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Working-class and Memory Policy in Post-Industrial Cities: Łódź, Poland, and Tampere, Finland, Compared International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-11-27 Magdalena Rek-Woźniak, Wojciech Woźniak
Łódź and Tampere share an industrial and political past. Part of the Russian empire, the cities became major textile hubs crucial for Tsarist industrial economy.1 The cities were also Red strongholds. Historically, they can be seen as socio-economic “experiments” and “islands of modernization” within largely rural societies. Since the 1980s (in case of Tampere) and the 1990s (in case of Łódź) both
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Framing labor militancy and political exchange in a Spanish Catholic trade union: the Autonomous Union of the Vine in Jerez (1979–1987) International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-11-27 Beltrán Roca, Eva Bermúdez-Figueroa
This article examines the evolution of the Autonomous Union of the Vine (Sindicato Autónomo de la Vid [SAVID]), a radical wine industry union that operated in the Jerez area (Spain) between 1979 and 1987. The SAVID was born as a result of a series of internal conflicts and splits in the trade union Unión Sindical Obrera (USO), which was founded by Christian groups that were influenced by self-management
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The Incorporation of Women in the Agricultural Trade Union Struggle: The Case of the Galician Peasants’ Union Sindicato Labrego Galego International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-11-27 Ángel Rodríguez-Gallardo, María Victoria Martins-Rodríguez
This project investigates the participation of rural Galician women in social movements regarding labor and rural concerns from 1970 to 1990, with a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. Based on the studies we have analyzed we can conclude that the recognition of rural women and their roles in their organizations have been consolidated in recent years. Rural women have gradually become significant
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US Imperialism and Puerto Rican Needleworkers: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Women's Labor in a Deep History of Neoliberal Trade International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-11-27 Aimee Loiselle
In 1898, US occupation of Puerto Rico opened possibilities for experimentation with manufacturing, investment, tariffs, and citizenship because the Treaty of Paris did not address territorial incorporation. Imperial experimentation started immediately and continued through the liberal policies of the New Deal and World War II, consistently reproducing drastic exceptions. These exceptions were neither
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Provisioning the Posho: Labor Migration and Working-Class Food Systems on the Early-Colonial Kenyan Coast International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-11-27 Devin Smart
Engaging questions about social reproduction, migrant labor, and food provisioning, this article examines the emergence of a working-class food system on the coast of Kenya during the early decades of the twentieth century. Like elsewhere in Africa, labor migrants in Kenya's port city of Mombasa and on nearby plantations were provisioned with food rations, which were part of what Patrick Harries calls
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The Caledon Lockout: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Rural Ulster, 1918–1922 International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-11-27 Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh
This paper examines an unsuccessful strike by Irish Catholic and Protestant workers at a woolen mill in 1919. The location, Caledon in County Tyrone, is renowned as a stronghold of Ulster Unionism and Orangeism, yet in the context of the revolutionary period in Ireland from 1916–1926, traditional sectarian divisions briefly abated in the face of working-class solidarity. In this respect, the analysis
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Consolidating the Collar Line: The Professionalization of Engineering and Social Stratification in Modern Japan International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-11-27 Jamyung Choi
Historians have extensively explored conflicts and reconciliation between labor and management, but have hardly considered how class hierarchy took shape and persisted. This article explores the birth of class hierarchy through the lens of the Tokyo Worker School. While education bureaucrats created this school as a training ground for skilled workers, the school's educators helped their students join
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And the Virus Rages on: “Contingent” and “Essential” Workers in the Time of COVID-19 International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-11-26 Annelise Orleck
“It affects your nerves, your mental state, your way of thinking—because you have to be cautious in everything you do now,” Rosie said. “It's like I'm risking my life for a dollar. It's twisted.” Rosie is an Amazon worker in New York City. She made these comments during the summer of 2020 after learning that a colleague in his twenties had recently died of COVID-19.
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‘Building the Internationalist City from Below’: The Role of the Czechoslovak Industrial Cooperative “Interhelpo” in Forging Urbanity in early-Soviet Bishkek International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-11-23 David Leupold
Off to the other promised land: Western émigrés in the “first country of workers and peasants” At first glance, present-day Bishkek, the capital of Republic of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, may seem like a typical representative of the (post-)Soviet city: prefabricated, modernist-style residential buildings along the old Sovyetskaya Boulevard (today named after the Soviet-Kirghiz politician Yusup Abdrakhmanov)
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“Inoculations: The Social Politics of Time, Labor, and Public Good in COVID-America” International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-11-11 Jennifer Klein
“We are becoming a 24/7 workforce.” —Fair Workweek Initiative “I Can't Breathe” —Eric Garner, George Floyd, Manuel Ellis, Derrick Scott, Byron Williams, Vincente Villela, Ngozi Mbegu, Willie Ray Banks, James Brown… On May 1, 2020, Justa Barrios, a New York City home-care worker and labor activist, passed away from COVID-19. After working twenty-four-hour shifts for fourteen years, Barrios had injuries
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Foxconn, Ciudad Juárez, and the Trials of Solidarity International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-11-03 Gabriel Solis
In San Jeronimo, Chihuahua, on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, a beige monolith of placid architecture hovers over the newly reconstructed US-Mexico border wall. Looking like a mix between a prison and a city built entirely of suburban Walmarts, this is in fact Foxconn's largest assembly plant at the US-Mexico Border; a shrine of sorts to over fifty-five years of low-cost export manufacturing in the
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Notes on Essential Labor International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-10-27 Verónica Gago, Liz Mason-Deese
The pandemic exposes (and leaves us exposed to) the totality of capital; its most intricate and subterranean links come to light. The extractivist push and its relation to Indigenous genocide in the Amazon, as well as its direct effect on the financialization of land in cities’ poorest neighborhoods becomes apparent. It also becomes clear how the precarization of labor manages to extend working days
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The Etymology of Despair in the Americas International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-10-12 Ernesto Semán
Halfway into White Noise, Don DeLillo's novel from 1985, Jack Gladney packs his family in the car and leaves town running from a black chemical cloud. The “airborne toxic event” had triggered an emergency evacuation plan: floodlights from helicopters, sirens, unmarked cars from obscure agencies, clogged roads, makeshift shelters at a Boy Scout camp where the Red Cross would dispense juice and coffee
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Service Work in the Pandemic Economy International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-10-12 Aaron Benanav
The rapid spread of COVID-19 interacted with long-unfolding economic trends to set a global tinder box aflame. Over the past thirty years, the world's workforce has increasingly found employment in low-wage, low-productivity jobs in the global services sector. The pandemic lockdowns hit these sorts of activities the hardest. Opportunities to work evaporated, spreading both poverty and hunger around
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A Social History of Parastatal Employees in Southern Benin, 1989–1990: Contesting Decline and Unemployment During “Africa’s Second Democratization” International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-08-13 Alexander Keese
The huge parastatal sectors in postcolonial African societies interested sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s, but have never found a historical discussion – and the experience of change towards the democratization (eventually) has not yet been interpreted by historians. This study attempts to bring both elements together for the case of Benin, a country particularly shaken by massive economic decline
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“German Labour History is Back”—Announcing the Foundation of the German Labour History Association International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Stefan Berger
When the curtain closed on the first conference of the German Labour History Association (GLHA) that dealt with the topic “Freedom of Labour under Capitalism” and took place at the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, from February 6 to 8, 2020, the sixty plus members that had been in attendance were agreed: “German Labour History is back.” This was a statement that was repeated
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Police Work, Unbounded International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Kirsten Weld
To scholars of labor and working-class history, police pose a problem—though, one less grave than the problem they pose to contemporary life in the United States, where roughly 10 percent of all homicide victims, and fully one-third of all people killed by strangers, die at police hands. How should police be categorized, and are they worthy subjects for the field? They are workers, of course, but they
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Ottoman Tax Registers as a Source for Labor Relations in Ottoman Bursa International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Karin Hofmeester, Jan Lucassen
Recently, Ottoman labor history and historiography has been moving beyond the “classical” labor history period of the nineteenth and twentieth century, shifting attention from mere wage work to other types of labor relations including unfree labor. Often focusing on one particular region, changes in work and labor relations are being followed over longer period of time. This article wants to contribute
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Segmented Possibilities: Migrant life Histories of Hindustani Workers in Post Colonial India International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Camille Buat
Starting in the late 19 th century, workers from north India came to constitute the backbone of the urban and industrial labour force in Calcutta and neighboring mill municipalities. As they settled in and around the colonial metropolis, these Hindustani workers maintained strong connections with their rural homes. One generation after the other, they reproduced this dual settlement over the following
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Marronage, Here and There: Liberia, Enslavement's Conversion, and the Settler-Not International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Tryon P. Woods
This proposed contribution to the special issue of ILWCH offers a theoretical re-consideration of the Liberian project. If, as is commonly supposed in its historiography and across contemporary discourse regarding its fortunes into the twenty-first century, Liberia is a notable, albeit contested, instance of the modern era's correctable violence in that it stands as an imperfect realization of the
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Rehabilitation as the Wage of Starvation: The 1941 Local 313 Sharecropper Strike's Critical Theory of Normativity International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Kasia Kalina
This paper examines the 1941 pamphlet “Down with Starvation-Wages!,” written by Local 313 striking sharecroppers in Southeast Missouri, as it both anticipates and places into deep historical tension theories of normativity that would come to be associated with continental European critique after World War Two. The pamphlet's contents are both a local response to and critical theory of New Deal struggles
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Labor Laid Waste: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Waste Work International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Jacob Doherty, Kate Brown
Waste studies brings to labor history a suite of conceptual tools to think about precarious labor, human capital, migration, the material quality of labor in urban and rural infrastructures, and the porosity and interchangeability of workers’ bodies in the toxic environments in which they labor. In this introduction, we explore the conceptual insights that the study of waste offers for the field of
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The Labors of Failure: Labor, Toxicity, and Belonging in Mumbai International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Syantani Chatterjee
Shivaji Nagar in the Deonar suburb of Mumbai is popularly known as “Bombay's Gas Chamber.” Located between one of Asia's largest garbage dumps and Mumbai's largest municipal slaughterhouse, this neighborhood is environmentally vulnerable, situated at the crossroads of clusters of heavy and petrochemical industries, and a network of the city's busiest highways. In popular, official, and scholarly narratives
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Trashing Solidarity: The Production of Power and the Challenges to Organizing Informal Reclaimers International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Melanie Samson
This article presents a nuanced social history of how reclaimers at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa, organized against each other on the basis of nationality instead of uniting to combat the effects of the 2008 global economic crisis. Through this narrative of struggles at one particular dump, the article contributes to debates on informal worker organizing by theorizing the importance
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Changing Registers of Visibility: Immigrant Labor and Waste Work in Naples, Italy International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Valeria Bonatti, Zsuzsa Gille
In recent years, growing emphasis on green economies and green capitalism have brought renewed attention to the waste practices of all places of work, including ones that are not directly linked to neither production nor waste management, such as schools, offices, and stores, as well as households, which European countries, in particular, are increasingly depicting as key sites of intervention for
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Beyond the Abject: Caste and the Organization of Work in Pakistan's Waste Economy International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Waqas H. Butt
This article examines the historical processes by which low or non-caste groups have situated themselves in Pakistan's waste economy. Adopting caste as a category of governance, the colonial regime implemented policies and interventions that not only impacted these groups in the Punjab, but also cemented enduring connections between caste, waste work, and governance, which have subsequently shaped
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Dangerous Exposures: Visualizing Work and Waste in the Victorian Chemical Trades International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Jennifer Tucker
Cheshire, Britain, and the towns of Widnes and St. Helens, where many of the world's first chemical factories and towns were created in the nineteenth century, is an especially important place to study historical responses to industrial pollution and its social costs. This paper, based on newly recovered archival sources about the Victorian alkali industry, explores the role of visual imagery, particularly
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“The Ghetto is a Gold Mine”: The Racialized Temporality of Betterment International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Marisa Solomon
Gentrification makes trash a discursive and material index of degeneration, mobilizing projects to “clean” and “better” neighborhoods and people. This ethnographic article explores how trash's movements and labor reveal the spatialized and temporalized racial histories of neighborhood transformation in the historically black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy), Brooklyn and the gentrified
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The Strange Career of the Convict Clause: US Prison Imperialism in the Panamá Canal Zone International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Benjamin D. Weber
This article follows the “convict clause” in the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution – the exception for slavery and involuntary servitude to continue as punishment for crime – to the Panama Canal Zone. It argues that US officials used the prison system not only to extract labor, but to structure racial hierarchy and justify expansionist claims to jurisdiction and sovereignty. It reveals how
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Beyond Freedom's Reach: An Imperfect Centering of Women and Children Caught within Cuba's Long Emancipation and the Afterlife of Slavery International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Karina L. Cespedes
This article examines Cuba's long process of gradual emancipation (from 1868–1886) and the continual states of bondage that categorize the afterlife of Cuban slavery. The article addresses deferred freedom, re-enslavement, and maintenance of legal states of bondage in the midst of “freedom.” It contends with the legacy of the casta system, the contradictions within the Moret Law of 1870, which “half-freed”
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The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx's Method International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Sara-Maria Sorentino
“The Abstract Slave: Anti-Blackness and Marx's Method” presents an immanent critique of the Marxist value-form. While Marx could historically think the empirical reality of slavery appearing together with capitalism, the value-form theoretically unthinks the significance of the conjuncture slavery and capitalism. Even with attempts to recuperate Marxism from some of the errors of evolutionism, the
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Writing agrarian histories of the Roman world: seasonality and scale as tools of analysis International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Cam Grey
Agrarian labor history of Greco-Roman antiquity—indeed, labor history of the period more broadly—does not look very much like the agrarian labor histories of other periods. Many explanations might be adduced for why this is so, including the very particular circumstances that led to the development of ancient history as a discipline separate from (yet intimately related to) the humanistic intellectual
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Revisiting Labor Activism in Iran: Some Notes on the Vatan Factory Strike in 1931 International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Serhan Afacan
This article discusses the discursive practices of Iranian workers between 1921 and 1941, with a particular focus on the Vatan Factory strike, which took place in Isfahan in May 1931. Initially, the article provides a brief background on the industrialization process of the era for a better contextualization of the factory and the strike under study. Then, it discusses Iranian workers’ self-perceptions
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Workers and the Right Wing: the Situation in India International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Smriti Upadhyay
Why and how does a right-wing social movement mobilize workers along class lines? The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), the labor wing of the Hindu nationalist movement in India, marshals working-class support by emphasizing workers’ class positions and identities . Following Gramsci, I argue that the BMS represents the Hindu right's recognition of workers’ class power and is thus key to the Hindu Right's
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The Politics of Disembarkation: Empire, Shipping and Labor in the Port of Durban, 1897–1947 International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Jonathan Hyslop
The National Research Foundation of South Africa and the Colgate University Research Council.
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Labor and Dictatorship in Brazil: A Historiographical Review International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Paulo Fontes, Larissa R. Corrêa
This article analyzes recent Brazilian scholarship on workers and trade unions during the military dictatorship (1964–1985), emphasizing the relative absence of studies and the neglect of worker organization. By focusing on working-class agency and the dilemmas the labor movement faced due to the regime's economic policies and fierce repression, this essay offers a better understanding of the political
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The Argentine Dictatorship and Labor (1976–1983): A Historiographical Essay International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Victoria Basualdo
This article aims at briefly reviewing some of the main contributions on the transformations and role of the labor movement during the dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The analysis of the historiography will distinguish three main sub-periods: the 1980s, marked by the transition to democracy in Argentina; the 1990s, a decade during which neoliberal reforms were applied with full strength;
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Writing about Workers, Reflecting on Dictatorship and Neoliberalism: Chilean Labor History and the Pinochet Dictatorship International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Ángela Vergara
This article explores the trajectory of Chilean labor history and its recent efforts to study workers’ experiences under the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990). Influenced by the impact of dictatorship on Chilean society as well as global historiographical debates, Labor Studies became an interdisciplinary and transnational field in Chile. This article focuses on the different academic traditions
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Implementing the Ridley Report: The Role of Thatcher's Policy Unit during the Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985 International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Phil Rawsthorne
The Conservative Party has long faced concerns that in regard to the great British miners’ strike of 1984–1985, senior Tories had, in fact, planned the confrontation as early as 1977, when still on the opposition benches. Historian John Savile pointed to the existence of the Ridley Report—a Conservative think-tank paper produced in 1977, which appeared to include a detailed blueprint on how to provoke
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“The Martyrs of the Saucepan:” Parisian Cooks, French Gastronomic Reputation, and Occupational Health around 1900 International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Martin Bruegel
Cooks exploited the leverage offered by the publication of information about the prevailing insalubrity in restaurant kitchens when Paris was at the center of global attention during the World Fairs of 1889 and 1900. They framed the issue of workers’ health in connection with consumer safety and gastronomic reputation. Their movement succeeded in securing the law of July 11, 1903 with its encompassing
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Challenging Colonial Forced Labor? Resistance, Resilience, and Power in Senegal (1920s–1940s) International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Romain Tiquet
Based on the combination of colonial archives and the analysis of several complaints published in Senegalese newspapers, this article sheds light on the daily compulsory reality experienced by local populations with regards to forced labor in colonial Senegal (1920s–1940s). In contrast to analyses approaching forced labor systems through the study of colonial bureaucratic routines, this article studies
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Ships, Bread, and Work: Agrarian Conflict in the Mediterranean Countryside, 1914–1923 International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Julia Hudson-Richards
This article examines the collapse of the citrus industry in València, Spain during the last years of World War I. In it, I argue that the strikes represent a key moment in the proletarianization of the region’s agricultural working classes. By 1914, citrus had become one of Spain’s most profitable exports, and prior to the 1917 crash, the landed and monied interests in control of the industry had
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The Making of a “Simple Domestic:” Domestic Workers, the Supreme Court, and the Law in Postrevolutionary Mexico International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Sara Hidalgo
This article examines the legal construction of domestic labor as an unskilled and undervalued occupation in postrevolutionary Mexico, a milieu that was otherwise renowned for an extraordinary expansion of workers’ rights. Based on the writing of legal scholars and legal disputes between domestic workers and their employers that reached Mexico's Supreme Court, the article discusses how a discourse
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Academic Casualization in the UK International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2018-01-01 Steven Parfitt
The casualization of academic work is a deepening problem at UK universities. From the late 1990s, the number of academics working on non-permanent, non-full-time contracts has skyrocketed, even as student fees have increased at an exponential rate. This casualization has generated resistance on the lower rungs of the academic ladder. On the one hand, the union for the higher education sector, the
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A State of Underdevelopment: Sovereignty, Nation-Building and Labor in Liberia 1898–1961 International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Christine Whyte
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Liberia was in the unusual position of being a colony with no metropole. Without military or financial support, the settlers’ control over their territory remained weak. Surrounding European empires preyed on this weakness, and Americo-Liberian rule was often at risk from coalitions of European forces and indigenous African resistance. From the early twentieth
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The Radical Left after 1968: From Ideological Craze to Reconfiguration of Politics International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Luca Falciola
By the mid-1970s, Jerry Rubin—icon of American radicalism and cofounder of the Yippies, who campaigned in 1968 to elect a pig as president of the United States and appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee dressed in an eighteenth-century Revolutionary War uniform—had transformed himself from protester to successful businessman. He launched a new career on Wall Street as a stockbroker
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“This Was Being Done Only to Help”: Development and Forced Labor in Barue, Mozambique, 1959–1965 International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Zachary Kagan Guthrie
This article examines the history of development and forced labor in Barue, a rural district in central Mozambique, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Barue was designated as a labor reserve, whose economic role was to send forced workers into migrant labor elsewhere. This was slated to change in the early 1960s, with the rise of a new developmental discourse in the
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In Memoriam: Judith Stein International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Joshua B. Freeman
Judith Stein, a long-time member of the ILWCH editorial board, died on May 8, 2017 after a long battle with cancer. Distinguished Professor of History at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Stein was one of the leading historians of the twentieth-century United States, especially of African American politics, labor, and political economy. She was widely admired
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Lessons from the 2016 Harvard Strike International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Carlos Aramayo
For 22 days during the month of October 2016, more than 750 cooks, food servers, dishwashers, and cashiers struck Harvard University’s dining halls. This was the first open-ended strike in the 380-year history of the institution. It drew national and international press and inspired many students, faculty, and members of the university community to rally in support of the workers. The strike’s picket
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What “Development” Does to Work International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Benedetta Rossi
This article introduces an Africa-focused special issue showing that the rise of development in its modern form coincided with the demise of the political legitimacy of forced labor. It argues that by mobilizing the idea of development, both colonial and independent African governments were able to continue recruiting unpaid (or underpaid) labor—relabeled as “voluntary participation,” “self-help,”
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The IWW in Turin: “Militant History,” Workers’ Struggle, and the Crisis of Fordism in 1970s Italy International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Nicola Pizzolato
In 1970s Italy, the historical trajectory, tactics and goals of the International Workers of the World (IWW)—the American radical labour union active between 1905 and 1924—rose to renown, and references to the Wobblies appeared frequently in essays, journal articles, books and in contemporary debates of Italy’s own radical movement. The 1970s were, according to labour activist and historian Peppino
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From Unfree Work to Working for Free: Labor, Aid, and Gender in the Nigerien Sahel, 1930–2000 International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Benedetta Rossi
This article focuses on the consequences of twentieth-century developmentalism for labor practices in the Nigerien Sahel under French rule and in the postindependence period. It examines labor regime transformations at the desert’s edge; the ways in which state-led developmentalism influenced labor relations; and gender disparities in the history of emancipation from slavery. Following the abolition
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Thinking Labor Rights through the Coolie Question International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Mae M. Ngai, Sophie Loy-Wilson
In 2014 the conservative Australian Institute of Public Affairs called for the abolition of the minimum wage—at the time AU$16.87, the highest in the industrial world and twice that of the United States. The Australian minimum, enacted in Victoria in 1896, was the first in the world. Other nations copied it, and the International Labor Organization inscribed it as an international convention in 1928
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Uniting Academic Workers: Graduate Workers Organize with the United Auto Workers International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Lindsey Dayton, Rudi Batzell
On Friday December 9, 2016, Columbia teaching and research assistants elected the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers (GWC-UAW) Local 2110 as their union with 1602 yes and 623 no votes. On December 22, a preliminary count for the Harvard Graduate Students Union-UAW was not conclusive, with 314 challenge ballots exceeding the margin between 1,272 yes and 1,456 no votes. Both elections were
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“It is All He Can Do to Cope with the Roads in His Own District”: Labor, Community, and Development in Northern Ghana, 1919–1936 International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Alice Wiemers
In the 1920s and 1930s, colonial officials in Ghana's Northern Territories formulated the first development plans for this hinterland region. Administrators recast local roads and bridges as instruments of agricultural production and began to pursue small-scale resettlement efforts. In the absence of colonial funding, officials layered the requirements of development onto existing forced labor policies
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Powderly Will Go to Paris: The Paris Exposition 1889 and the Knights of Labor International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Steven Parfitt
This article deals with one of the many neglected chapters of the global history of the Knights of Labor: the events that led the Knights to participate in one of the great international events of the age, the Paris Exposition of 1889, and their attempts to found their assemblies, as they called their branches, on French soil. Drawing on voluminous correspondence between the leaders of the Knights
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Belgian Rule and its Afterlives: Colonialism, Developmentalism, and Mobutism in the Tanganyika District, Southeastern DR-Congo, 1885–1985 International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Reuben Loffman
The arrival of Belgian rule in the late nineteenth century initiated significant changes in the labor history of Tanganyika, a province in the southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), as well the discursive regimes used to legitimize these transformations. After the colonial conquests, unfree labor was justified by paternalistic rather than mythical discourses. Although unfree labor was
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Come Together, Right Now/Over Me, Over You, Over Us International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Georgette Fleischer
In the wake of a U.S. presidential election that will send Donald J. Trump, besmircher of the New York skyline and riverfront, to Washington D.C., I hope I can be forgiven for waxing nostalgic over a different “flat top” with “joo joo eyeballs”—one who, unlike the current orangey combed-over bogey, imagined himself in a funky self-parody “grooving up slowly.” In a 1972 New York performance of the song
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Redefining Exploitation: Self-Employed Workers’ Movements in India's Garments and Trash Collection Industries International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2016-01-01 Rina Agarwala
This article examines how self-employed workers are organizing in the garments and waste collection industries in India. Although the question of who is profiting from self-employed workers’ labor is complex, the cases outlined in this paper highlight telling instances of how some self-employed workers are organizing as workers. They are fighting labor exploitation by redefining the concept to include
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Precarious Class Formations in the United States and South Africa International Labor and Working-Class History (IF 0.364) Pub Date : 2016-01-01 Marcel Paret
Recent scholarship highlights the global expansion of precarious layers of the working class. This article examines the growth and collective struggles of such precarious layers in two very different places: California, United States and Gauteng, South Africa. The comparison challenges and extends existing research in two ways. First, it shows that the spread of insecurity is far from uniform, taking
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