Business
A working class does not appear automatically when people are moved into factories. Workers come to see themselves as a group with shared interests through their daily experiences, and especially through their struggles together. The economy supplies the conditions, but the identity is built from lived experience.
A long build-up of sorrow over injustice, felt as personal misfortune, can be turned into collective action. Release of that bottled-up grievance became a driving force behind labor militancy. The act of release itself shaped how workers came to see themselves as a class.
Early European workers could draw on old craft and guild cultures to build solidarity. New factory workers without that heritage meet official beliefs in its place: strong anti-communism, nationalism, and loyalty to family. These ideas crowd out what workers learn from their own factory experience.
The same forces that first keep workers quiet can later fuel their revolt. A tradition that looks down on manual work and a state that crushes unions produce obedience at first. Over time they build up anger and resentment, and that anger becomes the energy behind a strong labor movement.
Workers under harsh, contemptuous treatment may fight less for higher pay than for being treated as human beings. Their central demands become humane treatment and the right to form unions they control themselves. Insult can mobilize people more powerfully than low pay does.
When industrialization happens fast, a society can turn peasants into factory workers within a single generation. In Europe the same scale of change took about a century. A class formed this quickly lacks inherited traditions of solidarity, yet it can also form its shared identity unusually fast.
Young women factory workers faced two layers of oppression at once: sexism, and contempt for manual work. Yet they led the early struggles. Those accumulated struggles laid the groundwork for later breakthroughs that are often credited to others.
When the state blocks unions, sympathetic outside groups can keep a movement alive. Progressive churches, drawing on radical religious ideas about the poor, gave emotional and material support to women workers organizing in the 1970s. They offered protection that workers could not get on their own.
A sudden mass uprising of workers is usually the result of many earlier struggles, not a spontaneous event. Each bitter experience at work added to workers' sense of themselves as a class. Those small battles, even when lost, prepared the ground for the eventual breakthrough.
After a movement wins democratic openings and political power, its sense of shared identity can weaken. A labor force that grew militant under repression gradually lost that militancy once the repression eased. Gains in formal power were accompanied by a decline in collective identity.