Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas最新文献

{"title":"Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927","authors":"Adam Ewing","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10330061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10330061","url":null,"abstract":"Four decades ago, Jeffrey Perry embarked on a project to chronicle the life and work of Hubert Henry Harrison, one of the most important and understudied Black intellectuals of the twentieth century. Perry worked with Harrison's family to collect, preserve, and inventory surviving writings, correspondence, scrapbooks, and diaries, then collaborated with staff at Columbia University to establish a Harrison archive and a Harrison website. He published two important books that did much to revitalize scholarly interest in Harrison: an edited collection of Harrison's writings, and a biography that chronicles Harrison's life from his birth in St. Croix in 1883 to the height of his leadership of the New Negro movement in 1918. The volume under review here comprises a second and final biography of Harrison, leading readers up to his death in 1927. It secures Perry's legacy as the preeminent chronicler of Harrison's life.By 1918, when this volume opens, Harrison had already cemented his role as “the most class conscious of the race radicals, and the most race conscious of the class radicals” (Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918, 46). Ardently anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, Harrison emerged as the most important Black organizer for the Socialist Party by 1912, before leaving in frustration over the party's racial chauvinism. In 1917, Harrison launched the Liberty League and inaugurated what he coined the “New Negro movement,” the race-conscious, radical edge of Black American politics during and after World War I.The second volume of the biography begins during a moment of transition, as the mantle of New Negro leadership passed from Harrison to the Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). One of the great strengths of the book is Perry's comprehensive examination of the relationship between Harrison, Garvey, and the UNIA. Perry argues, as he and others have done previously, that Garvey lifted much of the platform of the Liberty League and used it to relaunch his own struggling organization. In this volume, Perry also ascribes Harrison a central role in building the UNIA itself. Hired in early 1920 as the managing editor of the Negro World, the UNIA's key propaganda tool, Harrison overhauled the paper and stewarded its rise as the most important Black newspaper of its time.Just as Harrison was a major influence in sparking Garvey's radical turn during the UNIA's rise, he served as a radical and independent voice within the organization during the UNIA's peak institutional years in the United States (1920–22). Despite his association with the Negro World, Harrison maintained a distance from Garvey and grew increasingly frustrated with the UNIA leader's lack (in his view) of a constructive political program. By the time Garvey was arrested for mail fraud in 1922, Harrison was thoroughly disillusioned with Garvey's “swindle” and joined many New York–based Black intellectu","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On","authors":"Stephen Brier","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329834","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329834","url":null,"abstract":"Along with the late distinguished historian Ira Berlin, my colleagues and I at CUNY's American Social History Project (ASHP) had the privilege of being the people who worked most closely with Herb Gutman in the final half-dozen years of his all-too-short life and career. In his final years, as he had for much of the previous three decades of his work, Herb remained deeply committed to questioning accepted historical truths and using new methodologies to transform historical analysis and to popularize the writing of American history for a broad public audience. In pursuit of these connected goals, Gutman constantly posed difficult questions about the past to his colleagues, collaborators, and students: What are the proper subjects of historical inquiry? How can we conduct the most effective scholarly research? How do we evaluate and best present the results of that research? In addition to being an innovative scholar, Herb was also an inspired teacher who always challenged all who came in contact with him to discover innovative ways to convey what happened in the past and to rethink its larger meaning for American society in general and for the writing and rewriting of American history in specific.At the outset of his academic career in the 1950s, rather than focusing on the institutional history of unions, radical parties, and labor leaders or seeing workers as mere “factors of production,” Gutman set out to uncover what ordinary working people had believed, and how they had behaved in their disparate responses to the rise of industrial capitalism in local communities and workplaces. And while he was always interested in writing about strikes and what happened in the workplace (the standard fare of labor historians), he was even more engaged by the diverse cultural and social forms of multiethnic/multiracial working-class activity. Gutman's early scholarly work emerged from two basic premises: the often hidden history of working people needed to be uncovered for the light it would shed on larger historical issues and questions; and working people were active agents in the historical process rather than its passive victims. Gutman's early work drew heavily on the pioneering historical scholarship of Edward Thompson and the cultural anthropology of Sidney Mintz. His early methodology (as embodied in the various essays published in the 1976 collection of his early work, Work, Culture, and Society) centered on close readings of local primary sources—initially in working-class newspapers in small towns, industrial cities, and coal mining communities in the old Midwest. Gutman believed these local sources held the key to uncovering how and in what ways working people had responded to the dramatic transformations wrought by US industrial capitalism in the Gilded Age.Gutman's pioneering methodology allowed him to ask new questions about old historical issues. In “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” arguably his most consequ","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Red Banners, Books, and Beer Mugs: The Mental World of German Social Democrats, 1863–1914","authors":"Sebastian Voigt","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329946","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329946","url":null,"abstract":"Founded in 1863, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD; Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) became the strongest political outfit in Imperial Germany prior to World War I. It was also a cultural mass movement in which its members immersed themselves from cradle to grave. Until the ascension of National Socialism in 1933, the German labor movement was the numerically strongest and best-organized specimen of its kind globally.Thus, it was an object of intense historical research until 1990. Researchers mainly analyzed theoretical discussions between the different wings of the party, its programs, and its relation to state and government. The Australian historian Andrew G. Bonnell chooses a different approach. He focuses not on the party elite or its main theorists but on its rank-and-file membership. He shows how the party successfully mobilized its base by addressing real-life issues of workers, on the one hand, and offering a transformative perspective for overcoming a classed society (i.e., capitalism), on the other.The lucidly written book is based on extensive archival research in Germany, including the Archive of Social Democracy of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Bonn. Bonnell does not present a chronological history of the socialist movement; rather, he explores its mobilization efforts by focusing on specific topics. This innovative structure sheds light on many aspects of German social democracy that have hitherto largely been neglected.As German labor history in general has been marginalized in historiography in the last decades and is only slowly making a comeback, it is refreshing to read a book about social democracy in Imperial Germany. Yet Bonnell's study is more than labor history, not least because the research perspective on the Kaiserreich has changed in the last years: from viewing it as a reactionary, oppressive, and class-based system that paved the way for Nazism to stressing its lively middle class, organizational life, and progressive aspects. Bonnell makes a counterpoint by writing labor history from the perspective of Social Democratic workers and rank-and-file party members: “Returning the focus to the working class and the organised labour movement, and their confrontation with an authoritarian state structure, can restore the balance in how we look at Imperial Germany, and correct some of the more rose-coloured depictions of recent times” (3).The first chapter deals with the personality cult around Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of the General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein; ADAV), one of the SPD's precursor organizations. After his death in a duel in 1864, a veritable cult evolved around Lasalle. He became a legendary figure; people wrote songs and poems about him. Although the party moved away from his idea of a people's state (Volksstaat), moving in a Marxist direction, he remained a stylized reference point, especially during hard times, such as in the period of the ant","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Black Death and Consequences for Labor","authors":"Samuel Cohn","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329778","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329778","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract From the perspective of the Black Death, the economic consequences for laborers in our unfolding pandemic, COVID-19, might come as a surprise. Instead of labor shortages benefiting workers, especially the unskilled, and narrowing the gap between rich and poor, our pandemic has sent economic inequality racing forward across the world with laborers’ health and material well-being plummeting. However, a closer examination of the Black Death suggests that the consequences for labor of the two pandemics may not be as different as first assumed. This essay explores the silver lining for labor after the dramatic crash in population caused by the Black Death and subsequent waves of plague during the second half of the fourteenth century. By first turning to Europe as a whole and then concentrating on Italy, this essay challenges notions that labor conditions and standards of living improved immediately after the Black Death's halving of populations and that these changes were almost universal across Europe or even within city-states, such as Florence, or in rural areas hosting different sorts of agricultural workers. In Italy, where real wages have been calculated, the Black Death's silver lining for laborers failed to arrive until two or three generations after 1348. Moreover, compressing economic inequality from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries spurred reactions from elites that wrought new inequalities in other spheres of activity.","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice","authors":"Eileen Boris","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329961","url":null,"abstract":"In writing history, beginnings and endings matter. “I had originally intended to conclude this book on a triumphant note with the success of the union campaign in 1937 and with subsequent achievement of industry-wide agreements that secured higher wages, shorter hours, paid vacation and sick days, arbitration machinery to mediate workplace grievances and a closed shop,” confessed Jenny Carson (6). By moving the time frame forward, she instead offers a sobering study of New York City's laundry worker unionism that accounts for the subsequent purge of communist organizers and the postwar defeat of the civil rights–and community-based “democratic initiative” led by Black women (127). The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), the union where the laundry workers found a home, installed a cadre that maintained white male power while suppressing rank-and-file decision-making and sustaining the racialized gender division of labor in the industry. Nonetheless, Carson finds inspiration in the laundry workers’ long fight for “racial justice, economic dignity, and gender equality” against mobbed-up bosses and self-serving union bureaucrats (9).Grounded in recent scholarship, A Matter of Moral Justice combines structural analysis of the industry with deft mini-biographies and astute assessments of industrial feminism, left organizations, and the CIO itself. While home washing and hand laundries never completely faded away, new technologies allowed for power laundry expansion in the 1920s. The association of Black women with the southern washerwoman and dirty work justified employer hiring of recent migrants into this low-wage occupation. Against standard interpretations that stress the undesirability of laundry jobs, Carson argues that “African American women embraced power laundry work as a rare and coveted opportunity to leave domestic service” (21). Still, they faced a Jim Crow organization of production in which customer and employer preference for white men as drivers and white women as markers and office staff highlighted racialized understandings of skill. Inside work further reflected gendered notions of men as best able to handle machines that were thought to require scientific exactitude. As shakers and ironers, Black women did the most manual labor for the least pay under the worst conditions, including constant sexual harassment. Carson concludes that more privileged male workers sought to maintain their economic advantages, joining employers in stymieing “workplace solidarities, while simultaneously providing opportunities for women and people of color to mobilize in independent and oftentimes empowering spaces where they forged race- and gender-based coalitions with allies in the labor movement” (40). Chinese hand laundries retained a niche and remained an unorganized sector throughout the century.Carson's revisionism extends to the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), which appears more committed to organizing than previously acknowledg","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On","authors":"Stefan Berger","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329848","url":null,"abstract":"I first encountered Herbert Gutman's work as a PhD student at the University of Oxford in 1988 when I was working on my thesis comparing the experiences of the German Social Democrats and the British Labour Party during the first three decades of the twentieth century.1 A friend of mine introduced Gutman to me with these words: “This is the American E. P. Thompson.” When I first read Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, its author had already been dead for almost three years, but his reputation was huge. Memory is a fickle thing, but if I recall it correctly thirty-five years later, I was as impressed with Gutman as I was with Thompson. Not only did I cherish both as engaged historians—Thompson's campaigning on behalf of European Nuclear Disarmament and Gutman's work with trade unionists, on the American Social History Project and his teaching at Black colleges in the United States, I was also intrigued by their common insistence on the agency of ordinary working people and the importance of working-class cultures in explaining their beliefs and behaviors. It was highly significant that Thompson visited Gutman in 1964 and a sign that they recognized each other as kindred spirits, both deeply influenced by Marxism, both unorthodox in their adaptation of Marxist ideas, and both insistent that the reaction of working people to industrial capitalism, both in England and in the United States, had much to do with preindustrial traditions and values.Like Thompson in Britain, Gutman in the United States was often associated with the move of the “New Labor History” from organizational and institutional histories of labor to the study of ordinary workers and their everyday surroundings and experiences. In my native Germany, historians of everyday life, such as Alf Lüdtke, Hans Medick, and Thomas Lindenberger, were the earliest historians receptive to this New Labor History. They were also interested in exploring the lifeworlds of ordinary workers rather than studying the labor movement. As someone who had just started a comparative study on the labor movements of two European countries that had developed some of the strongest labor movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I was taken aback by that dichotomy between “ordinary workers,” on the one hand, and “organized labor,” on the other. Surely it remained important not to see the two as entirely separate, even if one could have a lot of sympathy with the claim that one should not only study organized labor and that there was a difference between the worlds of organized labor and the worlds of working people. Hence, I was relieved to find many years later that Marcel van der Linden had been making very similar arguments, finding enormous value and inspiration in the new labor histories, exemplified in Germany by Alf Lüdtke, in Britain by E. P. Thompson, and in the United States by Herbert Gutman, while at the same time insisting that historians should also pay atten","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On","authors":"Joe William Trotter","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329876","url":null,"abstract":"It is a pleasure to join this fiftieth anniversary celebration of historian Herbert G. Gutman's seminal collection of essays, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. Historians of US and African American urban, labor, and working-class history owe a special debt to Gutman's groundbreaking essay on the Black coal miner and labor leader Richard L. Davis, “The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America.” This essay was first read as a paper at the 1966 meeting of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in Baltimore, Maryland. Before appearing in Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society, the essay was first published in an anthology edited by labor historian Julius Jacobson, The Negro and the American Labor Movement (1968).Set in the larger context of Gutman's growing interest in a new social history of American workers, initially a focus on Blacks in the United Mine Workers union might seem a bit incongruous. In his essay “Work, Culture, and Society,” published some five years after the Davis piece, Gutman embraced the work of E. P. Thompson and other British historians and labor scholars seeking a more bottom-up perspective on workers’ lives and labor. As he explained, “The pages that follow give little attention to the subject matter usually considered the proper sphere of labor history (trade union development and behavior, strikes and lockouts, and radical movements) and instead emphasize the frequent tension between different groups of men and women new to the machine and a changing American society” (12). Together, though, these two essays advanced the larger project of reconceptualizing and interpreting the history of American workers from below. They influenced an entire generation of young labor and working-class historians and had a profound impact on my own framing of research on the Black working class. Gutman's scholarship not only helped to answer a series of thorny intellectual and practical political questions that many of us brought to graduate studies in history but also suggested a fruitful way forward, politically and ideologically, in social movement terms.In 1975, when I enrolled in graduate studies in history at the University of Minnesota, I had just completed a six-year career as a high school teacher in the public schools of Kenosha, Wisconsin. During my high school teaching years, in order to help unload student loans, I combined teaching with a number of part-time evening jobs (as dishwasher in a local restaurant, as night clerk in a YMCA in nearby Racine, and, during the final two years, as a full-time factory worker at the Snap-On Tools Corporation, located next door to Tramper Senior High School, where I taught school during the day). In addition, especially during my first four years as a public high school teacher, I maintained an intense schedule of community organizing activities—first among students and then among their parents, and the larger community. During these years, my community","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"33 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina","authors":"Calvin Schermerhorn","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10330003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10330003","url":null,"abstract":"Justene Hill Edwards's brilliant book argues that the business ventures of enslaved people from colonial times to emancipation were integrated into the broader political economy of slavery in South Carolina. African-descended South Carolinians did not just labor for enslavers. Many worked for themselves in small enterprises and networks that permitted them, in many cases, a return. The book's graceful prose and lucid argumentation will appeal to students and specialists. Unfree Markets explores changes over time, arguing that enslavers’ efforts to regulate Black business activities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave way to predatory involvement in enslaved people's dealings in the nineteenth century, partly because of the state's shift from rice to cotton as the primary economic activity. This shift prefigured predatory capitalism of later eras. From 1686 onward, the colonial legislature worked to establish a legal framework that sanctioned independent Black business activities while bringing them under the control of enslavers.As South Carolina became a majority Black plantation society, its leaders worked assiduously to exert control over African-descended people's independent economic activities while at the same time sponsoring them. The task labor system of cultivating rice was exquisite industrial psychology that left labor time for self-directed enterprises. Enslavers also permitted bondspersons to cultivate marginal lands and hire themselves out for wages. The result was a seemingly widespread practice of marketing produce, poultry, and other consumables and a Black consumer market for goods, including, notably, alcohol. That symbiosis seems to have helped diversify the colony's economy, and enslaved people sold necessities to whites despite being legal chattel property themselves.Nineteenth-century South Carolina enslavers found self-serving reasons to prey on the economic activities they insisted enslaved people do. Charles C. Pinckney (nephew of South Carolina's constitutional delegate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney) was adamant that enslaved people cultivate their own food and trade surpluses for “luxuries of life” (133). In Hill Edwards's view, enslavers like Pinckney were predatory paternalists whose self-serving rationale twisted a novel form of exploitation into a defense of race-based slavery.Both enslaved and enslavers practiced recognizable forms of capitalism, which Hill Edwards understands as economic actors investing resources in activities designed to generate returns. It was not uncommon for an enslaver to encourage enslaved people to steal cotton, which that enslaver paid for in whiskey. The resulting configuration of capitalism was expansive. And Hill Edwards's definition provides enough space for enslaved market actors to be petty capitalists based on the concept of free time rather than freedom. One of the book's interventions is “how the rise of capitalism in the early nineteenth century undermined racial s","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"33 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337119","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation","authors":"Jason Resnikoff","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10330017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10330017","url":null,"abstract":"In 2013, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne published a paper claiming that 47 percent of jobs in the United States were in danger of being replaced by artificial intelligence (AI). The paper made quite a splash at the time. Apparently even Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisors took it quite seriously (322).A decade later, Frey's fears haven't quite come to pass. (A Bureau of Labor Statistics report from July 2022 in fact finds little evidence that AI has made any appreciable difference in the rate or character of job loss in the United States.) Still, out of that 2013 paper came Frey's most recent book, a survey of the history of mechanization in Europe (mainly England) and the United States. In it, he claims that we currently stand on the threshold of a “technology trap.” Until the ascent of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century, Frey argues, European authorities generally outlawed the introduction of machines that threatened the livelihood of craftspeople. The result was to delay industrialization and all its benefits. This was the first technology trap: when those with political power blocked mechanization, or what Frey calls, simply, “progress.”Of course, industrialization dispossessed many working people, as Frey acknowledges. It is one of his axioms that workers automatically attack machines that threaten their income—evidently regardless of the influences of culture, politics, law, and so on. As a result, machine wrecking was a “rational response” by Luddite English workers at the turn of the nineteenth century (125). With AI, Frey continues, workers once again find their incomes threatened, but with one important difference: “Unlike the situation in the days of the Industrial Revolution,” he writes, “workers in the developed world today have more political power than the Luddites did” (xiii). That is to say, while Luddites could only attack machines, working people today may attempt to regulate the rate or character of technological change through democratic governance. This, Frey tells us, would be bad, for he is adamantly opposed to “slowing down the pace of progress or restricting automation” (xiii). To oppose the degradation of working conditions wrought by “automation,” in other words, would be to slow down or restrict progress. It therefore falls to society to ameliorate the lives of those who will lose from automation, Frey holds, so that they don't short-circuit “progress” by way of that troublesome institution, democracy.I must be frank. I did not think it was still possible to write a book like The Technology Trap. Perhaps the single most important contribution to come out of the history of technology in the past half century has been its debunking of the fallacy of technological determinism, the idea that technology is a pure force of history that develops itself autonomously. Frey seems unaware of this major (and not particularly recent) insight as he narrates the history of mechanization from European antiquity","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On Work and Disaster","authors":"Jacob A. C. Remes","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329764","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and the economic and social disruption that it precipitated have brought increased attention to the intersections of disaster studies and labor and working-class history. This historiographical essay lays out four places where disaster intersects with work: first, all disasters are workplace disasters for somebody; second, disasters create labor; third, disasters can reveal what always existed about labor, class relations, and working-class life; and fourth, disasters can remake living and working conditions by providing new grounds to contest them.","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}