This article examines the impact of the capitalist economy, colonial rule, and wage labor on African masculinity and how African ideas about manhood impacted behavior and expectations of work in the coal mines of the Enugu Government Colliery in southeastern Nigeria from 1914 until the great depression. These mines were a “site” where racism became a crucial part of British strategies to control African labor and is one of the first places African workers experienced the “colonial masculinity” of racist white bosses. Both the workplace and the development of the city of Enugu encouraged subordinate local men (local slaves, unmarried men, poor men) to challenge the hegemony of powerful elite rural men in the form of rural revolts by men pressed into the mines and waves of industrial protest against conditions in the mines. Coalminers' presence in and political ties to rural villages led them to push for increased wages used to enhance their standing as men in their communities. Also, both the material and ritual requirements of rural male status and the masculine ethos of coalmining figured critically in workers' assessments of a “just” wage and respectful working conditions. Finally, miners drew strength from their position as “modern,” self-improving rural men to challenge racist (the African “boy”) and emasculating treatment in the mines. At the same time working men drew strength from their jobs in a “modern” industry (and the income they generated) to challenge the power of authoritarian colonial chiefs and elite men in the rural village. The article suggests that by factoring race and masculinity into the analysis of African laboring men scholars can gain new insights into the consciousness of workers.

“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.

“It is hard to think of an idea more immediate,” says Amartya Sen, than that of “the living standard. . . . It figures a good deal in everyday thought. It is, in fact, one of the few economic concepts that is not commonly greeted with the uncommon skepticism reserved for the other concepts of economics.”Amartya Sen and John Muellbauer, The Standard of Living (New York, 1987), 1. At the turn of our century, however, this was certainly not the case. A “standard of living” was neither “immediate” nor “everyday.” The term itself rarely appeared before the 1920s. Even then, observed one economist surveying her contemporaries' vocabulary and assumptions, “all the meaning, and the exact meaning, that is bound up in it” was far from clear. Hazel Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption (New York, 1923), 174. On different meanings, see also Carle Zimmerman, Consumption and Standards of Living (New York, 1936), 4–10; and Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: Workers and the Making of American Consumer Society (Ithaca, 1997), which is reviewed in International Labor and Working-Class History 56 (forthcoming, Fall 1999). It could variously signify a technical measure of purchasing power, an aspiration, or an entitlement—although whether to a minimum subsistence or a more expansive notion of comfort would be bitterly disputed. For many European intellectuals of the 1920s, the term, almost solely used as “American standard,” captured in one phrase the threat or the promise of the increased economic clout of the United States, Fordism as an economic strategy, and a new politics of material abundance. On both sides of the Atlantic, all of these meanings were hotly contested by economists, reform sociologists, political leaders, and the labor movement. In short, some historical scrutiny seems in order. What did the concept mean and when? What light would a genealogy of the “standard of living” shed on the prehistory of “mass consumption” or the transition to new consumer regimes of the twentieth century?

From the post-World War II era to the present, the US garment industry has turned to Latinas as a source of low-wage workers in their countries of origin and as migrants to the United States. The globalization of the garment industry has meant the proliferation of export processing zones overseas and of sweatshops in US cities. Sweatshops, here and there, have become a locus of Latinas' labor in the global economy. This essay examines the impact of this evolving process on Puerto Rican and Dominican women, in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and as labor migrants to New York City. The globalization of the garment industry provides an example of the economic and political connections between the United States and countries of origin that shape migrations, as well as a lens for understanding deteriorating economic conditions in the inner cities.

Scholars examining ethnic and racial barriers in twentieth-century societies have argued that they function to reinforce workplace inequalities, perpetuating a substratum of superexploited and disenfranchised workers for the benefit of capital. Debate continues as to whether the state, deliberately or inadvertently, willingly or unwillingly, has helped to reinforce these barriers. Locating the history of British state support for race segregation within this debate is an effort to move discussion away from the prevalent and unfocused emphasis on popular racism or “intolerance” to examine the material underpinnings of racial conflict.

Following the onset of mass politics in early twentieth-century Latin America, party systems were distinguished by different patterns of labor incorporation. In some countries, political competition was realigned by the emergence of a mass-based, labor-mobilizing populist or leftist party. In other countries, party systems remained under the control of traditional oligarchic parties or elite personalities who provided little impetus for labor mobilization. Countries with labor-mobilizing party systems were more deeply embedded in the state-led model of capitalist development known as import substitution industrialization in the middle of the twentieth century, and they suffered severe economic trauma when this development model collapsed in the debt crisis of the 1980s. Economic austerity and free-market reforms undermined the social foundations of these party systems, which experienced sharp declines in trade-union density and widespread electoral volatility during the waning decades of the twentieth century.

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, and secondly win, a battle against Britain's powerful miners’ union. After Margaret Thatcher's second election victory, and her first landslide, in 1983, the Prime Minister populated the Downing Street Policy Unit with private-sector allies who looked to implement aspects of the report. Some of these allies had clear economic incentives in running down British coal. Nevertheless, the Policy Unit members were instrumental in determining government policy concerning all aspects of the strike, including preparation, policing, the law courts, financial concerns and the portrayal of the strike in the media. The campaign by Thatcher's Policy Unit resulted in a shattering blow for Britain's trade union movement from which it has yet to recover—just as the Ridley Report had predicted.

Since the early twentieth century Eugene V. Debs and his essay “The Negro in the Class Struggle” have been cited repeatedly as examples of an alleged indifference among white radicals to African Americans and the historical significance of racism in the United States. A close reading of the essay reveals just the opposite. Not only did Debs support African Americans' struggle for equality, he believed that it was critical to the realization of America's democratic promise. That position alienated him from other white Socialists, but it won the admiration of African American radicals including W.E.B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph. This essay examines how Debs's essay came to be interpreted as a capitulation to racism and, over time, alleged indifference to African Americans and the significance of racism in the history of the United States.

Recent interpretations of World War Two have stressed the decisive role of economics in the success of the Allies and especially in the failure of the Axis. Yet the place of labor in the war remains under-appreciated. ILWCH commissioned several essays for a special issue on wartime labor mobilization, forced and free. This introduction briefly compares Nazi Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and highlights the implications of the differing wartime labor regimes for the postwar period.

The Labor Movement has entered a crisis. Declining support for unions and for socialist political movements reflects the exhaustion of a reformist growth strategy where capitalists and state officials accepted unions in exchange for labor peace. While winning real gains for workers, this strategy undermined labor and its broader democratic aspirations by establishing unions and union and party leaders as authorities over the workers themselves. In the upheavals of the late-1960s and the 1970s, dissident movements, directed as much against reformist leaders as against employers and state officials, pushed protest beyond traditional limits toward demands for popular empowerment and democracy. Union decline began then, not because workers had lost interest in collective action but because employers and state officials abandoned collective bargaining to find alternative means of controlling unrest. Capitalism entered a new post-union era, when national leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan used policies of open trade and capital flows and high unemployment to discipline labor. Abandoned by their capitalist bargaining partners, reformist unions and political parties have withered. Now, without social space for reformist movements, the labor movement can only advance by openly avowing its original goals of popular empowerment and the establishment of economic democracy.

Religion is becoming a crucial issue in women's history. Tired of portraying women as misguided victims, historians have begun to show how women have used religion, especially radical religion, to gain added status or at least impart meaning to their lives.l But in this new portrayal we must be careful to untangle the threads of female religious symbolism from the realities of women's lives, to examine the contrast between the opportunities for women in radical religion and the restrictions placed upon them by established churches and chapels. Furthermore, we must consider that religion is vital to the construction of masculinity in strengthening patriarchal power but also in revealing the needs of men, especially plebeian and working-class men, to cope with their lack of power.

Planned working-class suburbanization began in Ireland in the early twentieth century, coinciding with a period of labor unrest and serious housing problems. Through a focus on Dublin in the first forty years of the century, this paper illustrates the persistence of debates about the relative merits of central as opposed to suburban housing, which were reflected in the policy oscillation of Dublin Corporation. It also shows an enduring policy bias towards the upper tier of the working class, which led to increasing class and social segregation. While changing policies tended to reflect the influence of political parties in power, the overall political weakness of the working class resulted in a failure to seize control of their own destiny.

This article examines the experiences of Spanish workers during the construction of the Panama Canal by the United States from 1904 to 1914. Spaniards engaged in a wide range of protest actions during the construction years, from strikes to food riots to anarchist politics. Employing Victor Turner's concept of liminality, the article highlights the mutability of the Spaniards' position and identity and examines several factors that shaped their experiences: the US government's policies of racial segregation and the injustices Spaniards experienced; the political and racial identities they brought with them from Spain; and their complex racial and imperial status in the Canal Zone. Spaniards possessed a remarkably fluid racial identity, considered white or nonwhite depending on circumstances, and that shifting status fueled their racial animosities as well as their protests.

In Sweden, workers’ education—Arbetarbildning—is part of the all-embracing popular adult education movement that assumed its organizational consolidation in the late 1800s. Popular education—Folkbildning—is a culturally determined practice of social communication with roots in the Reformation and the Enlightenment, playing a decisive role in the shaping of the Swedish labor movement in the late 1800s, the history of which is intertwined with democratization and the transformation of Sweden into a highly developed welfare society. The pedagogical and ideological configuration of labor education in Sweden is surveyed from a historical perspective through the lenses of the Workers’ Educational Association (ABF) and the labor movement's most powerful branches: the Social Democratic Party (SAP) and the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO). Workers’ education was utilized as a political strategy for a just and equitable society, via successive reforms, based on knowledge and initiated and supported by well-informed citizens.

In this article, I examine the contours of pan-Pacific revolutionary trade union internationalism from 1923 up through 1934, with special attention to the years 1928 to 1934, which years are commonly understood in Communist International (Comintern) historiography as the Third Period. The Third Period is typically viewed as being characterized by “a loss of influence” on the part of the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU or Profintern) as a result of the Comintern's “left” turn. My research shows that in spite of high levels of repression across Asia during the late 1920s and early 1930s and the continued existence of restrictive immigration and shipping laws in North America, the pan-Pacific revolutionary trade union movement retained a visible presence across the Pacific. Sustaining this movement were two groups of actors. First, were Chinese and Japanese seamen who, subject as they were to severe repression, understood that the strength of their unions at the local scale depended at least in part upon support from overseas and their ability to command space at the regional and international scales. Therefore, at great risk, through face to face contact and the medium of print, they sought to forge pan-Pacific ties of international solidarity. Second, were the Chinese and Japanese immigrant Communists who, also at great personal risk and with their efforts also always subject to repression and failure, sought to “jump” scales by boarding ships that came into North American ports and on which Chinese or Japanese seamen worked. Together these immigrant workers and seamen were the “conductors of the [pan-Pacific] revolutionary movement” linking up one side of the Pacific with the other.