This chapter introduces the social, economic, political and cultural conditions of the working class. Industrial workers, artisans and wage earners in the service sector and low-income white collars and retirees constituted the largest proportion of the urban population. In contrast to the existing literature reducing the working class to factory workers, this chapter also covers all of these groups. It gives the backdrop against which they struggled. That is, this chapter describes how these groups experienced the social and economic policies and conditions of the first decades of the republic. This chapter especially underlines the low wages, problems with payments of salaries, paucity of social security measures, high cost of living and the urban masses’ material deprivation.