Existing scholarship on China's industrial politics in the early post-Mao era has not paid adequate attention to the tension between two seemingly contradictory tendencies: the reform drives to consolidate managerial despotism in urban public enterprises, and policy endeavors to strengthen formal institutional channels for workers to participate in their enterprises’ democratic management. Focusing on the city of Wuhan in 1984–1985, this article examines the policy logic behind these two overlapping tendencies and how workers experienced and reacted to them. It argues that, on the one hand, Wuhan's local authorities merely intended the institutional formalities of democracy to facilitate and build popular support for the inauguration of managerial despotism. On the other hand, workers’ very involvement in this façade of democracy accidentally emboldened many of them to air grievances, make subversive demands, assert agency, and even resist managerial despotism. These findings shed light on the nuanced historicity of 1980s China and contribute to a rethinking of the meaning of workplace democracy.

Although real wages have long been a cornerstone of our understanding of the premodern economy, in recent years historians have become sceptical about their usefulness as a proxy for living standards. One of the main concerns is that, before industrialization, most households did not depend on wages but were self-employed. This article therefore proposes a new methodology to test the representativeness of real wage series for the general population by comparing changes in the purchasing power of builders’ wages with the relative position of building labourers in tax lists. Not surprisingly, it confirms their exceptional position, which evolved according to remuneration. Instead of disregarding the unreal wages, the methodology shows a promising path forward. The relationship between changes in wage income and the relative position in fiscal sources can be exploited to identify other groups who were or became dependent on this type of labour. Accordingly, it holds the potential to retrace shifts in the functional distribution of income and the wage systems for different groups in the premodern economy.

This paper investigates the labour market for female servants in England and Wales between 1780 and 1834, using previously unexplored archival materials alongside qualitative sources. After introducing the dataset, the study provides a micro-level analysis of wage determinants and traces the sources and evolution of employer market power. The findings show that real wages fell substantially during the early decades of the nineteenth century and stagnated throughout the period from 1780 to 1834. Amid rising cost-of-living pressures in the early 1800s, declining real wages were accompanied by increased nominal wage bunching, suggesting greater employer market power. These trends are contextualized with insights from servants’ autobiographies and household manuals. The combined quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that service labour markets were highly localized, employers coordinated wage-setting and working conditions, and servants faced barriers to job mobility due to living in tied housing, difficulties in recovering unpaid wages, and the critical role of character references. The results indicate that employers in the largest segment of the labour market had considerable wage-setting power, which intensified during the early years of industrialization.

Although non-monetary benefits remain an important component of most workers’ wages in today's industrial economies, development economists and economic historians tend to view such payments as a remnant of older, obsolete labour regimes. But when in-kind wages are assumed to be exploitative, an outcome of market inefficiencies, or simply the result of limited supply of coinage, their actual economic functions can be obscured. Once we drop the constraints imposed by such assumptions and look at the historical evidence, we are forced to confront the possibility that workers actually used them to their advantage.

In this article, I analyse how in-kind wages functioned in certain historical contexts, and conclude that available explanations are far too limited. As the historical cases studied show, the different forms of in-kind payments must be examined because those forms – not just overall wage levels – helped determine labour supply, social and occupational mobility, and even capital formation.

The goods and services that made up in-kind payments also provide a fuller understanding of gender wage gaps. Non-monetary wages gave workers options that cash wages did not, and so created and reproduced fundamental inequalities among different groups.

This article examines the role of travel in the practice of Cold War politics, focusing particularly on the experiences of Indonesian trade unionists who travelled between Indonesia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. During the Sukarno era (1949–1966), Indonesians from the country's largest trade union federation SOBSI held leading positions in the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). In 1965–1966, the army-directed purges against the Indonesian Left destroyed independent trade unionism as the country transitioned to the Suharto New Order regime. As leftist trade unionists were killed, imprisoned, or detained without trial, memories of travelling to the Communist bloc became denied, repressed, and submerged from history. The prison notebooks of Indonesian trade unionist Adam Soepardjan represent a unique set of underground writings produced after the army coup. An analysis of these notebooks reveals the ambivalences of Cold War political travel and the complex subjectivities of the traveller who appraises and reappraises the experiences of travel in a radically changed set of circumstances.

This article examines the business strategies employed by early twentieth-century Bombay mill owners in work organization and wage differentiation. The traditionally highly segmented and fluctuating domestic textile markets in India were further complicated by colonial free trade policies, making them highly competitive. This prompted Bombay mills to adopt various strategies, including maintaining a flexible workforce, product diversification, tailoring sales strategies to the Indian market, and increasing labour inputs, related to their heavy reliance on short-stapled Indian raw cotton. Using detailed and disaggregated data reported by textile mills in Bombay during the 1920s and 1930s, this article investigates how employers adopted these strategies in tandem with distinct wage-setting systems as management tools to depress the wage bill. By analysing the motivations behind the adoption of or resistance to these tools across different operations within the production process – such as weaving, spinning, reeling, and winding – the article reveals how gendered and social-class stratifications shaped these strategies and led to wage disparities across the industry. Ultimately, these labour-intensive strategies, conditioned by the broader colonial context in which India's textile industry developed, were at the root of the lower productivity of Indian workers, with long-run adverse consequences for India's general industrial development.

It has long been recognized that, in order to understand economies in the past, we need better information about women's work and tertiary sector work. It is also well known that, while valuable in many ways, nineteenth-century censuses give incomplete information about women's contributions to the economy. Consequently, censuses are a poor basis for estimating the occupational structure. This article offers a solution to these problems by triangulating census data with qualitative information extracted from court records. The result is a more reasonable estimate of the first-level occupational structure in a Swedish local society (Västerås and its surroundings) around 1880. This estimate suggests that just before the onset of industrialization, around eighty per cent of the adult population, women and men, were active in primary and tertiary sector work. Compared to the census, the analysis sets women's share in the primary and the tertiary sectors at higher levels. The article has a strong methodological focus and describes in detail how the court records were analysed and adjusted to be comparable with the census.