When the postwar economic boom came to a crashing halt in early 1970s West Germany, foreign “guest workers,” often the first to be laid off, bore the brunt of high inflation, rising prices, declining growth rates, widespread unemployment, and social discontent. Following the economic downturn and the ensuing crisis of stagflation, workers' uprisings became increasingly common in West Germany. The summer of 1973 saw a sharp increase in workers' activism broadly, including a wave of “women's strikes.” However, historical attention to the role of foreign workers, especially of foreign female workers, within these strikes has been limited. This article presents a case study of wildcat strikes spearheaded by foreign, female workers in the early 1970s, focusing specifically on the strikes at the Pierburg Autoparts Factory in Neuss, West Germany. For these foreign women, activism in the early 1970s had a larger significance than just securing better working conditions. Indeed, striking foreign workers were no longer negotiating temporary problems; they were signaling that they were there to stay. Foreign workers' sustained and successful activism challenged the imposed category of “guest worker,” switching the emphasis from guest to worker. Ultimately, the Pierburg strikes' outcomes benefited all workers—foreign and German, male and female—and had grave implications for wage discrimination across West Germany as well.

This paper explores the gendered concept of community with reference to the activism of women during the UK 1984–1985 miners’ strike. Drawing on texts from the period and reflective discussions twenty years later with women associated with the strike, it interrogates the ways in which the idea of community was used to accommodate the activism of women. We argue that the apparently gender-neutral ideal of mining community carried meanings that had ambiguous political implications for the women and that the strike highlighted paradoxes that question established understanding of female strike activism.

The extraction of oil in 1908 and the ensuing construction of an oil refinery, shipping docks and company towns in southwest Persia/Iran opened a new chapter in the nation's labor history. Enjoying absolute monopoly over the extraction, production and marketing of the oil, the Anglo-Persian/Iranian Oil Company (APOC, AIOC, now British Petroleum—BP) embarked on a massive labor recruitment campaign, drawing its recruits primarily from tribal and village-based laboring poor throughout a region. But, in a region where human needs were few and cheap, it was no easy task to persuade young men to leave their traditional mode of life in exchange for industrial milieu with radically different work patterns. Those who did join the oil industry's work force were then subjected to labor discipline of an advanced industrial economy, which eventually contributed to the formation of the early clusters of modern Iran's working class.

This article presents a nuanced social history of how reclaimers at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa, organized against each other on the basis of nationality instead of uniting to combat the effects of the 2008 global economic crisis. Through this narrative of struggles at one particular dump, the article contributes to debates on informal worker organizing by theorizing the importance of the production of identities, power relations, space, and institutions in understanding how and why informal workers create and maintain power-laden divisions between themselves. The article argues that organizing efforts that seek to overcome divisions between informal workers cannot simply exhort them to unite based on abstract principles, but must actively transform the places and institutions forged by these workers through which they create and crystallize divisive identities and power relations.

This article explores production politics and labor conditions in electronics manufacturing in China. With case study analysis of three electronics factories in a production chain at an export processing zone, it examines external factors of labor regulation from local government or international challenges and labor market situations that help shape a sociopolitical environment for local strategies in global production. It also considers some key internal factors of firms—enterprise scale, market capabilities, and requirements of the labor process—that influence work organization on the shop floor. The central argument of this article is that manufacturing factories in the global production apply local conditions to work organization and take different strategies in recruitment and labor control within and beyond the workplace.

This article engages the question of what happens to labor as Indian cities become transformed into “global cities.” It does so by focusing on the convergence of three interrelated trends over the past few decades: the informalization of labor, the making of global cities, and the financialization of the economy. The article explains the effect on labor, capital, and urban space of this concatenation of trends. It challenges the conclusion of urbanization scholars who emphasize how labor has been largely excluded and bypassed by the growing urban economy. Instead, the article demonstrates, by using nationwide data as well as examples from Bangalore, that as labor is being displaced from formal employment and as wages become compressed, the urban commons is becoming a more valued terrain. On the one hand, displaced urban and rural workers must increasingly rely on subsistence practices and depend more upon the city's public spaces and goods to survive. On the other hand, these spaces, vital to city life, are becoming attractive to indebted municipal governments and aggressive financial investors for their speculative land values, and hence have led to greater insecurity and dispossession. The global city, therefore, is being built in large part with workers' wageless labor. Consequently, the struggle between capital and labor has reached far “beyond the factory” and farm, to the urban commons, sites simultaneously key to the majority's survival and integral to the urban speculative project of financialization.

The thirty years since Women on the Line has witnessed great achievement in the literature of gender and work both in the West and Global South. There was a booming literature since the 1970s and 1980s in the fields of sociology, anthropology, women studies, and cultural studies—most of them excellent works that touch upon sophisticated debates on the interplay between gender and work, production and reproduction, dominance, and resistance in an increasingly globalized context.

This article investigates the historical relationship between gender and precarious labor by analyzing the case study of Italian women in the second half of the twentieth century. A gendered historical approach shows that different production modes and working conditions were simultaneously present in Fordist and post-Fordist societies, and women, as well as migrants, experienced a significant level of precariousness even in the so-called golden age of the twentieth century. Sexual division of labor and sex-based discrimination seem to lie at the very heart of the gendered nature of precarious work, a long dureé nexus that has characterized industrial and postindustrial societies, as the article shows, in regard to the Italian case. By approaching the question of job precariousness as a multifaceted phenomenon, it is claimed that the subsequent spread of precarious work in the second half of the twentieth century was directly affected by labor and women's movement struggles, on the one hand, and by the role of the state and politics in defining and redefining the labor law relationship, on the other.

Sex workers in Argentina and beyond are making their histories visible through political action, often in the face of extreme and violent repression. Alongside two first waves of sex worker organizing, a third appears to be emerging from countries in the Global South, which has largely been neglected in academic commentaries. One such organization is Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de la Argentina (AMMAR), the female sex workers' association of Argentina. This essay draws on questionnaire data, participant observation, and in-depth interviews with union and nonunion sex workers and members of the Central de Trabajadores Argentinos (CTA), the umbrella federation of which they are a part, across ten cities in Argentina. It traces the relationship between AMMAR and the CTA to examine how the two organizations have worked together to organize workers in an infamously exploitative, precarious, and vulnerable labor sector to achieve social and political change. The essay contributes to debates about the regeneration of the trade union movement and challenges the reigning wisdom that sex workers and trade unions are unlikely partners.

The article discusses the opposition by the South African Municipal Workers' Union (SAMWU) to the privatization of Johannesburg's municipal services under Apartheid and in the new democratic dispensation. The unionization of South African black municipal workers has been shaped by a tradition of “social-movement unionism,” which greatly contributed to the decline and fall of the racist regime. The post-1994 democratic government has adopted policies of privatization of local services and utilities, which SAMWU opposed in Johannesburg by resurrecting a social movement unionism discourse. Conditions of political democracy have, however, proven detrimental to such a strategy, whose continued validity is here questioned.

In the 1930s, the Mexican federal government consolidated political control following the chaos of the revolution and developed strategies for industrial development and economic growth. In 1936, at the height of the Popular Front and amid unabashedly progressive declarations by Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas, the Department of Labor ordered an investigation to insure the protection of women's and children's labor rights. The “new woman” in postrevolutionary Mexico would be both a conscientious mother (protected by her husband) and a productive wage laborer (protected by the paterfamilias of the federal government). Two years later, confronting political and economic realities within Mexico, the Cárdenas government all but abandoned this agenda, turning a blind eye to labor abuses as labor-intensive enterprises leaned on underpaid women workers to facilitate the transition to industrial production.

Waste studies brings to labor history a suite of conceptual tools to think about precarious labor, human capital, migration, the material quality of labor in urban and rural infrastructures, and the porosity and interchangeability of workers’ bodies in the toxic environments in which they labor. In this introduction, we explore the conceptual insights that the study of waste offers for the field of labor history, and what, in turn, a focus on labor history affords to social science research on waste. We examine the relationship between surplus populations and surplus materials, the location of waste work at the ambiguous fulcrum of trash and value, and the significance of labor for the understanding of infrastructure.

This article examines Mexican migration to the US during the Bracero Program, the unofficial name for the series of US-Mexico agreements that brought Mexican men to work in US agricultural fields from 1942 to 1964. Juxtaposing Mexican and US states' goals for the Program to migrants' understandings of their journeys, the article shows how this migration disrupted men's subjectivities, even as it simultaneously provided the mechanisms to resecure gender and class subjectivities and claims in crucial way. Revealed, ultimately, is what was forged in the wake of this migration: a new kind of historical actor, transnationally gendered and classed.

This article emphasizes the crucial links between gender, working-class formation, and postrevolutionary statebuilding in Mexico. During the 1940s, textile unions in Puebla defined and implemented gendered conceptions of working-class identities and beliefs about men and women's proper roles within the sexual division of labor. Union leaders employed concepts of working-class honor to foster bonds of masculinity that in turn became the foundation for union authority and revolutionary working-class identities. These bonds subsequently underpinned union efforts to establish regional influence amid the union strife and political conflicts that persistently plagued postrevolutionary Puebla. To justify women's exclusion from factory and union life, unions concurrently promoted an ideal of working-class femininity, identified with home-based domesticity and scientific definitions of modern motherhood. This article ultimately suggests the important connections between industrial masculinization, modernization, and statebuilding in twentieth-century Mexico.

This article examines recent Brazilian rural labor and agricultural history. It identifies three broad periods for analysis in the postwar era: the 1940s to 1960s, the 1960s to 1980s, and a third period that dates roughly from the promulgation of Brazil's new constitution in 1988 to the present. Using primary and secondary sources the article analyzes recent agrarian transformations associated with globalization, including the organized response of workers and farmers to the loss of millions farm livelihoods. It explains the rise of an autonomous peasant movement in the late twentieth century and describes the recent development of a polemic between a peasant vision of expanded family farming and the agricultural capitalist model promoted by powerful agribusiness interests.

When nineteenth-century liberals searched for reasons not to enfranchise the lower orders, they most often hit upon the argument that, once given the vote, workers would use it to elect governments pledged to redistribution and welfare at the expense of property. A cursory look at the political history of the twentieth century suggests they were not entirely deluded. Indeed, the most salient facts about political development since 1900 surely are related: The democratization of the political system allowed for the emergence of the working class as a distinct claimant to political power, and its presence within the polity somehow or another stimulated the enormous extension of the social and economic role of the state.

By investigating the hitherto unstudied trans-colonial migration between Mauritius and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century, this article complicates liberal Eurocentric perceptions of global labor force formation under the auspices of colonial capital. Indeed, coercion, as depicted in liberal historiography, was a crucial component of indentured migration but indentured workers themselves sometimes availed of the opportunity of the global demand for their labor by engaging in trans-colonial migration. The dialectic of the formation of globalized indentured labor regime was such that while capital sought to confine workers to specific plantations, the very nature of the demand for labor enabled workers to defy the dictates of capital and further enabled them to move from one colony to another in search of better livelihoods and thus made them globally mobile. These migrations did not follow the so-called boundaries between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. Rather such migrations reflected workers’ search for jobs through trans-colonial networks within the framework of imperial domination.