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.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, some of the most contentious disputes over international labor standards and worker rights occurred not between Western nations and the “rest” but within single nations. To explore the deep fissures in Japanese society over the rights of women and workers, I offer the first scholarly account of Japan's only woman representative to the ILO's inaugural 1919 Washington conference, elite social feminist Tanaka Taka, grandniece of renowned Japanese capitalist Shibusawa Eiichi. I recount her efforts in Japan and in Washington to secure free speech and economic rights for Japan's workers, men and women, and detail the hostilities she encountered from employers and organized labor. In addition, I reconstruct the parallel tale of factory supervisor Masumoto Uhei whose appointment as Japan's labor delegate led to widespread labor protests and a power struggle between trade unions and the state in Japan. The debate over who would speak for Japan's workers at the ILO and whether Japan would accept the labor standards being proposed by Western nations captured worldwide attention. It changed ideas in the East and the West about what Japan's workers deserved and desired and had lasting consequences for global politics and social policy.

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 scenario after 1964. The second part of the article examines the themes of the most recent studies about workers and the labor movement during the military regime, emphasizing existing blind spots and future challenges for scholarship.

The autonomist Marxist critique of determinist Marxism offers even more valuable insights for labor historians than that mounted by earlier antideterminists, such as Sartre and Thompson, who emphasized proletarian agency to counter determinist orthodoxy in which the accumulative logic of capital unilaterally shapes the world. Autonomist Marxism is more far-reaching. It places labor at the very beginning of the labor-capital dialectic: Labor can exist independently of capital, but capital needs to command labor to ensure profit; therefore, capitalist development does not occur due to internal momentum but in reaction to labor's tendency to unloose itself from capital. Linebaugh and Rediker offer a similar hypothesis in exploring the myth of the many-headed hydra—and demonstrate the fruitfulness of such an approach. By contrast, the notion of the multitude in Hardt and Negri's Empire has not been well received by labor historians due to its inexplicable abstraction when read in isolation from other autonomist texts. This article attempts to rescue the ideas of autonomist Marxist philosophers, especially Toni Negri, from the enormous condescension of labor history.

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 efforts to incorporate workers into hegemonic capitalist social relations. The form that right-wing activity takes depends on the histories of working-class mobilization and the class power of workers. Thus, right-wing actors do not exclusively dictate the terms of the engagement with workers, but workers also exercise agency in shaping and contesting this interaction.

The article examines the history of the violent 1955 Perfect Circle strike to join the growing body of labor history scholarship that rejects the existence of a postwar “labor-management accord.” Contrary to previous depictions of a postwar “class peace,” the small-town industrial Midwest stood as a key battleground between unionized workers and competitive-sector employers such as the Indiana-based Perfect Circle Corporation, a small, family-owned manufacturer, a model welfare capitalist firm, and one of the nation's leading automotive parts producers. Driven by their desire to hold down labor costs and their own antistatist ideology, Perfect Circle's owners had opposed the New Deal and, by the late 1930s, had shed their previous provincialism to join the national political coalition of business conservatives in the National Association of Manufacturers to secure the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. During the Cold War era, even while they were extending their political reach and expanding their operations overseas, Perfect Circle's owners sought to forge labor-management unity by promoting a quaint vision of “heartland consensus,” a conservative civic identity that management was convinced would render unions unnecessary. As with many business conservatives, Perfect Circle owners tried to rid their plants of unions by tapping into an interlocking network of well-financed right-wing policy groups to mount an extensive employee educational program and public relations campaign in defense of “free enterprise.” Despite Perfect Circle's vigorous efforts to undercut unionization, by 1953 the majority of workers at all four of its east-central Indiana plants voted to affiliate with the United Auto Workers (UAW). Conflict between labor and management culminated in the violent 1955 strike, in which Perfect Circle handed the UAW a decisive defeat while enjoying widespread support from the regional and national press. The strike became a conservative cause célèbre during the 1957 national “right-to-work” campaign and a centerpiece of the Senate's 1958 McClellan “Labor Rackets” hearings, which launched Barry Goldwater's bid for the 1964 presidency. The article concludes that Perfect Circle and many other employers not only continued to contest unions in the 1950s but also played a neglected but important role in the formation of the New Right.

Biomass briquettes have emerged as a development silver bullet, supposedly converting waste to wealth and tackling crises of unemployment, urban waste management, and rural deforestation. Briquettes have captured the imagination of international environmental NGOs operating in many African cities who promote briquette production, partnering with local Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) to improve urban livelihoods and sanitation. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Kampala, Uganda, this article examines the entanglement of material and immaterial labor in the production of briquettes. The outcome of these production processes is to capitalize Community, transforming everyday socio-spatial relations into an agential entrepreneurial subject fit to receive aid and carry out development. This has the additional effect of exacerbating differences of gender and education within the CBO, alienating the CBO from the rest of Bwaise, and reproducing the racial hierarchies of the development economy.

Scholars of race and gender have borrowed heavily from the analysis of class in formulating strategies to analyze the operation of social stratification. In the process, the analysis of class itself, along with the definition of what counts as work and who counts as a worker, have been radically revised. A more powerful analytical tool has emerged, offering possibilities and flexibilities as well as a better understanding of the interdependence of multiple and mutually supporting processes of social stratification.

Geoff Eley and Keith Nield embrace an institutional perspective à la Ira Katznelson, but they do so with a much stronger emphasis on popular alliance formation and social movements than Katznelson. Social history's role, in their vision, would consist of capturing the dynamics of stability and change in densely and intensively studied local contexts. It is the injustices embedded in such contexts that apparently feed these movements and alliances. Class is thus reduced to a microheuristic of hidden injuries and subaltern identities. However, the concept of social class can only help to articulate a position beyond formal institutionalism and the class language of bipolarity when it is wedded to a nonreductionist, nonessentialist, and nonfinalist theory of capitalism. Seen from this perspective, capitalism is a worldwide and world- embedded process of combined and uneven development that constantly assembles and disassembles the materials from which human communities are made. In short, if we want to rethink class in place, we need to rethink capitalism in space.

“Everyone knows,” observed W.E.B. DuBois, writing at the turn of the century, “that in a city like Philadelphia a Negro does not have the same chance to exercise his ability or secure work according to his talents as a white man.” Focusing on what he described as “the practical exclusion of the Negroes from the trades and industries,” DuBois highlighted the role of organized labor in maintaining Philadelphia's segregated economy whereby “each union steadfastly refuses to admit Negroes, and relies on color prejudice to keep up the barrier.”

Much of the recent debate in early modern European labor and economic history has centered on Jan de Vries’s concept of the industrious revolution. Briefly, he claimed that workers during the period 1650-1800 chose to labor longer hours, often at greater intensity, in order to consume novel manufactured goods and imported commodities. Moreover, plebeian families increasingly pursued new employments beyond the household to pay for these objects. As a result, men, women, and children spent ever more hours in waged labor, and their growing purchasing power proved decisive in stimulating large-scale European industrialization. My work on the history of French and English papermaking raises fundamental challenges to this model. First, paperworkers already labored exhausting hours at the outset of de Vries’s period of newfound industriousness. Second, masters and workers alike knew that they had to both “speed up” and “take their time” to turn out quality paper at the expected rate. Third, women and adolescent workers toiled for wages in paper mills long before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the eve of large-scale mechanization, enduring shopfloor realities, skills, and quotas prevented a surge of productivity beyond papermaking’s familiar standards. With the demand for paper rising rapidly, it was the absence of an industrious revolution in papermaking that turned the manufacturers’ attention first to enlarged mills and small technological shifts, and finally, to the development of a papermaking machine.

When, on June 5, 1873, the Lalla Rookh docked in Fort Nieuw Amsterdam, Suriname, 399 indentured British Indian immigrants had almost reached their destination: the colonial plantations. The timing was no coincidence. On July 1, 1863, the Dutch government had abolished slavery in its Caribean colonies. During a ten-year transition period the former slave were to work for employers of their own choice under the supervision of the state.Three weeks before this mandatory “apprenticeship” period was over, the Lalla Rookh arrived. The immigrants aboard had signed a contract obliging them to work for five years on a plantation in Suriname yet to be assigned. The labor contract and additional local ordinances specified the rights and duties of the indentured workers and forced them to commit their labor power to the unspecified demands of their employers at specified times. Fundamental to the system was the penal sanction, which gave employers the right to press criminal charges against indentured workers who, according to them, neglected their duty or refused to work. Thus the penal sanction allowed planters to impose their own conception of work discipline.

This article explores the evolution of a developmentalist discourse for colonial Somalia and the attempts of the colonial government to present agricultural plans and labor policies as efforts to bring about social and economic development for colonial subjects and profit for colonial investors. In the long term, these efforts provided both a justification and a scope for the colonial venture. Fostering intensive farming and commercial agriculture, development planning institutionalized forced labor, disrupted the local production of foodstuff, and made the colony dependent on foreign imports.

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 emancipated slave, the liberated colony, and the freedom to labor unalienated, then such representation continues to hide more than it reveals. This essay, instead, reads Liberia as an instructive leitmotif for the conversion of racial slavery's synecdochical plantation system in the Americas into the plantation of the world writ large: the global scene of antiblackness and the immutable qualification for enslavement accorded black positionality alone. Transitions between political economic systems—from slave trade to “re-colonization,” from Firestone occupation to dictatorial-democratic regimes—reemerge from this re-examination as crucial but inessential to understanding Liberia's position, and thus that of black laboring subjects, in the modern world. I argue that slavery is the simultaneous primitive accumulation of black land and bodies, but that this reality largely escapes current conceptualization of not only the history of labor but also that of enslavement. In other words, the African slave trade (driven first by Arabs in the Indian Ocean region, then Europeans in the Mediterranean, and, subsequently, Euro-Americans in the Atlantic) did not simply leave as its corollary effect, or byproduct, the underdevelopment of African societies. The trade in African flesh was at once the co-production of a geography of desire in which blackness is perpetually fungible at every scale, from the body to the nation-state to its soil—all treasures not simply for violation and exploitation, but more importantly, for accumulation and all manner of usage. The Liberian project elucidates this ongoing reality in distinctive ways—especially when we regard it through the lens of the millennium-plus paradigm of African enslavement. Conceptualizing slavery's “afterlife” entails exploring the ways that emancipation extended, not ameliorated, the chattel condition, and as such, impugns the efficacy of key analytic categories like “settler,” “native,” “labor,” and “freedom” when applied to black existence. Marronage, rather than colonization or emancipation, situates Liberia within the intergenerational struggle of, and over, black work against social death. Read as enslavement's conversion, this essay neither impugns nor heralds black action and leadership on the Liberian project at a particular historical moment, but rather agitates for centering black thought on the ongoing issue of black fungibility and social captivity that Liberia exemplifies. I argue that such a reading of Liberia presents a critique of both settler colonialism and of a certain conceptualization of the black radical tradition and its futures in heavily optimist, positivist, and political economic terms that are enjoying considerable favor in leading discourse on black struggle today.

Research by labor historians on the acquisition of power by the working class tends to focus on labor relations (acquisition of power in businesses) or on political relations (power through elections, with the government, and so on). This approach overlooks the third source of labor's power, which is based on patterns of consumption resulting from the collective use of purchasing power. This essay examines this source of power. Because the topic is a virtual terra incognita, I will merely discuss a few observations and some very provisional hypotheses that are not always well substantiated.

This article explores the technopolitical mechanisms by which radiation hazards in South African uranium production were rendered invisible. The occupational health effects of underground uranium mining were deeply contested for decades, all over the world. From the 1950s to the 1990s, the volatile nature of labor relations under apartheid shaped how the South African mining industry responded to the presence of radon gas. With occasional help from state scientists, the industry muffled the political menace of radon gas by making its physical presence difficult to see. Sometimes this invisibility resulted from deliberate decisions, sometimes from structural suppression, sometimes from the tangle of both. This article argues that maintaining radon's invisibility took work.