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[Submitted to the list by Michael McCarthy <mam726@gmail.com>. --ed.] As part of my dissertation research, for the past several months I searched just about everywhere that I know of for historical data on private social provisions. Specifically, I’ve been looking for information on the employment schemes of individual large factories in America over the first few decades of the 20th century. In terms of data, I need to identify (1) large factories (employing approximately 750 or more people) and (2) whether some sampling of these large firms did or did not have private social provisions at specific points in the first few decades of the 20th century (i.e. did they have housing programs, sickness insurance, pensions, profit sharing, etc). If this latter information is unavailable, I’m interested in finding a proxy (such as a factory’s expenditure on private social provisions for their workers). Realizing that there is very unlikely going to be any central source for this (given the sheer number of large factories that existed) – I tried to look at the state/country and industry level. Starting with steel firms in PA, I found that none of the major archives or state agencies there have records on this. And, after looking into the possibility of using county level tax records or company charter books, I found this to be an unlikely source as well. Most of the scholars I’ve talked to suggest that the best way would be to look through actual company records. Unfortunately, I can’t do this because of time constraints - I need a large number of cases in order to generate some robust statistics. At this point I am very interested to find any information that would serve my research question. I am basically looking for information that would allow me to measure the impact of private social provisions on local working-class politics in the initial decades of the 20th century. If anyone has ideas about where I can find this information – please let me know – I truly appreciate it. Michael A. McCarthy New York University Sociology --- Hyungsub Choi List Editor, H-Business
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