When Ilf and Petrov visited the recently completed Boulder Dam, they took surprisingly little notice of the workers or their working conditions. What troubled them was the fact that no one in America knew the names of those who constructed the “biggest dam in the world.” Chapter 21 argues that this failure to accord the builders their due provided Ilf and Petrov with a means of at once praising American technology and criticizing American capitalism. They contrasted Boulder Dam with an imagined Soviet Boulder Dam that would generate both electricity and heroes of socialist labor. Their tour guide at the dam, GE engineer Charles John Thomson, was well positioned to help them draw such comparisons. In charge of installing the generating turbines at Boulder Dam, he had received the Order of the Red Banner of Labor for doing the same job at Dneprostroi.

In August 1952, students at Makerere University College, Kampala, went on strike. Chapter 1 connects the strike – and its leader Abu Mayanja – to the regional crises of 1952–1953: the Mau Mau uprising and the imposition of the Central African Federation. Education institutions and party politics came into unprecedented dialogue in this period, but this process was not directed from above by an older generation of nationalist leaders. Secondary school graduates, college students and newly qualified schoolteachers all encouraged this shift as they sought to define a global role for this regional cohort, thinking through regional comparisons, historical crossroads and notions of constitutional protest. Returning repeatedly to Makerere, this chapter focuses on correspondence around the strike, networks of schoolteachers, party-political student clubs, student publishing and anti-Federation newsletters. These examples demonstrate the importance of regional structures – and of how young people responded to these structures – as they set their sights on anticolonial work beyond the region.

Solidarity is one of the rights mentioned as a central value in the preamble of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU and it is the title of chapter IV which contains with Art. 27 (workers’ right to information and consultation within the undertaking) and Art. 28 (right of collective bargaining and action) central rights of collective labor law. The protection of the weaker party is the central idea, both in individual labor law and in collective labor law. But to which extent does that include the idea of solidarity? If solidarity would be the basic idea of the concept of collective labor law, this would imply a strong social approach. The following elaboration looks for an attempt of a definition and analyzes the components of solidarity in collective labor law based upon European and German Labor Law, bearing in mind provisions and jurisdiction on trade union rights, collective bargaining, the right to strike and on European and German works councils. Besides a legal analysis, sociological methodology is also applied, when the internal and external dimension of solidarity or the concept of inclusive and exclusive solidarity are presented.

Chapter 3 pairs the expansion of liberal and religious solutions to working-class problems with increasing labor radicalism in Cuba. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Catholic church and Cuban government created institutions to help domestic servants and to institutionalize education in domestic sciences for young women. The 1910s were also marked by phenomena that challenged these charity and education-based initiatives: rapidly increasing Caribbean migration to Cuba, growing labor unrest, and the feminist movement. These contradictory trends all found expression in the experiences of and discourse surrounding domestic workers. During the revolutionary upheaval of 1933, domestic workers acted in solidarity with other workers, helping to occupy mills and demanding increased formal attention to their labor. This chapter also considers the politics of the archives and how domestic workers were written out of stories of labor resistance at the very moment such resistance occurred.

The fourth chapter shifts to the early 1990s. The 1990s and 2000s are crucial decades that saw the emergence of a new dominant social force, led by Gamal Mubarak and other businessmen associated with him, signalling the finale in the neoliberal project put in place under the previous ruling class. The financialisation of Egypt’s economy began in earnest, a process that not only created severe social tension but also marginalized other actors within the ruling class such as the military. By engaging in the debates surrounding this new social force, I argue that their decision to accelerate Egypt’s neoliberal restructuring contributed to the ultimate collapse of the ruling class and the continuing failure to create hegemony. Tracing the rise in violence and repression, I show how the pendulum swung further towards coercion under this ruling class. I pay particular attention to increasing police brutality in the everyday; electoral politics; increasing workers’ strikes; and the shift from productive to unproductive capital to highlight these changes. I argue that it is the ultimate failure of this ruling class to create a political project that could have become hegemonic that culminated in the 2011 revolution.