Dados is one of the most widely-read social sciences journals in Latin America. Created in 1966, it publishes innovative works, originating from academic research, by Brazilian and foreign authors. Edited by IESP-UERJ, it aims to reconcile scientific rigor and academic excellence with an emphasis on public debate based on the analysis of substantive issues of society and politics.
Dados vol. 33 n. 3 Rio de Janeiro 1990
Abstract
The modem notion of unemployment took form shortly after the Great Depression of 1880-1890. It was the correlate of a new wage relation, one which would progressively impose its presence as mechanization and the factory system evolved (and whose structural crisis is currently being witnessed in the West). The question was thus to define unemployment in order to redefine work. This article presents the first results of a research project concerning three large industrial nations (Great Britain, the US, and France) at the tum of the century. Unemployment was not the object of a discovery, as most works on the origins of social politics would have it, but rather an invention. That which Alfred Marshall called systematic unemployment and Beveridge, underemployment, is not an economist's pure .concept but designates instead a social category that must simply be eliminated: workers holding irregular jobs have to either be transformed into regular wage-earners or simply join the ranks of the unemployed. At a moment when a classificatory fever had taken hold in the ruling classes, the new concept ended up serving as one of the essential principles behind the divisions of the vast population of poor people in industrial cities. It is an intellectual category, destined to foster knowledge, investigations, and statistical computations, while it is at the same time a practical category, used to inform philanthropic and administrative action. Involuntary unemployment - our modem unemployment - was thus born of an effort to generalize the wage relation - which is our modem form of work.
A Invenção do Desemprego: Reforma Social e Moderna Relação Salarial na Grã-Bretanha, na França e nos Estados Unidos
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