Nogales is the shared name of two towns in North America that have grown up in the Sonoran desert; they are separated and united by the international border between the United States and Mexico. Until the early twentieth century, people who frequented Brickwood's Saloon in Nogales, Arizona would literally be standing on the border if they moved close to its south wall (it had to be knocked out to make room for a border marker put up in 1894). A lot of alcohol flowed north over the borderline at Nogales during prohibition. Much illicit traffic in people and goods continues to flow through Ambos Nogales (as the two towns are collectively known). Yet there is also a tremendous amount of licit traffic that goes through America's Port of Entry at Nogales—$2.5 billion worth of fresh produce—tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, peppers, eggplant, mangoes and more, much of it organically grown. These goods came over the border in Mexican trucks in 2011, supplying a healthy dose of fruits and vegetables to American consumers in the winter months. Meanwhile, Mexican workers from places like Oaxaca make a perilous passage through the desert to enter the United States, heading to fields and groves in California or Georgia or Washington or countless other places to harvest fruits and vegetables for Americans or perform other work vital to the so-called American way of life. Over 6,000 migrants, lost or left behind by coyotes, have perished of dehydration in the crossing in the last decade trying to make it to America's fields and other opportunities for work, as other less environmentally punishing border zones in California and Texas have been hardened with walls and intensive surveillance regimes.

This essay examines working-class white ethnics' rejection of middle-class suburbanite notions of racial innocence, meritocratic individualism, and idealized equality in post-Civil Rights America. Most scholarly attention on white ethnics has tended to dwell on well-documented racism or on their crass embrace of programs earned by others' hard-fought activism (a kind of “me-tooism”). I argue that these interpretations do not adequately capture the complex and often contradictory expressions of “ethniclass” identity in a decade characterized by working-class revolt, backlash, and retreat. I focus on white ethnic leaders allied with the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs (headed by civil rights veteran Msgr. Geno Baroni); seizing on the capacious definition of “disadvantage” common in the early 1960s, they worked with African Americans and others for increased job training, formed coalitions with organized labor, and lobbied for expanded affirmative action. As they stumbled to construct an economic vision beyond the fading deindustrializing cities from which mainstream liberals seemed disconnected with their version of “rights consciousness,” ethnic leaders articulated positions based on an unwieldy mix of principle and parochialism that defies easy generalization. Given the waning of the white ethnic movement by the late 1970s, their significance lies less in legislative or policy gains and more in their imprint on civic and popular discourse in a period where, despite its powerful effects in the corridors of power, color-blind conservatism fails to capture the views of a majority of white Americans today.

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.”

This essay has two aims. The first is to provide a critical overview of the nature and development of labor history in selected places during the past fifty years. The second is to offer a critical evaluation of the recent “transnational turn” in labor history and its likely future development. Although reference is made to the global context and to labor history beyond national borders, my main focus rests upon the development of labor history in parts of the Americas and the countries of Britain, Ireland, Germany, India, Japan, and Australia.

If this book had halted after its opening chapter, an adjective like “elegant” would fit the resulting essay well. Those opening pages sketch with precision “the classic social movement agenda” developed since the 1960s, respectfully yet sharply identify important limitations of that agenda, and suggest some plausible theoretical tools for moving beyond those limits. Having themselves over those decades made so many contributions to the study of movements and related phenomena (the bibliography cites a half-dozen of their own previous books and could easily have contained more), the intrepid trio are now marking out some very interesting new trails.

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.

This article analyzes the characteristics of domestic service in the city of Buenos Aires at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, showing the importance it had in a porteño society undergoing profound societal transformation. It reconstructs the changes in the sociodemographic profile of the sector and investigates the living and working conditions therein. It describes how that particular labor market was structured. It shows that the complexity of the sector was not only due to the existence of different occupational categories, functions, and hiring conditions, but also to the coexistence of various remuneration concepts, “arrangements” in which work and family life were interwoven in a particular way. It explores domestic service in the light of phenomena such as immigration, urbanization, family dynamics and child-rearing practices, state assistance policies, and the social reproduction processes of the working classes.

“Work means everything to us,” James Livingston writes in the introduction to his recent book, No More Work: Why Full Employment Is A Bad Idea. The meaning of work, what Livingston calls the work ethic, is our problem. “And we've believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives—at any rate, we're pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV.” The time for this mode of thinking, we learn, has passed. “These beliefs are no longer plausible,” Livingston says. “In fact, they've become ridiculous, because there's not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won't pay the bills.”

Surveying countries in all continents, a recent international report sponsored by The Club of Rome declared privatization to be “one of the defining features of our era.” Any major phenomenon of our time must have historical roots. The purpose of this volume is to address privatization as an issue of globalization, to give it a history apart from the totalizing notion of neoliberalism and the prescriptive models of economic theory. The consensus among social theorists and observers is that this global process of privatization is a result of neoliberalism, a practice and ideology whose central tenet is the primacy of markets. Certainly, the rhetoric and policies of neoliberalism have been spreading rapidly throughout the globe, but the blanket use of this concept has not enabled us to get inside the real social and political transformations that marked the last decades of the twentieth century. The writers in this volume introduce the particularities of social and labor histories and locate privatization in narratives of class politics and struggle. Bringing social and labor history into the analyses of privatization, at the same time, these essays put labor history, often monographically focused, into larger discussions of the state and capitalism. These essays make the class agenda of privatization explicit, viewing it not just as the “opening of markets,” but as clear assaults on the working classes and on the public claims that workers and citizens are able to make on the economy's resources and productivity.

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.