The privatization of New York City's Central Park in 1998 was among the most high-profile municipal privatizations in the US during the 1990s. Since then, the park's privatization has been cited as an exemplary model of privatization. This essay develops a unique class approach to municipal privatization and uses it to reconceptualize Central Park's privatization. In doing so, it argues that the park's privatization involves an important contradiction—one that regards its ostensible status as one of the nation's most famous and treasured public goods against its production as a capitalist commodity. This class approach to the park's privatization yields four insights. First, it underscores the limitations of the hegemonic cost-efficiency calculus that has long informed the municipal privatization discourse. Second, it raises important questions regarding the troublesome relationship between democratic principles and capitalist production relations. Third, it offers an alternative to a wage-led approach to privatization. Finally, and paradoxically, it provides a framework for theorizing “progressive” privatizations.

Consumer activists organizing in the 1930s against rising milk prices demonstrated the power of a strong grassroots movement to enlarge prevailing understandings of the political and to wring responses from an unwilling state. Their maternalism, combined with milk's emotional, social, and political meanings, attracted broad popular support and deflected criticism from the dairy industry, hostile public officials, and anticommunists. Their campaign for affordable milk became a synecdoche for broader demands that the state restrain business in the interests of consumers and protect ordinary people from the harsh injustices of the Depression. After winning immediate concessions, the Toronto Housewives Association failed to achieve their long-term goals, but their impact was nonetheless significant. Their campaign fueled and informed public debates about the political economy of food and government's responsibilities to protect citizens, pushing socialist policies onto the political agenda under the cover of maternalism. Participation in Housewives' campaigns transformed powerless victims into effective political actors. Housewife-activists challenged prevailing notions of normative feminine behavior, creating social space for ordinary women acting within their domestic roles to engage in direct political action.

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.

The transformation of global capitalism, labor, and class relations in our own day is having a marked effect on how we study those subjects historically. Yet, as happens repeatedly in our historical discipline, insights gained from the juxtaposition and recognition of deep structural affinities between the present and the past also carry the risk of a distorted mirror effect. What questions we carry to the past and what lessons we, in turn, extract from it must be handled with care. As couriers between worlds of time as well as space, our work as historians inevitably reflects the ignorance as well as intelligence attending the message (as well as the messenger) of the given moment. With these caveats in mind, I want to explore the link between today's global crisis in worker welfare—perhaps most commonly summoned up by the twinned terms “neoliberalism” and the “precariat”—and a new historical preoccupation with coerced laborers of the past. With due deference to the aims of this collection, I will concentrate on the connection between the coolie question, as it developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the plight (and possible strategies) of low-wage global workers today.

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”.

In 2014 the conservative Australian Institute of Public Affairs called for the abolition of the minimum wage—at the time AU$16.87, the highest in the industrial world and twice that of the United States. The Australian minimum, enacted in Victoria in 1896, was the first in the world. Other nations copied it, and the International Labor Organization inscribed it as an international convention in 1928. Responding to calls for its abolition, University of Melbourne historian Marilyn Lake reminded Australians that the minimum wage was a “symbol of Australian values.” Envisioned as a “living wage, sufficient to meet the variety of needs of a person living in a civilized community … [it] recognized workers as human beings and equal citizens,” she wrote.

In contrast to the US, scholars of Latin America have not been shy about viewing agrarian life through a class lens. To the contrary, Latin Americanists have often seen class formation as a primarily rural process. This paper examines the uneven nature of and relationship between class formation, “industrialization,” and “urbanization” by tracing the history of a single family: the Alvaros. It is a narrative that provides an interesting window into the central processes, forces, struggles, and events that have defined Ecuadorian as well as much of Latin American history during the twentieth century. It is, at the same time, a history that highlights the problematic nature of any analysis of class formation that (a) focuses solely on urban or rural life, (b) posits a smooth transition from one to the other (i.e. rural to urban), or (c) privileges the solitary male worker so familiar to labor studies. It is not simply the fact that members of the Alvaro family moved back and forth between city and country, a trait they share with many of their counterparts in the non-Western world. The reproduction of the family has, and continues to be, dependent on the relationships between family members living in small rural towns, regional centers, and Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest and most industrialized city-port. The family as a whole has always been—and needed to be in order to survive—simultaneously rural and urban. Like the Alvaro family, those of us interested in understanding class formation need to inhabit these multiple worlds simultaneously.

Engaging questions about social reproduction, migrant labor, and food provisioning, this article examines the emergence of a working-class food system on the coast of Kenya during the early decades of the twentieth century. Like elsewhere in Africa, labor migrants in Kenya's port city of Mombasa and on nearby plantations were provisioned with food rations, which were part of what Patrick Harries calls a “racial paternalism” that structured many labor relations during the colonial period. The article starts in rural Kenya, but then follows labor migrants to their places of employment to examine the formation of this new food system. In upcountry rural societies, women had primarily produced and then exclusively prepared their communities’ food. However, as migrants, men received a ration (posho) of maize meal or rice as part of their pay, used their cash wages to purchase foodstuffs from nearby markets, and some plantation workers were also able to grow their own vegetables on plots allocated by their employers. After acquiring their food through these wage-labor relations, men then had to cook their meals themselves. In addition the cuisine created by labor migration was one of extreme monotony compared to what these migrants ate in their rural communities, but I also show how food became a point of conflict between management and labor. The article demonstrates how workers successfully pressured their employers to improve the quantity and quality of their rations from the 1910s to the 1920s, while also raising their wages that allowed them to purchase better food. I additionally argue that during this period an “urban” or “rural” context did not fundamentally define how migrant workers acquired their food, as those laboring in both city and countryside received these rations. However, the article concludes by examining how after 1930, economic transformations changed Mombasa's food system so that workers became almost entirely reliant on cash and credit as the way they acquired their daily meals, while paternalism continued to infuse the food systems of rural migrant laborers. In sum, this article is a local study of coastal Kenya that is also concerned with global questions about how food provisioning fits into the social reproduction of working classes in industrial and colonial capitalism.

The 1961 constitutional reform in Turkey recognized the right to strike and granted other rights and freedoms related to the collective actions of labor. Conventional wisdom holds that Turkish trade unions became independent of the state power with class-based interests only after this reform. Across mainstream literature, this is considered, in historical institutionalist terms, as the first critical juncture in Turkey's industrial relations. This paper provides a critical account of the institutional continuity, development, and change that took place in Turkey's industrial relations starting from its establishment as a republic in 1923 until the end of the 1950s, by considering the socioeconomic and legal-political environment during these years. Considering the historical evidence employed, and under historical institutionalism, it is argued that the first critical juncture in the country's industrial relations occurred in 1947, when the ruling cliques permitted the establishment of trade unions. In this paper, it is purported that the consensus reached by the trade unions on the necessity of the right to strike from the mid-1950s onwards initiated a peaceful class struggle between Turkish labor and the state, which gradually steered the industrial relations toward the second critical juncture following the promulgation of the 1961 constitution.

In my comment I raise two main questions about the Eley/Nield essay. First, I express some doubts about whether the issues discussed in their essay can be unproblematically transposed to historiographical debates in areas beyond Western Europe and North America. Certain themes, such as the need to reemphasize the political, are hardly pressing given the continual emphasis on politics and the state in Latin American labor history. Closely related to this, I question whether the state of gender studies within labor history can be used, in the way these authors seem to be doing, as a barometer of the sophistication and vitality of labor and working-class history. Despite recognizing the tremendous contribution of gendered approaches to labor history, I express doubts about its ability to help us rethink the category of class, and even express some concern that it might occlude careful consideration of class identities. Instead, pointing to two pathbreaking works in Latin American labor history, I argue that the types of questions we ask about class, and primarily about class, can provide the key to innovative scholarship about workers even if questions such as gender or ethnicity go unexamined. Finally, I point out that class will only be a vital category of analysis if it is recognized not simply as “useful,” but as forming a basis for genuinely creative and innovative historical studies.

In the last fifteen years or so, a generation of European social historians, armed with an integrated understanding of society, class, culture, and politics, has demystified the history of religion. In particular, they have probed the complicated relationship between institutional and popular belief in the time when Roman Catholicism formed the ideological mainstay of landed power in the precapitalist European countryside. Even apart from the Reformation, they have shown that orthodox religion faced a raft of powerful popular challenges. Superstition, magic, and other “pagan”—or folk—carryovers still survived. Even when accepted, orthodox religion often underwent subversive transmutation at the hands of supposedly docile and devout underclasses who reinvested its practices with new meanings, reappropriated its symbols for their own ends, and sometimes thereby used it as a resource against the predations of society's rulers. In the process, they transformed the Church's own religion from a theology of subjugation into an arena for popular struggle, resistance, expression, and assertion.