This introduction sets out the context for the special feature on gender and deindustrialization. It briefly outlines the development of research in this field and the contribution made by the articles included in this issue, before pointing to some directions for future research.

Throughout the literature on contemporary populism in Europe, scholars point to increasing precarity brought about by post-Fordist labor relations as a central component in outrage on both the Left and the Right. Focusing on the case of Madrid and its right to housing movement, I instead argue that current mobilizations need to be understood as the product of the long absence of Fordist urban economic arrangements. I demonstrate how the working class was only able to attain full membership in the city during the recent economic boom. With the property crash, that membership appeared fleeting, triggering both inequality and outrage. Ultimately, I insist on the role of housing in the production of class formation and subjectivities.

In this article, I choose struggles over skill development as an entry point to uncovering features of women's labor activism in state-owned tobacco factories in Romania, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. I look at the processes that constructed women tobacco workers, especially those at the Tobacco Manufactory in the city of Cluj, as non-skilled workers, and examine the forms of labor activism in the tobacco industry that challenged those constructs. I describe how women's work at the Cluj Tobacco Manufactory, from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s, was shaped by successive waves of production intensification and rationalization, demonstrating that these reorganizations affected female workers more than they affected their male coworkers. I point out that although they were considered non-skilled laborers, female tobacco workers exercised an amount of control over their work and were important contributors to their families’ maintenance. I show that spanning two different political regimes, matters of skill were at the core of labor activism. For female workers, in the interwar period, labor activism in male-dominated organizations and structures entailed skill-mediated political strategies that emphasized experience and shopfloor status besides skill. By the 1950s, labor activism encompassed engaging in confrontational politics over seasoned women workers’ lack of access to skill training programs. I show that both in the late 1920s and in the early 1950s, illiteracy and women's more limited access to formal schooling in general shaped new experiences of participation in labor politics.

This article examines the correlation between union activism, crime, and violence in the shipping industry in wartime China. Drawing on diplomatic and police records, shipping manifests, periodicals, and newspapers, the article deals with self-employed unskilled steamship attendants called “teaboys.” With insight into Chinese civilians’ underground struggle, the article contends that, steamship teaboys sustained their livelihoods during World War II by operating as everyday low-level spies for rival regimes. As workers, steamship teaboys pragmatically, without evidence of politico-ideological considerations, accommodated the needs of different belligerents in exchange for their own survival. Moreover, this article argues that the drastic socio-political upheaval in wartime China made these marginally employed shipboard attendants increasingly inclined towards a utilitarian patron-client relationship, originally forged in the mid-1920s when unionization began, and continued at the expense of their native-place ties and fictive family bonds. Impacted by the patron-client relationship in a climate where workers’ interests were protected by the armed forces of various regimes, the teaboys viewed unions as competitive sellers of muscle power in a market for crime and violence in industrial unrest.

By the mid-1970s, Jerry Rubin—icon of American radicalism and cofounder of the Yippies, who campaigned in 1968 to elect a pig as president of the United States and appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee dressed in an eighteenth-century Revolutionary War uniform—had transformed himself from protester to successful businessman. He launched a new career on Wall Street as a stockbroker, became known for his promotion of “networking,” bringing together yuppies at parties in Manhattan, and was an early investor in Apple Computer. For a long time, both in public memory and in many historical accounts, Rubin's conversion embodied the path of an entire generation of leftists who hastily shifted from the ideological craze of 1968–1970 to the disillusionment of the so-called “me decade.”

To scholars of labor and working-class history, police pose a problem—though, one less grave than the problem they pose to contemporary life in the United States, where roughly 10 percent of all homicide victims, and fully one-third of all people killed by strangers, die at police hands. How should police be categorized, and are they worthy subjects for the field? They are workers, of course, but they are also front-line agents of state repression and shock troops for capital. They remain robustly unionized, at least by US standards, but their unions are regressive and politically conservative, more concerned with shielding cops from accountability than with building solidarity. As individuals, many hail from working-class communities of color, but as a social and political category, their effect is to rationalize, reproduce, and fortify axes of racial and class difference. Their labor power is undoubtedly appropriated to produce surplus value, but is the exploitation they suffer superseded—or, to use a newly vexed word, “trumped”—by the work they do as exploiters?

Major recent work in US history has credited the New Deal with a dubious double legacy. One group of historians has shown how Roosevelt's domestic policies subsidized the consolidation of a political economy and culture of mass consumption, while another has described how his foreign policies generated the strategies and institutions of neoimperialism. Scholars have analyzed these developments in isolation, but this essay demonstrates that they were linked and synergistic. Working from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to the nascent program for multilateral international development, it argues that an integrated complex of New Deal domestic and foreign policies harnessed the rise of the United States as a “consumers' republic” to the forms of imperialism refined in Latin America in the thirties and forties and deployed globally after the war. This policy complex rationalized the global production of US mass-consumer prosperity, displaced the costs of the Keynesian rehabilitation of US capitalism abroad, and evolved to regulate the metabolism between domestic mass consumerism and international hegemony after 1945.

Eric Hobsbawm, who died on October 1, 2012, was one of a handful of extraordinary labor historians who emerged from the British Communist Party Historians' Group in the 1940s and 1950s. Today he is widely acknowledged as one of the great historians of our era. His influence is truly international. For a long time, a significant limitation on the extent of his renown was the USSR where, during the era of “actually-existing socialism,” his works were never translated or published. This was ironic since he was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) from 1936 until its dissolution in 1991.

The first conference of the European Labour History Network (ELHN) took place on December 14–16, 2015, in Turin, Italy. It was, for the time being, the culmination of a development that has been going on for a number of years. Increasingly European labor historians work together across borders. Since the 1970s the number of research projects comparing two or more national cases has grown considerably, while in recent years transnational connections have attracted more attention as well. Likewise, labor historians now take Europe's imperial, colonial, and neocolonial past very seriously, and therefore the labor dimension of that past is explored more intensely (chattel slavery, indentured labor, convict labor, and so on).

The papers by Eileen Boris, Laura Frader, Laura Tabili, and Eric Weitz were presented at the 2000 meeting of the Social Science History Association. The panel was organized to reflect upon how and in what ways the “gender turn”—the move from feminist-inspired women's history to feminist-inspired gender history—has influenced labor and working-class history in different national contexts. The gender turn was, to a large extent, informed and motivated by a renewed and reinvigorated cultural history, which itself grew out of scholarship focused on language and discourse.

The ninety-third annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) took place in St. Louis, Missouri, from March 30 to April 2, 2000. Surprisingly, few panels addressed labor history at the OAH, but those that did proposed new and exciting ways of rethinking the field, emphasizing new narratives for the history of labor in the United States and the inclusion of new areas of investigation.

The novelty of the new millennium proved too tempting for most to pass without offering some reflections on the waning century or speculations for the future, and the 114th annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) was no exception. The tone was set early by the announced theme of the conference (“History for the Twenty-First Century: Continuity and Change”) and its opening panel, which promised to consign the twentieth century to history. There were also sessions on “Scholarly Publishing in the Twenty-First Century” and “Interviewing in the Job Market in the New Millennium.” By my count there were no less than eight panels at the conference that adopted an explicitly millennial theme. Not to be outdone, labor historians added their musings with a roundtable entitled “Labor History at the Millennium: International Capitalism and the Comparative Historical Dimension.”

Comparative studies of social policy usually portray the French welfare state as lagging behind most of its counterparts in Western Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century. The sheer complexity of the French system, moreover, with its baroque mixture of separate private, government and quasi-public funds, made it exceptional as well. Yet tardiness and complexity by no means prevented the French from expanding social insurance at an especially rapid clip in the decades following the Second World War. By 1980 France spent more on social security as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product than any country in Europe except Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. Today the French are among Europe's most stalwart defenders of publicly funded pensions and health insurance. Given its unimpressive beginnings, how did the French welfare state become such a heavyweight?