The World From Below

Force

Trade & Caste

When a clerk’s only named skill is a firm’s private ledgers, how free is he to keep a place among neighbors who treat job loss as social death?

The force where white-collar specialization, neighborhood respectability, and immigrant day labor redefine what counts as work.

Related places

Little Italy waterfront

Stories

The Emigration That Was Only Ten Miles

After twenty years as a woolen-company clerk, a New Englander who called himself Carleton lost his desk to a younger man — then sold the parlor set and took a subway shovel for a dollar and a half a day.