töölistid

Töölistid is Estonian for “workers” or “the working class,” referring to people whose main means of subsistence is wage labor, typically manual or industrial, as opposed to owners of capital or professionals. The term is formed from the word töör (work) and the agent suffix -list, indicating a person associated with working.

Historically, the concept has been central in discussions of social class and labor movements. In Estonia, industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries contributed to the emergence of a wage-earning class that came to be described as töölistid in socialist, political, and academic writing. The term was used to articulate the interests of labor in periods of reform, strikes, and political agitation, and it appeared in party programs, periodicals, and debates about workers’ rights, suffrage, and social welfare.

In modern Estonian, the term remains understood but is less common in everyday neutral speech. Contemporary usage often favors töölised or töötajad (workers or employees) for neutral reference to people employed for wages. Töölistid is more likely to be encountered in historical, scholarly, or ideological contexts, especially when discussing the traditional working class and its role in political movements or class analysis.

See also: working class, labor movement, trade unions, Estonia, socialist movements.