Postwar social tension forced state officials to concede citizenship rights to workers

Evidence

The “strikomania” that spread across Italy and Great Britain in 1919 drove an unusually large number of workers to put down tools and to fight for fewer working hours and higher wages. As an official British communiqué explained, workers were “no longer prepared to acquiesce in a system in which their labour is bought and sold as a commodity in the labour market,” and demanded to be treated “not as ‘hands’ or part of the factory equipment” but “as human beings with a right to use their abilities by hand and brain in the service not of the few but of the whole community.” — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 185 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: 1940s drafters of the UDHR saw social rights as a working-class victory — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 149; Wartime union power positioned workers to demand social rights after armistice. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 217; Postwar workers rejected labor as a commodity and demanded democratic control of production — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 185 (+7 more)

Related

• Wartime union power positioned workers to demand social rights after armistice. (similarity 0.88)
• Postwar workers demanded meaning and agency in production. (similarity 0.87)
• Even state elites conceded workers full citizenship rights at peak social tension (similarity 0.87)
• Postwar workers explicitly rejected the treatment of labor as a commodity (similarity 0.82)
• Postwar workers rejected labor as a commodity and demanded democratic control of production (similarity 0.82)
• Postwar strikes were political demands for workers’ self-government, not mere wage disputes (similarity 0.81)
• Postwar British and Italian strikes demanded workers’ control of production. (similarity 0.80)
• Postwar Italian labor leaders recast the worker as indispensable and rights claims as settled (similarity 0.80)
• Postwar labor claims turned political out of hostility to capitalism itself (similarity 0.80)
• Postwar British and Italian strikes aimed to build democratic production relations (similarity 0.79)
• Postwar worker demands and state reformist concessions drove each other in an escalating spiral (similarity 0.79)
• Postwar labor unrest aimed at revolution, not just wages. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Postwar workers rejected labor as a commodity and demanded democratic control of production #expands (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 185
• State dependence on soldiers’ bodies secured social bargaining power #corroborates (0.80)
• Postwar strikes were political demands for workers’ self-government, not mere wage disputes #corroborates (0.78)
• Postwar workers demanded meaning and agency in production. #expands (0.75)
• War-induced labor scarcity forced state intervention to discipline workers #contradicts (0.74) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 171
• Rising national consciousness forced the state to recognize only nationals as citizens #qualifies (0.72)