In 2019, near Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, five children perished in a house fire while their parents were away at night shift jobs. This widely-reported tragedy brought to light conflicting imperatives and highlighted the precarity of gendered productive and reproductive labor across Kazakhstan. This highly-publicized incident ignited a conflagration of protests by “mothers with many children” (mnogodetnye mamy, kopbala analar), the official designation for low-income women who have four or more children and are eligible for state support. This paper analyzes the mothers’ protests of 2019, and the public and official responses to these protests. It finds that, by centering motherhood and traditional gender norms in their protests, these protestors successfully linked their demands for social benefits back to historic Soviet-era protectionist and paternalist policies, thus legitimizing their demands. However, the article argues that at the same time these gendered labor norms force women, especially marginalized mothers, to engage in precarious forms of labor that neither Western-style NGOs nor limited government support are able to adequately address. The article further concludes that “mothers with many children” labor under precarious conditions and are subject to skepticism and censure, as their actions challenge idealized national scripts of proper womanhood in Kazakhstan. This research contributes to the study of labor, gender, and reproduction in Central Asia and calls for centering the study of gendered labor precarity within Central Asian studies.

This study focuses on welfare capitalism and workers’ housing policy in the Habsburg Empire on the eve of the Great War. It deals with the concessions for buildings containing healthy and affordable workers’ flats. The study argues that the existing research on welfare capitalism concentrated mostly on the entrepreneurs and industrialists as key actors in the building of workers’ flats. As the concessions for the building of workers’ houses suggest, the imperial authorities also maintained welfare capitalism and played a certain role in supporting the construction of workers’ housing. Through the concessions, authorities tried to regulate the company construction and to intervene into places of the everyday. They sought to enforce an appropriate lifestyle and to separate spaces for people of workers’ background, male and female workers, single workers, and workers’ families.

In the last month before the Haymarket Riot, Chicago's labor movement staged two grand demonstrations as it prepared to inaugurate the Eight Hour Day on May 1. The Knights of Labor and the Trade and Labor Assembly arranged the first on April 10, the International Working Peoples' Association (IWPA) and the Central Labor Union (CLU) arranged the second, two weeks later, on Easter Sunday, April 25. The two demonstrations shared a common purpose—to rally the city's labor movement around shorter hours—but they could not have been more different.

In January 2008, at the meeting of the American Historical Association, I had coffee with two colleagues, Gary Gerstle and George Sánchez, with whom I share an abiding interest in labor and immigration history, as well as current politics. We hatched an idea to hold a conference on immigration policy reform, which we believed would potentially be back on Congress's agenda after the new administration—we did not know at the time who would be the next president—took office. Ours certainly would not be the first conference on immigration policy. But we wanted to bring two perspectives that are not commonly aired in policy debates today: the historical perspective and the international perspective. We decided to bring together historians, social scientists, advocates, policy analysts, and journalists for a gathering in Washington, D.C., where we hoped to get the attention of those on Capitol Hill. We were fortunate that the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies agreed to host and cosponsor the event and that we were able to work with historian Sonya Michel, the center's new director for United States studies. Additional cosponsors included Columbia University, the University of Southern California, and Vanderbilt University.

In one horrifying night and through the long misery of nearly eighteen years of injustice that have followed it, the city of Bhopal in India can be said to have experienced the head-on impact of world historical and political economic processes. In 1969, Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) set up a plant to manufacture the pesticide Sevin in Bhopal, with the permission and, indeed, the encouragement of the Indian government. This was the heyday of the Green Revolution, introduced in India in the mid-1960s and based on HYV (high-yielding variety) seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and vastly increased irrigation. The disastrous social and environmental consequences of this technological choice (made by Indian planners,This was done at least partially in order to avoid the political vulnerability that dependence on imported foodgrains might bring. Marshal Windmiller, conversation with one of the authors. with backing from international agencies such as the World Bank and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations) are well documented,See, for example, Vandana Shiva, Violence of the Green Revolution (New York, 1991). but it is not always remembered that the Bhopal gas tragedy has its roots in the same narrative. The design of the Bhopal plant, as well as the policies relating to its maintenance and operation, were in keeping with the double-standard often applied by transnational corporations in their Third World outposts, where environmental, worker, and community safety issues may be seen as less pressing than at home.For detailed accounts of the corporation's disregard for safety standards at the Bhopal plant, see David Dembo, Ward Morehouse and Lucinda Wykle, Abuse of Power. Social Performance of Multinational Corporations: The Case of Union Carbide (New York, 1990), 87–91; Ward Morehouse and Arun Subramaniam, The Bhopal Tragedy: What Really Happened and What It Means for American Workers and Communities at Risk (New York, 1986), 2–8; Ruth Norris et al., Pills, Pesticides and Profits, (Croton, NY, 1982).

This article examines the “levee camp” as a social and cultural site for reconstituting rural black workers' masculine identities in the early twentieth-century Mississippi-Arkansas Delta. The construction of the Mississippi River's levees during this period depended heavily on the labor of black mule-drivers drawn from the Delta's cotton plantations. In spite of this dependency, the levee camps' exploitative commissaries and harsh disciplinary violence quashed workers' efforts to reclaim a sense of autonomy that was increasingly denied them on the region's plantations. However, partly in response to the perceived erosion of their authority within the sharecropper family, levee workers successfully used the notorious after-hours culture of the levee camps to construct a hyper-masculine image of themselves as “rough mens” who had been to the levee camps, enjoyed the sexual attention of camp women, and were manly enough to survive the murderous violence of white bosses and other “rough mens” alike. Using a series of 1930s labor investigations as well as early Delta blues hollers and songs about the levee camps, this article shows how black workers' efforts to cultivate this hyper-masculine levee worker image ultimately proved detrimental to their class interests. Levee contractors and foremen welcomed levee camp gambling, prostitution, drinking, and fighting as ways of reducing workers' wages and maintaining labor control in the camps. Ultimately, the levee camps provide a useful example of an all-male work site where gender had important, if unintended, ramifications for workers' class position.

The Working Pupils’ Association of High Schools was founded in 1960s’ Greece as an organization of working boys and girls who attended secondary evening schools after having finished their daily waged work. Acting simultaneously as a conventional union and as a collective that encouraged artistic activity, the association elaborated new meanings about the relation between work, education, and youth. The postwar period saw the rapid expansion of secondary schooling to the lower classes, which affected deeply both youth and the working class. However, significant attention has not yet been paid to pupils generally, let alone to those of the working class. Addressing this lacuna, this article suggests a new perspective on the relation between the histories of youth, class, political acculturation, and social change in the second half of the twentieth century.

This article discusses the effects of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 on the timber industry in Southeast Alaska from the perspective of Alaska Native “choker setters.” Choker setters form lowest wrung on the logging production hierarchy, providing much of the labor involved in deep woods harvests. The argument that emerges from this material highlights the importance of a distinction between the relations of work and the relations of production in advancing anthropological notions of culture, while emphasizing the continuing importance of culture and meaning for understanding class-based social processes. The primary material for the article is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Southeast Alaska by the author.

In today's liberal democracies, the “social question” and the “immigration question” have become entwined as rarely before. Elites and citizens alike ask who belongs to the national political and social community of the “we” and what belonging entails in the way of rights and obligations. Under the impact of unprecedented free mobility for both capital and labor and the crises of the social welfare state, the borders and bonds of citizenship have been changing, mostly weakening. This essay takes a preliminary look at how these two questions are intertwined in the United States, Germany, and Israel.

When I moved to Madison in 2001 to take a job as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, I knew embarrassingly little about my newly adopted state's historical significance. Judging from their wisecracks about the sociology of cows, neither did my friends in New York. I soon learned about Wisconsin's prominent role in many of America's social advances, from “Fighting Bob” LaFollette's opposition to powerful railroad trusts, to pioneering contributions to social insurance, to the nation's first law for public-employee bargaining in 1959, to the turbulent campus protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Little did I know that a decade after my arrival, Wisconsin would once again become “ground zero,” as some commentators now call it, in America's ongoing struggle between democratic progress and reaction.

The Russian Revolution became a beacon flare for anti-capitalists across the world, including many anarchists. The Spanish anarcho-syndicalists became ardent supporters of Bolshevism, and many endorsed the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here, I try to arrive at a political and historical understanding of this uncanny honeymoon, and question empirical explanations that present it as a simple misunderstanding. I firstly historicize the evolution of the concept of the workers’ dictatorship in the Spanish labor movement and assess it through the prism of the antagonism between the anarchists and socialists. I then set the reception of the Russian Revolution in the context of social ferment that emerged in Spain after 1917, which generated enormous enthusiasm and clouded theoretical differences. I finally relate the reception of the Soviet dictatorship to the intensification of class violence in these years, which rendered many anarchists hospitable to the authoritarian methods of the Bolsheviks.