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.

The experiences of the Chinese workers illustrate most dramatically the profound changes taking place in contemporary China. No longer the “leading class” in a socialist country, as proclaimed in the Constitution, many of them, especially the migrant workers from rural areas and the retired, the laid-off, the new urban poor, and farmers, are now reduced to being “the weak groups.” They are voiceless and defenseless, the most vulnerable and desperate people in a society that is rapidly transforming itself through marketization and globalization.

The restructuring of capital and the transformation of the workforce in the late twentieth century has produced a newly-shaped working class; one that encompasses those in insecure work and unemployed workers. With this repositioning has come new political organizations of unemployed workers, of which Te Roopu Rawakore o Aotearoa, the national New Zealand organization for unemployed workers, is an example. This organization of unemployed was not only significant for its existence in the face of poverty, status disintegration, and a perceived sense of social worthlessness, but also for the tripartite ideology its members employed. Unemployed workers in New Zealand combined the identity politics of race and gender with a class-based critique of society to demand “the right to work and a living wage for all.”

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.

Labor history in UK museums is constantly in a state of change. A hundred-year-old tradition of displaying and interpreting the history of the common people has seen a shift from the folk life museum to a much more all-encompassing model. The academic trend for and acceptance of working-class history began this process, and museums followed, albeit at a much slower pace. Young curators actively involved in the History Workshop, Oral History, and Women's History movements brought their new philosophies into the museum sphere. This internally driven change in museums has been matched with demand for change from above. Museums have been given a central role in the current Labour government's wide-ranging strategies to promote an understanding of diversity, citizenship, cultural identity, and lifelong learning as part of a broader social inclusion policy. The zenith of this plan would be a museum devoted to British national history, though whether this will take place is yet to be seen. The transformation of the People's History Museum makes an interesting case study. The museum, originally an institution on the fringes of academic labor history and actively outside the museum community, is now at the forefront of labor history display, interpretation, textile conservation, and working-class historical research.

In many ways, the vast industrial complexes that developed on the Central African Copperbelt and the Fushun coalfields in the early twentieth century were very different places. One on a high plateau stretched out across the border between what is now Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia with a sub-tropical climate; the other on the rolling foothills of Changbai Mountains in what is now Liaoning Province, northeastern China, with a humid continental climate. Yet anyone who visited either of these places would immediately and unavoidably have become aware of a basic fact about both: that racial hierarchies governed life and work on the mines. This article is about that basic fact, and in it we aim to make a two-fold contribution: First, it is a comparative history of mining regions, which, although it might seem an area of study ripe for comparison, is seldom undertaken. Second, through this comparison to argue that the prevalence and significance of race as a way of organizing life and work in the mining industry has been underestimated. We support this claim with an overview of production and everyday life in two seemingly very different mining regions: the Fushun coalfields and the Central African Copperbelt (see figure 1).

Beginning with Brazil in 1964, continuing with Chile in 1973, and concluding with Argentina in 1976, the ABC powers of South America experienced civil-military coups and long-lived dictatorships that put an end to their democratic governments and programs of structural reform. Each coup reflected national circumstances and histories that differed from country to country—in Brazil, the military overthrew João Goulart's left populist government, in Chile, the Pinochet coup put an end to Allende's democratic road to socialism, while in Argentina, the military Junta and their civilian allies ended the left Peronist “revolutionary” project (already under attack from the Peronist right) and replaced it with a rightist “process” of their own.

The essay examines the British army's transformation from a small professional force into a mass conscript army between 1939 and 1945. Battlefield defeats and criticism of the nation's conduct of the war acted as a stimulus to reform in the early years. Examining such areas as officer selection, discipline, and the expansion of army education services (ABCA), the essay shows how the military adapted to the recruitment of millions of “civilians in uniform” and in some instances worked to contain or resist change. Special attention is given to class conflicts that arose between officers and “other ranks” and situations where perceived indifference to recruits' basic rights provoked protests and strikes, including protests over slow demobilization in 1946. A final section analyzes the role of ABCA and the forces press in creating a space for political discussion; the radical views prevalent among British servicemen; and the contradictions between the official ban on political debate in the forces, the rhetoric of “a people's war,” and the troops' growing focus on postwar reconstruction and the General Election of 1945.

The Housewives' Associations were the largest women's organizations in Australia during the interwar years and were the first consumer-watch agencies. This article examines the gendered economic identity they cultivated in successfully mobilizing women under the banner of free-market economics against the protectionism of the mainstream political parties and the labor movement. In challenging the dominant economic discourse, they asserted the claims of consumption to the same status and recognition in the functioning of the economic system as the overwhelmingly masculine forces of capital and labor. In the process, they also threw into question the relevance of class as a basis for women's political activism.

In 1981 liberation theologian José Porfirio Miranda argued that the parable of the weeds in Matthew was a clear guide for a radical politics in the modern world. According to the Mexican mathematician and union adviser, Jesus' explanation that “the farmer sowing seeds is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed the citizens of the Kingdom” was an injunction to achieve justice and freedom in the present. This earthly incarnation of the Kingdom of God was a central pillar of resistance to capitalism among middle-and lower-class groups in Latin America in the last third of the twentieth century, from human rights activism in the Southern Cone to Central America's revolutionary insurrections.

Much of the literature on the New Deal over the last fifteen years has sought to extend it in time and scope. The New Deal has become the New Deal Order. More than the legislation and programs of the Great Depression years under President Roosevelt, it encompasses or designates particular political coalitions brought together under a dominant Democratic Party, expanded citizenship rights, Keynesian economic policymaking, rising standards of living through collective bargaining and public investment, checks on the prerogatives of business, and working-class enfranchisement that continued well beyond the Roosevelt years.1 We talk about the New Deal when we refer to the G.I. Bill, Truman's economic and social policies or organized labor's gains in the late 1940s, Republican President Eisenhower's extension of Social Security in the 1950s, Lyndon Johnson's enactment of Medicare, and can even include the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) laws in 1970 as the New Deal's last gasp, under President Nixon. Other historians have extended the New Deal back in time, linking its programs more firmly with social policy and industrial relations experiments in the Progressive Era, the First World War, and the 1920s. Widow's pensions, war labor boards, unemployment insurance, industrial democracy became the basic building blocks of the New Deal.2 Historians have also been revising the histories of later social movements, such as the African-American freedom struggle or the women's movement, and relocating them as New Deal movements.3 So we no longer think in terms of the “interwar period”—which was always more of a European periodization—just as we no longer talk about the New Deal as emerging full-blown from the forehead of Roosevelt and an inner-circle, male Brain Trust and ending with the Supreme Court packing incident.

This article analyzes the relationship between masculinity and domestic service by exploring how servants resisted the changing culture and realities of their work in colonial Dar es Salaam, the capital of British colonial Tanganyika. Domestic servants formed nearly half the working class in the city, and ninety-seven percent of servants were African men. Considered during the early decades of colonialism to be a well-paid, skilled, and respectable occupation, domestic service transformed in the 1940s and 1950s, due to the World War II economic crisis, soaring urban population, and introduction of new labor regulations. The primary threats to servants’ masculinity during the latter half of the colonial era were the growing limitations the occupation placed on men's abilities to achieve the financial and social capital required to achieve senior status and respect within their families and the African community. In response to rising exploitation and declining wages, servants formed Tanganyika's first African labor union.

This article examines transnational connections between African American emancipation in the United States and Chinese and Indian indenture within the British Empire. In an era of social upheaval and capitalist crisis, planters and colonial officials envisioned coolies as a source of uninterrupted plantation labor. This vision was often bound to the conditions of African American emancipation. In British Honduras, colonial officials sought to bring emancipated African Americans to the colony as labor for sugar plantations. When this project failed, interest turned toward indentured Chinese labor managed by white planters from the U.S. South. In India’s North-Western Provinces, the outbreak of famine came to be seen as a “kindred distress” to the crisis in Lancashire’s textile industry. Unemployed English factory workers were seen as suffering from famine due to the scarcity of slave-produced cotton, just as colonial subjects suffered from scarcity of food. While some weavers in the North-Western Provinces were taken into the coolie trade, the emigration of unemployed Lancashire weavers was looked to as a possible alternative to indenture. Drawing upon archives in Australia, Belize, Britain, India, and the United States, this article explores connections between seemingly disparate histories. By focusing upon their interrelation, this article locates the formation of crisis not in raw materials, but rather within a transnational struggle over racialized labor exploitation, or what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “dark and vast sea of human labor.”

This article focuses on children taken by Istanbulite families for upbringing and employment in the Ottoman capital during the 1800–1900 period. It suggests that domestic child labor which was shaped by the concept of ‘charity’ and economic interests during the first half of the nineteenth century progressively turned into wage labor during the second half of the century. The study claims that the nineteenth century witnessed a transformation of labor relations in the domestic service market, implying the transition from reciprocal to commodified labor. The labor of children employed in domestic services underwent a monetization process throughout the nineteenth century. Parallel to this monetization, the status of children under foster care or in domestic service came to be determined by standardized legal contracts.

This article deals with one of the many neglected chapters of the global history of the Knights of Labor: the events that led the Knights to participate in one of the great international events of the age, the Paris Exposition of 1889, and their attempts to found their assemblies, as they called their branches, on French soil. Drawing on voluminous correspondence between the leaders of the Knights of Labor and their enthusiasts in France, and on the Order's own journal and the proceedings of its conventions, this article analyzes the reasons why the Knights failed to capitalize on their participation in the Exposition, illustrates many of the failings of leadership and organization that afflicted the Order both at home and abroad, and demonstrates some of the problems and potential solutions that faced French labor activists at the end of the nineteenth century.