The military and the working class have intersected in myriad ways, especially in the era of mass conscription. Millions of workers served in, fought in, and died in the armed services. They brought their political and cultural values into armies and their military experiences back into labor movements and working-class communities. Militaries have been large employers of civilians, on bases in home countries and abroad, directly and indirectly, in the vast armament industries. In some countries, like China and Iran, they directly control large parts of the economy, including major industrial establishments. Military employment practices have reflected and shaped civilian-sector labor relations, race relations, and gender roles. Armies have been used to break strikes and have launched coups designed to defeat left-wing and labor movements or, occasionally (as in Portugal and, more recently, Venezuela), to defeat conservative forces. Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, war and militarism remain prominent features of both advanced industrial societies and less developed ones.

This article reveals the range of tasks performed by military laborers in twentieth-century Bolivia, distinguishing between martial and nonmartial labor to understand how productive tasks became central to the military's mission. The detailed exploration of soldiers' laboring lives shows that their work as strikebreakers, builders, agriculturalists, and domestic servants reinforced social hierarchies and supported private capital. Despite hopes that military service would unify a diverse populace, soldiers on the indigenous end of the spectrum disproportionally performed the more abject labors. The first section charts the development of nonmartial labor and shows how some soldiers objected to working conditions by invoking the dissonance between martial discourse and nonmartial experiences. The article then turns to the increasing legibility of nonmartial labor in the aftermath of the Chaco War (1932–1935). The final section details the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement's efforts to fold the army into the 1952 Revolution by emphasizing soldiers' productive labor.

This article tells the story of an often-forgotten attempt to unionize the United States armed forces in the 1970s. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), an AFL-CIO-affiliated union representing federal employees, voted to allow military personnel to join its union in 1976. Military personnel proved far more open to the bid than expected. Nursing grievances from threatened congressional cuts to their institutional benefits, between one-third and one-half welcomed the union. Though a worried Congress, a powerful military leadership, and skeptical public opinion quashed unionization within the year, the brief episode nevertheless left an influential legacy. Coming just after the difficult transition from the draft to the volunteer force, the union bid forced military leaders, soldiers, and supporters in Congress to defend both military service and military benefits from encroachments of an “occupational” model symbolized by unionization. Their successful distinction between military service and employment elevated the former as uniquely honorable and arduous—and thus deserving of unwavering congressional support. Public unions, the embodiment of the occupational threat to military service, emerged bruised by the comparisons to vaunted military service and endured a decades-long decline in membership and congressional protection.

This essay uses German East Africa as a historical example to illustrate some of the complex interrelationships between colonial labor and military practices. Analysis of African soldiers' roles in colonial labor regimes underscores the degree to which colonial militaries, labor, and punitive structures reinforced each other on a daily basis. Colonial states depended on their African soldiers, and the free and unfree laborers they recruited, conscripted, and supervised, for preservation of the German colonial state's political authority and economic viability. Moreover, these military labor practices tied soldiers' households to colonial state interests, laying the basis for new colonial cultures and campaign communities.

This article explores the military history that links federal suppression of the Pullman Strike in 1894 to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and the US conquest of the Philippines in 1899–1903. Military men expressed remarkably similar understandings of their targets in the three campaigns, and in each case they paired condemnations of the enemy with many of the same positive stereotypes of soldiers like themselves. Analysis of this imagery offers new perspectives on the US Army's role in imperial projects as well as state action against labor. If strikers resembled unruly colonial subjects in the military mind, the reverse also held true; and soldiers' self-representations reveal that their goals did not necessarily match the state's agenda.

Although war and militarization have loomed large in the history of the United States for well over a century, labor historians have only infrequently examined the relationship between American labor and the military. The career of General Brice Pursell Disque suggests the complex flow of ideas and personnel back and forth between labor relations in the military and in the civilian economy. First involved with the management of labor as an officer during the Spanish-American War, Disque went on to serve as a prison warden, the head of an army effort to suppress labor radicalism in the timber industry during the First World War, and in business posts involving collective bargaining. Through Disque we can begin to see the multiple connections between labor relations in the so-called free market of the private sphere and in the decidedly unfree arenas of military and penal life.

The essay examines the British army's transformation from a small professional force into a mass conscript army between 1939 and 1945. Battlefield defeats and criticism of the nation's conduct of the war acted as a stimulus to reform in the early years. Examining such areas as officer selection, discipline, and the expansion of army education services (ABCA), the essay shows how the military adapted to the recruitment of millions of “civilians in uniform” and in some instances worked to contain or resist change. Special attention is given to class conflicts that arose between officers and “other ranks” and situations where perceived indifference to recruits' basic rights provoked protests and strikes, including protests over slow demobilization in 1946. A final section analyzes the role of ABCA and the forces press in creating a space for political discussion; the radical views prevalent among British servicemen; and the contradictions between the official ban on political debate in the forces, the rhetoric of “a people's war,” and the troops' growing focus on postwar reconstruction and the General Election of 1945.

In the August 8, 2008, edition of the Wall Street Journal, an editorial denounced the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), organized labor's most recent effort to reform US labor law, as a measure that would lead to worker intimidation and the end of free and fair workplace representation elections. That the nation's leading business journal carried an editorial outlining the familiar EFCA opponent's trope of worker intimidation by unions was not surprising. That the author's identity was former South Dakota senator George McGovern—that aging icon of American liberalism and a self-described “longtime friend of labor unions”—foreshadowed the uphill battle and ultimate defeat labor and its allies would face in enacting the measure.

Thanks to Joseph McCartin for advancing this debate with an insightful critique of the workers'-rights-as-human-rights framework and for his generous treatment of the series of Human Rights Watch reports in which I had a hand. McCartin so fairly presents the human rights case, even while disagreeing with it, that it's hard to respond without simply borrowing from his framing of my own views. But I'll try.

Over the past few decades, as restless capital has moved about the world looking for cheaper production sites, labor campaigns have looked across borders for support. In a world where threats of capital mobility and outsourcing strategies are used to push wages and working conditions ever lower, local activists have called on international allies to insist that multinationals improve the treatment of workers—especially in the developing world, where local governments often seem unwilling or unable to protect their citizens at work and where workers on their own have little leverage.

There has been little examination of the possible negative effects on labor's interests when those interests are asserted as rights. It is as if proclaiming “workers' rights are human rights” can only cause good things to happen. Joseph McCartin's essay contributes to a more balanced and sophisticated discussion of the effects of rights talk for labor. He uses George McGovern's critique of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) to illustrate the more general point that prolabor rights arguments invite antilabor rights arguments even from friends of labor, and that in the current conjuncture appeals to rights are more likely to empower neoliberals and libertarians than workers. Indeed, the very name of the proposed act, emphasizing freedom and choice, is part of the problem, as the union idea involves definite limits on individual freedom in the interest of the betterment of the group. The titling of EFCA indicates unwillingness on the part of Labor and its allies to face this.

First, I would like to offer my thanks to Lance Compa, Richard McIntyre, and Gay Seidman for their thoughtful responses to my essay. One could not find three more accomplished scholars with whom to engage in this discussion. Each in their own way has sharpened our thinking about the relationship of labor rights to human rights—Compa through a lifetime of inspiring organizing and writing, Seidman through her eloquent defense of human rights-based labor activism, Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights and Transnational Activism, and McIntyre through his sharp interrogation of this activism in Are Worker Rights Human Rights? Not only do they bring well-honed critiques to bear in discussing my argument, they are generous and fair-minded. I'm grateful to them for prodding me to clarify my thinking.

One of the less noticed events of the “January 25 Revolution,” as Egyptians call the popular uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak, is the formation of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU). Its existence was announced at a press conference on January 30, 2011, in Cairo's Tahrir Square—the epicenter of the popular movement. The independent unions of Real Estate Tax Authority workers, healthcare technicians, and teachers established since 2008 initiated the new federation. They were joined by the 8.5 million-member retirees' association, which has just received permission to reorganize itself as a professional syndicate, as well as representatives of textile, pharmaceutical, chemical, iron and steel, and automotive workers from industrial zones in Cairo, Helwan, Mahalla al-Kubra, Tenth of Ramadan, and Sadat City. The independent trade union federation was the first new institution to emerge from the popular uprising, and it linked the cause of workers to what was, after January 28, an explicitly revolutionary movement.

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.

May 1968 in France was one of those events that became instantly a distinct historical moment. Nearly contemporaneously with the events themselves, “May '68” became an object of conscious—and contentious—reflection, research, and analysis. By October 1968, the Bibliothèque nationale had already listed 124 books on the May–June events. The leading scholarly labor and social history journal in France, le mouvement social, immediately prepared a special issue on May 1968. Successive anniversaries have been marked with waves of scholarly and popular articles, books, films, interviews, colloquia, and other commemorative events and gatherings. The graphic depictions of May '68—photographic and other—have become enduring iconographic images that reappear with each anniversary.

Beginning in the mid-1930s, Western Hemisphere nations turned to social insurance legislation—guided by the new concept of social security—in response to the economic crisis of the Great Depression. Supported by the International Labor Organization (ILO), national-level policy makers introduced a range of measures in recognition of the 1935 US Social Security Act. As Europe descended into a war, inter-Americanism served as way to maintain regional economic, and later military, security. This article describes an era of social welfare diplomacy in the Americas, one in which countries south of the US border projected their own distinct visions of social policy. Regional solidarity served as an integral step in the development of ideas concerning international social and economic rights. Placing President Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy in a wider frame, this analysis of ILO inter-American activities reveals an intriguing moment in history, when leaders from several nations saw economic development, trade, future growth, social security, and labor rights as integrally bound together.