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.

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.

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.

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.

This article highlights the heterogeneity within the Mexican women's labor force after the 1910 Mexican Revolution by profiling the coffee sorters in the Central Veracruz export industry. It contends that working women were not entirely subordinated to the patriarchal culture usually found in the workplace despite the seasonal and low-skilled nature of their work. Their work experience, ability to support their families, and the new social networks on and off the shop floor contributed to the shaping of their dual identity as women and as workers. In their life histories, these working women sought to construct an alternative working-class women's culture based on the meaning and importance of women's work, which reconfigured provincial conceptions of gender and class.

An examination of the diverse patterns of women's migration challenges abiding stereotypes of Indian history: the urban worker as a male “peasant-proletariat” and women as inhabiting a timeless rural past. When men opted for circulation between town and country, wives and children undertook the actual labor of cultivation for the survival of “peasant-proletariat” households. Men retained their status as heads of the family and, even though absent for long periods, their proprietary interests in the village. Yet towards the end of the nineteenth century, many unhappy, deserted, and barren wives, widows, and other women were able to escape to the burgeoning cities of Calcutta and Bombay and the coal mines, where they experienced new processes of social and economic marginalization.

Much attention has been given to women's migration to overseas colonies and the Assam teagardens. Such migration has been seen as doubly negative, not only harnessing women to the exploitative contract regimes, but also subjecting them to sexual violation. A general assumption is that women were deceived, decoyed and even “kidnapped,” since there was no possibility of “voluntary” migration by women. Such a view of women's recruitment was produced by a variety of interests opposed to women's, especially married women's, migration, and eventually influenced the colonial state to legally prohibit, in 1901, women's “voluntary” migration to Assam plantations. This provision was an explicit endorsement of male claims on women's labor within the family.

In 1905, Henry Nevinson, at the time a well-known British journalist, visited Angola. He discovered that the slave trade was still going on in secret in that region, many years after it had officially been abolished. Deep inside Southern Africa slaves were caught; they were forced to walk hundreds of miles to the coast until they arrived at Katumbella, where “the slaves were rested, sorted out, dressed, and then taken on over the fifteen miles to Benguela, usually disguised as ordinary carriers.” In Benguela's main street,

In the late 1920s, the colonial government of French Equatorial Africa decided to employ Chinese workers to complete their railway line. The employment of Chinese indentured labor had already become the subject of considerable international criticism. The Chinese government was concerned that the French could not guarantee worker health and safety and denied their application. However, the recruitment went ahead with the help of the government of French Indochina. This article explores the nature of Chinese worker protest during their time in Africa and their struggle against French notions of what constituted appropriate treatment of so-called “coolie” labor.

The mechanization of Guadalajara's corn mills—along with the building of the new revolutionary state, competition between secular and Catholic labor movements, the conflict between church and state, and changes in the labor force—created the conditions for a militant feminist working-class politics in the Mexico of the late 1920s and 1930s. The convergence of these processes sheds light on how men and women workers, entrepreneurs and the revolutionary state, and male and female labor leaders attributed different cultural meanings to sexual difference, work, and politics at this time. The example of women workers in the tortilla industry highlights how differences in gender and class became culturally significant and why specific gender differences changed and became politicized when mechanization at the corn mills was accelerated in the 1930s. This story challenges the myth of women's passivity, reveals the significance that women's mobilization and militancy had on the labor movement, and illustrates the difficulties encountered by secular feminists and organized women workers in a male-dominated trade union movement. It concludes that women gained a bittersweet victory by obtaining certain rights while remaining marginalized by male-dominated institutions.

This article reveals the range of tasks performed by military laborers in twentieth-century Bolivia, distinguishing between martial and nonmartial labor to understand how productive tasks became central to the military's mission. The detailed exploration of soldiers' laboring lives shows that their work as strikebreakers, builders, agriculturalists, and domestic servants reinforced social hierarchies and supported private capital. Despite hopes that military service would unify a diverse populace, soldiers on the indigenous end of the spectrum disproportionally performed the more abject labors. The first section charts the development of nonmartial labor and shows how some soldiers objected to working conditions by invoking the dissonance between martial discourse and nonmartial experiences. The article then turns to the increasing legibility of nonmartial labor in the aftermath of the Chaco War (1932–1935). The final section details the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement's efforts to fold the army into the 1952 Revolution by emphasizing soldiers' productive labor.

How do migrants assert their rights as workers when they do not enjoy the rights of citizenship in their countries of employment and are unable to assert their human rights through international conventions? This article focuses on the work of Migrante-International's Middle East chapter in Saudi Arabia. Specifically, it examines the ways Philippine migrants strategically assert their rights as Philippine citizens transnationally in local labor struggles. This case study of transnational labor activism in a region where migrant workers enjoy limited rights not only highlights how migrants exercise their agency in spite of major obstacles, but it also offers up novel ways to think about worker organizing within the context of contemporary neoliberal globalization for labor activists and scholars concerned with the labor rights of migrants.

Most efforts of the current domestic workers’ rights movement in the United States have focused on ending the exclusion of domestic workers from employment protections that were institutionalized during the New Deal in the 1930s. These victories have been significant in both policy and culture. They have brought public attention to the invisibilized world of domestic work, and state recognition has validated this often-degraded occupation as “real work.” However, enforcement has been a problem. As domestic worker organizing has matured, it has expanded to include pushing the boundaries of state-ensured minimum standards as well as raising standards in the industry through direct intervention in the relationship between workers and employers. These programs are significant in that they reflect a different strategic approach—often with the goal of base building—than the earlier model of domestic worker advocacy and organizing.

Cheshire, Britain, and the towns of Widnes and St. Helens, where many of the world's first chemical factories and towns were created in the nineteenth century, is an especially important place to study historical responses to industrial pollution and its social costs. This paper, based on newly recovered archival sources about the Victorian alkali industry, explores the role of visual imagery, particularly drawings and lantern slides, in materializing the connection between labor in chemical trades, the disposal of waste, and poor health outcomes for diverse communities in the late nineteenth century. The paper will focus on the writer Robert Sherard's article “White Slaves of England” (1897), a work that, more than many of its time, drew national attention to the plight of nineteenth-century chemical workers by pictorializing the ways that work in heavy chemical industries, many of them involving waste and its disposal, affected individual workers and their lives. The paper concludes with critical reflections on the current state of scholarship on images, waste, and labor, areas for more needed work, and paths forward.

Beginning in the mid-1930s, Western Hemisphere nations turned to social insurance legislation—guided by the new concept of social security—in response to the economic crisis of the Great Depression. Supported by the International Labor Organization (ILO), national-level policy makers introduced a range of measures in recognition of the 1935 US Social Security Act. As Europe descended into a war, inter-Americanism served as way to maintain regional economic, and later military, security. This article describes an era of social welfare diplomacy in the Americas, one in which countries south of the US border projected their own distinct visions of social policy. Regional solidarity served as an integral step in the development of ideas concerning international social and economic rights. Placing President Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy in a wider frame, this analysis of ILO inter-American activities reveals an intriguing moment in history, when leaders from several nations saw economic development, trade, future growth, social security, and labor rights as integrally bound together.

Studies of globalization in India have focused on high-tech industries, such as call centers in urban areas. But a widespread effect of the globalization of India's economy is the growth of “rural outsourcing”—the expansion of urban-based industries into the countryside. Rural outsourcing links to longer histories of decentralized manufacturing in India. This ethnography of the decentralized industry of sari embroidery in Southern Bengal shows that workers are ambivalent toward it. Among villagers who participate in the embroidery industry, I found three scales of ambivalence: ambivalence toward the product; toward the production process; and finally, toward the politics of this form of decentralized production. Ambivalence is not a transient or uncertain position of confusion or ambiguity. Rather, it is a widely-held expression of the dual and contradictory positions that workers and contractors hold in relation to the industry. I argue that the “frictions” of globalization find expression not just in resistance or contestation, but also in articulated positions of ambivalence toward globalization processes.

During the first three decades of the twentieth century, a cluster of self-educated workers that called themselves obreros ilustrados (enlightened workers) sought to dominate the means of knowledge production, reproduction, and documentation. The discourses produced by this group of working-class intellectuals did not challenge but complemented the elite's contempt towards the laboring masses. In order to be legible in the “Archive of Puertorriqueñidad”—an archive crossed by centuries of colonialism, slavery, and imperial violence—these ragged intellectuals created various layers of exclusions that silenced those individuals that unapologetically upheld their Blackness. These silencing practices not only had power in the moment in which they took place but also influenced later historical production. To explore these dynamics, this paper uses the stories of Juana Colón and Mateo Pérez Sanjurjo. Both were highly-respected Black illiterate labor organizers that were absent in the historical narratives obreros ilustrados wrote about the labor movement. Ultimately, this article seeks to create counterarchives by unearthing, imagining, and retelling the lives of those that were not deemed worthy of being represented in the historical record.

The Hampden Community Archaeology Project (HCAP) is a public archaeology project in a former textile mill neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland. Since the early 1990s the area has been transformed by gentrification. There are now two distinct communities (an older, working-class community and a newer, upper-middle-class community) in the neighborhood. The goal of HCAP is to create a critical public dialogue on issues of class and economic inequality relevant to the current issues facing the neighborhood. After three years of public archaeology in Hampden-Woodberry, the project has achieved some notable successes but has also run up against several roadblocks.