Following the 2014–2015 oil price crisis, service companies in Kazakhstan went through a process of industrial restructuring centered on workforce reduction and a concomitant increase of labor outsourcing. Taking the restructuring – or “optimization” – of state-owned service companies in the region of Mangystau as a starting point, this paper illustrates the heterogenous precarization effects and forms of precarity catalyzed by the process. Taking a multidimensional approach, the paper describes and analyses the effects of precarization in both socio-economic and political terms, as well as the implications for the production of differentiated laboring subjectivities. It situates the ethnographic trajectories of workers within the framework of Kazakhstan's authoritarian neoliberalism, highlighting the punitive and pastoral techniques of goverment deployed in the restructuring of the regional oil complex. In the first part, the article describes how precarization was experienced by workers as “slavery”, entailing the loss of social recognition as well as the intensification of economic exploitation and political domination, heightening their exposure to social and bodily vulnerability. The second section looks instead at the workings of a governmental agency in its effort to remake redundant workers into small business owners through the acquisition of entrepreneurial skills and the abandonment of the Soviet “dependency mindset”. The third and last section of the article concentrates on the individual trajectory of a dismissed worker joining a multi-level marketing scheme in order to cleanse himself from the bodily and social toxicity of precarized work in the oil industry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pem Davidson Buck's book is intended to offer readers a view from under the sink (1). Initially rejecting a career for which her middle-class upbringing had prepared her, Buck moved from Pennsylvania to central Kentucky, where she and her husband became back-to-the-landers, growing and canning food and raising goats and calves, sometimes supplementing the family income by working as part-time day laborers on tobacco farms, as hod-carriers, and as plumbers. But it's not so easy to leave a middle-class liberal upbringing behind, especially down on the farm living below the poverty level. Working as a helper in the small plumbing and heating business she operated with her husband, Buck spent time lying on her back on the floors of the wealthy fixing leaks; from that perspective under the sink she looked up and saw fine furniture and other manifestations of wealth she could not afford. One thing led to another: seeing the world as if for the first time, “it appeared oppressive” (2). People, working people, that is, work extremely hard, and what do they get for their efforts? Boney fingers.

The first State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook conference on working-class studies was the best structured, most enjoyable semi-academic meeting I have ever been to. Without being claustrophobic, organizers effectively matched the content of individual panels with plenary presentations in service of the subject: “How does class work?” Often conference themes get only the most nominal attention. Here, organizers apparently stuck to their guns when accepting proposals for panels and papers, and presenters largely stuck to the program. Attendees broke up into individual panels and repeatedly came together as a group throughout the day for plenaries. This worked on an informal basis as well. Plenary sessions always started off with a buzz as folks reintroduced each other in the mornings or, later in the day, compared notes on the panels they had just been to. Stony Brook is launching a working-class studies program, and its semi-yearly conference is to be the social science version of the Youngstown State University conference on class (they will alternate years). My sense is that the conferences will feed each other. Many people who had been to Youngstown also came to Stony Brook. And while at Stony Brook, they recruited for Youngstown.

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).

In this essay, we address the educational program and experiences of the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), as found in its camps, settlements, schools, and political training courses. One of the most active organized social movements in Brazil during the last thirty years, the MST combines political struggle with the organization of worker-controlled enterprises and educational opportunities for landless workers and their families. We begin with an excerpt from a report by one of us (Janaina Stronzake), which illustrates the ways in which the material conditions of an MST encampment led to a different kind of school, focused on the needs of students from the countryside.

The carceral history of Rikers Island, which now houses nine of the New York City jails, begins with garbage and forced labor. The Municipal Farm on Rikers Island, operated by the Department of Public Charities and Correction, opened in 1884 and served as a “prison farm.” Penal farms were common at that time, but what was not common was the simultaneous use of the island as a landfill. Most of the landmass that now comprises Rikers was formed from the refuse of New Yorkers. As the amount of garbage grew the initially productive farm became plagued by rats and other pests—not to mention fetid smells and poor air quality. This history is felt today on the island, as there are shunts into the earth that spew sickening steam, a constant reminder of its origins.

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.