{"title":"The Entangled Nature of Work: Histories of Humans and Nonhuman Labor","authors":"Thomas Fleischman","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000443","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 A survey of recent works of labor and environment reveal the centrality of hybridity to analyses of human and nonhuman natures. These are most apparent in analyses of labor, technology, and nature. While ways of knowing nature amongst the powerful have been oriented toward the ever-greater domination of workers and nonhuman nature, interspecies entanglements and solidarity erupt through the marginal, overlooked spaces. Taken together, the books included in this review suggest a way toward finding alternative, more just futures for living alongside nonhuman nature.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"6 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138945085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Special Section on Productive Hierarchies in Global Perspectives: Gendered Skill, Labor Control and Workplace Politics","authors":"Görkem Akgöz, Bridget Kenny","doi":"10.1017/S0147547923000340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547923000340","url":null,"abstract":"From the nineteenth century, when the new social question of women's factory labor came to preoccupy the (middle-class) public imagination, to the present times of globalized labor chains, discourses on gendered labor have been at once fluid and constitutive of labor hierarchies. These discourses and social relations affirm their centrality within processes of industrialization and workplace restructuring as well as in development policy, urban formation, and indeed, nation building. Depending on the political economy of the labor market, the images of laboring women accordingly oscillated between, for instance, helpless and exploited victims to national heroines in the service of developmental projects. At the same time, since the early nineteenth-century, the steadily accumulating social reform, labor inspection, or social scientific accounts of women's paid and unpaid labor testified to states’ and employers’ growing comfort with hiring what was and is still, in many ways, a cheap, easily exploitable category of workers, one whose profitability increased the more precarious their employment became. Such discourses and labor control practices were deeply racialized and classed. On the other side of the public imagination and employer's surveillance, women who engaged in paid work sometimes appropriated the discourses and reshaped the practices that were used to characterize their labor and judge their choices.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":" 40","pages":"1 - 10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138994757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Franco Barchiesi, Aaron Benanav, Carolyn Brown, Jacob Eyferth, Lori Flores, Jennifer Klein, Talitha LeFlouria, Mae Ngai, M. Nolan, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Amy Stanley, Abosede George, Barbara Weinstein, Peter Winn, Xiaodan Zhang, Robert F. Wheeler, K. Brown, M. Kars, Marcel van der Linden, Joshua Frens-String, Izzy Plowright
{"title":"ILW volume 104 Cover and Front matter","authors":"Franco Barchiesi, Aaron Benanav, Carolyn Brown, Jacob Eyferth, Lori Flores, Jennifer Klein, Talitha LeFlouria, Mae Ngai, M. Nolan, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Amy Stanley, Abosede George, Barbara Weinstein, Peter Winn, Xiaodan Zhang, Robert F. Wheeler, K. Brown, M. Kars, Marcel van der Linden, Joshua Frens-String, Izzy Plowright","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000376","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"20 3","pages":"f1 - f5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138995315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Metaphorical Machines or Mindless Consumers: Young Working-Class Femininity in Early Postwar Turkey","authors":"Görkem Akgöz","doi":"10.1017/S0147547923000248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547923000248","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The simultaneous processes of secular state-building and state-led industrialisation resulted in a new ideology of women's labor in Turkey in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. As the country moved away from protectionist, state-led industrialisation in the post-war period, female industrial labor received increasing and contradictory attention from policy makers, employers, the new trade union movement, and middle-class feminists. On the one hand, there emerged an idealized image of factory women that emphasized their productive potential by metaphorically linking them with technology and mass production. However, this proud, progressive message was counterbalanced by an anxious, conservative view of young women's work—one that criticized factory girls’ consumption choices as posing a threat to respectable femininity. Weaving together lines of inquiry such as the change in industrialisation policy, women's access to technology, the sexual division of labor, and the emergent consumption patterns, I unpack the tropes of working-class productivity and femininity against the backdrop of the post-war expansion of capitalism in Turkey.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":" 39","pages":"32 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138964314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"White Coats with Blue Collars: Doctors’ Labor Protests and the Struggle for Democracy in Brazil, 1978–1982","authors":"Eyal Weinberg","doi":"10.1017/s014754792300039x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s014754792300039x","url":null,"abstract":"Studies exploring health and medicine in military Brazil (1964–1985) frequently focus on the struggles of public health activists to advance substantial healthcare reforms during the country's gradual transition to democracy. In the 1960s, the Brazilian dictatorship installed a market-oriented system that outsourced healthcare to private providers, mostly servicing urban and employed benefactors. Without proper government oversight, the healthcare administration was overbilled and national public health indicators lagged. Scholars have highlighted the efforts of the Sanitary Reform Movement (Movimento da Reforma Sanitária) to dismantle the dictatorship's health system. Forming professional associations and assuming leadership positions in governmental agencies, sanitaristas promoted research and policies of collective health, laying the foundations for Brazil's universal healthcare system, established after the return to democracy.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"9 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136348418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A British Labor Settlement Experiment and the Socioeconomic Experience of the Chuah Tamil Settlement in British Malaya","authors":"Thivya Ranie, Sivachandralingam Sundara Raja","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000133","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We explore the socioeconomic experience of a group of south Indian Tamil laborers and their families who established the Chuah Tamil agricultural settlement in British Malaya during the Great Depression. These were laborers who, though unemployed, refused to be repatriated to south India. Progressing from subsistence farming to small-scale agricultural production, their settlement evolved into an organized, socioeconomic system. It was also a critical field experiment for the British to assess the viability of a self-generating labor pool. In this article, we examine the social history of the settlers and the development of the Chuah Tamil colony within the context of Britain's overarching desire to create a labor source. Our study contributes to the reconciliation of microsocial history and colonialism, as well as to global labor history more broadly, by situating the settlers’ experience and the settlement itself in relation to historical contemporaries.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136113682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tunis in the Global Radical Web: Diasporas, Transnational Anarchism, and Labor Movements (1887–1912)","authors":"G. Montalbano","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000273","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The paper focuses on the Italian-speaking anarchists of the end of the nineteenth century and their involvement and legacy in trade union movements and strikes in Tunis during the first decade of the twentieth century. A perspective privileging the internationalist and trade-unionist activities, and their impact on that specific colonial context, avoids the dangers of a rigid ethnoscape and methodological nationalism. Even though most of the actors of this story were considered by the states as Italian nationals, their conflictual (at least for the anarchists) nationality helps us to understand the complexity of the national-cultural belonging of subversive migrants in the Imperial Mediterranean. The ideological struggle on the subversive legacy of Giuseppe Garibaldi at the end of the nineteenth century and the conflictual relations of the trade unions with consular authorities at the beginning of the twentieth century showed an Italian-speaking internationalism in the Southern Mediterranean shore, tightly connected with the European and the American areas. Based on understudied diplomatic, colonial, and police records, this research aims at analyzing the attempts of an international working-class movement in a hierarchical colonial situation also through Italian, French, and Tunisian sources.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49574544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Workers do not liberate themselves other than with their own hands”—The Political Experience of Workers' Committees in the Industrial District of Beirut (1970–1975)","authors":"Rossana Tufaro","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000224","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 From the end of the 1960s until the outbreak of the Civil War (1975), Lebanon experienced a phase of relatively sustained industrial expansion. Albeit the “boom” did not modify significantly Lebanon's tertiarized economic structure, it was anyway sufficient to create the structural conditions for the emergence of a new militant working-class able to become one of the most relevant contentious actors of its time. This new working class was made primarily of very young and recently urbanized unemployed of rural origin, brutally injected in a crude and hyper-exploitative productive cycle where formal labor unions were, for the most part, absent or scarcely effective. The input for their grassroots, transgressive organization into factory-based Workers’ Committees came from the Organization for Communist Action in Lebanon (OACL), i.e. the most important force of the so-called Lebanese New Left, within the framework of a broader process of militant penetration of the “revolutionary classes” produced by the contradictions of Lebanese capitalism. This created the precondition for the Committees to affirm themselves not only as the radical avant-garde of the Lebanese labor movement but also as an integral part of a broader process of contestation of the existing status quo by the subaltern groups emerged from - or activated by - the structural and cultural changes that the country was experiencing. By retrieving the forgotten history of the Workers’ Committees, the article wants to examine the forms and the trajectories whereby such a new working class became an integral part of this process. In particular, by adopting a Gramscian methodology, the article will first expose the structural changes in the Lebanese industrial sector in the examined period and their labor implications. Then, it will focus on the dynamics which superseded the Committees' birth and affirmation, reserving particular attention to the role played by the OACL. Finally, it will conclude by examining the impact of their agency on the political developments that the country was experiencing. The paper contends that the emergence and the affirmation of counter-hegemonical and transformative working-class activism on the eve of the Civil War, along with representing a direct by-product of structural stresses and constraints, was significantly debtor also of the new ideological and militant infrastructures that the emergence of an Arab New Left had contributed to popularize and deploy. The paper wants also to intervene in the historiographical debate on the Lebanese Civil War, stressing the importance of both subaltern actors and class phenomena in its outbreak, which have generally been widely disregarded by the dominant understandings of the conflict.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42805527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hiring, Firing, Atomizing; Manpower Agencies and Precarious Labor in Kazakhstan's Oil Sector","authors":"Paolo Sorbello","doi":"10.1017/S0147547923000029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547923000029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper analyses the influence that manpower agencies have on hiring practices and employment in Kazakhstan's oil sector. While influenced by the literature on transition from planned to market economy, this article's main argument is rooted in the understanding that labor precarization is produced through transnational capitalist practices. The influx of foreign capital through the investments of transnational companies (TNCs) also transplanted into Kazakhstan's labor market their antilabor policies and practices. This welcomed the presence of a new, dedicated actor for the establishment and curation of labor relations, namely manpower agencies, especially in the oil-rich region of Atyrau. This article argues there, the rationale for the presence of manpower agencies and the absence of trade unions is directly linked to the activities of TNCs. Manpower agencies have a decisive role in making employment and labor increasingly precarious in the oil sector. Manpower agencies function as a disaggregation force in the oil industry. Their presence stimulates a race to the bottom among workers, who have no other option but to accept precarious, unsafe, and underpaid jobs. Against this backdrop, the paper also offers a peek into “industrial gossip,” gathered during fieldwork in the Atyrau region. This more anthropological side of the argument highlights how the world of manpower agencies helps TNCs thrive by creating an atomized workforce.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"103 1","pages":"8 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56987427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Like a Meteorite: The Life of Mike Davis","authors":"T. Reifer","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000169","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article surveys the lifetime work of scholar-activist Mike Davis, and his attentiveness to the wide-ranging synthesis of the global political economy and ecology of capitalism and militarism, focusing on labor and social history, and to inequalities of race, class, gender, and nation, and struggles for diversity and inclusion, marking his distinctive style. Covering themes ranging from American exceptionalism, working-class formation, struggles for the eight-hour workday, the political economy and ecology of the Third World, and the growth of today's informal proletariat, the article underlines the author's deepest commitments to a lifetime of scholarship. These include democratic control over the means of production, and the remaking of the global system on new and enlarged, more peaceful and just socioecological foundations, now essential if humanity and other sentient beings are to survive and thrive.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42290902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}