The geographical term “Southeast Asia” dates from the 1930s, and came to denote a topic for academic studies in the early days of the Cold War. As such, it includes Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indochina, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines. Southeast Asia has become thoroughly incorporated in the global economy over the past 150 years; first, as a producer of commodities, and later, as a supplier of cheap garments and electronic components. Under Dutch colonialism and British hegemony—the latter established by the conquest of Burma and the imposition of free trade on Siam and the Philippines in the 1850s—Southeast Asia was turned into a key provider of commodities for the industrializing countries. During high colonialism, from 1870 to 1930, the region became increasingly intertwined, via Singapore as the central port and through the role of mainland Southeast Asia as the rice basket for the plantations of maritime Southeast Asia. After the Second World War, the region was the world's most violent frontier of containment for communist expansion. In recent decades, Southeast Asia has become integrated in global commodity chains as a producer of cheap industrial goods, often as a subcontractor for more advanced economies, such as those of Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and later on, Southeast China.

In June 1988 hotel-workers in Cape Town were amongst many dismissed in the then biggest stay-away against planned anti-union attacks. For months they met daily, organising their struggle for reinstatement: the site of an ongoing collective process of radical worker education for liberation. Workers shared this through a process of documentation and solidarity celebrating their collective agency, reflecting on past, making current, and envisioning future history. A different capitalist market-driven education for competitiveness now dominates postapartheid South Africa. A reflection written in 1994 illuminates the denigration of working class collectivism, successfully resisted by the dismissed workers but even then developing.

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.

The history of socialism has, without a doubt, been met with renewed interest in France in recent years. Several publishers have republished nineteenth-century texts (by Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Marx, Jaurès, etc.) and, particularly in the fields of history, philosophy, and political science there have been a series of scholarly research projects following various approaches (including the history of the diversity of Europe's socialist movements). All this is testament to a renewal of scholarly approaches, moving away from the more ideological approaches that had previously been predominant. The fact that this renewed interest comes twenty years after the disappearance of “actually-existing socialism” shows how far approaches have changed from the studies that were being published thirty years ago.

The postwar situation in Calcutta was part of the picture of seething anticolonial popular and labor discontent in the Indian subcontinent; this was perhaps the most radical, the most potent, period for the subalterns in the country. However, this complex historical moment with varied, competing, shifting, overlapping tendencies has been reduced and flattened in the historiography. It is as if the twin events of partition and independence were inevitable. City workers, especially the port workers, emerged as a visible and powerful presence in the anticolonial movement. By reconstructing the arena of collective action—focusing on the context, the modalities, and the social content of the major strikes involving port labor or “moments” of radicalism, this article seeks to recover the role of workers in decolonization. It will show how workers contested and outstepped the politics of nationalist leadership(s) and communalism in significant ways multiple times, placing a politics of labor rights and entitlements, of struggles against exploitation and poverty on the postcolonial agenda. The article argues that a “workers’ way,” an alternative even if hazily defined pathway of decolonization, in which new citizens would not be divided on religious lines, was concretized and became a part of the political imagination of the time. The port strike of 1947, a swing-back from the deadliest episode of communal riots, in a matter of months, signifies the extreme fluidity of the political situation in the late 1940s, which is unsurprisingly missed in the conventional historiography. The article finally highlights the limits of postwar radicalism: the “historic” port workers’ strike was ultimately channelized as a legal industrial dispute by the communist leadership of port workers’ union. With their key demand of parity of wages and allowances with government employees, port workers staked their claim to labor institutions offered by the postcolonial state, which was to cordon large sections of them as a privileged layer from rest of the laboring classes in the city.

“To articulate the past historically. . . . It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. . . . Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.

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.

The return of remains of Korean forced laborers who died in Japan between 1940 and 1945 has been a major controversy for over half a century for Koreans. These deaths reveal the tragic consequences of Japan’s World War II forced labor system. Japan forcefully mobilized nearly 800,000 Koreans who were taken to at least 1,589 worksites in Japan and 381 worksites in Hokkaido. Over 10 percent of all Koreans forcefully mobilized throughout the empire are estimated to have died or disappeared, but the precise number of Korean forced laborers’ deaths inside Japan remains unknown. Until 1989, remains recovered from graves throughout Japan by local people were immediately cremated by Japanese Buddhist priests, making cause of death and precise identities forensically impossible. This account relates the first and only comprehensive effort to exhume Korean forced labor graves without immediate cremation, coordinated by Korean and Japanese activists and academics based in Hokkaido. This effort helped revive a neglected aspect of Korean forced labor history while focusing on the concerns of bereaved Koreans seeking the remains of their lost family members. Nevertheless, the project had serious limitations due to working in a difficult political environment and neglect of forensic science protocols in mass grave excavations and identification. This complex situation prevented identification of victims’ names and cause of death that could have held the Japanese government and companies involved accountable.

In the interstices of Cold War rivalries and anti-colonial agitation in late 1950s Africa, African workers came into the focus of African nationalist politicians, Western leftists, colonial regimes and state socialist states alike. They were a small, but influential group, increasingly organized in trade unions and capable of bringing whole economies to a halt. European communists on both sides of the Iron Curtain saw these workers not only as part of an inceptive working class but also debated their role as a potential key force in global anti-capitalist revolution – if they had the right concepts. But how could trade union representatives, particularly those ones from Eastern Europe, actually get in touch with their African counterparts? Based on archival materials of the East German Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (FDGB), this article discusses East-West-South connections in labor education with a special emphasis on the role of Western trade union officials working for or affiliated to the communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). Drawing on their international experience, personal networks and linguistic skills, French and British communists established and intensified links between African trade unions and WFTU affiliates like the FDGB in the 1950s and early 1960s. Their influence facilitated and shaped these East-South connections. First, through their networks in West Africa, Western communists enabled the WFTU and the FDGB to internationalize their concepts of trade union education and integrate it into African political structures. Secondly, we examine the African Workers’ University in Conakry, an East-West-South joint venture between the West African Union Générale des Travailleurs d'Afrique Noire (UGTAN) and the WFTU, where trade unionists from the entire African continent attended courses between 1960 and 1965 and where European communists broadened their horizons while often holding on to rigid views. Thirdly, the article examines how European trade union functionaries talked about African course participants behind closed doors—building on the transcripts from a 1963 WFTU gathering on education for African trade unionists. Emphasizing their insider knowledge, French communists with experience in African trade union education called for innovative pedagogical concepts including a more practice-related education which acknowledged the heterogeneous conditions in different countries. However, they also promoted Eurocentric stage theories and saw a need to “discipline” Africans. The article concludes that the cooperation between actors from East, West and South rested on some shared assumptions, but encounters also led to reconceptualizations and realizations of ideological and practical constraints in international labor education.

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.

This study is the antidote to an overdose of what the author labels “globaloney.” Undoubtedly, the term “globalization” tends to overwhelm more than it explains, and this book is designed as a guide for readers seeking to plant the seeds of a progressive future in the many fractures and weaknesses of the international economy. In place of a monolithic process of globalization, Moody reveals the gradual economic and political construction of the new world order, which contains more opportunity for change than most tend to see. Moody does not depict workers and their unions as stupefied and bewildered victims of the immense scope and pace of international change; instead, we see how recent transformations have pushed many wage earners into active resistance on the local level and how they have even managed to create crucial linkages of solidarity across the economic landscape. Workers in a Lean World frames globalization as an open-ended process, one that the world labor movement can affect profoundly.