Aging in the Working Class: An Exploratory Essay

Abstract

Older workers have received little attention from labor historians, their late lamented but only in passing. The contrast with at least partial knowledge of definable internal groups such as children, women, various skill levels and the like is striking. When mentioned, one o\' two comments is typically made. The bluntest simply says that workers were dead or incapacitated by 45: this at once captures the horror of industrial capitalism and excuses any further study of the subject. The fact that it is entirely wrong, as the briefest glance at a census would indicate, is ignored. Approach two, applied particularly in comments on the early industrial period, berates employers for firing their older employees without support. The extent to which they actually did so has not, to my knowledge, been calculated, and again what happened to those dismissed is left to the imagination. We need to do better than this, for several reasons. By the second half of the nineteenth century, males over sixty-five formed up to 8% of all male manufacturing workers (specifically this was the case in France in 1906); over 60% of all male workers stayed on the job after 65. Even, then, to study the active work force involves attention to the older segment, and when one adds the minority retired or disabled the numbers become more significant still. But in urging study more is involved than a "let's fill a gap in social history" plea. Once we know the existence of a definable group of older workers we can begin to see certain potential pressures on the labor movement; how were the characteristics of old age, the tendency toward growing conservatism and distrust of youth, to be handled by movements that overtly stressed dynamism and waves of the future? In the French case, at least, and I believe quite generally, the labor movement was not up to the challenge. Still more important, a culture toward aging a particular set of fixed attitudes persists within the working class and while quite understandable, it is not healthy. It continues to be reflected in formal policies of the labor movement give them a pension and forget about them and it dominates the self-image of workers themselves. The historian can trace the origins of the culture and the causes of its durability; but he can step beyond his usual role and do more, evaluating the culture and indicating what might be done about it. In tracing the origins of retirement, for example, the historian adds to the impression that retirement must become more individual and flexible in its imposition. Precisely because aging has a discrete history and at the same time constitutes an agonizing contemporary problem, the historian can apply understanding of the phenomenon to social policy formulation. What follows, based on French working-class history, sketches some conclusions for France and suggests topics and research approaches applicable more generally. I view France as a case study, with some distinctive features due to the particular ideology of some labor leaders, but overall representative of a broader process; its typicality, obviously, can be tested only through comparative work. One can logically begin at the beginning, with the early industrial revolution. Precise data are hard to come by, as statistics with any age specificity await the second half of the century and the