Worker’s Housing and Class Struggle in the Northern Forest
Author(s): LouAnn Wurst
Year: 2017
Summary
Worker’s housing is the material embodiment of the contradictions and class struggle between capital and labor. These contradictions stem from capital’s goal of securing cheap and reliable labor while workers strive for higher wages and gaining a measure of control and autonomy over their own lives. Archaeologists tend to overly simplify these complex social relations by uncritically adopting common ideological descriptions such as paternalism or overusing dualisms like dominance and resistance. In this paper, I use archaeological data from the cordwood lumber camps in the Coalwood District of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula operated by Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company in the first decade of the 20th century to explore the complexity of worker housing and the capitalist class struggle.
Cite this Record
Worker’s Housing and Class Struggle in the Northern Forest. LouAnn Wurst. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Fort Worth, TX. 2017 ( tDAR id: 435161)
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Keywords
General
capital
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Labor
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Lumber
Geographic Keywords
North America
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United States of America
Temporal Keywords
Early 20th Century
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 183