Japan's war in Asia and the Pacific would have ground to a halt long before 1945 without the labor of millions of foreign workers, most of them mobilized against their will. For example, production of coal (then Japan's primary energy source) depended in large part on coerced labor from Korea, a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945. Throughout Japan's wartime empire, at least fifteen million Asians were put to work, often under brutally exploitative conditions, constructing roads, bridges, and air fields; digging minerals; and building boats, among many other projects. Untold thousands died because of harsh treatment, inadequate food and medical care, and poor planning. Many surviving workers, some of whom were left permanently disabled, are still waiting today for the wages they were promised. Such a large, destructive enterprise naturally had consequences that outlived the war. Coercive labor mobilization tore families and communities apart and sharpened class resentments, contributing to revolutionary upheavals after August 1945 in Korea and Indonesia, for example. In Japan itself, where mobilization took place on a relatively small scale and with comparatively little coercion, it left a complex, contradictory legacy, invigorating the labor movement in some ways and strengthening the hand of capital in others. Unlike the situation in Germany, where corporations have recently agreed to compensate wartime forced workers, both the state and corporations in Japan have refused to consider compensation for the foreign workers who kept Japan's war machine running from 1939 to 1945.

This article explores how working-class women who belonged to the prize-winning Liberation Brigade of the Budapest Hosiery Factory in the 1970s represented their identities at different stages of their lives in oral-history interviews conducted with the author between 1998 and 2003. It argues that these identities had a deeply ambiguous relationship to those that the official discourse of the socialist era ascribed to them. Issues of consent, accommodation, and opposition are raised, which not only shaped identities under socialism, but continue to shape working-class memory of the period.

Focusing specifically on colonial Ghana between 1855 and 1914, this article aims to situate the history of child labor in colonial Africa within the larger historiography of African labor history. Relying primarily on the records of the Basel Mission, this article complicates the narrative of labor history by studying how the mission acquired and sustained the labor of children and youth at various mission stations as part of the greater “missionary project.” This article argues that childhood in colonial Ghana can be viewed as a site of contestation between the competing interests of patriarchy, race, and colonial and missionary authority, in which the labor of children was used to achieve a larger degree of control and influence in the region.

This article explores the military history that links federal suppression of the Pullman Strike in 1894 to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and the US conquest of the Philippines in 1899–1903. Military men expressed remarkably similar understandings of their targets in the three campaigns, and in each case they paired condemnations of the enemy with many of the same positive stereotypes of soldiers like themselves. Analysis of this imagery offers new perspectives on the US Army's role in imperial projects as well as state action against labor. If strikers resembled unruly colonial subjects in the military mind, the reverse also held true; and soldiers' self-representations reveal that their goals did not necessarily match the state's agenda.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, critical attention has increasingly focused on the remaining world system, capitalist in nature and anchored in the World Trade Organization (WTO), founded in 1994 as the successor to the 1948 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). As the 1990s progressed, a smattering of exciting new intellectual work began to appear on the social and environmental impacts of the international trade and investment regime, especially given its apparently negative impact on many developing countries and the world's working people. “The distinction somewhat comfortably maintained by ‘trade hands’ who managed the post-World War II international economy—that trade is strictly a commercial function with no immediate connection to social concerns—has evaporated under the pressure of political and social forces generated by the globalization of the economy.”

This article explores the labor struggles of doctors in late 1970s and early 1980s Brazil, the final years of the nation's dictatorship. Health workers' protests for better salaries and working conditions were extensive and reflected a dramatic change in the way medical practitioners in Brazil perceived their professional and political identities. Fusing together histories of medicine and labor, the article shows how physicians not only led strikes and unionized by their tens of thousands but also collaborated with blue-collar sectors in a larger struggle for working rights, access to healthcare, and structural reforms. Dictatorship officials, the article reveals, were significantly concerned by hospital strikes and particularly by the emerging cross-sector alliance. In this sense, the doctors' movement played a significant role in challenging Brazil's military rule and advancing the nation's transition to democracy.

From 1880 to 1980 the Pullman Company repeatedly turned to photography to shape the attitudes and behavior of its workers. It built the Pullman Car Works and adjoining town on the fringes of Chicago as a model industrial community with the goal of resolving the endemic conflict between capital and labor. However, despite its claim that the model town was intended as purely “practical” philanthropy—that is, that sanitary and beautiful conditions would increase profits by improving workers' performance and preventing strikes—Pullman could not achieve its goal without also creating affective bonds with workers.

In April of 1983, the Chilean copper miners'confederation (the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cobre, or CTC), representing 26,000 copper workers, called for a general strike in Chile's copper mines and for a day of national protest against the military regime of Augusto Pinochet.

When the Statue of Liberty, a gift of the French government to the American Republic, was inaugurated in the New York harbor on October 28, 1886, the French radical press felt that the ceremony, held as it was on the eve of the executions of the Chicago martyrs, was more of an insult to labor than a tribute to freedom. Indeed, the French anarchists suggested that this statue should be renamed “the Goddess of Murder.” Was this just an outburst of anarchist rhetoric or does it tell us something about the depth of feeling created in the European radical movement by the dramatic events that marked the year 1886?

Frank Tannenbaum is best known for his studies of Mexican agrarian reform and for his contributions to the comparative history of slavery and slave societies. But as a young man he had made a name for himself as a notorious labor agitator, and he went on to publish two books on the US labor movement, which are worthy of reconsideration as important interpretations of independent trade unionism and political reform. The first volume appeared in 1921 and offered an original perspective on the popular syndicalism that formed such a large, positive element of the philosophy of the International Workers of the World (IWW), to the extent it had one, at the center of which lay the struggle for social recognition on the part of immigrant and (supposedly) unskilled workers. The second appeared thirty years later and provided a thoughtful defense of the private, employment-based welfare and industrial relations system that the New Deal established in the United States. Together the books offer a provocative account of the social and individual radicalism of US-style “pure and simple” trade unionism.

This article contributes to recent debates about the complicated ways in which women involved in the interwar British Labour Party negotiated their political identities through an examination of the activities and aims of a neglected group, the paid women organizers. It suggests that although they accepted the importance of women's work within the home, the organizers did not see women's lives as confined by domesticity. Instead, they argued that women in the home had the potential for collective political action. The article looks at the campaign for pit head baths to highlight the attempt by the organizers to develop a politics around issues such as dirt that concerned women in their daily lives. It was difficult to persuade the Labour Party to take these questions seriously, and the organizers experienced constraints as well as opportunities that came from their paid role, but it is argued here that they did carve a career that was woman-focused and sought to give women in the home a voice.

Many who study colonialism have noted that the same words used by the colonizer to describe the colonized—“dirty,” “backward,” “uncultured,” and “possessing an improper understanding of the value of work and property”—were often identical to those that rich people used to describe the poor. They were the terms the “modern” used to describe the “not yet modern”; the urban the rural; the educated the uneducated. To use a British example: Those who wrote from positions of power (the urban, educated bourgeoisie) looked down upon, first, the urban poor, then the rural poor, then the Scottish, then the “half-civilized” Natives of North America; then, finally, they squinted from on high upon the Aborigines of Australia. All of these groups fell short of the “norm,” the way the colonizer understood the very height of modern progress. All of these groups were “lacking” something. Thus, in sometimes surprising ways, colonialism merely seems to be another manifestation of the exertion of power over the powerless, a relationship much closer to that of “class” than many expect. This is especially so in a field that produces much of the best work in cultural history, and where anything hinting at old-fashioned “labor history” is gauche (no pun intended). Yet, as the authors of the books under review argue, understandings of labor and property, and the manner with which they are tied to an understanding of nature, are more fundamental to the history of modern colonialism than, for example, race, the latter a category almost always invoked by the colonizer in a completely instrumental fashion.

Still reeling from 9/11, I had been working in and about lower Manhattan nonstop until this trip. It was great to be far away in the smog-filtered Los Angeles sun, if even only for a day. I met Allan Sekula in his Echo Park work studio, a nondescript corner storefront filled with files of his photographs and boxes of exhibition prints just a stone's throw from Koreatown.

White workers and white working-class politics have been neglected in the historiography of South Africa during the second half of the twentieth century. This article seeks to extricate white workers from this historiographical neglect and fracture homogenizing representations of white, specifically Afrikaner, experiences of democratization. It does so by reintroducing class to a debate dominated by race. Employing a discursive analysis sensitive to issues of class, it shows that white workers were confronted with democratizing change and disempowerment more than a decade before the end of apartheid and suggests that class politics continue to inform white responses in post-apartheid South Africa. In this way, it argues for a historical, discursive approach to uncovering the power dynamics of class and the complex intersection of working-class and racial identities in the late twentieth century.

We live our domestic lives in the presence of objects. Through our relations with them, we appraise, assimilate, appropriate, and resist the currents of our time, in a warm and willful dialogue between self and other. As goods change, and times change, so does this cultural traffic between householders and their goods change—in dominant direction, in relative intensity, in the character of the burden it carries, and in the significance we allow this burden to assume. How much material goods matter in the social and individual reckoning of well-being varies historically, and within a given time, by nation, class, and gender. How much consumption matters is a cultural difference, a shared national predicament, a politics grounded in the circumstances of class, and learned as a gendered responsibility. When producers were not paramount in the regulation of consumption, to what priorities was commerce subsidiary? How were these priorities specific by nation, gender, and class?

In the second half of the nineteenth century the provision of better education for working-class men and women became one of the various and broad-ranging set of preoccupations of the cooperative movement in Britain. Much early cooperation was economic, concerning alternative means of production and distribution. However, local societies also turned themselves toward other forms of societal improvement, including creating the facilities and contexts that would promote and support the education and learning of adults. The archive of the Lincoln Equitable Co-operative Industrial Society offers a rich body of source material for a microhistorical investigation of the expansion and diversification of one local cooperative up to the First World War. The members’ magazine of this local society in particular records the evolution of its purpose—economic, political, social, and cultural. This included achieving progress through various forms of educational provision—although the opportunities for men contrasted with those made available for women. This research illuminates what is a relatively underresearched area—that is, exploration of the complexities, dynamism, and phenomenology of local cooperative adult education and the significance of what it had to offer the development of the labor movement in particular places.

This paper will shed light on the deportation process of visaless sojourners staying and working in Israel. I will explain how state bureaucrats, specifically border control officers of the Enforcement Unit of the Interior Ministry (in Hebrew, hamemune al bikoret hagvulot beyekhidat ha'akhifa, misrad hapnim) are able to conduct activities that cause suffering to sojourners while still viewing themselves as moral human beings, by breaking down the decision-making process into a series of dichotomic categories, by defining Zionism as a context that justifies deportation, and by governing their emotions. I claim that in Israel, state bureaucrats view sojourners as unmanageable and incorrigible. Consequently, deportation becomes a logical course of action. Such an approach, which stresses the bureaucratic aspect of national projects, enables a better understanding of how the “State” is able to perform large-scale projects that cause suffering to individuals.