Changing Labour Relations Research Articles

Grammar of Difference? The Dutch Colonial State, Labour Policies, and Social Norms on Work and Gender, c.1800–1940

AbstractThis article investigates developments in labour policies and social norms on gender and work from a colonial perspective. It aims to analyse the extent to which state policies and societal norms influenced gendered labour relations in the Netherlands and its colony, the Netherlands Indies (present-day Indonesia). In order to investigate the influence of the state on gender and household labour relations in the Dutch empire, this paper compares as well as connects social interventions related to work and welfare in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies from the early nineteenth century up until World War II. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, work was seen as a means to morally discipline the poor, both in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies. Parallel initiatives were taken by Johannes van den Bosch, who, in 1815, established “peat colonies” in the Netherlands, aiming to transform the urban poor into industrious agrarian workers, and in 1830 introduced the Cultivation System in the Netherlands Indies, likewise to increase the industriousness of Javanese peasants. While norms were similar, the scope of changing labour relations was much vaster in the colony than in the metropole.During the nineteenth century, ideals and practices of the male breadwinner started to pervade Dutch households, and children’s and women’s labour laws were enacted. Although in practice many Dutch working-class women and children continued to work, their official numbers dropped significantly. In contrast to the metropole, the official number of working (married) women in the colony was very high, and rising over the period. Protection for women and children was introduced very late in the Netherlands Indies and only under intense pressure from the international community. Not only did Dutch politicians consider it “natural” for Indonesian women and children to work, their assumptions regarding inherent differences between Indonesian and Dutch women served to justify the protection of the latter: a fine example of what Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper have called a “grammar of difference”.

Placing Césaire

Introductionpicture the bibliographical prelude: in 1973, Frederick Ivor Case publishes the first enumerative bibliography of Cesaire with the simple title Cesaire: Bibliographie. Around the same time, we imagine Thomas Hale already hard at work on his thesis, Aime Cesaire: His Literary and Political Writings with a BioBibliography, which he submits in 1974. A few years later, in 1978, a revised version of the latter is published in a special issue of Etudes francaises, Ecrits d'Aime Cesaire: Bibliographie commentee. Such bibliographic activity in the 1970s announces - perhaps more than any other event - the end of Cesaire's main writing activity, and the arrival of monumental Cesaire.By the end of the 1960s, soon after the publication of Une Tempete, a total of 135 scholarly works had been published on his work. By the end of the 1970s, the number more than doubled to 273. At this point, the total production on Cesaire included at least thirty-six monographs, 162 articles and five theses.1 Cesaire was well on his way to being required reading for the aggregation at the Ecole Normale Superieure - the same aggregation that he himself failed because he was too busy writing. Today, only three years after Kora Veron refined and expanded the work of Thomas Hale in Les Ecrits d'Aime Cesaire: Bibliographie commentee (1913-2008) in 2013, we count 1,201 secondary works written directly on Cesaire.2 As Hale and Veron's bibliography attests, we also know much more today about Cesaire's own writings in print; and with the work of several researchers and archivists in recent years - Jean Jonnaissant, Lilian Pestre de Almeida, Katerina Gonzalez Seligman, Kora Veron, Nadine Albert Ronsin and myself, to name but a few - a genetic dossier is beginning to take shape with the surfacing of rich and important manuscripts.I find it difficult to believe that the bibliographic work started with Cesaire's critics in the back pages of their essays and monographs as early as the 1950s, and continued apace in the publication of these major bibliographies, has not had an impact in the growing research activity around Cesaire. What a shame, then, that institutional support for bibliographic work of the enumerative, authorial kind has dwindled in recent decades,3 and more so at the moment when we need to deploy these modalities for the sake of decolonial, queer, feminist and ecological memory. The internal struggles within bibliographic circles have a role to play in this state of affairs. After all, enumerative bibliography has too often been seen as the poor cousin of analytic and descriptive bibliography by those who should know better.4 I would argue, though, that the bulk of the blame lies elsewhere.The more the work of enumerative bibliography is seen as merely 'practical' or 'technical' - the kiss of death of the hermeneutic class - the further the labour required to compile them shifts into the black boxes of the academy and the private sector. We should leave the deep history of these processes for future work, and content ourselves with a brief outline of the major forces that shape enumerative bibliography today. The most important, by far, is the rise of electronic cataloguing and its back-end indexing, which has come to meet the 'information needs' of scholars. These catalogues, both open and private, are accessible today through open and closed networks. Their very material construction traces the history of changing labour relations within and without the academy in recent decades, without losing its connection to a history of indexing that dates to the dawn of human inscription.With the rise of databases and discoverability we see a series of new private industries forming alliances with research and public libraries.5 In recent years a handful of North Atlantic monopolies - EBSCO, ProQuest, Springer, WileyBlackwell and Elsevier, to name a few - have come to dominate the production, flow and 'discovery' of the scholarly and pedagogical record in European languages at massive scales. …

Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia by Lou Martin

Reviewed by: Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia by Lou Martin Allen Dieterich-Ward Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia. The Working Class in American History. By Lou Martin. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. xi., 239.) Lou Martin’s new book effectively uses a case study of a single West Virginia county to explore the broader implications of rural industrialization in the twentieth century. The volume provides a fascinating counterpoint to high-profile studies of labor organizing in cities, especially Elizabeth Cohen’s Making [End Page 174] a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. Martin argues that despite conditions in the local steel and pottery industries similar to that of urban centers, lower rates of unionization and a stronger emphasis on local control of decision-making among workers in Hancock County emerged from a rural context that favored protecting a “small measure of stability in the chaotic world of industrial restructuring” (180). Key to this process was the notion of “making do” through strategies such as growing large gardens and hunting game that were only possible within a more pastoral setting (10). The first half of the book focuses on the rise of rural-industrial workers in the rugged countryside across the Ohio River from Steubenville, Ohio, and forty miles west of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Emphasizing an initial mix of subsistence and market farming along with a political sensibility primarily concerned about “powerful outside agents that could erode their local control,” Martin paints a picture of mutually dependent community members bound by ties of both economy and kinship (25). The arrival of big industry in the form of steelman Ernest T. Weir and potter Homer Laughlin built on this localism as managers sought to cultivate a docile workforce free of labor strife. Cities, Weir declared of his decision to build a new tinplate mill on a stretch of former farmland, “if not breeders, were certainly magnifiers of discontent among workers” (54). As in urban areas, executives substituted technology for skill, creating a proletariat and swelling the county’s population, from less than seven thousand in 1900 to more than 28,500 three decades later. Whether from Eastern Europe or the failing farms of Appalachia, however, new workers often maintained a rural sensibility that combined the routine of industrial production with other money-making activities enabled by access to land. After establishing the basic framework of Hancock County’s political economy, Martin explains how local residents weathered constantly changing labor relations brought on by technological shifts, the deskilling of work, and new labor laws of the 1930s. While there was a preexisting tradition of craft unionism in the potteries, the New Deal challenged Weirton Steel’s fierce antiunionism. Martin acknowledges the systematic violence and intimidation employed by steel executives, but also seeks a more nuanced understanding of why a large majority of workers voted against joining the United Steelworkers in 1950 in favor of a locally controlled Independent Steelworkers Union described by one observer as “ineffective, compromised, and self-lacerating” (104). In both politics and labor, rural residents continued to value local control and community harmony over more abstract notions of class interest—an attitude that resulted in support for Republican congressman Arch Moore even when his positions conflicted with the state’s labor leaders. Indeed, Martin argues that personal and community identity emerged as much away from the workplace as it did from the shop floor. The book’s final chapter carries [End Page 175] the story through the 1960s and 1970s as antidiscrimination laws opened up new opportunities for women and African Americans even as foreign competition and capital movement exposed the impossibility of maintaining truly local arrangements. Martin is particularly effective at teasing compelling conclusions about the nuances of local culture out of the subtleties of census records and oral histories. His analysis weakens as he attempts to bring the story past 1970 in an era where local power arrangements proved difficult to sustain in the face of larger political and economic pressures. Weirton Steel’s unique and initially successful Employee Stock Ownership Plan, which seemed to depend upon the very relationships the book highlights, deserved...

Deproletarianization in the Peri-Urban Interface: Transforming Labor Relations in Polokwane, South Africa

High unemployment rates and the search for job opportunities are defining characteristics of the modern day South African economy. As apartheid era labor and land controls continue to break down, many households find themselves searching for work in an economy characterized by surplus labor. Examining high unemployment rates through the theoretical lens of deproletarianization provides an explanation of persistent unemployment and poverty more complex and complete than others. Research conducted in Polokwane, South Africa demonstrates increasing peri-urbanization as a physical manifestation of these changing labor relations. 1In an era dominated by global capitalism, theoretical engagements help explain household poverty, the failure of South Africa's economy to absorb excess labor, and how persistent unemployment contributes to a recon-figuration of space in South Africa's urban and peri-urban areas. The research team used a combination of qualitative semi-structured interviews and quantitative surveys to gain insight into household livelihoods and individual experiences. The deproletarianization argument applied here asserts that labor has become unfree in South Africa and represents a new form of labor discipline. Through the deproletarianization thesis, the labor market can be better understood to inform future unemployment and poverty research in South Africa.

Briefing: The politics of Marikana and South Africa's changing labour relations

MORE THAN A YEAR AFTER the South African police killed 34 strikers in Marikana, labour unrest continues across the country’s mining sector. Industrial actions have targeted platinum giants like Amplats, the world’s largest producer, where an 11-day strike over planned retrenchments has just ended and another is looming amid fresh wage talks. Rivalry between the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) – aligned with the African National Congress (ANC) – and the more recent and militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) has also plagued the industry. On 17 October, an NUM branch chairperson at Lonmin – the third largest platinum producer in the world – was shot dead. Another Lonmin NUM shaft steward died in a similar situation on 3 November. A few months ago a former NUM leader who had become the AMCU regional representative in Rustenburg was ambushed – one of several from both sides assassinated since the Marikana massacre. In other words, the ‘Framework Agreement for a Sustainable Mining Industry’, promoted by South African Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe and signed by parties to the industry on 3 July 2013, has so far failed to restore peace to the mining sector in Africa’s largest economy. Beyond the economic uncertainty created by the continued industrial unrest, its political consequences ahead of the next general election should not be underestimated. The NUM is affiliated to the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and was until recently South Africa’s largest trade union, partly thanks to its membership in the platinum sector, where it is now outnumbered by the AMCU. The rapid decline of the dominant trade union and the model of party–labour relations associated with it is unlikely to pose a serious challenge to South

Understanding nurses’ work: Exploring the links between changing work, labour relations, workload, stress, retention and recruitment

This article enhances our understanding of nurses’ work as they see it, in an exploration of the links between changing work, the labour relations climate, workload, stress, retention and recruitment. Conventionally separate bodies of literature on occupational health and safety, public sector industrial relations and human resource management informed the design and implementation of the study. Interviews with nurses revealed a high level of commitment but also indicated clear links between the labour relations climate, work intensification leading to high stress and poor work–life balance, retention and recruitment. The study concludes that working conditions must be improved to gain a healthy workplace and because wage increases on their own are not enough to make nursing more attractive.

Changing labour relations in China's automotive industry

Based on a short overview of the labour regulation regime in China this article analyses the transformation of Chinese labour relations and the potential for labour conflict in the automotive industry. It is shown that labour relations in China’s automotive industry are deteriorating and that different forms of labour conflict are emerging at various points of the production chain. Thus, there is strong pressure for continued reform of the system of labour relations. However, the existing institutional setting presents massive obstacles to reform, strongly favouring the interests of capital over those of labour and putting the party-state’s imperative of political control before any autonomous articulation and negotiation of the interests of capital or labour. With no sign of a sustainable and democratic model for labour regulation, the automotive industry may remain a hotspot of labour conflict in China.

Relações de trabalho e os regimes contemporâneos de emprego na Espanha e no Brasil: um breve paralelo

Desde meados dos anos 1970, os países desenvolvidos vêm experimentando processos intensos de transformação de seus mercados de trabalho e de suas instituições de seguridade social como meio de debelarem a crise econômica e ajustarem-se às cambiantes demandas da competitividade internacional. Os chamados empregos atípicos são expandidos, num processo em que direitos são reduzidos ou retirados. Este artigo discorre sobre como a política liberal de flexibilização dos mercados de trabalho afeta e modifica as relações de trabalho na Espanha. Se ela avança na Europa, arrefecendo o poder das forças sociais que consolidaram as instituições protetoras do trabalho e pressionando o desmonte dessas instituições, seu poder de desagregação foi muito mais duramente experimentado naquele país devido a sua mais tardia democratização. O artigo também faz um paralelo com as instituições do mercado de trabalho no Brasil, outro país de tardia democratização, e cuja história em muitos aspectos converge com aquela que marcou a institucionalização do trabalho na Espanha. Com base em análise da literatura, argumento que as mudanças recentes no mercado de trabalho em ambos os países têm sido experimentadas sob a égide de um modelo de capitalismo flexível, que fundamenta suas iniciativas de ajuste competitivo na quebra do compromisso com o emprego e na baixa valorização da força de trabalho.

Industrial Voluntarism in Canada

The term “industrial voluntarism” has been used to describe the norm that dominated union organizing and, more broadly, union-management relations in Canada during most of the first half of the 20th century. In practical terms, the principle defines situations in which unions and employers initiate, develop, and enforce agreements without state assistance or compulsion. This paper investigates the history of voluntarism in Canada with attention to post-war legal accommodations and various manifestations of voluntarism related to union recognition. We show how aspects of the Framework of Fairness Agreement (FFA) negotiated between Magna International and the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) in 2007 is informed by industrial voluntarism. The FFA facilitates voluntary recognition of CAW locals at Magna plants in exchange for a no-strike promise and acceptance of many features of Magna’s existing human resource management system. Overall, the historical and contemporary evidence show that voluntarism continues to manifest in different forms in response to changing labour relations conditions.

Intersecting Tango: Cultural Geographies of Buenos Aires, 1900–1930

Literary critic Adriana Bergero has set herself an extremely ambitious goal in the book Intersecting Tango: to reveal the overlapping “maps” of modernity that defined the culture of early twentieth-century Buenos Aires. Her approach recalls David William Foster’s study of a more contemporary period of porteño culture in Buenos Aires: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production. Like Foster, Bergero is interested in the city not just as a location or backdrop but as a space that constitutes subjectivities. She proposes to explore this rapidly changing city through its “imaginaries, through the theoretical convergence of urban geography, sensorial geography, cultural studies, gender studies, and social history” (p. 6). The result is a wide-ranging and somewhat unwieldy work that nonetheless reveals to the reader a fascinating variety of social texts.Intersecting Tango contains 20 chapters divided into three parts: Urban Ceremonies and Social Distances, Muñecas Bravas of Buenos Aires, and Gender and Politics. The logic of the overall structure is not entirely clear, in particular the distinction between the second and third sections. Indeed, since gender analysis is central to most of the book one might have expected it to be highlighted in the title and more fully substantiated in the introduction. There is a certain lack of signposting throughout the text, leaving the reader with a somewhat impressionistic picture of Bergero’s overall argument.Still, there is a wealth of rich material here. Individual chapters treat such important cultural themes as the class exclusions built into elite housing design, the gendered messages presented in school textbooks, and fears about failed masculinity as expressed in tango lyrics. Bergero displays an encyclopedic knowledge of the period’s cultural sources: novels, plays, architecture, tango lyrics, newspaper columns, advertisements, private letters, popular magazines, fashion styles, and so on. Her command of “low” cultural genres such as tango and sainete (theatrical farce) is particularly impressive, and her lengthy quotations will introduce readers to little-known sources from the period.Bergero is at her best when presenting and interpreting these texts. Individual chapters juxtapose different kinds of sources, connecting discourses in advertising or public health to themes played out in popular music and theater. Bergero’s literary and popular sources shed light on changing labor relations, housing struggles, sexual politics, and patterns of consumption. For example, the middle chapters of the book explore social and sexual anxieties provoked by women’s increased mobility and autonomy in the big city. Chapter 11 contains rich material about men’s fears surrounding women’s new roles in the workplace. In chapter 12, Bergero reads classified ads for domestic servants for a glimpse of the “enormous number of illegitimate and orphaned children excluded from the metaphor of the nation’s well-formed family” (p. 211).Overall, this is a book written for scholars and specialists. References to historical events and characters are quite abrupt and would likely confuse a reader not already well versed in Argentine history. The prose is often dense and jargon-laden, as in the following interpretation of a text by physician and writer Eduardo Wilde. According to Bergero, Wilde expressed “the semiotics of a claustrophiliac aesthetics, underlying a utopia based on isolation and exclusion” (p. 32). Some awkwardness may stem from problems of translation, as in the assertion that French cuisine was “like a hand in a glove, reinforcing gastronomically the power of the elite’s ranching economy and its vast estates” (p. 21).This book would have limited usefulness in an undergraduate classroom, but it could certainly be used in graduate courses in cultural studies, gender studies, or literary criticism. It will also find a place on the shelves of scholars specializing in Argentine history and culture, who will likely be inspired into new fields of inquiry by its rich source material and suggestive cultural insights.

Child and Youth Labour in Eastern Cape Agriculture: Wool farming and changing labour relations, c. 1900–1960

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María Elena: el fin de una experiencia urbana: Un estudio de caso en el desierto de Atacama, Chile

In this paper we look into the relationship between the nitrate town of Maria Elena (in Region II) - designed on utopian principals as a private project - and the changing labor relations between the SQM Company and the workers as a result of the predominance of a new accumulation model guided by competitiveness, quality production and globalization. Th e town was created so that men and women could establish their livelihoods in the Atacama Desert, with guarantees and infrastructure based on a full employment policy. Th is was in order to anchor the population in this inhospitable environment, to meet production objectives and to strengthen a coherent and cohesive identity. New strategic decisions led to this model being replaced by one based on labour fl exibilization, deleting its original intention and collective interest to give way to a mining camp.

“Deaf-mutes, Illiterates, And Women”

In the Tibet Autonomous Region of China (TAR), the local labor policy has contributed to converting the Tibetan population into citizens of the People's Republic of China (PRC). This paper analyzes this socio-political process by looking at the changing labor relations and management in a Tibetan carpet factory amidst China's modernization projects. I argue that in the labor policy discourse and implementation, varied labor categories and labels were constructed to legitimize socialist or exploitive labor relations and to create a class of carpet weaver-workers within the PRC framework of citizen-laborer. In this case, the making of Tibetan weaver workers has intertwined with ethnicity and gender politics. Sino-centric and gendered labels associated with carpet weavers provoked discontent among the Tibetan cadres and workers. However, such discriminatory labeling is increasingly applied to justify the exploitive conditions in today's TAR carpet industry. Using archival and oral history materials, I demonstrate that since the 1970s Tibetan carpets have been celebrated as Tibetan cultural heritage under the protection of the Chinese Communist Party. But Tibetan women weavers, who migrated to Lhasa, Tibet's capital, from the rural areas in the 1990s are treated as “temporary” workers and their contribution to this economically and symbolically important industry is not acknowledged.

Guestworkers,Enganchadores, and Changing Labor Relations in U.S. Rural Communities

IntroductionIn a two-month time span early in 2007, North Carolina's Beaufort County Commission approved two measures directed against the growing Latino population in the county, voting first to remove all non-English language materials from county offices and following with a vote to approve the County Sheriff's cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to locate and deport undocumented immigrants. Around the same time, the New York Times reported on a case of excessive exploitation among two Thai guestworkers in North Carolina and Louisiana, the Southern Poverty Law Center (2007) released a report entitled, Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States, and National Public Radio aired at least two stories addressing immigration issues. In the week between the New York Times article and the release of Close to Slavery, the cooperative extension service of Johnston County, North Carolina, hosted a panel to address agricultural labor issues, inviting representatives of the North Carolina and U.S. Departments of Labor, the Employment Security Commission, North Carolina Department of Labor, the Farm Bureau, and, most notably, the North Carolina Growers Association (NCGA). This last organization is one of the largest labor contracting organizations in the United States, specializing in the placement of H-2 workers; in 2004, the NCGA signed an agreement with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee on the condition that law suits against them be dropped. Farmers from across the North Carolina's coastal plain attended, and the issue of pending immigration reform legislation generated the most heated debate. Not insignificantly, much of this focus on immigration occurred around the time that President Bush toured Latin America and, in Mexico, again raised the issue of immigration reform.These local, regional, and national events and reports illustrate the varied dimensions of immigration and its pervasiveness across the North American social and cultural landscape, underscoring the point that the United States is ripe for immigration reform. Several legislative initiatives include some form of expansion of the current H-2 programs-the nation's current guestworker programs-although these vary according to such things as how guestworkers' wages would be determined, whether or not employers would provide housing, guestworkers' access to the courts, protections workers would receive, and other factors. Much of this legislation has been crafted as if ignorant of the ways the H-2 programs have evolved (or devolved) since the last major immigration reform in 1986, despite widely publicized works like Close to Slavery and other, less widely read work (e.g. North South Institute 2006; Wilkinson 1989; Hahamovich 2003; Griffith 2006; Smart 1997). These works nearly always find that H-2 programs, primarily because of the provision that H-2 workers are bound to one and only one employer, have a tendency to deteriorate over time, approximating highly exploitative labor contracting practices like indentured servitude.In this paper, I examine practices that are common in the nation's current H-2 programs and in labor contracting generally, relating them to other developments in immigration taking place in the rural U.S. South.1 Drawing on research conducted in rural North Carolina regions from 2001 to the present, as well as case studies of immigration into Georgia, Iowa, and Minnesota, I suggest that, as labor relations in guestworker programs deteriorate, people participating in H-2 programs have been able to resist the excessive labor control that has been structured into the program. They accomplish this, usually, by working outside of their contracts, in jobs that they are not legally contracted to accept. At times they access these jobs with the assistance of their legal employers and at times against their employers' wishes or without their employers' knowledge. The maturing of Latino communities in new destinations across the United States, a process bolstered by several public and private U. …

The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Workers in the Jim Crow South (review)

Reviewed by: The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Workers in the Jim Crow South Brian Kelly The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Workers in the Jim Crow South. By William P. Jones . Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, A volume in The Working Class in American History Series. 2005. 232 pps. $45 hardback, $20 paper. Given the impressive range of recent scholarship on southern labor, the absence of a serious reconsideration of the region's lumber industry and its multiracial workforce has left an inexcusable void. At the turn of the century, sawmills and logging camps employed more workers than any other industry in the South, among whom African Americans comprised a substantial majority. William P. Jones's The Tribe of Black Ulysses fills that void as it makes a powerful case for the centrality of lumber in southern black working class culture. Jones chronicles the industry's complex interaction with local conditions in three discrete settings and illustrates the relationship between economic and technological evolution and changing race and labor relations. Though the book succeeds in situating lumber in a rapidly changing and racially polarized South, its aim is more ambitious. Jones asserts that black Southerners' experience in lumber directly refutes the "myth of Black Ulysses" that was articulated by sociologist Howard Odum in the 1920s. Odum's argument—that black Southerners were "essentially incompatible with modernity"—played a strong role in establishing the stereotypic image of the alienated working-class black man. This characterization lingers still among pundits who attribute persistent racial inequality to some timeless pathology of black working-class men. This study contradicts Odum's case and suggests that, far from being traumatized or disoriented by their experience in lumber, "African Americans retained the ability to negotiate and … even determine the direction of economic transformation in the early twentieth-century South." Jones offers a cursory sketch of developments in the industry prior to 1920, but the study focuses on the postwar, transitional period between its "Cut-Out-and-Get Out" phase, during which low capitalization and "unlimited" timber stands shaped an unstable industry, and the "conservation" phase that followed, when rapid depletion of timber stocks brought an end to "cream skimming" and a new arrangement between employers and workers allowed more stable communities to take root. It concludes in the late 1950s, when industrial decline threatened the hard-won gains that black workers had finally managed to win. Among the many strengths of the study is the author's ability to illustrate these changes and their impact on black working-class culture in discrete settings in Bogalusa, Louisiana; Chapman, Alabama; and Elizabethtown, North Carolina. [End Page 100] For the period under study, Jones finds that while lumber workers certainly faced hardship, on the whole black workers managed to assert their own interests. Bringing an impressive array of methodological approaches to bear in making his case, Jones is at his best in documenting the integrity of black community life and identifying the dynamic forces transforming black working-class culture in the early twentieth century. The evolution of musical tastes from barrelhouse blues, suited to the raucous ambience of the early logging camps, to commercially influenced swing more congruent with the stable community life of the "conservation" phase, is charted with analytical intelligence and originality. Attempts by Zora Neale Hurston and others to locate a pristine, authentically "black" culture were futile and misguided, Jones argues: the constant interaction between black and white, local, regional and national, folk, and commercial cultures in the New South meant that interchange and continual adaptation were the order of the day. The Tribe of Black Ulysses is not without its flaws. The author is anxious to assert black workers' agency, but an engagement with the substantial literature on welfare capitalism in and beyond the South would have helped frame the problem in a way that acknowledges both the scope for self-assertion and the limits to agency. Few scholars would dispute that where organization became viable, black workers often proved themselves the most capable, militant fighters in the South—a "natural constituency" for trade unionism. But their general predicament presented real obstacles as well, and the power that their employers and...

"I Verily Believed Myself to Be a Free Woman": Harriet Jacobs's Journey into Capitalism

In Harriet Jacobs's in the Life of Slave Girl: Written Herself, Linda Brent's initial act of freedom consists of walking into Philadelphia shop and making purchase--the first time in the narrative during which she trades money for goods. No longer an object of exchange, she proffers gold coin, takes her purchase, and counts her change. In so doing, she triumphs in surreptitiously learning something about the market without revealing her ignorance of its workings or her status as slave. (1) Her second act of freedom comes late that night when she returns to bed as firebells clang, realizing that she cannot be compelled to labor in extinguishing neighborhood fire. In these Incidents in Philadelphia, Linda Brent declares herself the proprietor of her own body and therefore free and equal individual capable of choosing whether to sell her labor as commodity, buy goods, or (by extension) marry and maintain home. Drawing on nineteenth-century notions of contract that idealized voluntary market exchanges as the embodiment of human liberty, Linda rejects the paternalistic ethos of the precapitalist South in favor of Northern, capitalist world view. With these narrative moments in mind, rethinking of in the Life of Slave Girl finds that, for Linda Brent, the journey from South to North is journey into capitalism. (2) My analysis draws on the work of historians who contend that the antebellum South was precapitalist animated paternalistic ethos antithetical to the emerging ideology of the free-labor North. (3) The North underwent an ideological transformation amid the rise of industrial capitalism, these historians claim, justifying changing labor relations idealizing contract rights as form of freedom--indeed, as the essence of freedom. (4) Contract principles drew on Enlightenment ideals and classical political to construe all individuals as sovereigns of themselves, possessive individuals entitled to their own persons, labor, and faculties (Stanley 3). This right to self-ownership was imagined to imply the right to sell one's labor, marry freely, and engage in market exchanges on terms of equality, not as subjugated dependent. Indeed, contract's validity depended on the unsentimental, rationalistic nature of the agreements made between free and equal agents: To contract was to incur duty purely choice and establish its terms without the constraint of status or legal prescription (Stanley 2). While providing new legitimation for capitalist relations, however, the North's valorization of contract widened the ideological divide with the South. (5) Denial of contract was fundamental to slave law, of course, for the institution stripped bondspersons of all proprietary rights and denied them volition outside their master's will. Using the soaring rhetoric of contract theory; abolitionists decried slave law as a daring infringement of the law of nature, base overthrow of the very foundations of the social compact. (6) In defense, embattled slaveholders clung ever more fiercely to paternalistic rhetoric that posited slaves as inherently inferior and permanently dependent. (7) in the Life of Slave Girl captures this dramatic moment in ideological and economic history, for it structures Linda Brent's story as journey from precapitalist South into free-labor North. Linda Brent describes her escape from slavery as release from society in which debased form of paternalism provided rhetorical justification for corrupt and corrupting economic relations; her goal throughout is to reach land where she imagines she will live the bourgeois life glorified free-labor ideology, life in which she will by dint of labor and economy be able to provide safe and comfortable home for her children (169). Reading as journey into capitalism provides an important intervention in Jacobs scholarship, which has predominantly analyzed the text according to its relation to male slave narratives or the domestic novel. …

The transformation of labor relations in China's emerging market economy

The economic reforms in China have set in motion a process of change that is transforming Chinese society and politics in fundamental ways. Gradual reforms in China often lead critics to argue that little substantive change has actually occurred with respect to labor relations in China. However, the transformation of labor relations in reform-era China has been fundamental and deep, and this transformation plays a crucial role in the “quiet revolution” currently underway in the Chinese economy and in society at large. From the changes in the workplace to the new institutional contexts in which firms are situated, the current position of labor in China marks a radical break from the past. An explanation of these changes must strive to integrate three levels of analysis. First, state level institutional changes, led by reform-minded leaders, have driven this process forward. Second, a rights-based labor regime is emerging in factories through on-the-ground pressure from foreign investors. Third, at the individual level, workers are no longer tied to their workplaces; fluid labor markets, and opportunities elsewhere, afford workers a bargaining power that was previously impossible in China. The emergence of a rule of law society in general provides a context within which changing labor relations in China are situated.

Public Service Broadcasting Beyond 2000: Is There a Future for Public Service Broadcasting?

This article focuses on the media coverage of a strike at the Irving Oil Refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick, between 1994 and 1996. A variety of central issues are examined, including: monopoly ownership of the New Brunswick media by the Irving Group of Companies, the ideological presentation of strikes in general, and the representation of changing labour relations in a postindustrial, globally oriented society. The four New Brunswick English-language daily papers as well as selected English-language papers elsewhere in Canada were analyzed for their representation of the strike. The paper argues that the media coverage reinforced an ideology of defeatism and aided in the increased legitimation of a "roll back" orientation in our society.

Dragon in a Three-Piece Suit: The Emergence of Capitalism in China

List of Figures vii List of Tables ix Preface and Acknowledgments xi 1. Firm Practices in China's Transforming Economy: Efficiency or Mimicry? 3 2. Path Dependence in China's Economic Transition 24 3. Formal Rational Bureaucracies in Chinese Firms: Causes and Implications 42 4. Changing Labor Relations in the Period of Market Reform 75 5. The Politics of Price Setting in China's Transition Economy 101 6. Economic Strategies in the Face of Market Reforms 121 7. Institutional Pressure, Rational Choice, and Contractual Relations: Chinese-Foreign Negotiations in the Economic Transition 150 8. The Declining Significance of Connections in China's Economic Transition 175 9. Conclusions and Implications 198 Appendixes 1. Methodology and Sampling 219 2. Interviews and Informants 228 3. Complete Interview Schedule 235 4. Sample Characteristics and Variables 240 Notes 249 References 281 Index 299

The Impact of Economic Reform on Industrial Labour Relations in China and Vietnam

Both China and Vietnam are undergoing a social experiment as they diverge from the path of their Soviet compatriots and attempt transition to a 'socialist market mechanism'. The economic reform in both countries aims towards the so-called 'third way' between the failed command economies and the capitalist alternative. However, after over a decade of reform, it is necessary to investigate whether China and Vietnam are locked into the cycle of reform and retreat which was characteristic of East European societies before 1989 or whether indeed the two countries are developing a stable system consonant with the notion of a 'socialist market economy'. This article tackles these issues by examining and comparing the changing labour relations systems in China and Vietnam in the wake of the changes in economic policies and enterprise regulation towards new forms of labour contracts, wages and welfare systems, worker representation and trade unionism, and legal frameworks. So far there have been significant changes in society and the two countries are still experimenting to find their way towards the 'socialist market economy' by following the philosophy of 'crossing the river by feeling the stones'. The new industrial relations lie at the heart of the reform and their successful management is the key factor determining the outcome of the further transition.