scholarly journals Race and Class in the Postwar World: The Southern African Labour Congress

2018 ◽  
Vol 94 ◽  
pp. 133-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Money
Keyword(s):  
Labor Movement ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
White Men ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
International Labor ◽  
Regional Labor ◽  
White Workers ◽  
International Labor Movement ◽  
Political Radicalism ◽  
National Framework

AbstractUnderstandings of class have often been highly racialized and gendered. This article examines the efforts of white workers’ organizations in Southern Africa during the 1940s to forge such a class identity across the region and disseminate it among the international labor movement. For these organizations, the “real” working class was composed of white men who worked in mines, factories, and on the railways, something pertinent to contemporary understandings of class.The focus of these efforts was the Southern African Labour Congress, which brought together white trade unions and labor parties and sought to secure a place for them in the postwar world. These organizations embodied the politics of “white laborism,” an ideology which fused political radicalism and white domination, and they enjoyed some success in gaining acceptance in the international labor movement. Although most labor histories of the region have adopted a national framework, this article offers an integrated regional labor history.

White Workers and the American Civil War

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Zonderman
Keyword(s):  
Labor Unions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Southern States ◽  
White Workers ◽  
Military Discipline ◽  
North And South ◽  
National Trade ◽  
Industry Associations

From the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 until the Confederacy surrendered in the spring of 1865, workers—North and South—labored long hours under often trying conditions at wages that rarely kept pace with wartime inflation. Though many workers initially voiced skepticism of plans for sundering the nation, once Southern states seceded most workers rallied round their rival flags and pledged to support their respective war efforts. The growing demand for war material opened employment opportunities for women and men, girls and boys, across the Union and Confederacy. Yet workers were not always satisfied with a job and appeals to back the boys in blue and gray without question. They often resisted changes pressed on them in the workplace—new technology, military discipline, unskilled newcomers—as well as wages that always lagged behind rising prices. Protests and strikes began in 1861 and increased in number and intensity from 1863 to the war’s conclusion. Labor unions, in decline since the depression of 1857, sprung back to life, especially in the war’s later years. Employers sometimes countered their employees’ increasing organization and resistance with industry associations that tried to break strikes and blacklist those who walked off their jobs. While worker discontent and resentment of “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” were common across the sectional divide, Northern workers exercised greater coordination of their resistance through citywide trade assemblies, national trade unions, traveling organizers, and labor newspapers. Southern workers tended to fight their labor battles in isolation from shop to shop and town to town, so they rarely built a broader labor movement that could survive the hardships of the postwar era.

Trade Union Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Bernards
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Transport Infrastructure ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Political Role ◽  
International Labor ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
International Labor Movement ◽  
The Unemployed

Although unionized workers have rarely represented more than a small minority of the population anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, trade unions have played, and continue to play, a significant political role. Trade unions still occupy strategic choke points in many African economies, particularly around transport infrastructure, and retain a spatially concentrated organizational base as well as a degree of symbolic power drawn from participation in struggles against colonialism, apartheid, and authoritarianism. Three persistent dilemmas have strongly shaped the role of African trade unions and driven much of the academic debate about them. First are debates about the relationships between trade unions and political parties. These date to the often-fraught relationships between unions and anti-colonial movements in the last years of colonial rule. Pitched struggles, both within trade unions and between unions and governing parties, were often fought in the decade after the end of formal colonization over the degree of autonomy that unions should have from governing parties. These were often resolved through the widespread repression of politically independent unionism in the 1970s. This relationship, however, became untenable under processes of structural adjustment, and unions have often played a significant role in protests against neoliberal reforms, which have spurred widespread political transformation. Second are debates about the relationships of trade unions to non-unionized workers, especially the unemployed or the “informal” sector. Critics on both left and right have long pointed to the relatively privileged position of trade unions. This has consistently been invoked by governments seeking to justify the limited political role of trade unions as well as policies for wage restraint, state retrenchment, or currency devaluation that have negatively affected organized labor. However, given the increasingly widespread nature of informality and unemployment in contemporary Africa, trade unions have begun to make tentative steps toward organizing informal and unemployed workers in some cases. Finally, the relationships of African unions to the international labor movement and to international organizations have often been important. African unions have frequently drawn on links to international trade unions, regional institutions, or the International Labour Organization (ILO) as a way of compensating for domestic weaknesses. These strategies, however, have often engendered significant conflicts around the differing objectives of African and metropolitan actors, between African unions over access to international resources, and concerning “imperialism” by American and European unions.

Beyond the Multinational States: the Revival of Nations and Nationalism

2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-305
Author(s):  
Steen Bo Frandsen
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
State University ◽  
Pennsylvania State University ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
International Labor ◽  
National Question ◽  
International Labor Movement

Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 202 pp., ISBN 0-521-57649-0. Michael Forman, Nationalism and the International Labor Movement. The Idea of the Nation in Socialist and Anarchist Theory (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 212 pp., cloth $35.00, paper $17.95, ISBN 0-271-01727-9. Ilya Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy. Nationalism and leadership in Poland, Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 443 pp., hardback £50.00, paperback £16.95 ($54.95 / $24.95), ISBN 0-521-57697-0. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation. Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 302 pp., cloth $55.00, paper $18.95, ISBN 0-804-73181-0. Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia. Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State 1953–1991, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 352 pp., ISBN 0-674-75408-5. Catherine Wanner, Burden of Dreams. History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 255 pp., cloth $50.00, paper $18.95, ISBN 0-271-01793-7.

The Preparation of International Labor Conventions

1934 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 506-526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis G. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
International Cooperation ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Labor Organization ◽  
International Labor Organization ◽  
Labor Conditions ◽  
Adequate Information ◽  
International Labor ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Labor Movement

There is virtual silence in the history of the international labor movement on the technique of preparing international labor conventions both before and at the Peace Conference. The developments of the last fourteen years in this field must, therefore, be listed as an unexpected evolution in international coöperation. It should have been easy to see at the end of the first International Labor Conference in 1919 that the methods of preparation were defective. That the Organizing Committee of 1919 should not have had adequate information on world labor conditions is understandable; but what is not understandable is that there was scarcely any consciousness of the magnitude of the problem before the International Labor Organization in drafting suitable labor conventions.

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