The recent controversy over a foreign-owned company running a US port brought attention to the creeping privatization of work in ports worldwide. Since the 1980s, there has been a head-long rush to privatize ports. The pace can be best described as rapid and chaotic. For some economists privatization is seen as a method to increase efficiency. But the process has substantial critics. For many privatization is perceived as problematic. There is evidence that the process does not indeed lead to savings and greater efficiency. Instead, the process has been haphazard and far from uniform in its application. Even where there is an entrenched presence, savings from privatization have yet to be realized. Others have made the point that the process cannot be transferred to ports in the developing world. That is, the multiplicity of ports and transportation problems in the interior make privatization more like wishful thinking than a policy that can work.

When most people think of the United Farm Workers, two things come to mind: Cesar Chávez and the grape boycott. Regarding the former, Chávez distinguished himself as perhaps the best-known Mexican American labor and civil rights leader in the country through his advocacy for farm worker rights in California during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1970, the union he led forced growers to the bargaining table for the first farm labor contracts in the history of the Golden State. This achievement would not have been possible without Chávez's embrace of the boycott, a strategy that, until proven important to the struggle, had been regarded by labor leaders as supplemental to the main strategies of strikes and marches. In fact, when we evaluate the contributions of the United Farm Workers to the history of labor in the United States, the grape boycott might well be its most enduring legacy, even more so than Chávez's leadership.

When, beginning on June 22, 1941, German forces sliced through Soviet defenses, Soviet citizens severed their ties with the Stalinist state. In the Western Borderlands, annexed in 1939–1940 as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact, locals welcomed the invaders with bread and salt as liberators from the Bolshevik yoke. Red Army men hailing from these regions left their posts and went home. Soldiers from the pre-1939 Soviet territories stationed in Ukraine deserted, too, reasoning that the Bolsheviks had “sucked our blood for twenty-five years, enough already!” A group of two hundred soldiers, including an outspoken Siberian, “decided to force our way back, at all cost, toward the Germans.” When army commissars tried to stop them, “[w]e killed them and moved on.” Further East, collective farmers in the pre-1939 territories greeted the German “liberators” in some localities, while displaying a “wait-and-see” attitude in others. One day after the start of the war an inhabitant of Leningrad region reacted to the news of his mobilization by threatening the official bearing the news with a revolver, exclaiming “I will not fight for Soviet Power, I will fight for Hitler!” Urban dwellers rejoiced at the arrival of the long-awaited apocalypse, believing that “the fascists kill Jews and Communists, but don't touch Russians.” As Moscow descended into panic in October 1941, crowds stopped functionaries leaving the city, pulled them out of their cars, assaulted them, and scattered the contents of their luggage on the ground. “Beat the Jews,” yelled the crowd, and protesting their non-Jewishness did not help the victims; to the mob, “Jew” and “functionary” were one and the same. On October 19, workers struck in Ivanovo, an industrial center with a long tradition of militancy. Excited by the spectacle of the advancing Germans and the apparent inability of the Stalinist leadership to stop them, rioters destroyed administrative and Party buildings and beat up state and Party activists, including the first secretary of the region. They demanded “Soviets without communists,” while discussing seriously whether life would be better under Hitler or Stalin. Meanwhile, back at the frontline, where news of the “massive beating up of Jews” in Moscow quickly spread, the state's enforcement agencies arrested soldiers voicing their discontent. They also ensured that both the confused and the hostile would fight. By October 10, People's Commissariat Internal Affairs (NKVD) forces had detained 657,364 soldiers separated from their units. The majority were returned to the front and thrown back into battle; 25,878 were arrested, 10,201 of them shot.

Workers’ education, understood to mean the education of workers by workers for purposes they themselves determine, has always been highly contested terrain, just like work itself. If there is to be an adequate global history of workers’ education, it will need to be guided by a suitable general theory. Hegel most expansively and Durkheim most persuasively argued that societies are cognitive and moral projects, of which education is constitutive: knowing and social being are inextricably bound up with one another. In the global democratic revolutions of the last 250 years, the labor movement distinguished itself as simultaneously a social movement, an education in democracy, and a struggle for a democratic education. The history of workers’ education is a history of workers striving to remake their communities into democracies and themselves into democrats. This brief essay introduces a collection of essays representative of a new generation of scholarship on the history of workers’ education, which we hope will help both traditional and emerging labor movements understand their past and think more clearly about their future.

The most widely accepted narrative about the long-term history of slavery in Ottoman lands rests on a supply-side story. According to this, military and diplomatic factors reduced the inflow of slaves from the seventeenth century onwards and, consequently, exorbitant prices turned slaveholding into a luxury inaccessible to all but the top elite. Using evidence from probate inventories of the city of Bursa and its hinterland from 1460 to 1880, the present study examines this narrative in light of the incidence of slave-ownership and prices. We observe substantial decline in slaveholding already before the beginning of the government reforms concerning slavery and slave trade in the nineteenth century. We also find a decline in slave prices, both absolute and relative to wages. This is unexpected. Further analysis suggests, on the one hand, that a different supply factor, relative increase in the African slave population due to changes in the global traffic may have been instrumental in these trends, which links Bursa's non-colonial market to world slavery. On the other hand, examination of the consumption/investment preferences of the wealthy suggests that demand for slaves, too, may have declined, we surmise, in response to demographic and social change affecting alternative labor costs as well as cultural change affecting the meaning of slaveholding.

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; and the post 2001-crisis, a time of economic growth and complex transformation of the academic sphere. It will examine approaches to two different complex and heterogeneous actors: the working class, its political and social role, as well as the labor force; and the trade-union movement, as the institutional organizations supposed to represent labor interests. In dialog with the historiographical analysis, the last part of the article will summarize some of the main existing open questions, as well as the possibly fruitful lines of research ahead.

This article describes a form of agricultural labor intensification common in the postwar Soviet Union that shares some important similarities to Clifford Geertz's notion of agricultural involution, first devised to describe Javanese wet rice agriculture. Using the examples of hog farming and cotton production, this paper describes the phenomenon of postwar agricultural involution, and explores its limits and possibilities. The most important divergence from Geertz's original model is that in the Soviet cases, agricultural involution did not attain any form of environmental equilibrium; in fact, because of agricultural involution, the Soviet Union was forced to confront the environmental limits of agricultural intensification. The concept of agricultural involution provides a way of thinking about the relative flexibility or rigidity of agroecological health in the face of labor intensification. This quality—how much additional labor and how many extra humans an agricultural ecosystem is able to support—is critical in evaluating how robust or fragile a landscape is.

Taking the long view, this article analyzes how the expanding power of Egyptian elites, and the emergent commercial agriculture they sponsored, forever changed the rural labor practices of peasant cultivators and their relationships to environmental resources. From the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 until the second half of the eighteenth century, Egyptian farmers initiated and oversaw the construction and repair of small-scale irrigation and other infrastructural works in their local environments. They controlled how and when their labor was used. At the end of the eighteenth century, rural labor in Egypt dramatically changed. It became coerced, required the large-scale movement of peasant laborers, resulted in enormous environmental manipulation, and was often deadly. This article thus explains how forced labor, deleterious environmental exploitation, extractive economics, and population movements emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and how they have come to characterize the relationship between work and the environment in rural Egypt from that period until today.

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 recycling economies. This trend represents a departure from historical waste management policies, which tend to view waste and waste work as separate from main economic and household activities, but is consistent with market economies’ trend of outsourcing dirty, demeaning, and dangerous labor to precarious and informal workforces, while at the same time granting them only limited legal access to waste materials and trash collection sites. The new forms of waste labor emerging from green capitalism's emphasis on private and small-scale recycling behaviors are largely invisible and unpaid; however, unlike more documented forms of global environmental racism denouncing the outsourcing of toxic materials to the Global South, they take place in industrialized countries where they are pushed upon disenfranchised minorities, such as informal workers, racialized ethnic minorities, and low-income women. In this article we examine women's participation in waste work through the lenses of waste, (in)visibility, and intersectionality. We draw on ethnographic and archival data collected in the city of Naples, Italy, an area with a prolonged history of toxic waste contamination and waste mismanagement which in recent years have drawn renewed scrutiny to public waste management as well as to everyday waste practices performed in households and workplaces, predominantly by women of different race and citizenship backgrounds. Through these experiences, we highlight how the increasing visibility of waste generated by green capitalism, coupled with the stigmatization and criminalization of informal waste collection and recycling, is generating new forms of social inequalities and exclusion.

It has become an embarrassment. The American Conservative crows, “Cesar Chávez, Minuteman,” and the accompanying article delivers the news that the United Farm Workers was not only anti-immigrant but that it set up its own border patrol between Arizona and Mexico. The magazine does not stand alone. Leaders of current right-wing vigilante groups claim Chávez's retroactive endorsement for their occasional attempts to close small sections of the border. In response, Chávez's defenders contend that the UFW opposed the undocumented only when they broke strikes; and besides, that was long ago, and now the union is a strong defender of immigrant rights. Thus, UFW policy toward the undocumented—controversial in its own time—once again has become a subject of public debate, threatening to tarnish the name given to so many California streets, parks, schools, community centers, and even university departments.

Gay male stewards performing drag shows on large passenger ships in the 1930s. Male hustlers selling sex to men for money and then going home to their girlfriends in the 1950s. Lesbian bus drivers organizing in the 1970s to include “sexual orientation” in their union contract's antidiscrimination clause. Gay male flight attendants fired from their jobs for being HIV-positive in the 1980s. These are some of the stories told in the four books under review, each about the queer labor history of the United States.

For as long as the people of Monterrey, Nuevo León could remember, class harmony had characterized their preeminently industrial city. Local residents attributed this aura of industrial peace to the unique character of the region's workers and the inherent benevolence of their employers. They took special pride in both. Like all northerners, Monterrey's workers had a reputation for hard work, industriousness, and staunch independence. They manifested the last through their celebrated autonomy from Mexico's national labor federations. The industrialists, in turn, earned local renown for having built their companies with Mexican capital. Furthermore, such pillars of local industry as the Cuauhtemoc Brewery and the Fundidora Iron and Steel Works provided fringe benefits unique by contemporary Mexican standards. Since the 1920s, local boosters claimed, company paternalism had established the basis for Monterrey's industrial peace and prosperity. Then, just as General Lázaro Cárdenas assumed the presidency in 1935, class struggle seemingly engulfed the city. In a startling development, the steel workers broke from the Independent Unions of Nuevo León and affiliated with the national Miner-Metalworkers Union. Two weeks later, the operatives of Monterrey Glassworks, a Cuauhtemoc subsidiary, voted in support of militant unionism.

In less than a minute on a summer evening in 1944, an earthquake reduced the city of San Juan to rubble, leaving ten thousand dead and half the province homeless. The worst natural disaster in Argentine history, the tragedy was an indictment of the old political order and a spur for the new order to come.On June 4, 1943, a military coup overthrew the last of the fraudulently elected democratic governments that had ruled Argentina since 1930. The military denounced not only the deposed regime but the liberal democratic order itself as fundamentally unjust and corrupt, proclaiming a need for social justice under authoritarian rule. Here the recently-installed military regime had its first chance to deliver on promises of social justice, as the little-known secretary of labor, Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, directed a massive relief campaign and commissioned ambitious plans for rebuilding. The social project to build a new citizenship was launched together with the spatial project to build a new city.

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 that framed domestic labor as an occupation confined within the protective bounds of the household became an enduring legal formula to justify and reinforce the exclusion of domestics from labor protections recognized for other workers. In so doing, it shows how Supreme Court jurisprudence ultimately redefined the criteria for delimiting this large occupational category based on what was understood as its particular spatialization (the indoor household space) and its distinctive temporalization (guided by family needs instead of production demands). Designating workers who fit these criteria as “simple domestics,” the Court erased any professional specialization among them, marginalizing this overwhelmingly female workforce from other service workers, such as doormen and private drivers, who had previously been considered “domestic.”