{"title":"ILW volume 103 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000364","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000364","url":null,"abstract":"An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136302705","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":"Controlling Bazaar, Fighting Precarity, and Producing the Nation","authors":"Diana T. Kudaibergen","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000194","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article focuses on production cycles of traditional embroidery making ( yaka ) in Turkmenistan. In Turkmenistan, yaka is a key element in the national dress for women's everyday wear and since the process of the embroidery making is often handmade, the distribution of yaka and the networks of producing and dealing this essential apparel offer a rich ethnographic context. The article focuses on the study of resellers and dealers who control the market flow and the precarious labor of those women who produce this highly valued handmade product in villages and households and then resell them at the major bazaar hubs in the central cities. At each stage, there is a quality, price and “tradition” control—whether the product adheres to the constructed but widely shared idea of the “national dress.” These relations are also imbued with logics of the gendered economy of respect for work and mutual help given the precarious circumstances of each individual yaka-maker. Yaka-making is seen by many women as a way out of financial crises, but it becomes a cycle of precarity based on the trends, demands, and forms of the formal dress requirement in the state institutions to which female clients have to adhere to when choosing the product. What influences the market flows in trends, supply, and everyday profit? How do women regulate the market from within despite the growing precarity? Studying these internal power relations will help us reveal how cultural and social control stems from the precisely political and male domination and how the rules of the game in that field are guided by completely different gendered and labor principles on the ground.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136305289","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":"From Neoliberal Dreams to Precarity: Micro-Entrepreneurs and Family Debt in Kyrgyzstan","authors":"Elmira Satybaldieva, Balihar Sanghera","doi":"10.1017/s014754792200031x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s014754792200031x","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article argues that precarity partly arises from the growth of household debt in the age of rentier capitalism. It examines the mechanisms of neoliberal finance and its debt-based economic growth model in shaping precarious work and life in Kyrgyzstan. The unequal social relationship between lenders and borrowers generates considerable economic dispossession, appropriation, precarity, and harm. For debt-ridden micro-entrepreneurs, some of the pressures and consequences of debt are acutely felt within their family context, where members struggle to negotiate and ameliorate the impact. By drawing on three case studies of a small farmer, a bakery owner, and a petty trader turned petty producer, the article examines how usurious interest loans plunged them and their families into distress, insecurity, fear, loss, and powerlessness. The first-person accounts of these micro-entrepreneurs-cum-borrowers explain how debt was produced and experienced, and how it was inseparable from the country's rentier capitalist transformation. The study also draws on twenty-nine semi-structured interviews with financial institutions and thirty-three semi-structured interviews with borrowers conducted in Kyrgyzstan.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136305521","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":"ILW volume 103 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000352","url":null,"abstract":"An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"98 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136305547","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":"Between Arrogance and Despondency: The Shanghai Workers, the Communists, and the Strikes at the Japanese Cotton Mills of 1926","authors":"Shen Yi","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000060","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In June 1926, Shanghai cotton-mill workers initiated strikes at Japanese-owned factories in Xiaoshadu, protesting the dismissal of workers accused of arson in the workshop. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recognized that Chinese workers’ actions should be aligned with their labor movement strategy, and tried to control the scale of the strikes. In August, responding to an incident where Japanese sailors killed a Chinese man, the CCP redirected to launch a large-scale combined strike, catering to Chinese laborers’ demands of Japanese employers, but not accounting for practical market conditions. Drawing on a variety of sources, this article reveals that dissidence in leadership, weaknesses in grassroots organizations, and unrealized alliances made it impossible for the Communists, so-called the vanguard of the working class, to lead the summer strike. Contrarily, the cotton workers coerced the Communists and their controlled labor unions to maximize their benefits. By mid-September, it had failed, causing a serious setback for the CCP. Compared to the CCP's improvisation and confusion, the capitalists took wise countermeasures in the favorable economic climate of 1926, ultimately triumphing over the Communists and workers.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"103 1","pages":"202 - 226"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43707320","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":"“We Were Democracy Mad:” Clerical Workers’ Unionism, Antiracism, and Feminism at the University of California, Berkeley, 1966–1972","authors":"J. Pierce","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000084","url":null,"abstract":"In April 1968, two Berkeley campus unions—the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1695 representing clerical, technical, and professional workers, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 1570 representing graduate students—held a work-stoppage and a teach-in on “campus racism” to honor the memory of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. who had been tragically assassinated in Memphis. Inspired by King's work and the AFSCME sanitation workers strike that he supported, the teach-in became a series of workshops that ultimately led to the development of a “white paper” with statistical data highlighting the ways the university harbored racism in its employment practices and in its admission of undergraduate and graduate students. Among its many demands, it called for the University: “to hire black, brown and red workers until the ratio of employees from these groups equals the ratio in the population; bring minority student enrollment and employment up to population ratios . . . publish the University census report showing the percentage of black, brown, and red employees by department; and make an additional report showing the classifications and promotions of black, brown, and red people in each department.”","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"102 1","pages":"181 - 199"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43957590","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":"On the Auction Block: The Garment Industry and the Deindustrialization of New York City","authors":"A. Battle","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000059","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Several important studies of New York City's fiscal crisis of the 1970s identify the city's deindustrialization as a key component. The flight of manufacturers from New York fostered a racialized unemployment crisis while eroding the city's tax base, undermining its ability to meet increasing demands for social services, creating incentives for policymakers to focus on real estate development as the motor of the city's political economy, and weakening the institutions, especially labor unions, that had served as bulwarks of the city's unique (by American standards) brand of municipal social democracy. This article explores the roots of deindustrialization in one of New York City's most important industries, the manufacture of clothing. Capital flight, in the form of “runaway shops,” began as early as the teens, when the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILG) established itself through a series of key battles. The handmaiden to runaway shops was the reemergence of contracting, whereby the assembly of garments was disaggregated in terms of time, space, and legal identity. The twin forces of contracting and runaways threatened the existence of the ILG by draining garment work out of its New York City stronghold. I trace efforts to combat it through their culmination in what I call the “New Deal settlement,” a stabilization of the industry across what contemporary analysts called the “New York Production Area.” This settlement, I argue, was at once geographical, political, cultural, and economic. Its goal was to limit competition and establish a new equilibrium in the garment industry, one that could permit manufacturers acceptable profits without resort to the sweatshop. I borrow the notion of a “regulating capital” from the economist Anwar Shaikh to describe these attempts to engineer a reproducible cost structure. As soon as the New Deal settlement emerged, manufacturers began working to collapse it. I trace the dispersion of garment work to places like northeastern Pennsylvania, where manufacturers enlisted the wives and daughters of unemployed anthracite miners to sew their garments. Factory owners, sometimes linked to organized crime, sought to establish a new regulating capital rooted in relationships of domination, protected by authoritarian local governments. When imported garments arrived in the 1950s, a new regulating capital rooted in a worldwide sweatshop economy forced manufacturers to leave Pennsylvania for the US South, the Caribbean, and beyond. In an attempt to link political economy with social history, I stress that the currency of regulating capitals, particularly in labor-intensive industries, is political domination. Throughout, I illustrate these processes with reference to Judy Bond, the blousemaker whose departure for the US South prompted a widely publicized but unsuccessful national boycott led by the ILG. In terms of the historiography of New York City's deindustrialization, this account offers an alte","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"103 1","pages":"179 - 201"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42270567","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":"The Origins of the Swedish Wage Bargaining Model","authors":"Erik Bengtsson","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000047","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper revisits the development of the canonical Swedish wage bargaining model, from the 1930s to the 1950s. The question at the core of the debate is: how did Sweden achieve “good” wage bargaining institutions -- good, in the sense of facilitating investment, employment, and controlled inflation? The conventional account focuses on the actions of employers and trade unions in export industry, and a cross-class alliance between the two. This paper questions this account. The paper builds on archival sources in the Swedish Labour Movement's Archives and Library in Stockholm: the minutes from the main trade union confederation's yearly wage policy discussions, in preparation for bargaining rounds. In total, some 1,500 pages of wage policy discussion. I find that the export sector cross-class alliance played a very small role, and that macro-corporatist concerns, that the labour movement had to take responsibility of all of society and pursue a planned wage policy, was much more important. This has theoretical implications for the analysis of wage bargaining institutions in general and the Swedish model in particular.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"103 1","pages":"162 - 178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44914239","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":"From Corporations to Companies: The Development of Capitalism in Maritime Cargo Handling in the Port of Barcelona (ca. 1760–1873)","authors":"J. Ibarz, Brendan J. von Briesen","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000023","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract For centuries, the maritime cargo passing through the port of Barcelona was handled by the men of a half-dozen guilds. Collectively, these ancient corporations enjoyed monopolistic privileges over the various types of cargo and areas of operation—in the shallow harbor, to and from the Customs House, and throughout the city and beyond. At the end of the eighteenth century, the advances of economic and political liberalism began to question, challenge, and eventually dismantle the guild structure: a process that came to fruition in the early nineteenth century with the abolition of most guilds throughout Spain. However, some of the cargo-handling guilds had been defended by the Navy against abolition until the second half of the nineteenth century, when their orderly world collapsed into competitive companies able to hire men of their choosing (former guildsmen or otherwise). In this article, we look at the harbor-based guilds and the process by which guildsmen became the unorganized workers and capitalistic directors of the new dockworker companies. We offer a vision of the transformation of the guild system into a private system for organizing the labor of maritime-cargo handling. In this account, we examine technological changes in the means of production, changes in the organization of labor, the appearance of a new capitalist class in the sub-sector, and the rise of a capitalist mode of production based on the proletarianization of cargo handling.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"102 1","pages":"200 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45936552","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":"Intergenerational Learning and Place-making in a Deindustrialized Locality: “Tracks of the Past” in Lanarkshire, Scotland","authors":"Ewan Gibbs, Susan Henderson, V. Bianchi","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper contributes to scholarship on the long experience of deindustrialization. It emphasizes contemporary place-making in navigating the much-changed socioeconomic landscapes that the closure of mills, mines, shipyards and factories have left behind. The ‘half-life of deindustrialization' suggests these experiences have been received through understandings of labour and community with origins in the industrial era. ‘Tracks of the Past' was a school-based education project themed around workers' occupation of Caterpillar's earth-moving machinery plant in Lanarkshire, Scotland. The occupation was a response to Caterpillar's shock closure announcement and the loss of 1,200 jobs. It lasted 103 days between January and April 1987 when closure was reluctantly conceded. A Caterpillar Workers Legacy Group (CWLG) commemorated the occupation's thirtieth anniversary. During 2018, academics collaborated with the CWLG to develop a curriculum for a local high school class. ‘Tracks' produced lessons where students engaged with archival sources and physical objects, interviewed members of the CWLG and conducted online research. The ‘learning journey' montages that the students produced combined conversations in 2018 with sources from three decades earlier, often reflecting on the occupation as a historical episode in a highly localised context. Others implicated the closure within an international pattern, linking Caterpillar’s divestment to the actions of multinationals in the contemporary global economy. In neither case did the invocation of the occupation lead to a straightforward translation of the occupation into contemporary workplace justice issues as the CWLG had hoped. However, these results did suggest a creative deployment of the past that rationalised the occupation with reference to contemporary deindustrialized contexts. These findings demonstrate the utility of the half-life through a lingering industrial past, but also demonstrate the need to conceptualise agents or custodians of labour history and challenge the linearity of passing time that an incrementally receding industrial era implicates.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"102 1","pages":"157 - 180"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42655791","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}