The study of the place of sexuality in working-class culture is still in its infancy. The most noteworthy investigations stop short at the threshold of the twentieth century, on the eve of full-fledged industrialization. The sparseness of data on all periods has made sexuality a particularly intractable subject. The reticence of both memoirists and oral history subjects to reveal the most intimate aspects of their private sphere has forced historians to work with very fragmentary evidence and to rely on inference and contextual reconstructions. If this is so, then why study the subject at all? Because our understanding of working-class culture would be very incomplete without some glimpses of intimate life. There, at the core of the workers' private sphere, lie the emotional resources that have made it possible for them to express their selfhood at the workplace and to respond to the most oppressive aspects of wage labor. There, also, are embedded a variety of subcultural forms and associations which, acting both as disabilities and strengths, have made it possible for workers to resist exploitative manipulation and reformist schemes for self-improvement.

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.

Our principal anxiety about the responses to “Farewell to the Working Class?” concerns their strangely private character. In the main—the response of Barbara Weinstein excepted—the respondents seem to use the opportunity our article has provided simply to restate some of their own previous positions. Often they engage neither with the substance of our article nor, equally importantly, with its conciliatory tone. As a result, the chance further to depolemicize these important debates has been lost or otherwise evaded in a variety of reiterations.

Responding to the triumph of the right during the 1980s, Eley and Nield conclude that traditional concepts of class are no longer workable and need a major overhauling. Unfortunately, they mischaracterize the literature, offer little that could refine the debates, and ignore the important role of capitalism in the last two decades.

This article analyzes the role of pickets in two of the most emblematic strikes in Brazilian labor history during the twentieth century: the “strike of the 400,000,” which involved several industry categories in São Paulo and neighboring cities in 1957, and the “forty-one days strike” in 1980 involving the metalworkers of the industrial belt, known as ABC Paulista, in the metropolitan region of the city of São Paulo. Both strikes broke out at a time of profound reconfiguration of Brazilian society, marked by industrialization, migration, and urbanization processes. Although separated by a time gap of almost twenty-five years, both the “strike of the 400,000” and the “forty-one days strike” reveal important aspects of the performance of workers in that crucial period of Brazilian history.

From the first usage in nineteenth-century America of the term “sweatshop,” the definition of this emotive term has “reflected social anxiety about global flows and exchange of people, goods, culture, and capital,” Bender and Greenwald write in their useful edited volume, Sweatshops USA. And if the term sweatshop today connotes a race to the bottom in which a market structure of intense competition reflects the absence, or lack of the enforcement of, effective protective legislation across the relevant market, then there is little basically new in the organization of garment production and the unrelenting pressures on its workers. Essential characteristics of sweated labor in the industry result from structural characteristics which have remained and are only ameliorated by strong unions, public concern for the conditions of labor, and enforced social regulation. While it has often seemed to be an outlier in its exploitative norms, the idea that garment work is totally unique in the flexibility it demands, the excesses and abuses inherent in the contracting system with its pressures to respond to unpredictable and rapidly changing fashion, its production of a labor-intensive product not easily mechanized, and its ability to seek out and control a vulnerable labor force is a misjudgment. It is rather an industry which represents an extreme but not a different form of the way labor markets operate. It is not a vanishing past but a worrisome globalized future of just-in-time production and multisourced internationalized commodity chain organization of production which should be worrying.

The present immigration system is based on a core paradox. The method of allocating visas for the admission of permanent residents is based on principles of equality and fairness because all countries have the same quota. Yet visa demand varies widely. The principle of formal equality has disparate effects, being inclusionary for some and exclusionary for others. Four countries persistently max out on their caps—China, India, Mexico, and the Philippines—leading to long waits, easily ten to twenty years or more, and hence pressures for unlawful entry. The system generates an ever-larger caste-population of unauthorized immigrants.

This article illustrates the crucial role played by the Trades Union Congress and its occupationally organized union affiliates in the failure of Labour's postwar social agenda. It has been widely recognized that Labour's inability to improve the social insurance system and construct an effective floor under wages during the first decades of the postwar period was of crucial importance to the continual underdevelopment of the British welfare state and the emergence of a dual welfare system in the United Kingdom. Yet that Labour's inability to do so was to a large extent the result of union opposition has largely been neglected. This article shows that Labour's postwar social agenda had strong consequences for the distribution of earnings among different groups of workers and that these consequences were fiercely resisted by unions representing privileged workers. In doing so, this article illustrates the limited political feasibility of government measures to provide adequate earnings and security against labor market risks for all workers in countries where privileged workers largely organize along occupational lines.

The popular front strategy, by which the French Communist party (PCF) came to mean a tactical alliance of the left including the Socialists and the left-leaning elements of the petty bourgeoisie represented by the Radical party, was pursued only briefly by the PCF in the 1930s, from 1934 to 1936. This is ironic, since it is by the slogan of the Front Populaire that the period of the 1930s in French history was to be subsequently known and remembered. The popular front was actually a transitional strategy between the famous (or infamous) “Third Period” of Comintern history from 1928–34, characterized in France by the class-against-class policy, and the policy of Front National, in which the PCF pursued a policy of alliance with anyone, including the right, against fascism at home and abroad. The PCF launched the national front in August 1936, and although the slogan did not catch on and was withdrawn, the party pursued that strategy for the remainder of the period until the war. But it was the popular front that would be remembered as having resulted in a wave of social legislation following the Blum government's assumption of power in June 1936 and which has ever since become a point of reference for the PCF. The wage increases, rights to unionize, paid vacations, forty hour week and nationalizations remain accomplishments for the party, to be built upon in each successive experience of participating in, or supporting the French government.

The elaborate “remaking” of the African working class that took off in earnest in the period after 1945 has only recently begun to receive the attention of scholars working on African labor and working-class history. This process of remaking, as in nineteenth-century England, essentially involved the incorporation of the African working class into a system of industrial relations which would guarantee it a stake in society with regard to jobs, wages, housing, and general working conditions.

When I started organizing the CIO I was called a Communist anyhow, and one thing I noticed was that the Communists were the most dedicated union supporters. In 1939, I wasn't a Communist, just a militant young guy caught up in the class struggle … But I became acquainted with the Communists and I found myself defending them because they were the best organizers. I got caught up in the struggle, and at that time the big issue was black and white unity. I could see from experience that there was no way to achieve union organization without unity between black and white. It was a question of self interest on the part of whites, and the other white workers saw that too.

During a decade of constant turmoil in the 1870s, immigrant textile workers from Lancashire, England seized control of labor politics in the southern New England region of the United States. They were men and women who had immigrated in successive waves before and after the American Civil War to the United States, specifically to the textile cities of Fall River and New Bedford, Massachusetts and to the mill villages north of Providence, Rhode Island.