The year 2025 marks the 120th anniversary of Lochner v. New York, a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down legislative limits on work hours in the baking industry. U.S. scholars generally agree this decision harmed workers and was a setback to the labor movement in the United States. The essay borrows from some of the historian E.P. Thompson’s writings on the relationship between historical inquiry and normative values in order to reflect on Lochner and the relative consensus among scholars opposing the decision. That reflection in turn serves as a point of entry for thinking about the role of normative values in doing labor history, what values we propound in the present by writing and teaching about the history of working-class people, and how those issues relate to different ways labor historians can understand what is arguably our field’s central category, class. The essay suggests that, with regard to the Lochner decision and in general, labor history is something of a different activity if the field’s orientation is toward the amelioration of time- and place-specific problems in working-class people’s lives, toward class as inherently a category of violence and injustice, or both.

Across the twentieth century, hundreds of women worked as nurses, cooks, cleaners, and teachers on Mexico’s railroads. They have been overlooked in histories of the railroads and Mexican industrialization more broadly, their limited number perhaps suggesting that their work is not of analytical importance in understanding processes of economic development and class formation. On the contrary, these women’s work constituted many of the most coveted labor rights of the postrevolutionary railroad workforce, itself a symbolic vanguard of Mexico’s working class and one of the most important beneficiaries of the expansion of social and economic rights ushered in by the Mexican Revolution. The gendered division of labor characteristic of the railroads was neither accidental nor insignificant. Railroads used the feminization of the work of social reproduction to write off structural failures and predictable shortcomings in welfare provision as failures of femininity. Women became scapegoats for the consistent violation of workers’ rights through underfunding and understaffing. In tracing this process, the article models a historiographical and methodological intervention with broader relevance. It suggests that the social and labor rights that expanded around the world in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries must be studied not only from the vantage of legal or political history, but as themselves questions of social and labor history. Making these rights real depended on socially reproductive work that has often been marginal in accounts of industrialization and economic development. It is impossible to understand the political economy of social and economic rights without understanding women’s work.

Labor historians, particularly in the United States, have given unique attention to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Emerging out of a series of tumultuous strikes on the West Coast during the early Depression years, the ILWU won trend-setting employment contracts, survived Second Red Scare-era persecution despite keeping avowedly leftwing leadership, and maintained its presence on the docks even after containerization dramatically reshaped the longshore industry. This review examines multiple recent works on the ILWU, noting new interventions—both in ILWU history and labor history, more broadly. All three reviewed works offer invaluable insight for how contemporary unions can adapt to technological changes in the workplace, foster internal democracy, and build labor power while fighting for social justice. The review concludes by offering potential avenues for further scholarly research, particularly on the nature of leftwing unionism and labor-generated alternatives to deindustrialization and workforce displacement.

In 1920s Seattle, dance halls charging ten cents per dance became the focus of debate. Tracing the dance workers’ self-representations and labor organizing in a city increasingly hostile to interracial social spaces, this paper evaluates how gender, race, labor organizing, and politics intersected in unprecedented ways in Seattle’s nightlife. In a decade of tepid labor organizing and in a sexual labor sector where unions were extremely rare, female dancers in Seattle unionized. Moreover, they did so in what became under Mayor Betha Knight Landes (1926–1928) the first major American city to have a female mayor. The Women Dancing Entertainers’ Union’s (WDEU) tactics of emphasizing the respectability of their profession enjoyed initial successes, yet faltered when dance hall critics increasingly constructed the presence of interracial couples as a sign of immorality. The closure in 1929 of numerous ten-cent halls south of Yesler Way reflects how Anti-Asian prejudice entered into regulation of the city’s nightlife, adversely impacting dance hall workers, women in politics, and minoritized men. The WDEU’s insistence that they were upstanding workers and economic providers nonetheless provides a powerful corrective to contemporaries’ and, until recently, historians’ tendency to overlook sexual sector night labor.

Labor in the textile and garment industry is at the heart of a series of recent books on South Asia. Together these books document the different scales at which textile and garment work has been structured and restructured over the last century, and its implications for workers, their health as well as collective solidarity. Across the countries of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, the industry developed and declined in vastly different temporalities and rhythms. Yet, as these works reveal, workers have often been confronted with similar challenges brought on by the boom-and-bust cycles of industrial development. In each case, textile and garment workers have been forced to navigate transitions to premature deindustrialization, closure, or national/transnational industrial policy changes. The books center workers and their long “post”-industrial or industrial “afterlives,” as they cope with the dramatic changes in the global manufacturing of textile and garment.

In the 1910s, U.S. social reformers advocated for labor laws to protect women who worked in factories. The laws included bans on women working at night. In New York, a small contingent of night-working women who had lost their jobs objected. Arguing that the laws were paternalistic and harmful, they formed the Women’s Equal Opportunity League. The group opposed all single-sex laws and ultimately won repeal of New York’s night work ban for printers, elevator operators, and transit workers. Night work was the stage on which reformers’ ideas about the greater good conflicted with arguments for women’s autonomy. Whether and what kind of work women should do at night was a conflict about class, motherhood, and self-determination. This article profiles three leaders of the Women’s Equal Opportunity League—printer Ella M. Sherwin, transit guard Margaret Hinchey, and streetcar ticket agent Mary A. Murray. All three were devoted union members whose opposition to women-only laws made them dissidents within their unions. They remained shift workers their entire lives while lobbying state legislatures and Congress to demand formal legal equality for women. Histories of the early Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) have emphasized the support of upper- and middle-class women. These working-class women, who had long opposed protective legislation, later demanded the ERA—not in spite of the prospect that it would nullify single-sex labor laws, but because they hoped it would. Theirs was a minority position, and paying attention to it reveals the complexity of class conflict at the root of a feminist dispute which persisted long into the twentieth century.

Russian Poland was among the most militant tsarist borderlands during the 1905–1907 Revolution in the Russian Empire. However, only a decade later, when revolutionary movements again loomed large and shook the whole region after 1917, Poland remained relatively calm. Forging a new statehood after 1918 rivaled the earlier popular drive toward social revolution. Revolution was aborted in Poland; in other rim regions of the Russian Empire, however, the situation evolved differently, and this scenario should not be taken as self-explanatory. The dynamic of political contention on the ground in the inter-revolutionary decade is the key to understand the pathways of the new state and its society. But the existing accounts deliver only a fragmentary picture, concentrating on the teleology of nation, nation state and its elites or party politics. Meanwhile, the dynamics of labor contention can be hardly squared with unanimous class or national mobilizations. This article addresses this gap drawing from an extensive collection of courses on social unrest and conflict in the Kingdom of Poland based on administrative sources from local Polish and central Russian archives (more than 3300 entries on contentious events). Covering broad available sources, it offers a picture of labor unrest spanning from tinier township workshops, insular, dispersed industrialization of smaller cities harboring quite large mills, to fully-fledged industrial power hubs. The findings show the large heterogeneity of conflict among urban workers. The initial enthusiasm of the 1905 upheaval did not hold sway for long. Workers were tired with the revolutionary mobilization, derailed by the state repression and reluctant to embark on political action again. The lore of 1905 was not an important point of reference for the forthcoming mobilizations. Instead, protests had their own rhythms and spatial patterns, resembling the pre-industrial calendar of festivities turning into insurgencies but also followed pan-imperial causes. Inter-ethnic tensions kicked in: within crews (mostly Polish-Jewish) but above all between rank-and-file workers and foremen, often of German origin. This plurality resulted in various possibilities to build a working class imagined community ranging from a single factory, through branch-wide solidarities, national filiation up to pan-imperial class alliance. Also the tsarist administration, interested in maintaining the basic stability of supply and keep the state going was an important factor. These heterogenous field of tensions did not form any cleavage conductive to singular mobilization. However, it was susceptible to broader political projects binding various claims. Such a project was a new Poland, supported by major parties and perceived by many as nothing less as a revolutionary state for a while promising anti-imperial self-assertion, national rights, political freedom, and social emancipation.

This article highlights the author’s body and its physical experience in labor history, by a focus on their historical implication for the emergence of writings about miners in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth century China. Miners and their workplace entered Chinese textual and pictorial representations at the turn of the twentieth century, as a result of the growing importance of the mining industry, the dissemination of new mining knowledge, and the formation of new social groups. Later in the 1920s, literary movements tied up with the revolutionary agenda under the influence of Marxism brought new conceptualizations of miners’ position in society and their relationship with intellectuals. When authors turned to write about miners in the late 1920s and early 1930s, they chose to legitimize their writing by descending into mine shafts to acquire the experience in the underground mining workplace and to incorporate the bodily experience into their writings. The mining lamp in texts and images from this period provides a prime example to illustrate how the author’s experience in the underground mine was embodied in the author’s and the miner’s corporeal visions and contributed a new way of seeing and representing miners. Drawing upon materials about miners of various genres, this article reveals the formulation of Chinese visual modernity within Chinese social interactions and brings the author’s body into labor history by calling attention to both its material presence in the workplace and its agentic power to inscribe workers.

The essay argues that the idea of the United States as a classless society was never a faithful representation of the U.S. socioeconomic reality, but constituted a myth elaborated since the 1830s by the first generation of U.S. economists to oppose the insubordination of Northern white workers, their mobilization through strikes, their politicization of class, and their critique of wage labor. It was precisely to counter the workers’ discourse, the essay maintains, that the first U.S. economists, most importantly Henry Charles Carey (1793–1879), developed an ideological representation of U.S. society as a classless structure devoid of fixed boundaries, in which industrious individuals could improve their condition through labor and in which social positions reflected a scale of talents and merits. By studying the early writings of Carey, but also of Theodore Sedgwick (1780–1839), Francis Wayland (1796–1865), Henry Vethake (1791–1866), Alonzo Potter (1800–1865), and Francis Lieber (1800–1872), the essay shows how economists used the myth of the classless society to scientifically legitimize the coming of capitalism to the United States, as well as to delegitimize class conflict. This anti-labor reaction, the essay argues, marked the very emergence of political economy in the United States as a science aimed at justifying the order of society through a mystified representation of its power relations, while the myth of the classless society would persist as a fundamental ideological pillar in the legitimation and naturalization of American capitalism.

The article analyzes a period when public officials withdrew children from the labor market and assigned them to the school system. While existing research delves into the reasons behind this process, focusing on sociopolitical reforms, economic factors and changing concepts of childhood, there is limited understanding of how working-class families responded. The article aims to fill the gap by examining the social impact on families when their children were barred from factory work by political-administrative authorities, shedding light on class formation and political subjectivation. Inspired by Jacques Rancière’s book Proletarian Nights the article specifically investigates the Swiss canton of Aargau, where the clash between industrial child labor and liberal school reforms around 1830 provides a unique perspective. The conflict prompted the mobilization of proletarian families, compelling them to organize, unite politically and collectively advocate for their children to rejoin the labor market.

The global turn has contributed to a revitalization of labor history. Historians have become increasingly attentive to the varied forms of labor commodification that existed under capitalism. Many historians have welcomed this approach which challenges the universalism of “free” wage labor. Critics, however, have warned that global labor history risks re-inscribing the power of capital at the expense of local specificities, particularly in terms of the plurality of labor’s worlds and its (dis)connections with capital. This is not a new debate within African studies. Since the 1980s, historians of Africa have questioned the privileging of wage labor at the expense of other forms of labor and the focus on (post)colonial workplace relations to the exclusion of other relational power structures which shaped the behavior of African men and women. This article takes up these debates by focusing on different forms of labor connected to the gold mining industry in colonial Ghana. The article argues that African men and women involved in the mining sector, including mineworkers, petty traders, and sex workers, responded to their experience of commodification in ways that were about more than just their status as abstract sellers of labor power. What emerges from this analysis is a more nuanced understanding of the strategies and aspirations of African labor which was connected to the mining sector. That is to say, where colonial officials saw working patterns that were purportedly symptomatic of the “lazy” and “ill-disciplined” character of African labor, this article demonstrates otherwise. The behavior of African labor associated with the mining sector was indicative of choices that were made in accordance with individual and collective needs connected to issues of class, gender, and generation, which, in turn, were “entangled” with capitalist market imperatives but not necessarily determined by them.

In Charleston, Maine, a town of about 1,500 near the center of the state, there is an orchard with 750 apple trees and a farm where a variety of produce is grown.1 This bucolic setting is on the grounds of the Mountain View Correctional Facility, a 374-bed minimum- and medium-security state prison.2 Incarcerated people tend to the apple trees and vegetables, and every year they cultivate 100,000 pounds of produce that wind up on their prison cafeteria, or chow hall, trays.3 Writing for the New York Times in 2021, Patricia Leigh Brown highlighted how Mountain View's prison food service manager Mark McBrine, who also happened to be “an organic farmer with dirt under his fingernails,” was “making the prison a pioneer in a nascent farm-to-prison table movement.”4 According to multiple media outlets that have reported on Mountain View's food system, it is a model to be emulated—both an antidote to dreary prison food and a cost-saver for the state of Maine.5