A complex relationship existed between working-class formation and the development of the welfare state in Imperial Germany between 1871 and 1914. In the 1880s, the Social Democratic party voted against the three major national social insurance law's, and many workers seemed to spurn the incipient welfare state. But by 1914, socialists were active in social policy-making and workers were participating in the operations of the welfare state. Tens of thousands of workers and social democrats held positions in the social insurance funds and offices, the labor courts and labor exchanges, and other institutions of the official welfare state. Hundreds of workers had even become “friendly visitors” in the traditional middle-class domain of municipal poor relief. This shift is interesting not only from the standpoint of working-class orientations; it also challenges the received image of the German working class as excluded from the state —an interpretation based on an overly narrow focus on national parliamentary politics.

Apart from the intrinsic value of understanding the fate of Japanese workers during the war, Japanese labor history in World War II also gives us a non-Western point of comparison for studies of wartime labor in the West. To facilitate that comparison, we should consider government policy, the response of the labor movement, and the conditions of workers during the war. In Japan, labor and economic history periodization of World War II does not conform to the European and American conceptions. For the Japanese, the war began with the outbreak of the “China incident” in 1937; Pearl Harbor, traumatic as it was for the United States, only marks the beginning of a new stage the Japanese call the “Pacific War.” It is not surprising, then, that Japanese labor history begins its wartime phase in 1937. In fact, to comprehend changes during the 1937–45 war, at least brief mention must be made of earlier developments.

On May 1, 2020, Justa Barrios, a New York City home-care worker and labor activist, passed away from COVID-19. After working twenty-four-hour shifts for fourteen years, Barrios had injuries and compounding medical issues, including asthma, stomach difficulties, and heart problems. Her doctor determined that she could no longer work twenty-four-hour shifts. Yet when the home-care agency received a letter from the doctor requesting Barrios be assigned to eight-hour shifts, the agency dropped her. Barrios fought back. She found her voice in the “Ain't I a Woman?!” Campaign; comrades described her as a “fearless leader.” Stemming from an alliance among female immigrants and US-born garment, plastics, office, and home-care workers, via workers’ centers such as the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, this organizing effort has sought to end twenty-four-hour days—and the legally permissible practice of paying for only thirteen hours—in New York state through direct action, the courts, union arbitration, and state legislation prohibiting twenty-four -hour shifts. Women such as Justa Barros, Lai Yee Chan, Mei Kum Chu, Seferina Rosario, and Sileni Martinez see the “Aint I a Woman?!” Campaign as a “new women's movement fighting for control over our time, health, respect and payment.” As a cross-racial group, members chose to invoke Sojourner Truth, who tied together the causes of slavery abolition and women's rights, emancipation from coerced labor and from patriarchy, the dignity of women's labor and the dignity of release from work. But this legislation, which would seem so obviously humane and jarringly anachronistic, has been stalled in the New York legislature and ignored by Governor Andrew Cuomo for over a year.

This article examines debates over Chinese indentured labor in the Australasian colonies at the height of the gold rushes. It does so through the testimony of Chinese gold miners who protested the seizure of their gold by customs officials in Sydney Harbour. As a result of these protests, a “New South Wales Select Committee into the Seizure of Gold from Chinese Miners” was established in 1857 to investigate customs law and “coolie” rights. The findings of this committee uncovered Chinese and white settler memories over failed coolie transportation schemes, revealing the ways in which the legacies of coolie migration continued to shape understandings in the Australian colonies of law, labor rights, and fair taxation well after the cessation of such schemes in the 1840s. The archive of Chinese grievance against the colonial state, preserved in testimonies given to the select committee, reveal the long shadow of slavery in the British Empire, the complexities of multiracial communities, and the role of law and legal institutions in shaping both.

The military and the working class have intersected in myriad ways, especially in the era of mass conscription. Millions of workers served in, fought in, and died in the armed services. They brought their political and cultural values into armies and their military experiences back into labor movements and working-class communities. Militaries have been large employers of civilians, on bases in home countries and abroad, directly and indirectly, in the vast armament industries. In some countries, like China and Iran, they directly control large parts of the economy, including major industrial establishments. Military employment practices have reflected and shaped civilian-sector labor relations, race relations, and gender roles. Armies have been used to break strikes and have launched coups designed to defeat left-wing and labor movements or, occasionally (as in Portugal and, more recently, Venezuela), to defeat conservative forces. Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, war and militarism remain prominent features of both advanced industrial societies and less developed ones.

In the late 1940s the British people seemed preoccupied with family and children to an unprecedented degree. A similar revival of family life occurred in other European countries, testimony to the common legacy of the war years, during which private life had been broken apart by death, forced separations, constant anxiety, and unaccustomed privation. But the specific form of postwar familial ideology in Britain reflects the complex circumstances, cultural traditions, and mood of the nation. Everywhere the faces of smiling, responsible parents and healthy, carefree children gazed out from advertising billboards and National Health posters, symbolic of the nation's “social capital” and a better future. Widespread concern about low birthrates helped to strengthen domestic and mothering images of women; magazines and radio espoused the ideas of a growing phalanx of child-care professionals; and government social policy redefined the reciprocal obligations of parents and the state, reflecting a new “social democratic” conception of family as the basic unit of society and the chief incubator of citizenship and community values.

This article explores relationships between religious and economic practices in Kozhikode, a medium-sized city in Kerala. We examine debates concerning the apparent decline of the “bazaar economy” in the face of the onslaught of globalization and the consequent emergence of a “new economy.” The latter is felt locally to be overdetermined by capital and entrepreneurial practices connected, either directly or indirectly, to the combined effects of migration to the Gulf countries of West Asia and to the post-1991 liberalization of the Indian economy. We argue that these public debates are not simply reflections on the harsh reality of economic rationalization, but underscore the production and articulation of specific economies of morality and affect. We also perceive a drawing together of seemingly divergent orientations, sensibilities, and practices—namely, those commonly associated with reformist Islam and what in recent literature has been described as “neoliberal global capitalism.”

The 1970s have made something of a comeback recently–in terms of interest, if not always reputation. This is partly because it was an unfashionable, “lost” decade, possessed of a depressing image in the shadows of its immediate neighbors and because the present economic crisis has made its difficulties relevant and brought them closer. The decade is ripe for revisionism, as well as for seeking lessons. And what ultimately emerges is not just an arc towards neoliberalism but a more fragmented picture, liberating in many respects–and which demands historians come to terms with the grim decline long associated with the decade.

This article deals with the Italian working-class attitude to vote right-wing, seen in a long-term perspective, in particular in the northern and more industrialized regions. It stresses the fact that the left-wing parties reached their largest majority among working-class voters only for a short period. The end of the long cycle of factory conflicts of the 1970s on the one side, and the crisis of the “local political subcultures”—Catholic and Communist—in mediating the relationship between the working class and the central State on the other, marked the outbreak of a new political phenomenon: the establishment of the Lega Nord party in the 1980s. This party has been able to shift progressively from identity-based claims and secessionist proposals to xenophobia and the demand that a priority be accorded to Italian workers on the labour market. In the most recent years workers’ support for the Lega Nord has been contended by a new populist competitor, the Five Star Movement, whose ability to intercept a widespread “working-class malaise” will be tested in years to come.

This article examines how globalization and violence have shaped workers' organizations in the Urabá banana zone in northern Colombia from the 1960s to the present. Early unions found allies in leftist political and guerilla organizations. The banana growers relied on the neoliberal state and rightist paramilitaries to unleash an extraordinary wave of violence to crush the leftist unions. They also wooed the right within the unions by pleading a set of common interests in reforming the global banana trade to the benefit of Colombian producers. By the 1990s, a newly right-dominated union in Urabá proved adept at labor-management collaboration in the interest of their joint regional stake in the industry, but it also promoted international labor unity aimed at pressuring banana transnationals to accept minimum labor standards.

The decline of coalmining has been a worldwide phenomenon in recent years. In Great Britain, both Labour and Conservative governments have steadily closed down state-owned mines, provoking economic devolution in parts of the north of England and South Wales. European Community nations have collaborated to recovert declining European coal basins in the decades since the 1970s. In the Soviet Union coalminers played a crucial role in galvanzing support behind Mikhail Gorbachev.Nevertheless, despite miners' political importance and union strength, they have been unable to arrest the industrial decline of the Donbass region of the Ukraine.1 A long-term process of substitution among fossil fuels has had a major impact on developed economies over the course of the twentiethcentury. Economic and population shifts have been central features of this broader process. By focusing on the internal migration that accompanied the decline of anthracite coalmining in northeastern Pennsylvania, this article examines an American manifestation of this phenomenon of economicand social transformation. It argues for the importance of viewing working people as conscious actors in this larger process. While working people are certainly affected by economic forces beyond their control, they actively make choices that shape both their own lives and the broader process of economic transformation.2 Examination of the experiences of members of mining families in the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania in the years since World War Two demonstrates the ways in which strong kinship, family, and ethnic networks have led residents in mining communities to resist an entirely economic calculus in responding to the region's economic decline.

“It affects your nerves, your mental state, your way of thinking—because you have to be cautious in everything you do now,” Rosie said. “It's like I'm risking my life for a dollar. It's twisted.” Rosie is an Amazon worker in New York City. She made these comments during the summer of 2020 after learning that a colleague in his twenties had recently died of COVID-19.

In the postwar era, conservatives manipulated concerns about union corruption and organized crime in order to score political points against New Deal Democrats and to win new legal restrictions on union power. The resulting racketeer menace had much in common with the contemporary red scare. Antiunion conservatives framed the issue of labor racketeering in terms that resembled the language then being mobilized against internal communist espionage and subversion. This rhetoric proliferated in the congressional debates of the postwar era. Proponents of the Taft-Hartley Act invoked the racketeer menace in 1946 and 1947. They depicted the law as an effort to curb racketeering and thus protect workers and the general public by restricting abusive union power. In the years that followed, a series of congressional hearings into union corruption kept attention focused on the issue of racketeering. For the Eisenhower Administration this campaign against labor racketeering offered a chance to peel the working-class vote away from the Democratic Party by politically dividing union members from their leadership. The culmination of this trend came at the end of the 1950s during the McClellan Committee hearings, which was the largest congressional investigation up to that time. Those hearings transformed Teamsters President James R. Hoffa into a potent symbol of the danger posed by labor racketeering. The committee's revelations and the publicity they received undercut the labor movement. Polls showed growing public skepticism toward unions, and especially union leaders. Such attitudes helped conservatives win a new round of legislative restrictions on organized labor in the form of the Landrum-Griffin Act (1959).

New immigration restrictions in the United States and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s made legal entry dependent on specific kinship formalities. This article explores the impact of the new system through a study of British Caribbean migrants. Because family patterns and the place of church and state sanction within them varied greatly by class—here, as in many parts of the world—the result was a curtailment of mobility that affected elites very little, and working-class would-be migrants enormously. In order to elucidate de facto patterns of exclusion, the author concludes, historians of transnational labor must begin paying more attention to the work “family” does.

Exploring the legal context and arguments put forth by women who sued for their wages, this article illustrates how contested definitions of “work” and “intimacy” played a fundamental role in the arguments that both domestic workers and those whom they challenged in court made. It discusses a sample of legal complaints concerning labor arrangements (specifically, wage contracts, or contratos de soldada) from the Brazilian National Archives involving women working in the households of single men or widowers in nineteenth-century Brazil. Brought by both former slaves and Portuguese immigrants and other “free” women, domestic workers advanced demands for compensation, claiming wages and entitlements that clearly defined their connection to their masters as “work,” even when personal intimacy and sex were also present. The article also considers the place occupied by “free” domestic work in a slave society, relating it to the changing legal and social context of nineteenth-century Brazil.

Latin American political movements linking traditional peasant values of subsistence with a leftist critique of imperialism are contributing to new forms of environmentalism there. While in the United States labor and environmental movements tend to operate within mainstream political and economic models based on privileging high levels of consumption and economic growth, Latin American voices are challenging both the global economic order and traditional concepts of economic development. From indigenous and peasant movements to leftist labor unions to political leaders, Latin Americans are calling for economic development that privileges the rights of rural peoples and their environments, and redistribution of resources domestically and globally. Yet they remain imbedded in an international economy based on extractivism and economic growth, which poses significant challenges to any alternative paths.