This article analyzes the ways in which Esso Standard Italiana, the Italian affiliate of Standard Oil (New Jersey), and the state-owned firm Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli (Italian General Oil Company, Agip), redefined the job of gas station attendants in post-war Italy. It argues that, drawing on US scientific management and marketing, the two companies advanced a new understanding of masculinity and class. They promoted the idea that gas station attendants should distance themselves from the forms of male working-class identity that were associated with mechanical work and combine technical expertise with the ability to market products by relying on appearance. It shows how during the 1960s Agip exported such Americanized business practices to the developing world, by organizing a series of training courses for gas station attendants from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. This article looks in turn at how attendants challenged the two companies' efforts to standardize and rationalize their services by joining trade associations and organizing strikes, in the name of their rights as shopkeepers and small businessmen.

On November 13, 1924, the first public announcements of white scion Leonard Kip Rhinelander's secret marriage to a working-class “colored” woman, Alice Jones, exploded across the front pages of New York newspapers. Although Rhinelander, a wealthy white socialite, ignored family orders and stayed with his wife through the first week or so of the scandal, few were surprised when he ultimately left her and filed an annulment suit. While New York did not outlaw interracial marriages, Leonard's suit reflected the extent of public sentiment against such marriages. Claiming he had not known Alice was black and would not have married her if he had, Leonard, acutely aware of his class station, nonetheless based his request to dissolve the marriage on prohibitions against interracial unions. It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that the jury of twelve white married men refused the Rhinelander heir his annulment and upheld the marriage, there-by accepting Alice's version of events and actions.

How do organized workers take advantage of political transitions to gain ground for their movements, and conversely, in what ways do these transitions shape workers' tactics and agendas? This essay compares popular responses to political opportunities in three countries in the throes of deep crises. Exploring the routes to divergent outcomes from a common juncture during and after the First World War draws attention to the possibilities of and constraints on working-class imprints on constitutional development.

A distinction has generally been made between the producer and the consumer … we have been led to suppose that the producer and the consumer were totally separate individuals, with separate and distinct interests, when in reality all producers are consumers.

The late Guyanese historian and political activist Walter Rodney began his posthumously published A History of the Guyanese Working People 1881–1905 (1981) by analyzing the “physical environment and class interests” in coastal Guyana. Writing against narratives that privileged the roles played by European capital and technology, Rodney argued that working people made large contributions to the “humanization” of the Guyanese environment. He noted that a powerful planter class placed severe constraints on working people who were “in no position to control the available technology or to initiate environmental intervention.” Political power was important, but Rodney noted that the environment played “a determining role in limiting the activities of all sections of the population [original emphasis].” Writing an “intelligible narrative” of Guyana's history then, was “impossible” without an understanding of Guyana's environment.

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 century, the political elite took on the concept of “development” as a central part of government policy in an attempt to gain political and economic control of the hinterland areas and stave off European incursions. This policy involved the extension and reinforcement of labor policies and practices that had developed through the nineteenth century as means to incorporate settlers and indigenous people into Liberian society. When these plans failed, huge swathes of territory were turned over to foreign commercial interests in an attempt to bolster Liberian claims to sovereignty. And after the Second World War, new policies of “community development” introduced by international agencies again tried to solve Liberia's “land and labor” problem through resettlement. At each stage developmentalist rationales were deployed in order to facilitate greater government control over the Liberian interior territory.

In a 1982 review article, Theda Skocpol asks the question, “What makes peasants revolutionary?” She analyzes the conclusions of authors who endeavor to explain what leads peasants—a stereotypically powerless group—to engage in collective action that challenges the economic or political status quo. The above example suggests a useful paraphrase of the question: was Stathoula's case exceptional, and if not, what made a Greek working-class woman during the 1940s revolutionary?

Both Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Commonwealth (2008) and Peter Linebaugh in The Magna Carta Manifesto (2009) want to put the commons and communism—understood as a form of society in which private property has been replaced by property in common—“back on the agenda.” They even insist that just such a social and economic order “grounded in the common” is “already in process” and that communism is thus more relevant and possible than ever. To a certain extent, they are right. We need a functioning commons if human society is to remain viable. But we also need a functioning commercial economy capable of feeding the billions that human society has and most likely will continue to produce.

In late August 1930, two white American workers from the Ford Motor Company in Detroit were tried for attacking a black American laborer at one of the Soviet Union's prized giants of socialist industry, the Stalingrad Traktorostroi. Soviet trade-union authorities and all-union editors used the near month-long campaign to bring the two assailants to “proletarian justice,” in order to cultivate the image that workers in the USSR valued American technical and industrial knowledge in the construction of the new socialist society, but vehemently rejected American racism. They reinforced this image in publications by juxtaposing visual depictions of Soviet citizens' acceptance of black Americans as equals against those which portrayed the lynching of black workers in the United States.

Contract work in India, though legally regulated by a 1970 Act, is widespread and mostly unrecognized. With the implementation of neoliberal policies in India since the 1990s, contract work has become the norm. There are now few spaces in which contract workers can get redress through the legal system. Using oral history narratives of contract workers' participation in a labor movement, this article shows how narratives of contention differ in the rendering of agency, success, and future, between one group of contract workers employed in the 1970s in a state-owned mine and another employed in the 1990s in an industrial area owned by private and foreign capital. The evidence for the article is ethnographic, collected in Chhattisgarh region in central India. This article suggests that these workers' narratives show the transformation in practices of citizenship, resistance, and militancy in India over time. Such differences are essential in understanding phenomena like the resurgence of the Maoist movement in Chhattisgarh.

Paid household labor has fertilized the development of national economies, while also nourishing the capitalist labor systems that has allowed globalization to thrive. However, this transnational sector has remained historically invisible, devalued, and unprotected from national and international legislative frameworks. In 2010, the International Labor Organization (ILO) finally embraced this challenge through two years of negotiations on the world's first international convention to assure “Decent Work for Domestic Workers.” These tripartite debates set the stage for the largest inclusion of “actual workers” in policy making. The debates also mobilized the world's first international domestic workers’ movement. This report from the field highlights a distinct process whereby workers themselves played a pivotal role in the creation of international labor policy. According to International Domestic Workers Federation president Myrtle Witbooi, this “new beginning” set “a benchmark for decent work and social equality.”

Second-wave feminism, scholars argued until recently, was a product of middle-class educated women who rejected inequality masquerading as domestic tranquility in the postwar United States. Women unionists were either invisible in these accounts or dismissed as unimportant to the development of feminism's objectives and strategies. Recent labor history research has called this portrayal of working women into question. Whether considering a single union or broad national patterns of political change, several historians have pointed to unionists' contributions to campaigns for equality. These came in the areas of pay and job discrimination as well as in the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

This note reflects on the August 2012 miners' strike at Marikana, South Africa in light of a century long history of violence associated with worker actions in that country and elsewhere in the Global South. It suggests that the breakaway union's allegedly ‘illegal’ strike fits within a long tradition of radical worker activism in South Africa, which is best understood in light of anticolonial efforts to short-circuit the chronologies of imperial power. The Marikana strike, like anticolonial rebellions during the early twentieth century and, critically, white worker struggles following First World War, was an effort to speed up the process by which the value of workers’ lives and labor might be made equivalent to those in power.

The essay focuses on two points: First, Eley and Nield's emphasis on micropolitics, discourse, and diverse forms of affinity is stimulating and essential but inadequate to the task of understanding when and how the category of working class is useful. Such a task also requires nuanced analysis of interactions on a large scale and at long distance, of control of material resources, and of centralizing institutions. Second, their identity-centered vision of politics is too constraining to make clear the multiple forms of political imagination, connection, and mobilization or to figure out the extent as well as the limits of power.

The cash-indemnity health insurance system that emerged in the United States after 1945 represented but one trajectory among many. The late 1930s and early 1940s marked a period of innovation and creative experimentation in voluntarist health care programs. Spurred by the Social Security Act of 1935 and the New Deal's legitimization of the politics of security, unions, consumers, employers, and doctors began developing a range of health care programs that enabled patients to pool the risks and costs of sickness and injury, thus bringing medical care within the reach of more people. Employers and private insurers, too, acceded to the pervasive ideology of security. Invoking the New Deal language of security, life insurance companies competed with community and nonprofit organizations to meet a burgeoning market—the market for prepaid health services. While organized labor advocated noninsurance models, commercial insurance companies, aligning with large employers, dramatically expanded their reach during the 1940s, bringing in large groups of subscribers. By the time substantive collective bargaining over health benefits commenced between unions and management in 1950, commercial group health insurance had become well entrenched in many workplaces, and, as a result of this growth, had undercut the competitive and political conditions that enabled other, more equitable, communal-based health insurance alternatives to thrive.

This keynote address, delivered in December 2015 at the International Federation of Workers’ Education Association General Conference in Lima, Peru, refutes the standard trope of labor movement decline and provides evidence for the global rise and feminization of labor movements worldwide. Trade union women’s commitment to emancipatory, democratic worker education helped spur these changes. The origins and effects of two historical examples are detailed: the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers held in the United States annually from 1921 to 1938 and the first International Women’s Summer School of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) held in France in 1953. The latter experiment, attended by women labor leaders from 25 countries, energized the Women’s Committee of the ICFTU. It led to the adoption of “The Charter of Rights of Working Women” by the ICFTU in 1965 and helped make possible the election of Sharan Burrow and other women to top office in the International Trade Union Confederation. The address concludes with a discussion of what the history of trade union women’s education teaches about strengthening future labor movements.

The history and iconography of trade union banners has been surprisingly under-explored since it was first taken seriously as a subject of study in the early 1970s. The nostalgia evident in these early accounts for an age that seemed to contemporaries then to be fleeting seems particularly incongruous given the more recent reinvigoration of the trade union demonstration. This article seeks to redress the balance by focusing on the Follonsby miners’ lodge banner. First unveiled in 1928, in a pit village on the northern edge of Durham coalfield in northeast England, the Follonsby miners’ banner was later hailed as a foremost candidate for the most revolutionary trade union banner in British history. This unsubstantiated claim is important in itself, as mass trade unionism in Britain is characterized by moderation and a reluctance to engage in radical politics; an observation that broadly stands for the influential British coal miners’ unions and, more specifically, for the miners of the Durham coalfield itself.

The article's argument has both narrow and broad dimensions. Narrowly, it argues that the Follonsby banner has a strong claim to be regarded as the most revolutionary in Britain, albeit with “revolutionary” understood in certain theoretical and context-specific ways. The broader argument develops the claim that the iconography of the Follonsby banner is more significant for what the process of interrogating its “revolutionary” credentials reveals about the complexities of the political culture of the mainstream British Left in the twentieth century and after. In this broader respect, the Follonsby banner—iconography, birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth—is more important for its curious representatives rather than its individuated existence as an “extreme revolutionary” outlier.

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, indeed ecological and ergonomic (rather than toxicological) perception of health risks on the job. Its principles benefitted a great majority of workers and employees. The chronicle of labor's contribution to the identification and regulation of health and safety issues on the job refutes claims about the indifference of the French working-class movement with regard to workers’ health. Attention to the cooks’ workplace experience, their politics, and the elaboration of labor legislation is an antidote to the tendency of narrating state- and institution-building as the history of providential individuals with big ideas.

This essay considers the biomedical framing of labor in tropical Australia from the late-nineteenth century until the early twenty-first century. This entails critical inquiry into racialized estimates of labor capacity or fitness, as well as skeptical examination of medical assumptions of risk and danger. Racial theories and medical conjectures have constituted flexible analytic toolkits that might adjust, adapt, and justify a variety of exploitative labor practices in Australia’s tropical north. Debates about coolie or indentured labor were never simply economic calculations: They also concerned notions of races and their proper places, and expressed particular moral sensibilities and medical fears. Thus labor history becomes entangled with histories of racial formation and of science and medicine