In all the upheaval of 1905 in Russia, one of the most violent and volatile areas was Ekaterinoslav Province, which included Donbass coal miners, militant railroaders, and heavy industrial factory workers in and around the mines, the towns, and the province's capital city. Although protest and upheaval were by no means new to the region, in 1905 the province witnessed not only a chain of strikes, meetings, and demonstrations throughout the year, but one of the largest and most militant armed uprisings in December and several destructive anti-Jewish pogroms among the hundreds that swept South Russia in October.This characterization of the region is most fully and persuasively outlined in Charters Wynn's important study, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870–1905 (Princeton, 1992). The present essay, though greatly indebted to Wynn's pioneering work, seeks to build on, critique, and modify some of its conclusions.

On September 17, 1911 a hunger revolt broke out in Ottakring, a proletarian suburb in northwest Vienna. But hunger and deteriorating living conditions were not the only causes of broad public unrest. The revolt was, to a greater extent, a spontaneous political articulation of a new social formation at the periphery of the metropolis composed of “old” underclasses and recently arrived migrants. Both faced miserable conditions of work, consumption, and family life, and the migrants lost their dream of a better life in the city. Mentally still rooted in the rural environments, the “lifeworlds” from which they had come, they experienced a fragmented urban topography driven by a chaotic mixture of sharp-cut urban planning and rationalization, and brutish Manchester-style capitalism. Instead of finding a new “Heimat” in the city, the new immigrants suffered from pauperization and collective estrangement. Their location in the new industrial quarters of the city brought them into misery and—in the perception of the elite—transformed them into the dangerous, amorphous “Other” of urban society. Their material poverty and cultural stigmatization allowed only a minimum of freedom and self-realization within the emerging formation of mass culture. Symbolic discrimination and economic marginality configured a specific suburban lifestyle modeled along the trajectories of assimilation and deviance, lethargy and revolt, power, impotence and emerging mass politics.

Focusing on scholarship in US history, this article claims that under assault from feminists, the class paradigm in the study of labor and working-class history lost its primacy. This turn to gender developed as part of the linguistic turn and has led to an emphasis on bodies. I further argue that race and class themselves are both engendered identities and categories of analysis. Bodies create a realm upon which racialized gender as well as class is inscribed, constructed, made, and remade. I end with examples from my research on World War II on how rethinking breadwinner ideology, family wage, and related topics from the standpoint of black women and men destabilize normative notions of worker and provider.

The picture has prevailed in Spanish social history of a revolutionary, insurrectional peasantry in the south of the country. Aided by literary or artistic analyses, this article shows the existence, in the Spanish north during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, of a counter-model consisting of small landowners. This model was based on real facts, such as the permanence of small and medium land properties, the preservation of the commons, and the stability of leaseholds, all of which contributed to its literary idealization.

However, a more profound and detailed analysis uncovers the existence of other types of conflicts which are different from the large unionized demonstrations of the Andalusian south. In fact, conflict arose in the north with respect to leaseholds and surpluses of milk, cider, or sugar beet. Old emblems of peaceful peasant life such as popular festivities were tainted with criminality, as well as with “urban” and “industrial” delinquency and the old systems of communal solidarity were redefined, which forced political bargaining in local and municipal life.

This article explores the changing modes of political practices in the mill neighborhoods of Ahmedabad, through an investigation of the figure of the political intermediary. By focusing primarily on local municipal politics in the mill areas it charts the electoral fortunes of the main union, the Textile Labour Association, and the techniques of political control it exercised. Through an examination of the circulation of local power, I seek to understand the ambiguous but critical position occupied by the intermediary. I use both archival material and oral narratives to investigate the intersections and overlaps between two figures of local importance—the union representative and the neighborhood tough.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the allegation that slaves were harvesting cocoa off the west coast of Africa on the Portuguese island colony of São Tomé and Príncipe became an international scandal, not only because slavery had long been outlawed, but also because one of the major purchasers of that cocoa was the Quaker chocolate company, Cadbury Brothers. The Portuguese denied the charge of slavery and claimed that African workers on the islands were not only happier than Portuguese peasants, but also more content than many European workers. This article explores this claim and argues that the conflicting interpretations of what the British called the crisis over “slave cocoa” and the Portuguese called “the English cocoa controversy” can be explained by differing perspectives about work.

This article reviews the labor historiography of Iran for the period between the 1953 coup and the early revolutionary activism of late the 1970s, an interlude marked by a lack of histories of labor activism. Based on a qualitative analysis of the types of collective actions that oil workers engaged in during the period, this article argues that contextualizing the struggles of workers and the types of collective actions they engaged in will tell us more about the social and political changes that they experienced and participated in than the search for an ideal type of labor activism. It is argued that the social and political climate of Iran during the 1960s, characterized by political repression and an extensive centralized reform program, added new tactics to workers’ repertoires of action as they made use of the discourse of the regime for their own ends. This study is based on archival research at the International Institute of Social History archives in Amsterdam, the BP archives at Coventry, the National Archives of UK in London, and the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC.

This paper focuses on the ideology and discourses of Tekstil İṣçileri Sendikası (the Textile Workers’ Union, Tekstil) in Turkey to highlight some of the specific visions of the organized labor for an emancipatory gender politics during the 1970s. This history of intersection between gender and working-class organizing has been overlooked by the Left scholarship on the one hand and liberal feminist scholarship on the other. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by highlighting gender and class concurrently throughout the history of the transformation of gender politics in labor organizations. The history of the simultaneous development of gender-related policies in Tekstil/DİSK and TEKSİF/Türk-İṣ reveals an unexplored aspect of the contentious dynamic between rival labor organizations. Between 1975–1980, the politics of gender became another pillar in trade union competition. Following the transnational influences in this transformation, this paper highlights a forgotten period of labor organizing and locates it within the history of labor and women's movements at the national and global scale.

When industrialist John D. Rockefeller visited the new open-pit mining operation of his competitor, Daniel J. Guggenheim, in Bingham Canyon, Utah, in 1910, he declared with genuine envy and admiration,“it's the greatest industrial sight in the whole world.” What most impressed Rockefeller were the massive steam shovels that had revolutionized the process of copper extraction by enabling firms to mine and smelt tons of previously worthless low-grade copper ore. Equally impressive was the fact that, where skilled American miners had very recently toiled underground in search of rich veins of copper, unskilled immigrants now worked aboveground, loading tons of newly blasted copper ore onto train cars. Rockefeller was not alone in expressing wonder at this new man-made marvel. Hundreds of sight-seeing tourists also traveled to the mine by train each week to experience the thrill of industrial America's newfound ability to move mountains. Like Rockefeller, they saw nothing but progress and modernity in the great open-pit mine.

After serving as an organizer for the independent labor union Solidarity (“Solidarność”) during Poland's 1980–81 upsurge, Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski was elected to the union's regional leadership in Łódź in 1981. Poland's most populous city after Warsaw, Łódź grew rapidly in the late nineteenth century after a torrent of foreign capital investment. Known as the “Manchester of Poland” because of its concentration of textile manufacturing, the city and its mills were the setting for The Promised Land, the story of a German, a Jew, and a Pole seeking to make their fortune in the brutal new world of industrial capitalism, as told in the 1899 realist novel by Władysław Reymont and the 1975 film by director Andrzej Wajda. The Łódź working class has a militant history dating to the strikes of May 1892, when, as Tamara Deutscher writes, “more than two hundred rioting textile workers were cut down by Cossacks.”

Taking as a starting point two strikes in colonial Cyprus in the 1930s—the miners' strike in 1936 in which both Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots were involved and the all-female spinners' strike in 1938—this paper looks at how the labor movement deeply transformed the political landscape of the island. In a society closely monitored by British colonial authorities and well acquainted with the Greek-Cypriot claim for Enosis, or the political union of Cyprus with Greece, the labor question became a locus, or “interstice of power structure,” articulating competing and mutually exclusive visions of Cyprus as a polity. More generally the paper investigates the modalities of formation of a collective group allegiance in a context of constraint.

Between 1946 and 1949, the Pilbara Walk-Off of Aboriginal pastoral workers in the Northwest of Western Australia came to symbolize the demand for Aboriginal rights and independence and is now recognized as a key event in the Aboriginal land rights movement. While the Pilbara strike has received attention from many historians, the involvement of Aboriginal domestic workers in the action has not. But the strike provided an unprecedented opportunity for Aboriginal domestic workers to mobilize and organize. This article examines the historical role and impact of Aboriginal domestic workers in the Pilbara strike. Drawing upon Aboriginal oral histories and correspondence of employers at the time as well as official records, this study argues that the involvement of the domestic workers made Aboriginal domestic labor visible, and in doing so challenged the racial and gender foundations of hierarchy and power that underpinned the pastoral economy of colonization.

Faced with the most up to date washing machine, the undocumented Rosa, newly arrived from Guatemala to Los Angeles, does what many resourceful Mayan women would: She handwashes clothes and lays them on the lawn to dry.1 Played for comic relief in the 1983 movie El Norte, this confrontation of the domestic worker with the machine represents how, presumably in the face of dirty wars in Latin America and rising labor force participation of mothers with small children in the United States, well-to-do households had it both ways: They purchased the latest appliances and relied upon the labor of immigrant women. Recent migrants appeared more tractable than the African Americans who historically had worked in other women's homes. New models superseded old Maytags, but domestic workers never became obsolete, despite the predictions of sociologists and the panicked laments of would-be employers.

With the sudden, almost ubiquitous reentry of The Coca-Cola Company to India during economic liberalization, the branded commodity became a sign of both aspirational global consumer-citizenship for India's urban middle class and of corporate enclosure for those dispossessed of material and symbolic resources to fuel this consumption. Village communities around several of Coca-Cola's rural plants, including in Mehdiganj, Uttar Pradesh, organized against the company's operations, which they accused of exploiting and polluting common groundwater in the production of bottled drinks as an increasing expanse of the country fell into a crisis of water scarcity. This “environmentalism of the poor” has articulated a powerful critique of corporate globalization and privatization, illuminating the exploitation of the resources of the rural poor for the consumption of those on the other side of an increasingly widening economic divide.

A few years ago, the global consulting firm McKinsey and Company began issuing a series of increasingly urgent reports concerning “automation” and the future of work. Defining automation broadly as artificial intelligence and “other digital technologies,” the company promised in its reports that it could advise companies how they might prepare. Amidst this flurry of publication, McKinsey produced several articles specifically on the theme of “The Future of Work in Black America.” With “a new and proprietary data set”—a data set so proprietary readers were not privileged to see it—McKinsey claimed that “automation” would hurt the job prospects of Black Americans, and in particular Black men, more deeply and more broadly than any other demographic group in the United States. The jobs Black people held, McKinsey seemed to believe, were precisely those best performed by robots. For McKinsey's analysts, this conclusion was all but obvious when one considered, first, the racist exclusion of Black Americans from the resources of society, and second, the levels of education required to obtain the jobs Black people in America disproportionately hold, like “truck drivers, food service workers, and office clerks.”

The achievements of the labor movement in the Caribbean are generally historicized without highlighting the contribution of labor colleges to the function and survivability of trade unions. For more than fifty years, labor colleges have played a critical role in developing the knowledge and skill sets of union members who had an interest in labor studies. Many will attribute the heydays of the Caribbean labor movement in the mid-1900s to the intellectual thrust given to the trade union movement by labor colleges. During this period, trade unions relied heavily on labor colleges for intellectual support and advice primarily on matters that required in-depth academic investigation. Support from the labor colleges enhanced the reputation of the labor movement by shifting popular notions that the trade union movement consisted only of the poor and illiterate working class. The effects of these parallel training activities have been positive for both the leadership of the trade union movement and the overall impact they have had on labor-management relationships. There has been a noted change in the pattern of trade union leadership where “the first generation leaders, considered by many as demagogic and messianic, have given way increasingly to a younger and more formally educated second and third generation leadership”.

Debates over the significance of immigration and demands for its restriction in industrialized nations have been a major feature of political life in the 1980s and 1990s. There are several reasons for this heightened concern. In Western Europe, the 1990s have been a decade of slower growth, particularly compared with the halcyon decades of the 1950s and 1960s when mass migration, severely restricted during the interwar years, again became a routine aspect of European life.Even more persistent and troubling has been the declining position of less skilled workers in the economies of industrial nations. The International Monetary Fund notes that, beginning in the 1970s or the early 1980s, “labor markets in the advanced economies have been characterized by marked increases in wage inequality in some countries between the more skilled and less skilled, and in other countriesby rises in unemployment among the less skilled.” Many less skilled workers believe that migrants are responsible for their declining wages and unemployment.