Workweek and weekend
The workweek and weekend are the complementary parts of the week devoted to labor and rest, respectively. The legal working week, or workweek, is the part of the seven-day week devoted to labor. In most of the world, the workweek is from Monday to Friday and the weekend is Saturday and Sunday, but other divisions exist: for example, many countries observing a Sunday to Thursday or Monday to Thursday working week. A weekday or workday is any day of the working week. Other institutions follow this pattern, such as places of education. Sometimes the term "weekend" is expanded to include the time after work hours on the last workday of the week; the weekend has had varying definitions, such as commencing after 5pm on Friday evening and lasting until Sunday 12pm. In some Christian traditions, Sunday is the "day of rest and worship"; the Jewish Shabbat or Biblical Sabbath lasts from sunset on Friday to the fall of full darkness on Saturday. Some Muslim-majority countries have instituted a Thursday–Friday weekend.
Today, many of these countries have shifted from Thursday–Friday to Friday–Saturday, or to Saturday–Sunday. The Christian Sabbath was just one day each week, but the preceding day came to be taken as a holiday as well in the twentieth century; this shift has been accompanied by a reduction in the total number of hours worked per week, following changes in employer expectations. The present-day concept of the "weekend" first arose in the industrial north of Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century; the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Union was the first to demand a five-day work week in 1929. Some countries have adopted a one-day weekend, i.e. either Sunday only, Friday only, or Saturday only. However, most countries have adopted a two-day weekend, whose days differ according to religious tradition, i.e. either Friday and Saturday, or Saturday and Sunday, or Friday and Sunday, with the previous evening post-work considered part of the weekend. Proposals continue to be put forward to reduce the number of days or hours worked per week, on the basis of predicted social and economic benefits.
A continuous seven-day cycle that runs throughout history, paying no attention whatsoever to the phases of the moon and having a fixed day of rest, was most first practiced in Judaism, dated to the 6th century BC at the latest. In Ancient Rome, every eight days there was a nundinae, it was a market day, during which children were exempted from school and plebs ceased from work in the field and came to the city to sell the produce of their labor or to practice religious rites. The French Revolutionary Calendar had ten-day weeks and allowed décadi, one out of the ten days, as a leisure day. In cultures with a four-day week, the three Sabbaths derive from the culture's main religious tradition: Friday and Sunday; the present-day concept of the longer'week-end' first arose in the industrial north of Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century and was a voluntary arrangement between factory owners and workers allowing Saturday afternoon off from 2pm in agreement that staff would be available for work sober and refreshed on Monday morning.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the term weekend to the British magazine Notes and Queries in 1879. In 1908, the first five-day workweek in the United States was instituted by a New England cotton mill so that Jewish workers would not have to work on the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. In 1926, Henry Ford began shutting down his automotive factories for all of Sunday. In 1929, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Union was the first union to demand and receive a five-day workweek; the rest of the United States followed, but it was not until 1940, when a provision of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act mandating a maximum 40-hour workweek went into effect, that the two-day weekend was adopted nationwide. Over the succeeding decades in the 1940s-1960s, an increasing number of countries adopted either a Friday–Saturday or Saturday–Sunday weekend to harmonize with international markets. A series of workweek reforms in the mid-to-late 2000s and early 2010s brought much of the Arab World in synchronization with the majority of countries around the world, in terms of working hours, the length of the workweek, the days of the weekend.
The International Labour Organization defines a workweek exceeding 48 hours as excessive. A 2007 study by the ILO found that at least 614.2 million people around the world were working excessive hours. Actual workweek lengths have been falling in the developed world; every reduction of the length of the workweek has been accompanied by an increase in real per-capita income. In the United States, the workweek length reduced from before the Civil War to the turn of the 20th century. A rapid reduction took place from 1900 to 1920 between 1913 and 1919, when weekly hours fell by about eight percent. In 1926, Henry Ford standardized on a five-day workweek, instead of the prevalent six days, without reducing employees' pay. Hours worked stabilized at about 49 per week during the 1920s, during the Great Depression fell below 40. During the Depression, President Herbert Hoover called for a reduction in work hours in lieu of layoffs. President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established a five-day, 40-hour workweek for many workers.
Th
Proletariat
The proletariat is the class of wage-earners in an economic society whose only possession of significant material value is their labour-power. A member of such a class is a proletarian. In Marxist theory, a dictatorship of the proletariat is for the proletariat, of the proletariat, by the proletariat. On the Marxist view, this will endow the proletarian with the power to abolish the conditions that make a person a proletarian and, build communism; the proletarii constituted a social class of Roman citizens owning no property. The origin of the name is linked with the census, which Roman authorities conducted every five years to produce a register of citizens and their property from which their military duties and voting privileges could be determined. For citizens with property valued 11,000 assēs or less, below the lowest census for military service, their children—proles —were listed instead of their property; the only contribution of a proletarius to the Roman society was seen in his ability to raise children, the future Roman citizens who can colonize new territories conquered by the Roman Republic and by the Roman Empire.
The citizens who had no property of significance were called capite censi because they were "persons registered not as to their property...but as to their existence as living individuals as heads of a family." Although included in one of the five support centuriae of the Comitia Centuriata, proletarii were deprived of their voting rights due to their low social status caused by their lack of "even the minimum property required for the lowest class" and a class-based hierarchy of the Comitia Centuriata. The late Roman historians, such as Livy, not without some uncertainty, understood the Comitia Centuriata to be one of three forms of popular assembly of early Rome composed of centuriae, the voting units whose members represented a class of citizens according to the value of their property; this assembly, which met on the Campus Martius to discuss public policy issues, was used as a means of designating military duties demanded of Roman citizens. One of reconstructions of the Comitia Centuriata features 18 centuriae of cavalry, 170 centuriae of infantry divided into five classes by wealth, plus 5 centuriae of support personnel called adsidui.
The top infantry class assembled with full arms and armor. In voting, the cavalry and top infantry class were enough to decide an issue. In the last centuries of the Roman Republic, the Comitia Centuriata became impotent as a political body, which further eroded minuscule political power the proletarii might have had in the Roman society. Following a series of wars the Roman Republic engaged since the closing of the Second Punic War, such as the Jugurthine War and conflicts in Macedonia and Asia, the significant reduction in the number of Roman family farmers had resulted in the shortage of people whose property qualified them to perform the citizenry's military duty to Rome; as a result of the Marian reforms initiated in 107 BC by the Roman general Gaius Marius, the proletarii became the backbone of the Roman army. In the era of early 19th century, many Western European liberal scholars - who dealt with social sciences and economics - pointed out the socio-economic similarieties of the modern growing industrial worker class and the classic ancient proletarians.
One of the earliest analogies can be found in the 1807 paper of French philosopher and political scientist Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais. It was translated to English with the title: "Modern Slavery". Swiss liberal economist and historian Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, was the first who applied the proletariat term to the working class created under capitalism, whose writings were cited by Marx. Marx most encountered the Proletariat term while studying the works of Sismondi. Karl Marx, who studied Roman law at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, used the term proletariat in his socio-political theory of Marxism to describe a working class unadulterated by private property and capable of a revolutionary action to topple capitalism in order to create classless society. In Marxist theory, the proletariat is the social class that does not have ownership of the means of production and whose only means of subsistence is to sell their labor power for a wage or salary. Proletarians are wage-workers.
For Marx, wage labor may involve getting a salary rather than a wage per se. Marxism sees the proletariat and bourgeoisie as occupying conflicting positions, since workers automatically wish their wages to be as high as possible, while owners and their proxies wish for wages to be as low as possible. In Marxist theory, the borders between the proletariat and some layers of the petite bourgeoisie, who rely but not on self-employment at an income no different from an ordinary wage or below it – and the lumpenproletariat, who are not in legal employment – are not well defined. Intermediate positions are possible, where some wage-labor for an employer combines with self-employment. Marx makes a clear distinction between proletariat as salaried workers, which he sees as a progressive class, Lumpenproletariat, "rag-proletariat", the poorest and outcasts of the society
United States
The United States of America known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U. S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D. C. and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico; the State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean; the U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The diverse geography and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century; the United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776; the war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties; the United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848. During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.
By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power; the United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U. S. Moon landing; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower. The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation, it is a representative democracy.
The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, other international organizations. The United States is a developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for a quarter of global GDP; the U. S. economy is post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U. S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, worker productivity.
The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, is a leading political and scientific force internationally. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci; the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan, Esq. to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort; the first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776. The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the'United States of America'".
The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence; this draft of the document did not surface unti
Collective bargaining
Collective bargaining is a process of negotiation between employers and a group of employees aimed at agreements to regulate working salaries, working conditions and other aspects of workers' compensation and rights for workers. The interests of the employees are presented by representatives of a trade union to which the employees belong; the collective agreements reached by these negotiations set out wage scales, working hours, training and safety, grievance mechanisms, rights to participate in workplace or company affairs. The union may negotiate with a single employer or may negotiate with a group of businesses, depending on the country, to reach an industry-wide agreement. A collective agreement functions as a labour contract between an employer and one or more unions. Collective bargaining consists of the process of negotiation between representatives of a union and employers in respect of the terms and conditions of employment of employees, such as wages, hours of work, working conditions, grievance procedures, about the rights and responsibilities of trade unions.
The parties refer to the result of the negotiation as a collective bargaining agreement or as a collective employment agreement. The term "collective bargaining" was first used in 1891 by Beatrice Webb, a founder of the field of industrial relations in Britain, it refers to the sort of collective negotiations and agreements that had existed since the rise of trade unions during the 18th century. In the United States, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 made it illegal for any employer to deny union rights to an employee; the issue of unionizing government employees in a public-sector trade union was much more controversial until the 1950s. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order granting federal employees the right to unionize. An issue of jurisdiction surfaced in National Labor Relations Board v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago when the Supreme Court held that the National Labor Relations Board could not assert jurisdiction over a church-operated school because such jurisdiction would violate the First Amendment establishment of freedom of religion and the separation of church of state.
The right to collectively bargain is recognized through international human rights conventions. Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights identifies the ability to organize trade unions as a fundamental human right. Item 2 of the International Labour Organization's Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work defines the "freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining" as an essential right of workers; the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 and several other conventions protect collective bargaining through the creation of international labour standards that discourage countries from violating workers' rights to associate and collectively bargain. In June 2007 the Supreme Court of Canada extensively reviewed the rationale for regarding collective bargaining as a human right. In the case of Facilities Subsector Bargaining Association v. British Columbia, the Court made the following observations: The right to bargain collectively with an employer enhances the human dignity and autonomy of workers by giving them the opportunity to influence the establishment of workplace rules and thereby gain some control over a major aspect of their lives, namely their work… Collective bargaining is not an instrument for pursuing external ends…rather is intrinsically valuable as an experience in self-government… Collective bargaining permits workers to achieve a form of workplace democracy and to ensure the rule of law in the workplace.
Workers gain a voice to influence the establishment of rules that control a major aspect of their lives. Union members and other workers covered by collective agreements get, on average, a wage markup over their nonunionized counterparts; such a markup is 5 to 10 percent in industrial countries. Unions tend to equalize the income distribution between skilled and unskilled workers; the welfare loss associated with unions is 0.2 to 0.5 of GDP, similar to monopolies in product markets. In Sweden the coverage of collective agreements is high despite the absence of legal mechanisms to extend agreements to whole industries. In 2016, 84% of all private sector employees were covered by collective agreements, 100% of public sector employees and in all 90%; this reflects the dominance of self-regulation over state regulation in Swedish industrial relations. In the United States, the National Labor Relations Act covers most collective agreements in the private sector; this act makes it illegal for employers to discriminate, spy on, harass, or terminate the employment of workers because of their union membership or to retaliate against them for engaging in organizing campaigns or other "concerted activities," to form company unions, or to refuse to engage in collective bargaining with the union that represents their employees.
It is illegal to require any employee to join a union as a condition of employment. Unions are able to secure safe work conditions and equitable pay for their labor. At a workplace where a majority of workers have voted for union representation, a committee of employees and union representatives negotiate a contract with the management regarding wages, hours and other terms and conditions of empl
Minimum wage
A minimum wage is the lowest remuneration that employers can pay their workers—the price floor below which workers may not sell their labor. Most countries had introduced minimum wage legislation by the end of the 20th century. Supply and demand models suggest that there may be employment losses from minimum wages. However, if the labor market is in a state of monopsony, minimum wages can increase the efficiency of the market. There is debate about the effect of minimum wages; the movement for minimum wages was first motivated as a way to stop the exploitation of workers in sweatshops, by employers who were thought to have unfair bargaining power over them. Over time, minimum wages came to be seen as a way to help lower-income families. Although minimum wage laws are in effect in many jurisdictions, differences of opinion exist about the benefits and drawbacks of a minimum wage. Supporters of the minimum wage say it increases the standard of living of workers, reduces poverty, reduces inequality, boosts morale.
In contrast, opponents of the minimum wage say it increases poverty, increases unemployment and is damaging to businesses, because excessively high minimum wages require businesses to raise the prices of their product or service to accommodate the extra expense of paying a higher wage and some low-wage workers "will be unable to find work... will be pushed into the ranks of the unemployed."Modern national laws enforcing compulsory union membership which prescribed minimum wages for their members were first passed in New Zealand and Australia in the 1890s. Modern minimum wage laws trace their origin to the Ordinance of Labourers, a decree by King Edward III that set a maximum wage for laborers in medieval England. King Edward III, a wealthy landowner, was dependent, like his lords, on serfs to work the land. In the autumn of 1348, the Black Plague decimated the population; the severe shortage of labor caused wages to soar and encouraged King Edward III to set a wage ceiling. Subsequent amendments to the ordinance, such as the Statute of Labourers, increased the penalties for paying a wage above the set rates.
While the laws governing wages set a ceiling on compensation, they were used to set a living wage. An amendment to the Statute of Labourers in 1389 fixed wages to the price of food; as time passed, the Justice of the Peace, charged with setting the maximum wage began to set formal minimum wages. The practice was formalized with the passage of the Act Fixing a Minimum Wage in 1604 by King James I for workers in the textile industry. By the early 19th century, the Statutes of Labourers was repealed as capitalistic England embraced laissez-faire policies which disfavored regulations of wages; the subsequent 19th century saw. As trade unions were decriminalized during the century, attempts to control wages through collective agreement were made. However, this meant. In Principles of Political Economy in 1848, John Stuart Mill argued that because of the collective action problems that workers faced in organisation, it was a justified departure from laissez-faire policies to regulate people's wages and hours by the law.
It was not until the 1890s that the first modern legislative attempts to regulate minimum wages were seen in New Zealand and Australia. The movement for a minimum wage was focused on stopping sweatshop labor and controlling the proliferation of sweatshops in manufacturing industries; the sweatshops employed large numbers of women and young workers, paying them what were considered to be substandard wages. The sweatshop owners were thought to have unfair bargaining power over their employees, a minimum wage was proposed as a means to make them pay fairly. Over time, the focus changed to helping people families, become more self-sufficient; the first modern national minimum wages were enacted by the government recognition of unions which in turn established minimum wage policy among their members, as in New Zealand in 1894, followed by Australia in 1896 and the United Kingdom in 1909. In the United States, statutory minimum wages were first introduced nationally in 1938, they were reintroduced and expanded in the United Kingdom in 1998.
There is now legislation or binding collective bargaining regarding minimum wage in more than 90 percent of all countries. In the European Union, 22 member states out of 28 have national minimum wages. Other countries, such as Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and Italy, have no minimum wage laws, but rely on employer groups and trade unions to set minimum earnings through collective bargaining. Minimum wage rates vary across many different jurisdictions, not only in setting a particular amount of money—for example $7.25 per hour under certain US state laws, $11.00 in the US state of Washington, or £7.83 in the United Kingdom—but in terms of which pay period or the scope of coverage. The United States federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. However, some states do not recognize the minimum wage law, such as Tennessee. Other states operate below the federal minimum wage such as Wyoming; some jurisdictions allow employers to count tips given to their workers as credit towards the minimum wage levels.
India was one of the first developing countries to intr
Labour Party (Norway)
The Labour Party the Norwegian Labour Party, is a social-democratic political party in Norway. It was the senior partner of the governing Red-Green Coalition from 2005 to 2013, its leader, Jens Stoltenberg, was Prime Minister of Norway during that time; the party is led by Jonas Gahr Støre. The Labour Party is committed to social-democratic ideals, its slogan since the 1930s has been "everyone shall take part", the party traditionally seeks a strong welfare state, funded through taxes and duties. Since the 1980s, the party has included more of the principles of a social market economy in its policy, allowing for privatization of government-held assets and services and reducing income tax progressivity, following the wave of economic liberalization in the 1980s. During the first Stoltenberg government, the party's policies were inspired by Tony Blair's New Labour and saw the most widespread privatization by any Norwegian government to that date; the party has been described as neoliberal since the 1980s, both by political scientists and opponents on the left.
The Labour Party profiles itself as a progressive party that subscribes to cooperation on a national as well as international level. Its youth wing is the Workers' Youth League; the party is a member of the Party of Progressive Alliance. The Labour Party has always been a strong supporter of Norway's NATO membership and has supported Norwegian membership in the European Union during two referendums. During the Cold War, when the party was in government most of the time, the party aligned Norway with the United States at the international level and followed an anti-communist policy at the domestic level, in the aftermath of the 1948 Kråkerøy speech and culminating in Norway being a founding member of NATO in 1949. Founded in 1887, the party increased in support until it became the largest party in Norway in 1927, a position it has held since; this year saw the consolidation of conflicts surrounding the party during the 1920s following its membership in the Comintern from 1919 to 1923. It formed its first government in 1928, has led the government for all but 16 years since 1935.
From 1945 to 1961, the party had an absolute majority in the Norwegian parliament, the only time this has happened in Norwegian history. The domination by the Labour Party, during the 1960s and early 1970s, was broken by competition from the left from the Socialist People's Party. From the end of the 1970s however, the party started to lose voters to the right, leading to a turn to the right for the party under Gro Harlem Brundtland during the 1980s. In 2001 the party achieved its worst electoral results since 1924. Between 2005 and 2013, Labour returned to power after committing to a coalition agreement with other parties in order to form a majority government. Since losing nine seats in the 2013 election, Labour has been in opposition; the party lost a further six seats in the 2017 election, yielding the second lowest number of seats Labour has held since 1924. The party was founded in 1887 in Arendal and first ran in elections to the Parliament of Norway in 1894, it entered Parliament in 1904 after the 1903 election, increased its vote until 1927, when it became the largest party in Norway.
The party were members of Comintern, a Communist organisation, between 1918 and 1923. From the establishment of Vort Arbeide in 1884, the party had a growing and notable organisation of newspapers and other press outlets; the party press system resulted in Norsk Arbeiderpresse. In January 1913 the party had 24 newspapers, 6 more newspapers were founded in 1913; the party had the periodical Det 20de Aarhundre. In 1920 the party had 6 semi-affiliated newspapers; the party had its own publishing house, Det norske Arbeiderpartis forlag, succeeded by Tiden Norsk Forlag. In addition to books and pamphlets, Det norske Arbeiderpartis forlag published Maidagen, Arbeidets Jul and Arbeiderkalenderen. From its roots as a radical alternative to the political establishment, the party grew to its current dominance through several eras: The party experienced a split in 1921 caused by a decision made two years earlier to join the Communist International, the Social Democratic Labour Party of Norway was formed.
In 1923 the party left the Communist International, while a significant minority of its members left the party to form the Communist Party of Norway. In 1927, the Social Democrats were reunited with Labour; some Communists joined Labour, whereas other Communists tried a failed merger endeavor which culminated in the formation of the Arbeiderklassens Samlingsparti. In 1928, Christopher Hornsrud formed Labour's first government. During the early 1930s Labour set a reformist course. Labour returned to government in 1935 and remained in power until 1965. During most of the first twenty years after World War II, Einar Gerhardsen led the party and the country, he is referred to as "Landsfaderen", is considered one of the main architects of the rebuilding of Norway after World War II. This is considered the "golden age" of the Norwegian Labour Party; the party was a member of the Labour and Socialist International between 1938 and 1940. In 1958 two Workers' Youth League members contacted MPs of the Labour Party, to have MPs sign a petition, as a part of what is known as the Easter Uprising of
Schenectady, New York
Schenectady is a city in Schenectady County, New York, United States, of which it is the county seat. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 66,135; the name "Schenectady" is derived from a Mohawk word, skahnéhtati, meaning "beyond the pines". Schenectady was founded on the south side of the Mohawk River by Dutch colonists in the 17th century, many from the Albany area, they were prohibited from the fur trade by the Albany monopoly, which kept its control after the English takeover in 1664. Residents of the new village developed farms on strip plots along the river. Connected to the west via the Mohawk River and Erie Canal, Schenectady developed in the 19th century as part of the Mohawk Valley trade and transportation corridor. By 1824 more people worked in manufacturing than agriculture or trade, the city had a cotton mill, processing cotton from the Deep South. Numerous mills in New York had such ties with the South. Through the 19th century, nationally influential companies and industries developed in Schenectady, including General Electric and American Locomotive Company, which were powers into the mid-20th century.
Schenectady was part of emerging technologies, with GE collaborating in the production of nuclear-powered submarines and, in the 21st century, working on other forms of renewable energy. Schenectady is near the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers, it is in the same metropolitan area as the state capital, about 15 miles southeast. In December 2014, the state announced that the city was one of three sites selected for development of off-reservation casino gambling, under terms of a 2013 state constitutional amendment; the project would redevelop an ALCO brownfield site in the city along the waterfront, with hotels, housing and a marina in addition to the casino. When first encountered by Europeans, the Mohawk Valley was the territory of the Mohawk nation, one of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee, they had occupied territory in the region since at least 1100 AD. Starting in the early 1600s the Mohawk moved their settlements closer to the river and by 1629, they had taken over territories on the west bank of the Hudson River that were held by the Algonquian-speaking Mahican people.
In the 1640s, the Mohawk had all on the south side of the Mohawk River. The easternmost one was Ossernenon, located about 9 miles west of New York; when Dutch settlers developed Fort Orange in the Hudson Valley beginning in 1614, the Mohawk called their settlement skahnéhtati, meaning "beyond the pines," referring to a large area of pine barrens that lay between the Mohawk settlements and the Hudson River. About 3200 acres of this unique ecosystem are now protected as the Albany Pine Bush; this word entered the lexicon of the Dutch settlers. The settlers in Fort Orange used skahnéhtati to refer to the new village at the Mohawk flats, which became known as Schenectady. In 1661, Arent van Curler, a Dutch immigrant, bought a big piece of land on the south side of the Mohawk River. Other colonists were given grants of land by the colonial government in this portion of the flat fertile river valley, as part of New Netherland; the settlers recognized that these bottomlands had been cultivated for maize by the Mohawk for centuries.
Van Curler took the largest piece of land. As most early colonists were from the Fort Orange area, they may have anticipated working as fur traders, but the Beverwijck traders kept a monopoly of legal control; the settlers here turned to farming. Their 50-acre lots were unique for the colony, "laid out in strips along the Mohawk River", with the narrow edges fronting the river, as in French colonial style, they relied on rearing wheat. The proprietors and their descendants controlled all the land of the town for generations acting as government until after the Revolutionary War, when representative government was established. From the early days of interaction, early Dutch traders in the valley had unions with Mohawk women, if not always official marriages, their children were raised within the Mohawk community, which had a matrilineal kinship system, considering children born into the mother's clan. Within Mohawk society, biological fathers played minor roles; some mixed-race descendants, such as Jacques Cornelissen Van Slyck and his sister Hilletie van Olinda, who were of Dutch and Mohawk ancestry, became interpreters and intermarried with Dutch colonists.
They gained land in the Schenectady settlement. They were among the few métis who seemed to move from Mohawk to Dutch society, as they were described as "former Indians", although they did not always have an easy time of it. In 1661 Jacques inherited what became known as Van Slyck's Island from his brother Marten, given it by the Mohawk. Van Slyck family descendants retained ownership through the 19th century; because of labor shortages in the colony, some Dutch settlers brought African slaves to the region. In Schenectady, they used them as farm laborers; the English imported slaves and continued with agriculture in the river valley. Traders in Albany kept control of the fur trade after the takeover by the English. In 1664 th