This special issue on precarious labor in global perspective includes analyses of precarious work in South Africa, Mexico, the United States, China and India. The key strengths of the contributions to this issue are that they demonstrate precarious workers’ capacity for collective action, the hidden forms of work that are not tracked by states, long-term historical continuities of precarious work, and differences between precarious work in the Global North and South. This introduction explores the challenges of conceptualizing precarious work; the history of precarious labor; its variations in the Global North and South; possible differences across sectors of precarious work; and the intersections between precarious work and categories of gender, race, and citizenship status. We conclude with a summary of the articles included in the issue.

This article explores some of the visual imagery that has emerged from the process of deindustrialization. It seeks to understand the similarities and differences between post-industrial photography collected in book format in both North America and Europe and the critics of this genre. It makes sense of the value and meaning of this publishing trend and what it says about its market. While it would be easy to dismiss this material as “simply nostalgic,” representing another manifestation of “smokestack nostalgia,” this article suggests that we need a more nuanced account which asks questions about the continuing desire to reflect back and find value in the industrial past. In so doing it makes a contribution to a wider critical account of the role of cultural approaches to interpreting industrial change and working-class history.

This article explores the political dynamics of labor migration in the Middle East. It seeks to explain the politics of Arab population movements by looking at historical trends in regional integration and contends that migration to the oil-rich countries, including refugee flows, has been the key factor driving Arab integration in the absence of effective institutions and economic integration processes. To account for the influence of this largely forgotten factor, the article looks at the formal and informal institutions that have shaped massive labor flows from the 1970s onward. It offers historical evidence pointing to the role of migration in Arab regional integration by looking at free circulation of Eritrean refugees and migrants in the Arab region using oral history and administrative archives. Linking labor migration, refugee movements, and regional politics, the article introduces the concept of “migration diplomacy” as an analytical framework and argues that the politics of regional integration can be better understood when looked at through the lens of migration.

This article examines the changes to and relations between labor policy and labor legislation in the context of China's market transition with a focus on the 1994 Labor Law and the 2007 Labor Contract Law. The initial impetus to labor policy change came from the unemployment crisis at the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s. Since then, the state has relaxed its control over labor mobility and job allocation. The last two decades of the last century witnessed the most important changes in China's labor policy, that is, the replacement of lifelong employment with contract-based employment and the replacement of government job assignment with the labor market. Such changes indicate the paradigmatic shifts of China's labor policy in the reform era. Under the new labor policy paradigm, the role of law has been strengthened in governing labor relations and other labor-related affairs. Within the policy context of promoting economic growth while maintaining social stability, both policy and law are coordinated and complementary in stabilizing labor relations and protecting labor rights. Given the socioeconomic circumstances and the underdevelopment of the rule of law in China, policy is still important during the period of market transition.

While historians have provided insights into the ways women's work culture and labor organizing were infused with issues of sex, sexuality and appearance, they have not similarly examined the white male working body. This article discusses the significance of this different analysis for our understanding of men workers and for its ability to continue to marginalize women at the workplace. It considers how to incorporate the “bodily turn” in history by examining three conceptual themes in research on working-class masculinity: masculinity crises, muscular masculinity, and homosociality.

In this introductory essay we review key themes in the scholarly literature on deindustrialization over the last twenty-five to thirty years. While the term deindustrialization has been in use since the early 1980s, more careful attention needs to be brought to bear on the cultural significance of industrial change over time, including on how individuals and communities reinterpret deindustrialization through the lens of memory. This essay highlights contributions that reflect multiple disciplines and approaches, including interdisciplinary work. We also argue that cultural representations such as photography, literature, the media, and personal narratives offer especially useful insights into the continuing significance of deindustrialization, giving us access to the ways people are drawing on and constructing their memories of industrial work and of the process of deindustrialization itself. This essay and the wider special issue suggest that taking a long view—from the perspective of more than two decades after major shutdowns—and examining documentary, personal, and creative representations provides important insights into the meanings and consequences of the experience of deindustrialization for individuals, communities, and nations.

This paper analyzes the roots of resistance to the privatization of public services in the context of the changes to class formation in Bolivia. Based upon two case studies of urban water privatization, it seeks to explain why the social coalitions that have emerged to protest the privatization of public water services in Bolivia have been led by territorially-based organizations composed of rural-urban and multiclass alliances rather than public-sector unions. It argues that protest against the privatization of water utilities in Bolivia must be understood within the context of neoliberal economic restructuring and the emergence of what has been termed the “new working class,” which is now primarily urban and engaged in informal forms of work.

By the early 1980s, the class-centered politics of the socialist tradition was in crisis. In this situation, leading commentators took apocalyptic tones. By the end of the 1980s, the Left remained deeply divided between the advocates of change (“New Times” required new politics) and the defenders of the faith (class politics could be practiced, mutatis mutandis, much as before). By the mid-1990s the former had mainly carried the day. We wish to present this contemporary transformation not as the “death of class,” but as the passing of one particular type of class society, one marked by the process of working-class formation between the 1880s and 1940s and the resulting political alignment, reaching its apogee in the social democratic construction of the postwar settlement. As long-term changes in the economy combined with the attack on Keynesianism in the politics of recession from the mid-1970s, the unity of the working class ceased to be available in the old and well-tried way, as the natural ground of left-wing politics. While one dominant working-class collectivity went into decline (the classic male proletarians of mining, transportation, and manufacturing industry, with their associated forms of trade unionism and residential concentration), another slowly and unevenly materialized to take its place (predominantly female white-collar workers in services and all types of public employment). But the operative unity of this new working-class aggregation—its active agency as an organized political presence—is still very much in formation. To reclaim the political efficacy of the socialist tradition, some new vision of collective political agency will be needed, one imaginatively keyed to the emerging conditions of capitalist production and accumulation at the start of the twenty-first century. Class needs to be reshaped, reassembled, put back together again in political ways. To use a Gramscian adage: The old has been dying, but the new has yet to be born. Class decomposition is yet to be replaced by its opposite, the recomposition of class into a new and coherently shaped form.

How has the Law and Justice Party in Poland (PiS) been able to get significant labor support to introduce far-right policies that undermine pluralist democracy? We look at PiS in the context of the “left fascist” traditions of the past, when redistributionist policies won wide support among workers who were accepted as part of the favored “nation.” Labor support breaks down along three lines, with industrial labor most closely aligned with PiS, white-collar labor (in education and health) mostly opposed, and the marginalized small-city precariat being mobilized by PiS, but also finding a place in explicitly fascist parties further to the Right. Left alternatives, weakened due to the collapse of class discourse, are slowly reemerging, but the Right will likely command most labor support for the near future.

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 town of Norfolk, Virginia. Foregrounding the objects and people whose value(s) are called into question as the context around them changes, I draw on two key interlocutors whose scavenging is conditioned by the “betterment”—community revitalization and “clean up”—programs that seek to displace them. As Sal “saves” Bed-Stuy by directing the flow of the dismembered ghetto, Superfly redirects coffee shop ephemera to black barbershops. By attending to how trash moves, Sal's and Superfly's labor make visible the material conditions of gentrification and point to how race and time are spatialized under racial capitalism.

In this paper I argue that adopting an explicitly spatial theoretical framework can add significantly to our understanding of working-class life. Specifically, I argue that workers are spatial as well as historical social agents and that they seek to shape the economic landscape in ways which facilitate their political and economic goals, though they clearly do not have free range to do so—workers make their own geographies, though not under the conditions of their own choosing. The paper explores how capitalism functions as a spatial system, what this means for workers' spatial praxis, and how workers can try to shape capitalism's geography to their own ends. The paper is in three main sections. The first section lays out the conceptual basis for understanding capitalism as a spatial system. In the second section I examine a number of ways in which a sensitivity to matters spatial can help us understand workers' social praxis. The third section explores some issues related to how the changing geography of capitalism is providing new challenges to workers and organized labor.

This article explores the changing workplace and labor-management relations in the Chinese automobile industry under the influence of globalization and China's market reform. It depicts the everyday working lives of Chinese autoworkers and the shop-floor dynamics of labor relations based on the author's intensive fieldwork at the seven major automobile assembly enterprises in China during 2004–2007.

The main findings of this paper are that, in spite of the generalized lean production and homogenization of workplace experiences of Chinese autoworkers, two different models of labor controls have emerged in the Chinese auto industry: “lean-and-dual” and “lean-and-mean.” On the one hand, under the lean-and-dual regime, management adopts labor force dualism by using both formal contract workers and agency workers on production lines side by side, which leads to a “hybrid” factory regime that combines both “hegemonic” and “despotic” elements. Hegemonic relations have been established between management and formal workers based on high wages, generous benefits, better working conditions, and relatively secure employment for formal workers, while “despotic” labor control characterizes the conditions for temporary agency workers with lower wages and insecure employment.

On the other hand, the lean-and-mean type of auto firms adopt a high-wage, high-turnover strategy of lean production without the promise of job security to their entire workforce. The interventionist roles of the Chinese central and local states in regulating labor relations and the roles of managerial staff, factory unions, and factory party committees in building hegemonic consent among workers in the auto industry are also explored. The paper concludes by discussing the potentials and limits of Chinese autoworkers and the likely roles they are to play in the evolution of labor relations under China's current market transition and globalization.

This article explores the legacy of the demise of the deep coal mining industry in Scotland. It places particular emphasis on the cultural scars of this process as witnessed through miners' and managers' memories, positioning these within the context of occupational socialization, conflict, and alienation. The piece explores the enduring importance of these cultural scars in shaping broader collective narratives of decline in Scotland, and how responses were manifest in shifting political outlooks and the emergence (at both a local and national level) of a resurgent nationalism from the early 1960s onward. Drawing on the notion of the “cultural circuit,” the article examines how and why personal experience of the loss of the coal industry informed and conformed to the politics of the miners' union in Scotland, the National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area (NUMSA). As the article makes clear, the program of closures in the industry has left profound psychological scars in coalfield communities—ones that, like the closure of other major industrial sites, shape a powerful national narrative.

In the first section of this essay I discuss alternative ways of interpreting an eighteenth-century anecdote about employment relations. This serves to introduce a series of arguments that advocate altering our conception of labor history (with special reference to American labor history) in ways that center it on the study of household relations. Asserting that law is the primary site upon which authoritative social relations are constituted, I also argue that legal history—in this case the history of domestic relations law—is of fundamental importance to the labor history the essay recommends.

On the basis of anthropological fieldwork carried out in South Gujarat in the early 1960s, I described and analyzed a system of bonded labor that dominated the relationship between low-caste farm servants and high-caste landowners (Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India, 1974). More recently, I have gone back to the study of agrarian bondage of the past in order to explore in greater detail the emergence of unfree labor in the precolonial era and comment on its demise as a result of efforts made by the colonial state, the nationalist movement, and peasant activists (Labour Bondage in West India from Past to Present, 2007). A recurrent research theme during my fieldwork in the last few decades has been drawing attention to practices of neo-bondage (neo because the relationship between bosses and workers is less personalized, of shorter duration, more contractual, and monetized) at the bottom of India's informal-sector economy. Additionally, the elements of patronage that offered a modicum of protection and security to bonded clients in the past have disappeared while the transition to a capitalist mode of production accelerated.