Labour Aristocracy Research Articles

Weathering the storm: why was there no Arab uprising in Algeria?

ABSTRACTThis article re-opens the discussion of why there was “no Arab Uprising in Algeria.” After critically reviewing previous findings, the paper suggests that the stability of the Algerian regime was mainly a result of the non-formation of a cross-class and cross-ideological coalition. Splitting this hypothesis into its two main parts, it will be shown, first, that the working class was the missing element. Two factors explain this: (a) the numerical and strategic marginalization of productive workers – in turn, an effect of the process of de-industrialization that hit the country from the late 1980s onwards; and (b) the presence of an aristocracy of labour in the hydrocarbon sector, from which a tiny minority of workers produced an overwhelming amount of wealth. Secondly, the enduring distrust among opposition groups – a direct legacy of the still-too-recent civil war, as well as an effect of the specific institutional environment that developed from the mid 1990s onwards – prevented the establishment of a “negative coalition” through which all opposition forces could jointly mobilize against the regime.

Zambia After Twenty Years: Recession and Repression Without Revolution

Zambia’s contemporary experience of recession without resolution is, alas, quite typical of the majority of African states over the decade; for since the celebration of ten years of independence in 1974, its national income has been in almost continuous decline. But this economic decay has had an uneven impact, between both time periods and social groups: occasional injections of foreign aid or loans have been permissive of relative affluence for elements in the bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy along the line-of-rail. The full impact of negative growth has been felt in the more distant rural areas and among the peasantry and the unemployed.

Transnational Labour Solidarity in (the) Crisis

The global financial crisis as part of globalisation has put labour movements under pressure around the world. This poses yet again the question of transnational solidarity. As a result of uneven and combined development, individual labour movements find themselves in rather different positions with contradictory interests. The purpose of this article is to assess conceptually possible labour strategies towards transnational solidarity against the background of the structuring conditions within the global economy.The article is organised into two parts. First, the structuring conditions of capitalism will be charted including processes of uneven and combined development. This will provide the basis for the second step of conceptualising the potential agency of labour and its possibilities to establish relationships of transnational solidarity despite the unevenness of global development. In this discussion the definition of ‘labour’ itself will be problematized and concepts of ‘labour aristocracy’ and ‘false consciousness’ critically examined.

Labor's Pink-Collar Aristocracy: The National Secretaries Association's Encounters with Feminism in the Age of Automation

Starting in the mid-twentieth century, secretaries responded to the pressures of automation and feminism with a range of strategies. The members of the National Secretaries Association (NSA), a national network of thousands of secretaries who defined themselves against both women's liberationists and less skilled women office workers, saw their occupation as a separate-but-equal role for women in the business world and thought of themselves as members of a labor aristocracy. They insulated themselves just beneath the glass ceiling, working throughout the 1960s and 1970s to boost their status at work through the prism of gendered, classed respectability rather than equality or collective rights. Yet while NSA members initially kept the feminist movement at arm's length, employer-driven automation eventually compelled them to adopt some of its elements. By the 1990s, in response to the proliferation of desktop computers in office work, the NSA had reinvented itself as an association of office managers and technology specialists, arguing that the same machines that had deskilled, outsourced, and eliminated many women office workers' jobs would liberate secretaries from the drudgery assigned to them by outdated sex stereotypes. In the end, clerical workers were not simply replaced by machines, and some skilled secretaries obtained office manager jobs. However, the glass ceiling persisted even as professional positions were nominally opened up to women; office support jobs retained their low pay, monotony, and inflexibility; and automation continued to sharpen the class divide in office work.

Sex, Bricks and Mortar: Constructing Class in a Central Indian Steel Town

AbstractBased on a case study of informal sector construction labour in the central Indian steel town of Bhilai, this paper explores the intersection and the mutually constitutive relationship between social class on the one hand, and gender (and more specifically sexual) relations on the other. It is part of an attempt to document and analyse a process ofclassdifferentiation within the manual labour force between aspirant middle class organized sector workers and the unorganized sector ‘labour class’. With some help from the (pre-capitalist) ‘culture’ of their commonly work-shy men-folk, their class situation forces ‘labour class’ women onto construction sites where they are vulnerable to the sexual predation of supervisors, contractors and owners. That some acquiesce reinforces the widespread belief that ‘labour class’ women are sexually available, which in turn provides ‘proof’ to the labour aristocracy that they themselves are a different and better breed, superior in culture and morals. Class inequalities produce a particular configuration of gender relations; gender relations (and in particular sexual relations) produce a powerful ideological justification for class differentiation. This proposition has strong resonances with processes reported from other parts of the world; but in the Indian context and in its specific focus on sex it has not been clearly articulated and its significance for class formation has not been adequately appreciated.

Labor Divided

Zak Cope, Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2012), 387 pages, $20.00, paperback.[Zak] Cope argues that the seemingly pervasive racism and cultural chauvinism in the global North is not the result of false consciousness, misinformation, indoctrination, or ignorance (at least to the extent that much of the political left assumes). Rather, racism and cultural chauvinism are the expression of economic interests shared by a variety of social strata in the global North, all of whom have an interest in exploiting the global South. Central to this argument is the idea that the labor aristocracy—the relatively privileged global North working class—developed as a result of the exploitation of the global South, and therefore has a material interest in continuing this exploitation.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Industrial Warriors: South Korea’s First Generation of Industrial Workers in Post-Developmental Korea

This study analyses the skills upgrading programmes of South Korea’s first generation of skilled workers, focusing on their political and social trajectories from bulwarks of the developmental regimes up until 1987, to a “labour aristocracy” of regular workers employed mainly in large companies in heavy industries in South Korea. The term “labour aristocracy” highlights how the “regular workers”, employed mostly in monopolistic large enterprises in heavy industries, have better wages, job security and other social benefits than “non-regular workers” and other regular workers employed in small and medium companies. It argues that these “Industrial Warriors” were the product of the Korean developmental state’s creation of an egalitarian social contract, and that the political and social trajectories since then must be seen in its totality. This is necessary because it manifests the profound change in Korea’s political economy from state-grassroots synergistic developmentalism to neoliberal industrial capitalism, wherein having a regular job has become a substantial asset in an era of non-regular employment. This study contributes to the literature on the political economy and to sociological discussion of the Korean developmental state that continues to this day and is far from over.

Lenin and the "Aristocracy of Labor"

Lenin and the "Aristocracy of Labor"

Suicide in a central Indian steel town

Over the past 15 years ‘farmer suicides’ have occasioned grave public concern; and it has recently been claimed that Chhattisgarh has the highest incidence in the country. This article suggests that the representation of such cases as the major public policy problem to do with self-inflicted death is politically inflected and that there are good grounds for supposing that—at least in certain pockets—the urban suicide rate is as high, if not higher. In the industrial area around steel town of Bhilai, this has risen dramatically over the last 20 years and it is the aristocracy of public sector labour that is significantly most susceptible. This is ultimately attributable to the liberalisation of the economy and the consequent downsizing of this workforce, which has led to a crisis in the reproduction of class status. Such workers are privileged; think of themselves as different from the informal sector ‘labour class’ and fear sinking into it. Suicides are significantly under-reported and the official statistics are systematically inflected by fear of the police and the law, which encourage both concealment and the deliberate obfuscation of likely motives, and almost certainly increase the ‘lethal probabilities’ of suicide attempts.

Social citizenship and ethnicity around a public sector steel plant in Orissa, India

This article is about a modern public sector steel plant in the state of Orissa and its promise to set standards for post-colonial India's citizenry at large. These steel plants were to provide their workforces with superior social and economic citizenship rights, which in turn were to serve as exemplary industrial relations for the industrialising nation. The steel plants were also intended to forge multi-ethnic workforces into exemplary Indian citizens by transcending their manifold ethnic differences. The trajectory of the public sector steel plant in the town of Rourkela confirms that enhanced social and economic citizenship rights detached public sector steel workforces from labour at large and produced a ‘labour aristocracy’. The trajectory, furthermore, reveals how in Rourkela policies designed to accommodate ethnic differences constantly recreated these differences and hampered the access of large sections of the local population to these enhanced social and economic citizenship rights.

The Aristocracy of Labour and Working-Class Consciousness Revisited

This article seeks to position the debate on the Labour Aristocracy, an important one during the early years of the Society for the Study of Labour History, within the wider controversies of the 1970s and 1980s on the future of the Labour Party and the adoption of post-modernist methodology. Its objective is to return discussion to the usage of the term as originally developed by Marx and Engels. This, it is argued, was not essentially about income differentials. Its central focus was on the active process of working-class formation and fragmentation. It assumed that working-class consciousness in the full sense was a historically rare though socially transformative phenomenon, usually constrained by the apparent inevitability of capitalist relations, and requiring a specific conjunctural analysis of working-class challenge and capitalist crisis and response. The article seeks to re-establish the validity of this approach using recent research on the Chartist movement and its decline. It takes issue with ...

Appropriating Social Citizenship: Women's Labour, Poverty, and Entrepreneurship in the Manual Workers Union of Botswana

Interrogating critiques of the ‘African labour aristocracy’ thesis, the article proposes that public service industrial-class manual workers in Botswana form, if not a labour ‘aristocracy’ in the sense first defined by Saul and Arrighi, then a marginal worker ‘elite’. They are privileged in having a regular salary above minimum pay, augmented by periodic lump-sum gratuity payments. This sets them apart from the other low-paid workers in the private sector, casual workers in the informal economy and a vast army of unemployed job seekers. In the absence of a national unemployment benefit scheme in Botswana, the article explores some of the strategies deployed by women members of the Manual Workers Union in their attempts to contend with the spectre of future unemployment and impoverishment. In gender terms, the article highlights the independence, autonomy and decision-making capacity of women trade unionist leaders, who straddle the worlds of workers' rights and citizens' rights, and manoeuvre their way through the maze of rules and regulations they encounter in both.

Class, Skill and Control in a Southern City: The Case of the Dunedin Branch of the ASE c. 1880-1920

Skilled workers and their unions have long held a central place in New Zealand labour history. While there has been much written about the economic position and industrial and political mobilisation of the skilled, less is known about their lives in terms of marital and residential differentiation and segregation, and their activities in voluntary associations. This article adopts a micro-historical approach and uses Hobsbawm's 'aristocracy of labour' criteria to describe and interpret the economic and social position of members of the Dunedin branch of a New Zealand trade union, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, for skilled engineering workers. In doing so, it makes reference to a large body of work that examines the process of class formation in one of New Zealand's oldest industrial suburbs.

'Ces forces obscures de l'ame': Women, Race and Origins in the Writings of Albert Camus

This is a well-researched and argued study, with an extensive bibliography, written from a feminist and sociological perspective. Christine Margerrison, disclaiming any ideological stance or final judgement, focuses principally on the prose fiction. Inevitably there is an element of arbitrariness in the interpretations of some aspects of Camus's complex personality and work. The author wishes to show that a ‘female stereotype’ is central to Camus's creative imagination. She establishes a paradigm into which she fits not only all the women in his writings, but also the indigenous peoples of Algeria and elsewhere, and all flawed male characters (Clamence, for example). Camus, she suggests, sees lucidity as the birthright of the male, woman being a body without a soul, instinct without intellect. His women are not so much virgins and whores as mothers and others, the pale-complexioned (European) mother representing racial purity and cultural priority. Nonetheless, even she is ambivalent, corruption and disease being passed on through her body. Female sexuality means loss of control and boundaries and thus signifies the disintegration of the colonial world. Margerrison chooses the early essay ‘La Maison mauresque’, written in 1933, when Camus was not yet 20, to set the perspective and interconnections: the architecture of the Moorish house becomes the embodiment of the dangerous ‘femininity’ of the harem, which, deep in Camus's psyche, it is claimed, characterizes the whole Arab world and women in general. The awakening of the intellectual and spiritual potential of the young male, Margerrison says, always requires the death of the Woman (L'Etranger, Caligula, La Chute), who is thereby reduced to absolute silence. Disagreeing with Rizzuto, Margerrison does not believe that Camus in any way deepened his sympathy for women or understanding of them. She places a good deal of emphasis on Camus's debt to Nietzsche, allowing however that his view changes as a result of the war. Camus dreamed of a natural aristocracy of labour and the intellect. We may add that it is d'abord l'acceptation de certains devoirs (Carnets III). This is in line with an ideal much older than Nietzsche's Übermensch. Nor can Camus's attitude to Christianity be reduced, as here, simply to an acceptance of Nietzsche's contemptuous epithet: slave religion (i.e. fit only for women!). Camus's contacts with the Dominicans and Bruckberger, or with the Jesuit Didier, his rebuke to an interviewer in 1948 (‘Je réfléchirais avant de dire comme vous que la foi chrétienne est une démission. Peut-on écrire ce mot pour un saint Augustin ou un Pascal?’, Essais, p. 380) amply show that while he refused Christianity, he never failed to respect it. Incidentally, the Renegade is not a priest, and he murders the priest who comes with le visage de la bonté. Women and Arabs are the great ‘absents’ from Camus's work (les absents ont toujours tort). Camus's deepest fears and fixations, les forces obscures de l'âme, are inferred from the fiction and essays, leaving a lot of room for discussion. Margerrison does not want to condemn Camus for being ‘a man of his time’, but, all the same, she puts the case for the prosecution very vigorously.

The making of a foreign “labour aristocracy” in Botswana

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate whether expatriate workers in Botswana are a labour aristocracy.Design/methodology/approachThis is a case study based on documentary research methodsFindingsThe evidence presented supports the case for the existence of a foreign labour aristocracy in Botswana. The labour aristocracy thesis has come under attack for describing the better‐paid workers as labour aristocrats and for its failure to take cognizance of the heterogeneity of the working class. Although it appears that the thesis has now been relegated to the periphery of labour studies debates, evidence from Botswana of a two tier wage structure, one for citizens and another for “expatriates”, resonates with the basic tenets of the labour aristocracy thesis.Research limitations/implicationsThere is a need to revisit the debate and for more case studies from different Third World countries.Practical implicationsThe paper highlights the difficulties faced by citizen employees in Botswana in seeking to improve their material conditions.Originality/valueThis paper reveals a linkage between a wages policy and the notion of national development in a specific society.

From Demand for Asiatic Labor to Importation of Indentured Chinese Labor: Race Identity in the Recruitment of Unskilled Labor for South Africa's Gold Mining Industry, 1903–1910

AbstractDespite international protests against bonded labor, the flow of indentured laborers during the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries was extensive compared to the earlier centuries. The focus of this article is on the particularity of the “Chinese coolies experiment” in South Africa's gold mining industry which commenced in 1904. This 20th-century episode of indentured labor is notable for several reasons, and it serves as a springboard for the discussion of some fundamental issues in capitalist development, labor and identity formation. This article emphasizes the last, examining how a “Chinese” identity was formed through the development of the gold fields and, in turn, how this formation reinforced a nascent white labor aristocracy. It discusses two dimensions of this labor “experiment” in South Africa: (1) the heady debate on the decision to look to China for cheap labor and (2) desertion by the indentured Chinese laborers from various mining compounds in the Witwatersrand.

From Demand for Asiatic Labor to Importation of Indentured Chinese Labor: Race Identity in the Recruitment of Unskilled Labor for South Africa's Gold Mining Industry, 1903–1910

Despite international protests against bonded labor, the flow of indentured laborers during the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries was extensive compared to the earlier centuries. The focus of this article is on the particularity of the "Chinese coolies experiment" in South Africa's gold mining industry which commenced in 1904. This 20th-century episode of indentured labor is notable for several reasons, and it serves as a springboard for the discussion of some fundamental issues in capitalist development, labor and identity formation. This article emphasizes the last, examining how a "Chinese" identity was formed through the development of the gold fields and, in turn, how this formation reinforced a nascent white labor aristocracy. It discusses two dimensions of this labor "experiment" in South Africa: (1) the heady debate on the decision to look to China for cheap labor and (2) desertion by the indentured Chinese laborers from various mining compounds in the Witwatersrand.

A new labour aristocracy? Aesthetic labour and routine interactive service

A re-conceptualization of the work and employment of interactive service and the workers who inhabit these jobs is required, not least because routine interactive services will provide most job growth in the UK for the foreseeable future (Wilson et al., 2004). This article initiates that task, arguing that it can be understood by reference to aesthetic labour, which is creating a potential new labour aristocracy and a reconfiguration of the service encounter.

Seeking labour's aristocracy? The ‘Westphalian incident’ and Polish nationality policy in the immediate aftermath of war*

ABSTRACT. In the immediate aftermath of World War II the Polish state placed a high value on national homogeneity. The Polish Committee of National Liberation signed population exchange agreements with its socialist neighbours in September 1944 and expelled the German population who remained within the new Polish borders. Far less frequently discussed are the Polish state's efforts to persuade ‘Poles’ in Western Europe to move to Poland. This paper analyses how Polish policy towards ‘Westphalian Poles’ and the British reaction to Polish claims offer insight into both Polish and British nationality and citizenship policy in the immediate post‐war period. I argue that the quality of potential labour played an important role in both British and Polish thinking. The paper also contends that the ‘Westphalian incident’ gives useful insights into the emergence of the Cold War.

Deux âges d'émigration ouvrière. Migration et sédentarité dans un village industriel

A partir del analisis de una cohorte de individuos nacidos entre 1939 y 1946 y censados en 1954 en un municipio del este de Francia, este articulo presenta un modelo de sedentarismo de la mano de obra trabajadora. En base a este modelo, la integracion de los obreros no calificados se produce a traves de la alianza con las mujeres autoctonas, y la reproduccion local del status de obrero a traves del hijo mayor. Es asi que aparece una aristocracia obrera, a traves de mecanismos de parentesco que corresponden a una situacion determinada del mercado de trabajo.Estos resultados se obtienen combinando una encuesta etnografica (para reconstituir las trayectorias familiares en el espacio y en lo referente al empleo) y analisis estadistico (ACM y modelos de duracion). Sin embargo, el modelo deja de funcionar si se toma como base una cohorte de individuos nacidos durante los anos sesenta. El hecho de ser autoctono, clave para la entrada en el mercado de trabajo local durante los anos sesenta, empuja a la migracion durante los ochenta, debido a la crisis del empleo local.