class culture. Fighting Unemployment in Twentieth-Century Chile contributes to understanding the profound inequality that permeates Chilean history through a detailed analysis of the relationship between welfare professionals and the unemployed, the interpretation of labor laws, and employers’ everyday attitudes.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/fighting-unemployment-in-twentieth-century-chile/oclc/1247726448&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: worldcat
Secondary URL: https://upittpress.org/books/9780822946793/
Secondary URL Description: Press catalog
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780822946793
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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