Japan's war in Asia and the Pacific would have ground to a halt long before 1945 without the labor of millions of foreign workers, most of them mobilized against their will. For example, production of coal (then Japan's primary energy source) depended in large part on coerced labor from Korea, a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945. Throughout Japan's wartime empire, at least fifteen million Asians were put to work, often under brutally exploitative conditions, constructing roads, bridges, and air fields; digging minerals; and building boats, among many other projects. Untold thousands died because of harsh treatment, inadequate food and medical care, and poor planning. Many surviving workers, some of whom were left permanently disabled, are still waiting today for the wages they were promised. Such a large, destructive enterprise naturally had consequences that outlived the war. Coercive labor mobilization tore families and communities apart and sharpened class resentments, contributing to revolutionary upheavals after August 1945 in Korea and Indonesia, for example. In Japan itself, where mobilization took place on a relatively small scale and with comparatively little coercion, it left a complex, contradictory legacy, invigorating the labor movement in some ways and strengthening the hand of capital in others. Unlike the situation in Germany, where corporations have recently agreed to compensate wartime forced workers, both the state and corporations in Japan have refused to consider compensation for the foreign workers who kept Japan's war machine running from 1939 to 1945.

This article examines the history of development and forced labor in Barue, a rural district in central Mozambique, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Barue was designated as a labor reserve, whose economic role was to send forced workers into migrant labor elsewhere. This was slated to change in the early 1960s, with the rise of a new developmental discourse in the Portuguese empire. This discourse promised to transform the economic model of Barue and other rural districts, by outlawing forced labor, minimizing migrant labor, and promoting rural agriculture. The Portuguese government, however, lacked the resources and the commitment necessary to actually change Barue's economy. Instead of development transforming Barue's economic model, the economic model transformed development, which was redefined as a series of modest social and economic improvements which neither changed Barue's economy nor reduced its dependence upon migrant labor. Nonetheless, while this narrower definition of “development” did not fulfill the transformative promise of its discursive progenitor, it was compatible with development's broader objective of defending and justifying the Portuguese empire against the threat of decolonization. The ultimate goal of safeguarding Portuguese rule made it possible to reconcile a discourse founded on change with a reality marked by continuity.

When the Statue of Liberty, a gift of the French government to the American Republic, was inaugurated in the New York harbor on October 28, 1886, the French radical press felt that the ceremony, held as it was on the eve of the executions of the Chicago martyrs, was more of an insult to labor than a tribute to freedom. Indeed, the French anarchists suggested that this statue should be renamed “the Goddess of Murder.” Was this just an outburst of anarchist rhetoric or does it tell us something about the depth of feeling created in the European radical movement by the dramatic events that marked the year 1886?

From 1880 to 1980 the Pullman Company repeatedly turned to photography to shape the attitudes and behavior of its workers. It built the Pullman Car Works and adjoining town on the fringes of Chicago as a model industrial community with the goal of resolving the endemic conflict between capital and labor. However, despite its claim that the model town was intended as purely “practical” philanthropy—that is, that sanitary and beautiful conditions would increase profits by improving workers' performance and preventing strikes—Pullman could not achieve its goal without also creating affective bonds with workers.

This article contributes to recent debates about the complicated ways in which women involved in the interwar British Labour Party negotiated their political identities through an examination of the activities and aims of a neglected group, the paid women organizers. It suggests that although they accepted the importance of women's work within the home, the organizers did not see women's lives as confined by domesticity. Instead, they argued that women in the home had the potential for collective political action. The article looks at the campaign for pit head baths to highlight the attempt by the organizers to develop a politics around issues such as dirt that concerned women in their daily lives. It was difficult to persuade the Labour Party to take these questions seriously, and the organizers experienced constraints as well as opportunities that came from their paid role, but it is argued here that they did carve a career that was woman-focused and sought to give women in the home a voice.

Frank Tannenbaum is best known for his studies of Mexican agrarian reform and for his contributions to the comparative history of slavery and slave societies. But as a young man he had made a name for himself as a notorious labor agitator, and he went on to publish two books on the US labor movement, which are worthy of reconsideration as important interpretations of independent trade unionism and political reform. The first volume appeared in 1921 and offered an original perspective on the popular syndicalism that formed such a large, positive element of the philosophy of the International Workers of the World (IWW), to the extent it had one, at the center of which lay the struggle for social recognition on the part of immigrant and (supposedly) unskilled workers. The second appeared thirty years later and provided a thoughtful defense of the private, employment-based welfare and industrial relations system that the New Deal established in the United States. Together the books offer a provocative account of the social and individual radicalism of US-style “pure and simple” trade unionism.

Still reeling from 9/11, I had been working in and about lower Manhattan nonstop until this trip. It was great to be far away in the smog-filtered Los Angeles sun, if even only for a day. I met Allan Sekula in his Echo Park work studio, a nondescript corner storefront filled with files of his photographs and boxes of exhibition prints just a stone's throw from Koreatown.

We live our domestic lives in the presence of objects. Through our relations with them, we appraise, assimilate, appropriate, and resist the currents of our time, in a warm and willful dialogue between self and other. As goods change, and times change, so does this cultural traffic between householders and their goods change—in dominant direction, in relative intensity, in the character of the burden it carries, and in the significance we allow this burden to assume. How much material goods matter in the social and individual reckoning of well-being varies historically, and within a given time, by nation, class, and gender. How much consumption matters is a cultural difference, a shared national predicament, a politics grounded in the circumstances of class, and learned as a gendered responsibility. When producers were not paramount in the regulation of consumption, to what priorities was commerce subsidiary? How were these priorities specific by nation, gender, and class?

White workers and white working-class politics have been neglected in the historiography of South Africa during the second half of the twentieth century. This article seeks to extricate white workers from this historiographical neglect and fracture homogenizing representations of white, specifically Afrikaner, experiences of democratization. It does so by reintroducing class to a debate dominated by race. Employing a discursive analysis sensitive to issues of class, it shows that white workers were confronted with democratizing change and disempowerment more than a decade before the end of apartheid and suggests that class politics continue to inform white responses in post-apartheid South Africa. In this way, it argues for a historical, discursive approach to uncovering the power dynamics of class and the complex intersection of working-class and racial identities in the late twentieth century.

In April of 1983, the Chilean copper miners'confederation (the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cobre, or CTC), representing 26,000 copper workers, called for a general strike in Chile's copper mines and for a day of national protest against the military regime of Augusto Pinochet.

Many who study colonialism have noted that the same words used by the colonizer to describe the colonized—“dirty,” “backward,” “uncultured,” and “possessing an improper understanding of the value of work and property”—were often identical to those that rich people used to describe the poor. They were the terms the “modern” used to describe the “not yet modern”; the urban the rural; the educated the uneducated. To use a British example: Those who wrote from positions of power (the urban, educated bourgeoisie) looked down upon, first, the urban poor, then the rural poor, then the Scottish, then the “half-civilized” Natives of North America; then, finally, they squinted from on high upon the Aborigines of Australia. All of these groups fell short of the “norm,” the way the colonizer understood the very height of modern progress. All of these groups were “lacking” something. Thus, in sometimes surprising ways, colonialism merely seems to be another manifestation of the exertion of power over the powerless, a relationship much closer to that of “class” than many expect. This is especially so in a field that produces much of the best work in cultural history, and where anything hinting at old-fashioned “labor history” is gauche (no pun intended). Yet, as the authors of the books under review argue, understandings of labor and property, and the manner with which they are tied to an understanding of nature, are more fundamental to the history of modern colonialism than, for example, race, the latter a category almost always invoked by the colonizer in a completely instrumental fashion.

From the first usage in nineteenth-century America of the term “sweatshop,” the definition of this emotive term has “reflected social anxiety about global flows and exchange of people, goods, culture, and capital,” Bender and Greenwald write in their useful edited volume, Sweatshops USA. And if the term sweatshop today connotes a race to the bottom in which a market structure of intense competition reflects the absence, or lack of the enforcement of, effective protective legislation across the relevant market, then there is little basically new in the organization of garment production and the unrelenting pressures on its workers. Essential characteristics of sweated labor in the industry result from structural characteristics which have remained and are only ameliorated by strong unions, public concern for the conditions of labor, and enforced social regulation. While it has often seemed to be an outlier in its exploitative norms, the idea that garment work is totally unique in the flexibility it demands, the excesses and abuses inherent in the contracting system with its pressures to respond to unpredictable and rapidly changing fashion, its production of a labor-intensive product not easily mechanized, and its ability to seek out and control a vulnerable labor force is a misjudgment. It is rather an industry which represents an extreme but not a different form of the way labor markets operate. It is not a vanishing past but a worrisome globalized future of just-in-time production and multisourced internationalized commodity chain organization of production which should be worrying.

This article analyzes the role of pickets in two of the most emblematic strikes in Brazilian labor history during the twentieth century: the “strike of the 400,000,” which involved several industry categories in São Paulo and neighboring cities in 1957, and the “forty-one days strike” in 1980 involving the metalworkers of the industrial belt, known as ABC Paulista, in the metropolitan region of the city of São Paulo. Both strikes broke out at a time of profound reconfiguration of Brazilian society, marked by industrialization, migration, and urbanization processes. Although separated by a time gap of almost twenty-five years, both the “strike of the 400,000” and the “forty-one days strike” reveal important aspects of the performance of workers in that crucial period of Brazilian history.

Responding to the triumph of the right during the 1980s, Eley and Nield conclude that traditional concepts of class are no longer workable and need a major overhauling. Unfortunately, they mischaracterize the literature, offer little that could refine the debates, and ignore the important role of capitalism in the last two decades.

Our principal anxiety about the responses to “Farewell to the Working Class?” concerns their strangely private character. In the main—the response of Barbara Weinstein excepted—the respondents seem to use the opportunity our article has provided simply to restate some of their own previous positions. Often they engage neither with the substance of our article nor, equally importantly, with its conciliatory tone. As a result, the chance further to depolemicize these important debates has been lost or otherwise evaded in a variety of reiterations.