The Soviet Union, in its drive to mobilize its every resource to turn back the German invaders, used a unique institution: the Gulag, a forced-labor, detention, and exile system isolating millions of citizens from the body politic.While the term “Gulag,” an acronym of “Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei” (Main Administration of Camps), properly notes a specific, time-limited administrative institution tasked with oversight of the Soviet detention system, I use the term here and throughout in its more common usage since the publication of Solzhenitsyn's works to refer to the entire Soviet penal system. This essay seeks to understand the wartime Gulag both as a microcosm of the Soviet home front and as an integral participant in the campaigns to mobilize Soviet labor power in support of the war effort and to cleanse that very labor force of real and potential enemies of the Soviet state. Focusing on the institutions and population, economic production, political education, and the rigidification of detention of those defined as “especially dangerous,” the essay explores the relationship between the Gulag and the larger Soviet polity. Although in economic and administrative terms the Gulag emerged as a burden to the Soviet state during the war, the Soviet leadership never even entertained the notion of dismantling the system. The Gulag was a pillar of the Soviet system, as important for its role in the battle to cleanse and shape the Soviet home front as for its role in military production.

This article examines recent changes in working-class collective actions. First it explains which were the main causes for the decline of traditional labor union militancy resulting from effects of economic stabilization, neoliberalization, and globalization on those key segments of labor movement that accounted for the backbone of union militancy as in the case of the automotive workers, bank workers, steelworkers, and civil servants of the Brazilian economy during the decade of the 1990s. Secondly, the article analyzes the emergence of alternative forms of worker contention among the urban informal sector and the rural workers through the landless workers movement, which also have been affected by the processes of neoliberalization and globalization, but unlike the workers in the formal sector, these continue to contend for worker entitlements and introduce new forms of worker organization different from the conventional union organizations upon which is based the Brazilian labor movement.

Taking a long-term perspective, this article charts how sweating was represented in different ways in different periods. It examines the practical difficulties reformers faced when moving from portraying certain images exposing sweated labor to the advocacy of remedies for it. At the turn of the twentieth century, the explanation of sweating as a wider issue of poverty had changed considerably from the narrow definition of sweated labor dating back to the 1840s. Initially this identified needlewomen and male artisans in declining trades as the primary victims of sweating. Jews later stereotypically featured prominently as both exploiters and exploited. By the 1890s, women homeworkers were simultaneously foregrounded as passive victims as well as perpetuators of a degenerate sweated “underclass.” From 1906, those depicted in sensational exhibitions plying their trade of sweated labor were no longer designated as isolated “white slaves” but as exploited citizens denied a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. They were also viewed as a danger to national efficiency. Even so, a Liberal government was only prepared to concede one small anti-sweating measure in the form of the 1909 Trade Boards Act. This piece of legislation was gender neutral and covered homeworkers as well as factory hands. But it encompassed only the most notoriously low-paying industries and less then a quarter of a million workers. Successive British parliaments shied away from enacting a national minimum wage until 1999.

In the United States, Canada, Australia, and even Britain there is a long and broad history of suburban working-class settlement. Conditions have improved and changed. Suburban workers once lived at the frontier margin of the urban economy; after 1945, occupying more standardized and financially leveraged subdivisions, they became part of its consumer apotheosis. Many writers have assumed that suburban residence rendered workers passive, but have couched their arguments in terms of long-term consequences, neglecting to weigh the immediate intentions of workers and their families. By acquiring homes in suburban communities, workers sought greater autonomy and control, similar to the goals that guided their actions in the workplace and the political arena. Indeed, the desire to own suburban homes has been expressed more strongly by the manual working class than by any other major group. The significance of the suburban worker remains unclear, and may most usefully be addressed within the framework of comparative research at the urban and national scales.

When International Harvester executives announced their plans in 1904 to build a clubhouse for employees at the McCormick reaper works in Chicago, they hoped that the facility might lure workers away from the coarse pleasures enjoyed in the surrounding working-class neighborhoods. They believed the three-story building would serve as a symbol of good taste and proper behavior in a grim landscape of tenements, taverns, and smoking factories (Fig. 1). As one newspaper reporter noted in that year, “the hope and expectation of the stockholders and officials whose money is going into this building is that it will prove a magnet to draw the employes from saloons and other places of resort where waste of money and weariness of flesh are the penalties that add to loss of time.” McCormick executives saw the brick and limestone structure as more than recreation center: It was also a transformative machine, gathering men up from the streets and converting them into efficient and compliant workers.

It is no coincidence that syndicalism emerges in a historical period when industrial discipline, economic efficiency, and social regularization are the guiding imperatives in the reconstruction of power and authority in the workplace. The syndicalist tendencies that mark the working-class response to this early twentieth-century effort at reconstituting workplace rules and regulations not only arise to combat capitalism but also to contest the respectable reformism of craft-based labor unions. “Syndicalism,” as Wayne Thorpe argues, “was simultaneously a contributing cause, a symptom, and a beneficiary of dissatisfaction with the dominant labor strategies of the period.”Wayne Thorpe, “The Workers Themselves”: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913–1923 (Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1989), 30. On the historical and in- ternational context for the emergence of syndicalism, see Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe, eds., Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective (Aldershot, England, 1990). Furthermore, as David Montgomery contends: “Revolutionary syndicalism extracted from the solidarities and ethical code of workers' daily lives a merciless critique of the existing structures of exploitation, power, and authority. It did not spare the institutions that workers had created for themselves.”David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York, 1987), 310.

In November 1894 the new store of the Ghent consumer cooperative Vooruit was inaugurated with sumptuous celebrations. One visitor was struck by the “grandiose vision of splendor and luxury,” while another admired the “long, huge and impressive facade, that instantly caught the attention of every passer-by.”Jules Van Den Huevel, Une citadelle socialiste. Le Vooruit de Gand (Paris, 1897), 6; “Le Vooruit. La coopération et l'organisation socialiste en Belgique,” Musée Social 20 (1897):460. A cascade of similar phrases may be found in books and newspapers of the time. The ornamented exterior of the Vrijdagmarkt became the symbol of a well-functioning social democracy, lending self-confidence to this movement inside and outside Belgium.Guy Vanschoenbeek, Novecento in Gent. De wortels van de sociaal-democratie in Vlaanderen (Antwerp, 1995), 69, 76. The admiration for the building was also accompanied by critical comments varying in view and vigor. Christian-Democratic, bourgeois, and middle-class observers were shocked by the extravaganza of the cooperative store, so distant from their image of the unpretentious cooperative supplying plain goods. Radical socialists and anarchists condemned the bourgeois style of the store as reformist.Jean Puissant, “L'historiographie de la coopération en Belgique,” Revue belge d'Histoire Contemporaine 22 (1991):21–25. The new building catalyzed feelings for and against the social-democratic co-op movement at the same time as it testified to the effervescence of a booming commercial enterprise.

In this article I analyze how African gender categories have interacted with those produced and imposed by French colonization and how these forced interactions may have given rise to specific kinds of resistance from local populations. Using the case study of forced recruitment for the private agricultural firm Société Anonyme des Cultures de Diakandapé (SACD) in the region of Kayes in Mali from 1919 to 1946, I examine the complexities of resistance to forced labor from a gender perspective, with a special focus on how resistance was shaped by struggles around (re)construction and (re)definition of local and colonial masculinities.

To date, most interpretations regarding the agency of maritime workers in the late eighteenth century have posited the seamen as a united working-class body. However, the application of gender as a mode of analysis illustrates that a division existed amongst the working-class seamen in their vision of what it meant to be a worker, specifically a maritime worker. These differing ideas of masculinity drove a wedge between the seamen of the British Royal Navy, thus weakening their class solidarity. One faction of seamen favored the existing social contract accepted a society based on inequality, even amongst men, but in return demanded that their contributions as workers and as men be acknowledged by their rulers through both material and symbolic rewards. Similarly, another element of the seamen sought a more revolutionary solution in seeking rewards for their masculine contributions, which included acknowledgement of their roles as workers and rights as men through political equality. What it meant to be a seaman and the contestation of that definition motivated and limited the historical agency of seamen in the greatest labor dispute during the Age of Sail: the British seamen's Spithead and Nore mutinies of 1797. As a new approach to labor history, the examination of the power of internalized gendered definitions to limit the actions of workers' agency offers powerful new insights.

Class in contemporary South Africa is undergoing an identity crisis. The demographic decline of the industrial working class, and the terrible predicament of the unemployed, especially in the countryside, lends support to the argument that we should, as Geoff Eley and Keith Neald have recently suggested in the pages of this journal, reconsider the class-centered theory that has dominated social history since the early 1970s. This paper examines the recent labor history of the coastal center of Durban, the urban epicenter of the contemporary disease and subsistence crisis in South Africa. Three distinct, ethnically defined, working-class groups have made the journey to this city from Zululand, Mozambique and India. And the histories of each of these groups suggest that class-centered histories in South Africa have been methodologically promiscuous, considering themes, problems and narratives that have no obvious connection to the industrial lives of the working class. The wide-ranging scope of South African labor history and its tremendous explanatory power in fields far from the industrial workplace follow directly from the effort to explore the rural roots of the working class. In following the paths that migrant workers have used to come to the city, historians have strayed into fields of social life—sex, marriage, identity, desire, witchcraft, nationalism—that have much greater significance today than the old working-class politics. Yet these studies never lose sight of the real powers of local, regional and imperial states and the capitalist institutions that harnessed them. The study of class has been recast in South Africa by the search for rural culture. Class may not be the most useful tool for understanding South Africa today, but it has proved extremely powerful as a means of understanding how we got here.

In his recent ethnographic history of the Nivkhi of Sakhalin Island, Bruce Grant employs the “Soviet House of Culture” as a metaphor of cultural construction and the “hybrid identities produced by the Soviet state.”Bruce Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture (Princeton, 1995), xi. Yuri Slezkine's rendition of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as a communal apartment (kommunalka), where each national group had its own room but shared the kitchen, bathroom, and corridors, serves a similar metaphorical purpose, enabling the reader to envision the complexities of superstate–nationality interaction in more familiar spatial terms.Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53 (1994):414–52. For the USSR as a “superstate,” see Moshe Lewin, Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New York, 1995). Both the communal apartment and the house, or palace, of culture were venerable Soviet institutions. Each was the product of the reimagining of sociability in the wake of the October Revolution, representing different types of imagined communities that only subsequently assumed material reality. The communal apartment has been the subject of novels (both utopian and dystopian), film, song, painting, economic and cultural history, and several (absurdist) exhibits.For the treatment of the communal apartment as “the cornerstone of the now disappearing Soviet civilization,” see Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 121–67, quotation on 123. See also Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1989), 200–4, 213–19; and Albrecht Martiny, Bauen und Wohnen in der Sowjetunion nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin, 1983), 20–24, 138–58. The avant-gardist artist Ilya Kabakov has made the kommunalka the subject of paintings and exhibits. See Blair A. Ruble, “From Khrushcheby to Korobki,” in Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, ed. William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble (Cambridge, UK, 1993), 232–33; and Dina Vierny et al., Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol (Paris, 1995), 128–29. By contrast, little attention has been given to palaces of culture or to the less grandiloquently titled workers' clubs.Western scholarship on workers' clubs and palaces of culture has been limited to the formative decade of Soviet power and the post-Stalin decades. In addition to articles by John Hatch cited below, see Gabriele Gorzka, “Proletarian Culture in Practice: Workers' Clubs, 1917–1921,” in Essays on Revolutionary Culture and Stalinism, ed. John W. Strong (Columbus, OH, 1990), 29–55; and Anne White, De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State Control over Leisure in the USSR, Poland and Hungary, 1953–89 (London, 1990).

This article explores relationships between religious and economic practices in Kozhikode, a medium-sized city in Kerala. We examine debates concerning the apparent decline of the “bazaar economy” in the face of the onslaught of globalization and the consequent emergence of a “new economy.” The latter is felt locally to be overdetermined by capital and entrepreneurial practices connected, either directly or indirectly, to the combined effects of migration to the Gulf countries of West Asia and to the post-1991 liberalization of the Indian economy. We argue that these public debates are not simply reflections on the harsh reality of economic rationalization, but underscore the production and articulation of specific economies of morality and affect. We also perceive a drawing together of seemingly divergent orientations, sensibilities, and practices—namely, those commonly associated with reformist Islam and what in recent literature has been described as “neoliberal global capitalism.”

The historiography of US labor during the Second World War has shifted away from New Left concerns with the fate of working-class militancy, becoming more attuned instead to the structure and development of the New Deal order. A quarter century ago, historians debated the extent to which the warfare state had emasculated working-class radicalism and constructed in its place a bureaucratized, corporate-liberal labor movement. Few scholars doubted that trade unions were a fixed and permanent feature of the postwar political economy. But in the decades following the presidency of Ronald Reagan, when the legal, ideological, and economic structures sustaining the institutional union movement are so weak, the agenda of most historians and social scientists has shifted to one that problematizes the rise, consolidation, and postwar devolution of the mid-century New Deal settlement. For US labor and other popular social movements, World War Two had a dichotomous character. In both politics and policy, war-era corporatist structures failed to win lasting institutional expressions, either during the war or in the decades following 1945. There was no “labor-management accord,” although labor's strength did generate a kind of armed truce in key oligopolistic sectors of the economy. Anti-New-Deal conservatives in Congress and the corporate hierarchy sought, above all, to divorce industrial relations issues from the larger political universe. This was the meaning of “free” collective bargaining in the years after 1947. But during the war and reconversion years right afterward, elite power at the top of the mobilization apparatus was repeatedly challenged by insurgencies from below that sought to take advantage of the unprecedented demand for labor while at the same time actualizing the pluralist, social-patriotic ethos that was the quasi-official ideology of the World War Two home front. These social movements were a dialectical product of the mobilizing bureaucracies—the War Labor Board, the Fair Employment Practice Com- mission, and the Office of Price Administration—that were among the most remarkable features of the wartime New Deal. Indeed, this increasingly contentious juxtaposition between a state apparatus drifting rightward and a well-organized working class represents the great paradox of the war, a dichotomy that would be resolved in the postwar years by a rapid, politically brutal divorce between popular aspirations and the state policies needed to fulfill them.

The 1970s have made something of a comeback recently–in terms of interest, if not always reputation. This is partly because it was an unfashionable, “lost” decade, possessed of a depressing image in the shadows of its immediate neighbors and because the present economic crisis has made its difficulties relevant and brought them closer. The decade is ripe for revisionism, as well as for seeking lessons. And what ultimately emerges is not just an arc towards neoliberalism but a more fragmented picture, liberating in many respects–and which demands historians come to terms with the grim decline long associated with the decade.

“It is hard to think of an idea more immediate,” says Amartya Sen, than that of “the living standard. . . . It figures a good deal in everyday thought. It is, in fact, one of the few economic concepts that is not commonly greeted with the uncommon skepticism reserved for the other concepts of economics.”Amartya Sen and John Muellbauer, The Standard of Living (New York, 1987), 1. At the turn of our century, however, this was certainly not the case. A “standard of living” was neither “immediate” nor “everyday.” The term itself rarely appeared before the 1920s. Even then, observed one economist surveying her contemporaries' vocabulary and assumptions, “all the meaning, and the exact meaning, that is bound up in it” was far from clear. Hazel Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption (New York, 1923), 174. On different meanings, see also Carle Zimmerman, Consumption and Standards of Living (New York, 1936), 4–10; and Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: Workers and the Making of American Consumer Society (Ithaca, 1997), which is reviewed in International Labor and Working-Class History 56 (forthcoming, Fall 1999). It could variously signify a technical measure of purchasing power, an aspiration, or an entitlement—although whether to a minimum subsistence or a more expansive notion of comfort would be bitterly disputed. For many European intellectuals of the 1920s, the term, almost solely used as “American standard,” captured in one phrase the threat or the promise of the increased economic clout of the United States, Fordism as an economic strategy, and a new politics of material abundance. On both sides of the Atlantic, all of these meanings were hotly contested by economists, reform sociologists, political leaders, and the labor movement. In short, some historical scrutiny seems in order. What did the concept mean and when? What light would a genealogy of the “standard of living” shed on the prehistory of “mass consumption” or the transition to new consumer regimes of the twentieth century?

This study examines the ambitions for higher education of women who grew up in working-class families in Minnesota and attended the University of Minnesota between 1950 and 1985. Most historical studies of the recent past have ignored the experiences of working-class women and considered them to be marginal to important changes in women's lives generally. This study argues that as early as the 1960s working-class college-bound women were developing an important critique of patriarchal relationships within and outside their families, and that their ambitions for college were significant to the larger culture as they shaped new prospects for women's independence. The article analyzes oral history narratives alongside other social and cultural data, linking women's stories of upward mobility to broader historical patterns in the economy, popular culture, and working-class communities during these turbulent decades. It points to the pivotal role of class backgrounds and shifting gender identities in white women's construction of “success stories” in an era of growing access to higher education.

In the midst of the freezing winter of 1978 and 1979, strikes erupted across Britain. In what became infamously known as the “Winter of Discontent,” workers struck against the Labour Government's attempts to curtail wage increases. The defeat of this “incomes policy” and Labour's subsequent electoral defeat ushered in an era of unprecedented political, economic, and social change for Britain. Conservative victory, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, not only seemed to signal the dissolution of “traditional” working-class ties to the Labour Party, it also suggested that British working-class politics might finally be on its last leg. Furthermore, a potent social myth developed around the Winter of Discontent, one where “bloody-minded” workers brought down a sympathetic government and “invited” the ravages of Thatcherism upon the British labor movement.

Absent from these various narratives are the experiences of rank-and-file activists, in particular, the growing number of female trade unionists active in these strikes. This article examines the experiences of a group of women trade unionists from the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) who participated in the strikes of the Winter of Discontent. Based on oral histories and corresponding archival material, it argues that the Winter of Discontent provided a crucial “rite of passage” for these women, one which exposed them to an unprecedented level of involvement in grassroots labor activism and leadership. Thereafter, these working-class women began to make significant inroads into NUPE and the Labour Party, which helped to make working women's issues more central to the British labor movement for decades to come. Therefore, rather than being the death knell of British working-class politics, this study of women involved in the Winter of Discontent strikes reveals that while one form of working-class politics was in decline, a reconfigured one was in the process of being born.

Exploring the legal context and arguments put forth by women who sued for their wages, this article illustrates how contested definitions of “work” and “intimacy” played a fundamental role in the arguments that both domestic workers and those whom they challenged in court made. It discusses a sample of legal complaints concerning labor arrangements (specifically, wage contracts, or contratos de soldada) from the Brazilian National Archives involving women working in the households of single men or widowers in nineteenth-century Brazil. Brought by both former slaves and Portuguese immigrants and other “free” women, domestic workers advanced demands for compensation, claiming wages and entitlements that clearly defined their connection to their masters as “work,” even when personal intimacy and sex were also present. The article also considers the place occupied by “free” domestic work in a slave society, relating it to the changing legal and social context of nineteenth-century Brazil.