The Labor System in Crisis: The Limits of Mobilization

By 1943, the labor system was in crisis. The state switched its focus from the cities to the countryside, mobilizing people to work far from home. Hundreds of thousands of Central Asian peasants were sent to eastern towns. Factories, mines, and timber operations became multinational sites combining workers from more than fifty national and ethnic groups. By 1945, 70 percent of Russian women were engaged in waged labor. As the Red Army began liberating the occupied territories, more workers were needed to rebuild devastated towns and industries. Local soviets, collective farms, and industry fought fiercely over labor. Leaders of the Central Asian republics demanded the return of their citizens. The Committee to Enumerate and Distribute the Labor Force failed to meet the demands of industry, and vast backlogs undermined all semblance of planning. Hundreds of thousands of newly mobilized workers fled back home; others sickened and died from illness and starvation. The labor system, initially a powerful weapon in the struggle for defense production, reached an impasse.

A Party of Ex-convicts: Bolívar Ochart, Carceral Logics, and the Socialist Party in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico

This article uses the case of Bolívar Ochart, a midlevel member of the Socialist Party of Puerto Rico, to explore the ways that labor leaders navigated the Puerto Rican polity after the 1898 US occupation of the archipelago. The Socialist Party radically challenged the new carceral logics through its prison reform stance. Since it was the only political party in which most of its leadership had all been imprisoned, it also offered a space for formerly incarcerated, self-educated workers to become career politicians. Ultimately, this essay tells the story of how Ochart went from being a convict to receiving an executive pardon, publishing a groundbreaking book, and later becoming an elected official.

Left Behind: Labor Unions and Redistributive Policy under the Brazilian Workers’ Party

How do leftist governments negotiate the trade-off between courting union support and maintaining the business sector’s trust? Scholars have argued that leftist parties will remain accountable to their labor base when powerful unions have strong ties to centralized leftist parties. However, I argue that strong party-union ties and party leadership centralization may, in fact, insulate leftist presidents against redistributive pressures from below. When party-union ties allow labor leaders to develop careers as professional politicians, these leaders become more responsive to the party’s goals than to their union base. Further, a centralized party organization can exclude unions and leftist factions from the design of redistributive policies. To test my argument, I use a case study of Brazil under the administration of the Worker’s Party (PT).

Fighting for the Working-Class City

This article examines the opposing sides taken by elderly tenants and labor unions over a major urban renewal project in 1970s San Francisco. Tenant activists sought to block the construction of the Yerba Buena Center and the resulting relocation of thousands of elderly residents of residential hotels. City labor unions lined up in support of the project, even though some of the displaced residents were former industrial workers and union members. By examining the path taken by both sides in the redevelopment struggle, this article grapples with their competing visions of working-class identity and interests. Ultimately, it argues that the position taken by labor leaders narrowed the labor movement’s vision of its constituents and its mission. This narrowed vision led them to view impoverished retired union workers as their opponents rather than as comrades in a shared struggle for working-class dignity and self-determination.

Determinants of Occupational Health Problems of Industrial Workers in Coimbatore - Tamil Nadu

The problems of industrial workers is a matter of concern for the partners of industry, Research scholars, academicians, policy makers, planners, labor leaders, and social workers. Recently there has been a growing awareness of the existence, importance, and needs of the unprotected workers. The unprotected workers are, by definition, disadvantaged workers, the degree varies from section to section. There is a lot of research in the field of unprotected workers. But very few research has been carried out about the unprotected industrial workers belonging to engineering and foundry units, who form a sizeable proportion of the total labor force. There is an immediate need to focus on occupational safety for the formal/organized industrial workers. In India, occupational health safety has so far benefited, only for workers of the formal sector. Against this background, the current study attempted to know the Determinants of Occupational Health Problems of industrial workers in Coimbatore – Tamilnadu. The study found that the sample industrial workers appear to be suffering from occupational-related health problems has increased with an increase in their current age, and such likelihood is also noted as moderately higher among those who are in debt, but unexpectedly such suffering from health problems is also found to be higher among those who own assets.

The Intermediary is the Message: US Public Diplomacy and the Marshall Plan Productivity Drive in the Netherlands, 1948–52

This article analyzes the public diplomacy of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) in the Netherlands during the Marshall Plan era. It shows that the impact of the ECA’s public diplomacy was shaped by its negotiations with local partners. The argument focuses on the operational level of US information campaigns, which sought to mobilize specific Dutch social groups behind a model of increased productivity and economic growth. By examining the interaction between the US country mission of the ECA and Dutch bureaucrats, managers, and labor leaders, the article demonstrates how the impact of public diplomacy was determined by a complex and at times contentious process of cooperation. While the Dutch readily accepted the US as a model of technological progress, local elites also managed to contain the threat that American propaganda posed to national recovery policies.

In the Land of Corporate Impunity: Corporate Killing Law in the United States

Since the early 2000s, a number of Western capitalist states, including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, have enacted criminal laws aimed at holding corporations to account for negligently killing workers or members of the public. In the United States, however, the existing respondeat superior (vicarious liability) regime remains intact. Drawing insight from semistructured interviews with corporate lawyers, nongovernmental representatives, union/labor leaders, and academics, I argue the relative impunity for corporate killing in the United States has its roots in corporate power and related beliefs in law and economics scholarship. This article documents how corporate offending is downplayed through hegemonic ideals that corporations are inherently good and law-abiding and any “bad apples” can be dealt with through existing law and market forces. In this respect, the recent rollback of various social protections is not simply a result of Trump’s presidency but instead a product of the neoliberal political, economic, and moral order.

Identities, Quandaries, and Emotions

The issue of transborder mobility posed a dilemma for U.S. labor organizations and for border communities that embraced workers, customers, and family connections from Mexico. Labor leaders including Ernesto Galarza of the National Farm Labor Union (NFLU) and César Chávez of the United Farm Workers (UFW) had to find ways of protecting U.S. citizen workers and yet humanely addressing the plight of resident aliens, permitted commuters, and undocumented workers from Mexico. Their strategies involved knowledge production and had to accommodate emotions. The article focuses on the Imperial-Mexicali borderlands, 1950s–1970s.

“They are nothing but birdbrains!”

From 1901, the Parisian clothing trades saw a remarkable escalation of labor activism and subsequent legislative reform driven by and on behalf of the more than 80,000 women working in the capital’s couture industry. Time and again (in 1901, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1916, 1917, 1918, and 1919), the midinettes of Paris took to the boulevards in work stoppages that captured unprecedented media attention and garnered meaningful gains for garment workers across the city. French journalists, government officials, and labor leaders alike promoted a romantic and infantilizing vision of the female garment strikers as insouciant girls in need of paternal care (whether of the state, union, or reforming bourgeoisie), and replicated the pervasive belle époque type of the midinette. In the face of strikes in the heavily feminine garment trades, an image of the female Parisian fashion worker as charmingly capricious and pleasure-loving persisted. This chapter assesses the symbolic work performed by such a persistence, and also attends to the workingwomen who lamented the condescension of strike coverage and stressed their own demands and experience. In tracing the discursive work of the midinette as type, this chapter draws upon archival material from the Préfecture de Police, union journals, cartoons, workers’ memoirs, reform inquiries, songs, novels, and newspapers. The aestheticization of workingwomen had real consequences for the handling of garment trade militancy by the press, politicians, police, labor leaders, and couture workers themselves. It also framed the evolution of a new brand of militant midinette over the course of these strikes