On November 28, 1946, a group of Puerto Rican women picketed the Chicago offices of Castle, Barton, and Associates, a private employment agency that had brought them to the city to become domestic workers. They protested low wages, long hours, and deductions from their pay for transportation and other costs. Their resistance challenged the Puerto Rican and United States governments to both recognize local labor exploitation and grapple with Puerto Rican rights as those of migrant United States citizens. These women made demands on the Puerto Rican state to regulate migrant contract work and sponsor training programs for domestic work. They would succeed as colonial subjects to gain recognition as workers. Nonetheless, they failed to win well-paid, safe, and desirable jobs. This history of Puerto Rican women's domestic work and their struggle for regulation illuminates a formative moment in the history of Puerto Rican women's organizing and activism for labor rights.

This article explores the historical relationship between scientific research and labor management by investigating the state supervision of color perception in British workers (1870s-1920s). Whereas eighteenth-century scientific writers had described color blindness as an individual idiosyncrasy, color blindness was interpreted in the late nineteenth century as a social contaminant. As multiple sites of labor and industry were saturated with color—for example, through the deployment of flashing red and green lights on ships and railways—the color vision of workers became an increasingly significant medical and legal concern. Starting in the 1890s, the Board of Trade developed new efforts to legislate the admittedly subjective realm of color perception. But British workers also publicly opposed the Board's efforts to regulate their perception and objected to the “modernist” palette that was commonly used in color vision tests. I trace the emergence of color blindness as a class-specific pathology and consider both the denigration and the valorization of workers' perceptions in modern British industrial society.

The view of New York Harbor was a welcome sight for Samuel Siegal, one of nearly two million Eastern European Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1881 and 1922.Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920 (Baltimore, 1992), 38–68; Samuel Joseph, Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881–1910 (New York, 1969). For Siegal and his shipmates it was the end of an enfeebling boat journey as well as their first glimpse of the goldene medinah (golden land) they had heard and talked about so much in the Pale of Settlement (the region of Czarist Russia open to Jews). Like the overwhelming majority of his coreligionist immigrants, Siegal had traveled to the United States in steerage. There, he ate nearly inedible food—and then only when he was not too nauseated to swallow.

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.

Across former Eastern Europe, the transition from state socialism toward neoliberal capitalism has been accompanied by a marked reduction in emphasis on working-class identities. Because of the centrality of class to socialist-era identity-construction projects, the recent and relatively sudden ascendancy of various forms of individualist, consumption-oriented subjectivity in postrevolutionary societies has produced conflicts that are often more visible than in societies where capitalism has been the accepted economic paradigm for much longer. This shift can be seen in the realm of art and visual culture: Images of the worker once dominated public spaces under state socialism, competing in number with representations of leaders and communist ideologues, but since 1989 they have often been vandalized, dismantled, or else relocated to decay in relative obscurity. Where new public images of the worker do appear in postsocialist neoliberal conditions, they frequently serve as nexuses of controversy, where generational and ideological conflicts regarding current labor conditions and the legacy of worker solidarity play out. The debates surrounding representations of workers in postsocialism are both part of a global history of postsocialist art and part of the history of labor and its relation to contemporary urban space. This article examines artistic representations of the worker sited in public space in postsocialist Albania, in order to map the political and artistic discourses that animate engagements with working-class identity in conditions of neoliberal social transformation.

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 essay explores changing trends in the post-1989 historiography of both eastern and western postwar Europe. It suggests that one major development is a shift toward themes in social and cultural history that see the late 1940s in the context of wartime experience. Another is the wresting of issues such as the imposition of communist power in eastern Europe from political science by historians. Shortcomings visible in these new trends include a tendency to divorce the history of representations and images from older concerns with power and the state. On the whole, however, common issues are emerging in the historiography of the two-halves of the continent that make it easier to envisage a more unified approach to their joint postwar history.

None of the award-winning films reviewed in this article has a blissful tone. In these films, we watch young girls in assembly lines producing all sorts of commodities in China as well as four hundred Chinese workers disassembling a coking plant in Germany. We are immersed in people's personal stories, such as a peasant woman forced to leave her farm and her lone hut, located in the area due to be submerged by the Three Gorges Dam project, and a sixteen-year-old girl learning to labor on a cruise ship along the Yangtze River. In most of the films we also meet managers, Chinese or foreign, who are concerned with nothing but maximizing profit through intense exploitation of labor. These films document how the massive force of modernization in a globalized world affects lives of common people in China. Their struggles with poverty, corrupt officials, and greedy business owners are displayed in sharp contrast to both shining metropolitan glory and rural banality. In this regard, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky's photographs of China, as shown in the film Manufactured Landscapes, seem emblematic enough: Modernization in China has altered the trajectory of people's lives as well as the landscapes of their nation. This article discusses the issues embedded in the stories the seven documentaries present: the impact of global capitalism; the relations between national development and globalization; the conflicts between corporate social responsibility and profit-making; and the predicament of migrant workers and their human agency.

In the scholarly debate about the increasingly flexible, informal, and precarious nature of employment relations, it is often suggested that these trends are new. This is especially true for the advanced capitalist countries. “Previously,” employees had permanent jobs, with good social benefits and a vast array of rights, whereas “nowadays” they are losing these forms of security and are more vulnerable to market whims. These observations do not take into account that standard employment relationships in fact came about relatively recently. In the past, insecurity and absence of rights were at least as prevalent as they are today. Standard employment appears to have been generalized rather briefly in a small part of the world. The crucial question is not why the old lack of security is returning, but why it was possible to reduce such insecurity for a small share of the world population for a few decades. While the answer to this crucial question remains unclear; studies reconstructing the course of events over several centuries will clearly be necessary to solve this problem.

Despite the prominence of both migrant workers and “global commons” as protagonists in recent meetings of the World Social Forum, few activists or scholars have successfully linked their historical agency or significance. In the following essay, I locate conceptual starting points for linking migrant workers and global commons by analyzing the work of the transnational and the commons in political conversation at the WSF and in the historiographies of immigration and the environment in North America. I argue that the transnational and global commons are best understood as analytical vantages rather than as utopian visions of nation-state transcendence. Using research into the history of human trafficking, I explore the analytical advantages of linking migrant workers to global commons. As inevitable trespassers of both national sovereignty and property claims, migrant workers' journeys help reveal a global commons that is, like them, migratory, fleeting, and often illegible to the state authorities. Such commons are not pristine wildernesses, but polyglots of weedy hybrids. Migrant workers' transnational vantages illuminate the limits of enclosure and the enduring adaptability of nonhuman nature across national boundaries.

Southern and South African labor history has, at least since the 1970s, been as much about the future of the region as about its past. Liberal scholars saw in apartheid and segregation irrational aberrations to the color-blind logic of capitalism. They believed the apartheid state to be an instrument of racial dominance but saw it as more or less neutral in terms of class relations. Economic growth and the abolishment of racial laws would bring freedom and equality—or at least equal opportunities. On the other hand, radical historians and sociologists thought of apartheid as a system that guaranteed the exploitation of cheap black labor for the benefit of capital. For them, apartheid was functional to capitalism.2 While both the liberal and the radical positions were often more nuanced than the other side would admit, the question that divided these two camps was one about politics and strategy: Would capitalist development bring an end to racial domination, or was it part of the problem? In the latter case, challenging apartheid and colonialism would also involve challenging capitalism. The vibrancy of these debates should continue to serve as an inspiration for labor historians. I will argue that for the Left to be able to formulate viable alternatives to present policies, we should look at the history and nature of labor and inequality in the region.

Over the course of one hundred years Haymarket has provoked a considerable body of personal and historical writing offering a variety of interpretations and evaluations of its meaning. Thus historians have attributed to Haymarket local as well as national significance; they have viewed it as a conspiracy by the ruling elite against the labor movement, as a death-blow to anarchism in the United States, as an attempt at weakening the eight-hour movement, and as a critical watershed for the organization of American labor at large. Before adding yet another view, it may be appropriate to address not only one basic issue underlying any such endeavor but also the assumptions for attributing to this unique historical event important and far-reaching consequences. Claims about Haymarket's wide ramifications certainly cannot be sustained by dealing with it solely on the factual level; such an attempt could justifiably be criticized as a simplistic and reductionistic “cause-and-effect” explanation.