Analogies between the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and populist leaders in Latin America are an emblematic case of misleading comparative analysis. They hide the ideological core of Trumpism, which undermines collective action and its emblematic institution, organized labor, dismantling the protections it attained during the twentieth century. In particular, references to Argentina's Juan Perón obscure Trump's emphasis on individual economic freedom, property rights, and the naturalization of inequality, values engrained in American political thinking. They also distort the populist legacies in Latin America. Populist leaders in the postwar years challenged liberal democratic thinking by posing that social rights and collective prerogatives for excluded groups should prevail over individual citizenship in order to expand political democracy. That legacy is not only alien to Trumpism; it might also be the main weapon to fight against it.

This article reconstructs the educational policies of the Latin American Confederation of Christian Trade Unions (CLASC)—the name of which was later changed to the Latin American Central of Workers (CLAT) —in the context of the Latin American Cold War. It provides an empirical description of its pedagogical praxis, showing how it was shaped in constant dialogue with the region's conflictive context. It explores how they viewed political training in relation to both their organizing efforts and struggles, applying a conception that brought together “action, organization and training” as integrated elements, in the run to foster class awareness, build up a “new society,” and “workers’ organized power”.

Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore have offered us two distinct arguments, one persuasive, the other anything but. There is much to be said for their proposition that the political coalitions that instituted New Deal reforms, far from being the historic culmination of an inexorable march from laissez-faire to the welfare state, were fragile and limited from the start and crumbled beyond the possibility of retrieval after 1970. Much more dubious is their contention that the basic explanation of both the limits and the defeat of the New Deal is to be found in a political culture of individualism, which they claim has circumscribed the political life of the United States from the nation's founding to the present.

Transnational labor migration is one of the most visible features of our globalizing world. The International Organization for Migration estimates that there are 214 million migrant workers crossing national borders in the world today. Migration both in and to the Middle East constitutes an important part of this movement of laborers and has deep roots. In the mid-fifteenth century, workers across a broad spectrum of occupations, including stevedores, boatmen, and bakers, trekked from areas in eastern and central Anatolia to the new imperial Ottoman capital, Istanbul, where they lived and worked for months and even years. Workers from outside the Middle East also have been part of the fabric of life in the region for several centuries, the slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa, which long supplied labor for a variety of purposes, being one of the most notable. Migrant workers took on new significance in the twentieth century, especially after the oil price hikes of 1973. Today the nations on the Arabian Peninsula, the destination for most workers, have the highest ratio of migrants to locals in the world.

Ira's paper begins with an apparent paradox: He agrees with William Sewell's statement that labor history is not in crisis, and yet, the remarkable historical occurrences and the powerful methodological and epistemological challenges of the past decade have produced nothing less than “labor history's loss of élan, directionality, and intellectual purpose.” These developments are so serious that labor historians are encouraged to undertake a dramatic departure from the well-trod methodological and thematic pathways of labor history.Marxism, which in varying guises was hegemonic in our discipline for at least two decades, has all but collapsed under the double pressure of events and theoretical challenges. Its political project is undermined by a disappearing working class, a declining welfare state, and the end of European communism, its theoretical preeminence shaken by new deconstructive and Foucauldian approaches. These approaches have questioned the timelessness and solidity of Marxist categories, arguing that the “historical subject” of the theory—the working class—is not a sociological given or an ontologically secure phenomenon; it is a category that is not merely undifferentiated, but constituted in such a way as to obliterate its constitutive “other,” most preeminently “woman.” Poststructuralist historiography undercuts the teleological and triumphalist assumptions of Marxist philosophy of history, just as the aforementioned events have shown them to be counterfactual, if not “sentimental reminders of times lost and aspirations disappointed.”

It wasn't quite the WTO in Seattle, but controversy did enliven the forty-sixth annual meeting of the Business History Conference at Palo Alto, California, March 10–12, 2000. Organized around the theme of “Enterprise in Society,” it boasted panels on work, science and technology, banking, social stakeholders and corporations, gender, the environment, and consumption. Participants came from many fields, and the event's interdisciplinarity sparked lively discussions as to whether particular papers even belonged at the conference. One commentator, Youssef Cassis (University of Grenoble, II), for example, asked if studies of working-class bank customers should be included in panels on banking, or whether such papers, however well done, are social or working-class history, and consequently outside the domain of business history? His question sparked a direct response from audience member Pamela Laird (University of Colorado-Denver) who suggested that this was precisely the direction that business history should be heading.

Verity Burgmann's call for a reinvigorated class politics and language is timely. This essay shares her goal of strengthening social movements in which class is taken seriously. It argues, however, that her efforts to resuscitate an antiquated class politics dressed up in identity clothes will not further that goal. This response offers an alternative reading of the nature and history of the “new” and the “old” social movements, of what can be learned about class and class-conscious movements from “identity politics” and from cultural theorists, and of what is needed to encourage future movements for social and economic justice. It calls for a class politics that recognizes the diversity of the working classes, embraces multiple class identities, reflects the fluid and multitiered class structures in which we live, and honors the aspirations of working people for inclusion, equity, and justice.

Crumbling smokestacks, shuttered furnaces, and abandoned quarries are all striking representations of deindustrialization. These and other images construct a discourse whose ideological undertones, far from confining them to the realm of symbolic nostalgia, have profound effects on contemporary societies. In 2015, within the European Labor History Network (ELHN), a working group on historical cultures of labor under conditions of deindustrialization (working group) began to critically study and reflect on this nascent theme. It grew from a small group of researchers to a network of academics across Europe and beyond. Though the study of deindustrialization is not new, contemporary work offers insights into the continuing struggle over the meaning of classical industrial work and its loss, revealing unresolved social, cultural, and political tensions. Yet, existing representations of deindustrialization have been criticized as “smokestack nostalgia.” In order to chart how we understand contemporary industrial decay in our political, cultural, and economic climate, the working group explores representations and more-than representations of loss and regeneration in deindustrialized regions, primarily in Europe but widening to include a growing global network.

The Workers' Museum in Copenhagen was formally inaugurated on April 12, 1982, at a meeting held at the historic Workers' Assembly Hall at Rømersgade in Copenhagen, the prime location near the Royal Gardens and Rosenborg Palace where the museum is located. At that time the museum had a governing board with representatives of The National Museum, The Museum of Copenhagen, The Library and Archives of the Danish Labour Movement, The University of Copenhagen, the National College of the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions (LO), the Friends of the Workers' Museum, and the General Council of the Federation of Trade Unions.