In the first decade of the twentieth century, the allegation that slaves were harvesting cocoa off the west coast of Africa on the Portuguese island colony of São Tomé and Príncipe became an international scandal, not only because slavery had long been outlawed, but also because one of the major purchasers of that cocoa was the Quaker chocolate company, Cadbury Brothers. The Portuguese denied the charge of slavery and claimed that African workers on the islands were not only happier than Portuguese peasants, but also more content than many European workers. This article explores this claim and argues that the conflicting interpretations of what the British called the crisis over “slave cocoa” and the Portuguese called “the English cocoa controversy” can be explained by differing perspectives about work.

Focusing on scholarship in US history, this article claims that under assault from feminists, the class paradigm in the study of labor and working-class history lost its primacy. This turn to gender developed as part of the linguistic turn and has led to an emphasis on bodies. I further argue that race and class themselves are both engendered identities and categories of analysis. Bodies create a realm upon which racialized gender as well as class is inscribed, constructed, made, and remade. I end with examples from my research on World War II on how rethinking breadwinner ideology, family wage, and related topics from the standpoint of black women and men destabilize normative notions of worker and provider.

Faced with the most up to date washing machine, the undocumented Rosa, newly arrived from Guatemala to Los Angeles, does what many resourceful Mayan women would: She handwashes clothes and lays them on the lawn to dry.1 Played for comic relief in the 1983 movie El Norte, this confrontation of the domestic worker with the machine represents how, presumably in the face of dirty wars in Latin America and rising labor force participation of mothers with small children in the United States, well-to-do households had it both ways: They purchased the latest appliances and relied upon the labor of immigrant women. Recent migrants appeared more tractable than the African Americans who historically had worked in other women's homes. New models superseded old Maytags, but domestic workers never became obsolete, despite the predictions of sociologists and the panicked laments of would-be employers.

This article reviews the labor historiography of Iran for the period between the 1953 coup and the early revolutionary activism of late the 1970s, an interlude marked by a lack of histories of labor activism. Based on a qualitative analysis of the types of collective actions that oil workers engaged in during the period, this article argues that contextualizing the struggles of workers and the types of collective actions they engaged in will tell us more about the social and political changes that they experienced and participated in than the search for an ideal type of labor activism. It is argued that the social and political climate of Iran during the 1960s, characterized by political repression and an extensive centralized reform program, added new tactics to workers’ repertoires of action as they made use of the discourse of the regime for their own ends. This study is based on archival research at the International Institute of Social History archives in Amsterdam, the BP archives at Coventry, the National Archives of UK in London, and the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC.

After serving as an organizer for the independent labor union Solidarity (“Solidarność”) during Poland's 1980–81 upsurge, Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski was elected to the union's regional leadership in Łódź in 1981. Poland's most populous city after Warsaw, Łódź grew rapidly in the late nineteenth century after a torrent of foreign capital investment. Known as the “Manchester of Poland” because of its concentration of textile manufacturing, the city and its mills were the setting for The Promised Land, the story of a German, a Jew, and a Pole seeking to make their fortune in the brutal new world of industrial capitalism, as told in the 1899 realist novel by Władysław Reymont and the 1975 film by director Andrzej Wajda. The Łódź working class has a militant history dating to the strikes of May 1892, when, as Tamara Deutscher writes, “more than two hundred rioting textile workers were cut down by Cossacks.”

Taking as a starting point two strikes in colonial Cyprus in the 1930s—the miners' strike in 1936 in which both Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots were involved and the all-female spinners' strike in 1938—this paper looks at how the labor movement deeply transformed the political landscape of the island. In a society closely monitored by British colonial authorities and well acquainted with the Greek-Cypriot claim for Enosis, or the political union of Cyprus with Greece, the labor question became a locus, or “interstice of power structure,” articulating competing and mutually exclusive visions of Cyprus as a polity. More generally the paper investigates the modalities of formation of a collective group allegiance in a context of constraint.

A few years ago, the global consulting firm McKinsey and Company began issuing a series of increasingly urgent reports concerning “automation” and the future of work. Defining automation broadly as artificial intelligence and “other digital technologies,” the company promised in its reports that it could advise companies how they might prepare. Amidst this flurry of publication, McKinsey produced several articles specifically on the theme of “The Future of Work in Black America.” With “a new and proprietary data set”—a data set so proprietary readers were not privileged to see it—McKinsey claimed that “automation” would hurt the job prospects of Black Americans, and in particular Black men, more deeply and more broadly than any other demographic group in the United States. The jobs Black people held, McKinsey seemed to believe, were precisely those best performed by robots. For McKinsey's analysts, this conclusion was all but obvious when one considered, first, the racist exclusion of Black Americans from the resources of society, and second, the levels of education required to obtain the jobs Black people in America disproportionately hold, like “truck drivers, food service workers, and office clerks.”

The achievements of the labor movement in the Caribbean are generally historicized without highlighting the contribution of labor colleges to the function and survivability of trade unions. For more than fifty years, labor colleges have played a critical role in developing the knowledge and skill sets of union members who had an interest in labor studies. Many will attribute the heydays of the Caribbean labor movement in the mid-1900s to the intellectual thrust given to the trade union movement by labor colleges. During this period, trade unions relied heavily on labor colleges for intellectual support and advice primarily on matters that required in-depth academic investigation. Support from the labor colleges enhanced the reputation of the labor movement by shifting popular notions that the trade union movement consisted only of the poor and illiterate working class. The effects of these parallel training activities have been positive for both the leadership of the trade union movement and the overall impact they have had on labor-management relationships. There has been a noted change in the pattern of trade union leadership where “the first generation leaders, considered by many as demagogic and messianic, have given way increasingly to a younger and more formally educated second and third generation leadership”.

Engaging questions about social reproduction, migrant labor, and food provisioning, this article examines the emergence of a working-class food system on the coast of Kenya during the early decades of the twentieth century. Like elsewhere in Africa, labor migrants in Kenya's port city of Mombasa and on nearby plantations were provisioned with food rations, which were part of what Patrick Harries calls a “racial paternalism” that structured many labor relations during the colonial period. The article starts in rural Kenya, but then follows labor migrants to their places of employment to examine the formation of this new food system. In upcountry rural societies, women had primarily produced and then exclusively prepared their communities’ food. However, as migrants, men received a ration (posho) of maize meal or rice as part of their pay, used their cash wages to purchase foodstuffs from nearby markets, and some plantation workers were also able to grow their own vegetables on plots allocated by their employers. After acquiring their food through these wage-labor relations, men then had to cook their meals themselves. In addition the cuisine created by labor migration was one of extreme monotony compared to what these migrants ate in their rural communities, but I also show how food became a point of conflict between management and labor. The article demonstrates how workers successfully pressured their employers to improve the quantity and quality of their rations from the 1910s to the 1920s, while also raising their wages that allowed them to purchase better food. I additionally argue that during this period an “urban” or “rural” context did not fundamentally define how migrant workers acquired their food, as those laboring in both city and countryside received these rations. However, the article concludes by examining how after 1930, economic transformations changed Mombasa's food system so that workers became almost entirely reliant on cash and credit as the way they acquired their daily meals, while paternalism continued to infuse the food systems of rural migrant laborers. In sum, this article is a local study of coastal Kenya that is also concerned with global questions about how food provisioning fits into the social reproduction of working classes in industrial and colonial capitalism.

The transformation of global capitalism, labor, and class relations in our own day is having a marked effect on how we study those subjects historically. Yet, as happens repeatedly in our historical discipline, insights gained from the juxtaposition and recognition of deep structural affinities between the present and the past also carry the risk of a distorted mirror effect. What questions we carry to the past and what lessons we, in turn, extract from it must be handled with care. As couriers between worlds of time as well as space, our work as historians inevitably reflects the ignorance as well as intelligence attending the message (as well as the messenger) of the given moment. With these caveats in mind, I want to explore the link between today's global crisis in worker welfare—perhaps most commonly summoned up by the twinned terms “neoliberalism” and the “precariat”—and a new historical preoccupation with coerced laborers of the past. With due deference to the aims of this collection, I will concentrate on the connection between the coolie question, as it developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the plight (and possible strategies) of low-wage global workers today.

In 2014 the conservative Australian Institute of Public Affairs called for the abolition of the minimum wage—at the time AU$16.87, the highest in the industrial world and twice that of the United States. The Australian minimum, enacted in Victoria in 1896, was the first in the world. Other nations copied it, and the International Labor Organization inscribed it as an international convention in 1928. Responding to calls for its abolition, University of Melbourne historian Marilyn Lake reminded Australians that the minimum wage was a “symbol of Australian values.” Envisioned as a “living wage, sufficient to meet the variety of needs of a person living in a civilized community … [it] recognized workers as human beings and equal citizens,” she wrote.

The privatization of New York City's Central Park in 1998 was among the most high-profile municipal privatizations in the US during the 1990s. Since then, the park's privatization has been cited as an exemplary model of privatization. This essay develops a unique class approach to municipal privatization and uses it to reconceptualize Central Park's privatization. In doing so, it argues that the park's privatization involves an important contradiction—one that regards its ostensible status as one of the nation's most famous and treasured public goods against its production as a capitalist commodity. This class approach to the park's privatization yields four insights. First, it underscores the limitations of the hegemonic cost-efficiency calculus that has long informed the municipal privatization discourse. Second, it raises important questions regarding the troublesome relationship between democratic principles and capitalist production relations. Third, it offers an alternative to a wage-led approach to privatization. Finally, and paradoxically, it provides a framework for theorizing “progressive” privatizations.

Consumer activists organizing in the 1930s against rising milk prices demonstrated the power of a strong grassroots movement to enlarge prevailing understandings of the political and to wring responses from an unwilling state. Their maternalism, combined with milk's emotional, social, and political meanings, attracted broad popular support and deflected criticism from the dairy industry, hostile public officials, and anticommunists. Their campaign for affordable milk became a synecdoche for broader demands that the state restrain business in the interests of consumers and protect ordinary people from the harsh injustices of the Depression. After winning immediate concessions, the Toronto Housewives Association failed to achieve their long-term goals, but their impact was nonetheless significant. Their campaign fueled and informed public debates about the political economy of food and government's responsibilities to protect citizens, pushing socialist policies onto the political agenda under the cover of maternalism. Participation in Housewives' campaigns transformed powerless victims into effective political actors. Housewife-activists challenged prevailing notions of normative feminine behavior, creating social space for ordinary women acting within their domestic roles to engage in direct political action.

Werner Sombart asks two questions in Why is there no Socialism in the United States?: Why the United States, home of the world's premier capitalist economy, lacks a strong socialist movement, and why American democracy has not led to significant reforms in the interests of the working class. To Sombart, these are the same question because he assumes that without popular sanction democratically elected officials would never act as openly as America's have in support of capitalist expansion and against labor. Assuming this democracy, he can then draw conclusions about popular attitudes from political outcomes, causally attributing procapitalist state policy to popular procapitalist attitudes. Indeed, the juxtaposition of democracy and state policy leads to his central conclusion that “emotionally the American worker has a share in capitalism …he loves it.”