Detroit is known the world over as the “Motor City”, Are you trying to change it? Where is your gratitude to your men, your city? We ask what will happen to the thousands who will be let out? What is going to happen to the thousands who are buying homes?

In 1917 and 1918 violent cost-of-living protests, largely peopled by poor urban housewives, erupted across the world. Although Britain did not experience such dramatic events, a women's politics of food can be found in local neighborhoods that touched the lives of unorganized housewives on the wartime home front. The new local committees created to defend consumer interests in the face of food shortages proved to be permeable to some women, particularly those who already had some experience with women's politics. However, limits were placed on this participation and on the self-organization of housewives by the ambiguous understanding of who constituted a consumer and thus who could speak for the ordinary housewife as she battled the food queues. By exploring the women's politics of food at a local level, it is argued that working-class women's participation in Food Vigilance Committees or in local boycotts may have had longer lasting effects in Britain than the more dramatic cost-of-living actions elsewhere.

After the tragic events of September 11, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani at once saw parallels in the London Blitz, the German air campaign launched against the British capital between September 1940 and May 1941. In the early press conferences at Ground Zero he repeatedly compared the bravery and resourcefulness of New Yorkers and Londoners, their heightened sense of community forged by danger, and the surge of patriotism as a town and its population came to symbolize a nation embattled. His words had immediate resonance, despite vast differences between the two situations. One reason for the Mayor's turn of mind was explicit: he happened at that moment to be reading John Lukacs' Five Days in London, although the book examines the British Cabinet's response to the German invasion of France some months before bombing of the city got underway. Without doubt Tony Blair's outspoken support for the United States and his swift (and solitary) endorsement of joint military action also reinforced this mental coupling of London and New York. But the historical parallel, however imperfect, seemed to have deeper appeal. Soon after George W. Bush was telling visitors of his admiration for Winston Churchill, his speeches began to emulate Churchillian cadences, Karl Rove hung a poster of Churchill in the Old Executive Office Building, and the Oval Office sported a bronze bust of the Prime Minister, loaned by British government.Mayor Giuliani's televised press conferences immediately after the September 11 attack. “Churchill Mania,” The Economist Nov. 10, 2001. See also, N. Ferguson, “The War on Terror is Not New,” New York Times, Sept. 20, 2001. “Bush Tours the New York Battlefield,” The Times (London), Sept. 15, 2001, 1. William Farish, the American Ambassador in London, thanked the British people for their “magnificent” response to the terrorist attacks and said that Americans now looked to the bravery of the British during the 1940 Blitz bomb attacks as an example of how to “prevail over an implacable foe.” The Times (London), Sept. 21, 2001, 2. An additional curious development was press reports that W. H. Auden's poem “September 1, 1939” (which begins in “I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-second Street/Uncertain and afraid”) was enjoying popularity on National Public Radio, in internet chat rooms, and even high school discussion groups. This quickly prompted a heated exchange of letters in the Times Literary Supplement about the merits or lack thereof of Auden himself and his poem. J. Lukacs, Five Days in London: May 1940 (New Haven, 2001).

The most celebrated case of paternalism in India is that of the Tata Iron and Steel Company (Tisco) and its company town, Jamshedpur. In the context of India, Jamshedpur is a marvel: a relatively clean, spacious, and prosperous city where more people live in middle-class neighborhoods than in slums. With a population of 650,000, Jamshedpur is certainly the largest company town in the world, and, because it is still controlled and administered by the private company that founded it in 1909, it is probably the oldest extant company town. Aside from the town, the steel company itself holds a special place in Indian industrial history. It was founded and capitalized in the colonial period by the Indian business community of Bombay in 1907, began production in 1911, and thereafter took its place as the largest private company in India and the largest integrated steel mill in the British Empire. It has survived revolutionary political changes, near-bankruptcy, and nationalization attempts, largely because its directors convinced the British that it was an essential defense industry and the Indian nationalists that it was a national treasure run by men of integrity for the benefit of the nation.

The European labor movements developed in different directions during the twentieth century. The class formation literature has tried to explain these differences but left unexplored the internal dynamics of the labor movement and, above all, the differences in ideological schooling. Workers’ education constitutes a forum for ideological schooling of members, and these educational settings can be identity constitutive and thus play an important part in the class formation process. In this article I analyze the institutions for workers’ education in Sweden and Britain and I suggest that the variation of the design and practices of workers’ education had an impact on the movements’ developments in terms of identity formation and cohesiveness.

This article examines public representations of slavery on plantation sites devoted to heritage tourism in the Americas. Plantations of various colonial backgrounds are compared in terms of the narratives they present, finding that the history of slavery is largely hidden in Barbados and Puerto Rico, while addressed more explicitly (although still problematically) in the Brazilian and Cuban cases. The article highlights the importance of tour guides and site administrators in the production of histories of slavery and advocates for a more proactive role of historians in the production of public histories of slavery and for more productive and instructive discussions on this thorny topic.

Globalization and modernization transformed the Mexican retail sector over the last two decades. One result is that Wal-Mart has become Mexico's dominant retailer. Another is the poor quality of jobs in the Mexican retail sector. Drawing on a variety of data sources, we review changes and current patterns in the characteristics and quality of retail jobs in Mexico. Retail jobs are worse than the Mexican average. Union coverage is widespread but offers little benefit to workers. Unlike the case in the United States, Wal-Mart offers unionized jobs very similar in quality to those of other retailers; indeed, in general we find little difference between the jobs of global and domestic Mexican retailers. Globalization and modernization have left Mexican retail workers with lousy jobs and invisible unions.

Paternalism is a construct that continues to be used by historians of eighteenth-century English society. As an explanatory or exploratory term it does resonate with some of the inflections in the sources, particularly those dealing with the mediation of class relations by the prototypical country gentleman justice of the peace, that denizen of countless novels, and the subject of much historical research over the last thirty years. Paternalism, in the sense of a putative concern for the welfare of the working poor, provided they kept within bounds, was certainly the announced creed of many better- and lesser-known philanthropic gentlemen of the period, and we can find (apparent) plebeian celebrations of the belief:

God bless Lord Dudley Ward

He knows as times been hard.

He called back the sodgermen,

And we'll never riot again,

Na boys, no boys, no the brave Dudley boys.

This article questions the notion that family reunification is the cornerstone of US immigration policies and points to the violation of the right to family reunification in US law. It specifically looks at the forcible separation of legal residents from their families, including foreign domestic workers in the Labor Certification Program; US-born children with undocumented relatives, including parents and siblings; and guest workers. We argue that the growing influence of nationalist politics and big businesses trumps the interests of the family in US immigration policies, resulting in the prolonged and forcible separation of working-class and poor migrant families.

When the British National Health Service was founded in 1948, professional employees and support staff, with the exception of family doctors, worked directly for the state. Since the 1980s, private employment in the National Health Service (NHS) has steadily grown. Beginning with the outsourcing of support services, the number of privately-employed workers in the National Health Service has gradually increased. This paper argues that marketization in the health sector has increased dramatically under the New Labour government. As policymakers have moved from ideological to pragmatic justifications for marketization, union opposition has similarly become more pragmatic and less ideological. With unions unable to stop these reforms, they have turned to the practical concerns of their members in partially-privatized workplaces under complex employment arrangements. This article shows that while ideologically opposing marketization, unions and employees have been forced into a more pragmatic position. Research at two privately-funded public hospitals shows that unions in the workplace have used their resources to protect their members, as thwarting the involvement of the private sector is nearly impossible.

In Towards the Abolition of Whiteness David Roediger tells the story of Covington Hall, the editor of a newsletter published by the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in Louisiana in 1913 and 1914. Roediger deftly analyzes efforts by Hall and other white writers in the brotherhood to construct cross-racial unity within an otherwise racially torn working class. He shows how Hall redrew the lines of solidarity: On one side were the degraded, of any race.On the other were enlightened workers who eschewed racial divisions, racist language, and stereotypes. “There are white men, Negro men, and Mexican men in this union, but no niggers, greasers or white trash,” proclaimed Ed Lehman, a soapbox speaker for the Brotherhood. A headline in the newsletter similarly asked readers to choose, “SLAVES OR MEN, WHICH?” Still more graphically, a cartoon commanded, “Let all white MEN and Negro MEN get on the same side of this rotten log.”

The essays in this special issue by Jack R. Friedman, Sándor Horváth, Peter Heumos, and Eszter Zsófia Tóth, reflect a growing interest in the social history of industrial labor and industrial communities in postwar Central and Eastern Europe. While they approach their subjects in different ways and employing distinct methodologies, the essays suggest how the history of the working class and its relationship to postwar socialist state formation across the region might be rethought. They illustrate how the protracted construction and consolidation of socialist states in the region was negotiated on an everyday level by working-class citizens, and that this was a dynamic process in which state projects interacted with a variety of working-class cultures, that were in turn segmented by notions of gender, skill, generation, and occupation. The essays all demonstrate, in their different ways, how working-class Eastern Europeans were not simply acted upon by the operation of dictatorial state power, but played a role in state formation across the region. This role was characterized by an ambiguous relationship between workers and those in power who sought legitimacy by claiming that their states represented the interests of the “working class.” Yet the policies those in power pursued often confronted working-class communities directly in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania, as these essays suggest. This produced a complex relationship characterized by consent, accommodation and conflict that varied from locality to locality, state to state, and from period to period.

The explosion of industrial and political militancy that swept the world during the early years of the twentieth century gave the revolutionary syndicalist movement a prominence and notoriety it would not otherwise have possessed, while at the same time providing a context for syndicalist ideas to be broadcast and for syndicalists to assume the leadership of major strikes in a number of countries. This article sheds new light on the complex nature of the relationship between syndicalism and strikes by means of an international comparative analysis of the revolutionary syndicalist movements in France, Spain, Italy, Britain, Ireland and United States. It presents evidence to suggest ideological/organizational initiative and leadership was of immense importance in understanding how syndicalist movements could be simultaneously a contributory cause, a symptom, and a beneficiary of workers' militancy.