Introduction: Chronic musculoskeletal pain significantly impacts the quality of life and physical productivity of women engaged in agrarian labour within rural settings. This study examined the efficacy of a hybrid rehabilitation approach specifically designed for this demographic in low-resource environments. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate a hybrid rehabilitation program combining field-based activities and tele-exercises to manage pain and improve functional muscle strength among rural Iraqi women. Methodology: A quasi-experimental pre-test–post-test cohort study was conducted among sixty-six women who had extensive histories of agrarian labour in the Hamdaniya District. The twelve-week intervention integrated home-based exercises delivered via mobile video applications with twice-weekly field sessions featuring culturally familiar games, while physical assessments utilized a handheld dynamometer and the Numeric Rating Scale-11. Results: The data indicated that the majority of participants suffered from severe lower back and extremity pain at baseline. Following the intervention, significant improvements in muscle strength were recorded across all targeted regions, and pain levels transitioned from severe to either moderate or mild, with several cases reaching complete resolution. Discussion: These findings aligned with previous studies suggesting that supervised exercise programs effectively mitigate chronic occupational pain. The results contrasted favourably with traditional clinical models by demonstrating that culturally adapted physical activity increases participant adherence and social engagement in rural communities. Conclusions: The hybrid rehabilitation program successfully reduced chronic pain and enhanced the functional capacity of rural Iraqi women. The model presents a feasible, low-cost therapeutic strategy for improving musculoskeletal health in resource-limited settings.

Criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by pro-labor politicians and worker unions in both the United States and Mexico has been long-standing, stretching from before the deal’s inception in 1994 through well after the switch to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2020. The division between corporate interests and worker interests is equally estab- lished. Yet, the contemporary animosity between U.S. and Mexican workers as a mainstream attitude is a more recent development, stoked by former Presi- dent Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric.1 To better understand the origins of such animosity and its link to trade policy, a discussion of early disputes over NAFTA within the U.S. Senate is warranted. The dialogue that took place between proponents and opponents of the treaty sheds light on the diamet- rically conflicting analyses of trade and labor history during this watershed moment in the 1990s.

Objective: To identify possible risk factors of preterm birth.Study Design: A retrospective cohort studyPlace and Duration of Study: This study was conducted at the Diwaniyah Maternity Hospital, Diwaniyah province, Iraq from 1st January 2025 to 30th June 2025.Methods: During this study, records of women with single gestation for the last five years (January 2020 to January 2025) were retrieved and analyzed. After reviewing all reports of pregnant women admitted to Maternity Teaching Hospital, twin pregnancies and cases with abortion were excluded from study. The first case for each year of the five years of the study was selected based on a random number generated by the Microsoft Excel software and then Systematic random sample was applied by selecting every other 10 cases. Only women with singleton pregnancy who gave birth after 28 weeks gestation and the age was in the range of 18 to 45 years were enrolled. At the end of the study, 428 cases of women with singleton pregnancy were enrolled.Results: Logistic regression analysis confirmed the findings of univariate analysis in that age, body mass index, history of abortion and history of preterm are the significant predictors of preterm labor (p<0.05). An increase of one year of age is associated with 1.14 increased risk of preterm labor (p<0.001). An increase of one kg/m2 of body mass index is associated with 1.57 increased risk of preterm labor (p<0.001). History of abortion is associated with 10.53 increased risk of preterm (p=0.003) and history of preterm labor is associated with 28.82 increased risk of preterm (p=0.003).Conclusion: Advanced maternal age >40 years, high body mass index >25 kg/m2, previous abortion and previous preterm labor are associated with increased likelihood of preterm labor.

Family planning (KB) is an important strategy to reduce maternal mortality by reducing the number of pregnancies and the proportion of high-risk pregnancies, while enabling family planning and improving quality of life. Although data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) shows fluctuations, the prevalence of active KB participation in Indonesia is not enough to significantly increase contraceptive use, especially in multiparous women. The purpose of this study was to examine the factors that influence contraceptive use in multiparous women in Indonesia. The study design was cross-sectional using secondary data obtained from the 2023 Indonesian Health Survey (SKI). The analysis focused on data from 14,975 multiparous mothers who had filled out the questionnaire. The dependent variable in this study was contraceptive use. Independent variables included age, education level, occupation, insurance ownership, delivery method, pregnancy risk, and history of labor and postpartum complications. Data were analyzed using binomial logistic regression. The results of the study showed that determinant factors such as education level, occupation, delivery method, and history of delivery complications affected the use of contraceptives in multiparous women in general by only 3.1%, while 96.9% were influenced by other factors not included in this model test. Therefore, targeted interventions are very important, including expanding contraceptive education for highly educated women and increasing flexible access to services for informal sector workers, as well as conducting counseling programs especially for women with a history of surgery or delivery with complications, to ensure optimal use of contraceptives

This interview with Dutch historian Jan Lucassen explores his intellectual journey from student activism to developing analytical frameworks that challenge both Marxist orthodoxy and Western‑centric historiography. Lucassen discusses his approach to writing accessible yet rig-orous history, shaped by the principle of explaining academic work to thinking citizens regard-less of their educational background. The conversation examines his departure from Marxist analysis, leading to the development of alternative methodological approaches in labour history. Lucassen reflects on his role in building the research department at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, creating an international scholarly community focused on com-parative analysis across different geographical and temporal contexts. The interview addresses contemporary concerns about artificial intelligence and automation in relation to historical patterns of technological change and labour displacement. The conversation concludes with reflections on mentoring doctoral students and the collaborative nature of historical research.

From a state-and-capital-centered perspective, sabotage has often been viewed as a destructive force driven by seditious individuals. However, scholars, such as E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Timothy Mitchell, and Andreas Malm, have highlighted the political motivations behind sabotage and the efforts to create alternative futures through disruptive actions. This article examines the opposition to the privatization of the state-owned telecommunications company in Colombia during the early 1990s, arguing that sabotage can be a tool to effect change in policymaking. Drawing from critical geography, political economy, and labor history, the article discusses the 1992 attempt to privatize Colombia's Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (Telecom) and how it prompted a response from below, conceptualized here as a strategy of “collective bargaining by sabotage.” Through a national strike that halted communications for seven days, the labor movement executed a techno-political strategy that successfully delayed the privatization of this state-owned company for a few years. The article delves into this narrative in Colombia through archival research, testimonies from former workers, and secondary sources. Furthermore, it underscores the political implications of sabotage, suggesting that it is not merely a destructive tactic but has radical and tangible effects: it can reshape public policies, politicize society, organize a new labor subject, and raise awareness about state issues. Overall, the article aims to understand the uneven neoliberal transition of recent years and reflect on how workers can, through sabotage, turn infrastructure into “technologies of dissent” to defend public ownership.

ABSTRACT Histories of the railways in South Asia accumulated in the last years but their labour history, especially that of the railway workshops, remains partial. Labour historians investigating other industries on the subcontinent have argued for the historical dynamism of workplaces and their role in shaping patterns of labour deployment. This article investigates the changes of production inside the Great Indian Peninsula Railway workshops at Parel (Bombay) during the 1920s. While it substantiates the importance of the historical dynamism of workplaces, it does so by looking at the changing control of labour-time. The latter is accessed through the central reorganization of production in the workshops in the mid-1920s and situates these developments within the contentious relationship between management and labour. It becomes discernable that the increasing control of labour-time within the confines of the working day by changes in management methods was implemented due to increasing labour militancy and shaped by global management debates.

This article examines the legal, social, and economic impacts of Brazil’s labor reform (Law No. 13,467/2017) and pension reform (Constitutional Amendment No. 103/2019), within the broader context of structural changes implemented between 2017 and 2025. It focuses on core legislative innovations, such as the predominance of collective bargaining over statutory law and the imposition of a minimum retirement age, assessing their implications for the effectiveness of fundamental social rights, union performance, and the financial sustainability of the social security system. The research adopts a qualitative approach, grounded in bibliographic review, legal analysis, and empirical data from official sources. The study concludes that the reforms shifted the axis of social protection toward economic rationality, weakening historic labor guarantees. It highlights the urgency of compensatory policies, reinforcement of collective bargaining, and measures for inclusive pension coverage as strategies to restore balance to the social protection framework.

Abstract Daniel James, a preeminent historian of the Argentine working class and Peronism, has fundamentally transformed how we understand Latin American labor history. This oral history interview, conducted by four of his former doctoral students, explores the personal, intellectual, and methodological foundations of his pioneering work. James discusses his working-class upbringing in post-war England as the son of Communist Party militants, his formative experiences at Oxford during the late 1960s, and his introduction to Argentina during the politically charged early 1970s. The conversation traces his evolution from the social history approach of Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class (1988) through his methodological innovations in oral history with Doña María’s Story (2000) to his recent collaborative work on photography and memory in Paisajes del pasado (2025). James reflects candidly on the influence of E. P. Thompson, Walter Benjamin, and the Latin American Labor History Workshop on his scholarship, while emphasizing the centrality of relationships, empathy, and historical imagination in his approach to working-class history. The interview also addresses his teaching philosophy, his commitment to graduate mentorship, and his view of history as a moral enterprise aimed at rescuing ordinary people “from the enormous condescension of posterity.” James concludes by outlining two prospective research projects on Argentine photography and political exile.

his study explores the knowledge and perceptions of Chilean citizens regarding the pension system administered by the AFP (Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones), which has faced widespread criticism for failing to address economic and gender inequalities. Despite reforms, persistent public dissatisfaction stems from low pension returns and high administrative fees. The research employs a quantitative observational methodology, systematically analyzing secondary data from the Social Protection Survey (EPS), a comprehensive and nationally representative longitudinal panel study conducted in Chile, with approximately 16,000 respondents. The survey collects detailed information on labor history, social protection, and financial knowledge. Descriptive statistical analysis was performed to identify significant patterns and emerging trends. Findings reveal significant dissatisfaction among affiliates, driven by inadequate pension amounts and a lack of trust in fund administrators. The study underscores the need for greater public confidence and enhanced equity within the system These insights are essential for guiding future public policy reforms, emphasizing the importance of understanding the factors shaping affiliates' perceptions. Addressing these issues is crucial for fostering a more equitable and socially legitimate pension system in Chile. The study contributes to the broader discourse on sustainable economic development by highlighting the need for structural reforms that align with public expectations.

Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Committee on Labour History, 17 July 2025, Convened virtually from locations across Turtle Island

The National Library of Australia’s (NLA) Trove database – and here I am more particularly concerned with its newspaper holdings – is widely and correctly regarded as an outstanding resource for the nation, as well as a means of making vast amounts of Australian material available globally. It is a boon to academic and professional researchers who would once have had to spend weeks and months in research tasks that might now take hours or minutes. It has greatly enhanced community access to resources, allowing family and community historians in far-flung areas open access to collections that would once have been beyond the grasp of all but the well-off: that is, those able to make a trip to Canberra. The spirit of democracy is strong with Trove but, at the same time, it has been chronically underfunded, it is limited in what it offers for the last 70 years, and some kinds of publications are better represented than others. What are the implications of a database that ends for most titles in 1954, for instance, for our understanding of the role of Indigenous people, of women, and of non-British migrants in Australian labour history? So, the question I ask here is: How well is labour history served by Trove? To borrow the theme of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous essay, does it allow the subaltern to speak? My purpose is activist as much as expository and analytical. At a time when the Labor government has restored some much-needed funding to national collecting institutions, including Trove, what should the community of labour historians be asking for? What mechanisms should the NLA establish to allow communities, and especially marginalised and under-represented communities, to have their say about what should be included?

This first study undertaken of Australian ship stewardesses draws attention to specific aspects of working in the male-dominated maritime industry. It takes a feminist methodology that looks to women-authored sources to find evidence of experience not visible in traditional union and business archives. The article makes a case for “Letters to the Editor” as a source for accessing emotions in labour history. These letters allow women’s voices to be foregrounded and provide insights into women’s workplace experiences of sexual harassment, the public–private domain of their work, and gendered concepts like ambition and heroism. Letters reveal girls’ continuing aspirations for paid work.

Centring the lives and traces of three women labour activists contributes to labour history by showing how archival form becomes a terrain of struggle where questions of work, visibility, and historical legitimacy remain unsettled. In this article I examine the archival afterlives of Jean Désirée, Emma Goldman, and Rose Pesotta to develop the concept of archival assemblages and introduce resistibility as a critical method for engaging the politics of historical visibility in labour history. Each was embedded in distinct traditions of socialist, anarchist, and trade union struggle, and left behind a fragmented or overdetermined archival presence. By tracing the unstable configurations through which their memory circulates I argue that the archive functions as a volatile field of meaning, shaped by material contingencies, affective investments, and epistemic tensions. The article intervenes in feminist memory studies and archival theory by foregrounding resistibility as a condition of the archive itself: its capacity to delay closure, generate friction, and open space for alternative temporalities and political imaginaries. This approach reframes the archive as an active and contested assemblage, where acts of remembering are entangled with acts of refusal, erasure, and reconfiguration. Archival assemblages, I suggest, not only preserve but also unsettle memory, offering new ways of understanding how histories of political labour are made, disrupted, and made again.

The records of colonial Australia, where unfree work and outputs were systematically recorded across many years, constitute an astonishingly vast and rich labour history archive, much of it recorded in tabular form and thus immediately suited to transcription and digital analysis. In this article, we depart from conventional tabular data constructs and employ graph database technology, enabling us to investigate the structured and unstructured contents of our records. Employing this technology, we investigate a cohort of around 2,000 male convicts in the early colony of New South Wales, tracking their working lives through their arrival, servitude and emancipation. We trace their changing occupations and where they lived and worked after they gained freedom to choose their own employment. As a result, we discover that the occupations of convicts during the period 1822–28 were highly dynamic, with the data also suggesting social connections between convicts played a diminished role in free worker migrations and employment. Through this demonstration of a new technology and method, we open the door to more nuanced ways of locating workers and labour in the archives.

How can we analyse the myriads of photographs of nineteenth-century indentured workers scattered across Australian libraries and museum collections? Using Harriett Brims’ 1890s photographs of Australian South Sea Islanders as a case study, the article offers a valuable contribution to labour history methodology. While historians have examined archival images of South Sea Islanders searching for evidence of slavery, art historians have tended to focus on the photographer’s unique skills and craftsmanship. Their methodologies risk obscuring the economic and social relations that underpinned the production of photographs in colonial capitalism. In fact, colonial photographers were businesspeople who made a living selling promotional pictures of plantations and mines. As entrepreneurs, they extracted value and labour from their subjects. Instead of looking at photographs as evidence of physical violence and coercion, or as expressions of the unique talent of the photographer-as-artist, we must then recognise the invisible exploitation of the workers depicted in them, whether they were willing or unwilling participants in the production of the images. This way we can bring a more critical awareness to photographic archives.

Australian Society for the Study of Labour History

Reading classical Arabic and Chinese sources at once comparatively and intersectionally, this article initiates an investigation of Black labor—specifically Black sailors and slaves—employed in medieval trade networks that connect Africa, Arabia, and Persia to South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China. It does not presume a homogeneous definition of Blackness, nor a generalized notion of slavery. While informed by concepts developed in scholarly studies of transatlantic slavery and Euro-American colonial history, this article strives to expand our understanding of the global articulation of Blackness beyond both the modern period and the Atlantic world. I draw on numerous genres of classical literature—Islamic ḥadīth commentaries, stories of marvels, geographical works, poetry, Buddhist dictionaries, and polemical treatises—and corroborate them with visual evidence from the same or adjacent periods. Rather than aiming for a social history of Black labor, I suggest that we harness the magical qualities of these half-true, half-invented narratives, capitalize on their marvelousness, and instead of laying claim to a definitive account of who the Black sailors were and what they did, create new avenues of research and imagination that may help us regain access to the breathtakingly rich and layered world of a Black subalternity articulated translingually across the medieval Indian Ocean world.

This paper examines the history of the cinchona plantation in India, with a particular focus on the Nilgiri district. Cinchona is a tree native to South America, known to the Inca tribes long before it was brought to Spain in 1532 by the Spanish Vicereine of Peru. It gained various names, including Kina-Kina in Spain and Quin-Quine in France, eventually becoming known as Cinchona everywhere. In 1638, the Countess of Chinchón, the Viceroy's wife, discovered that the tree's bark helped her recover from intermittent fever, leading to its introduction to Europe in 1640. It is mainly cultivated for its bark, which is a source of quinine and other medicinal compounds. Cinchona was cultivated in Indonesia, New Zealand, and India. Cinchona plantations started in the 19th century in India particularly in 1859 on Nilgiris. These plantations primarily focused on cultivating Cinchona trees, which were vital for the production of quinine, a crucial treatment for malaria. It also examines the development of the cinchona plantation and the expenditure involved. The British colonial administration recognised the potential of the Nilgiri hills for Cinchona cultivation due to the favourable climate and terrain. However, they faced challenges in sourcing labour, as the indigenous population was not inclined to work in the plantations. To address this, the colonial government implemented a system of convict labour. It highlights the history of convicted labourers in India and the essential roles that convicts played in various sectors. With the efforts of Chinese convicted labours the quinine medicine produced in Nilgiris was exported to malaria affected countries. It is noteworthy that the quinine medicine exported from the Nilgiris played an important role in the treatment of malaria fever worldwide. It primarily focuses on the arrival of cinchona plantation in Nilgiri District and the role of convicted labours for the development of cinchona plantation from 1859 to 1884, for a period of twenty five years.

Abstract Australian workers mobilised precociously to win the eight-hour day. Building workers in Melbourne secured the standard in 1856. They inspired and helped to lead a wider movement that shared in the victory over subsequent decades. By the early 1890s the “eight-hour day” was widely embraced as a social norm. Australian successes were contemplated in a range of international publications. Australian employees in several trades secured an eight-hour day from the middle 1850s. By the 1890s, Australian advances had attracted considerable international attention. But these precocious Australian successes have not yet been satisfactorily explained. The dominant explanations focus especially on a propitious environment in the middle 1850s, buoyed by the wealth of a gold rush and characterised by labour shortages. These accounts overestimate the persistence of favourable market conditions and underestimate the import of the political context and of creative and determined collective struggle. This article offers a new interpretation. It suggests that the Australian campaign for eight-hours is best understood as a social movement. It then applies five key concepts drawn from the field of social-movement studies to examine the campaign and to explain its successes: political opportunities; framing; strategy; repertoire; and mobilising structures. The article aims not only to explain the Australian eight-hours campaign, but also to demonstrate the value of concepts and approaches drawn from “social-movement studies” to the study of labour history. It is based on a substantial source base, including union records, scores of newspapers, parliamentary debates, contemporary pamphlets, and government reports.