Labor Hierarchy Research Articles

The Long Red Summer on the Railroads: Labor, Race, and Exclusion in Appalachia

Abstract This essay examines the relationship between race, work, and exclusion during the Long Red Summer of 1919. I focus on several “transportation towns” of railroad employees in Appalachia to argue for the combined importance of labor history and racial ideology in attempts to understand wartime violence. Academic and federal government investigations inform my analysis, as does the robust body of scholarship on railroad labor. After examining racism embedded in railroad work, unions, and community life, the essay then turns to the Wilson administration’s nationalization of the roads during the war. Wartime changes resulted in higher wages for Black workers and many perceived threats to the racialized labor hierarchy. What was once white railroaders’ effort to exclude African Americans from certain jobs became one to expel them from the industry entirely. In several transportation towns that experienced wartime migration, however, this impulse transformed into a campaign to remove Black people from their communities once and for all. I cite testimony from a grand jury trial of an expulsion, railroad union journals, and newspaper accounts of mob violence that made it clear that the transportation towns belonged to white labor at the end of the Long Red Summer.

“Our Dark Hands and Sore Backs”: The Comité Cívico Popular Mixteco and the New Grassroots Activism by Indigenous Mexican Migrants

Abstract In the 1980s, Indigenous people from southern Mexico migrated in considerable numbers to the United States. Among the most prominent groups were the Mixteco people from Oaxaca, who worked mainly as farmworkers on labor-intensive crops in San Diego and throughout California. Because they were incorporated at the bottom of a racialized labor hierarchy distinct from previous Mexican cohorts and in a period of increased border violence and anti-immigrant sentiments, these new migrants formed the Comité Cívico Popular Mixteco (CCPM). Building from their experiences in Mexico and the migrant circuit, the CCPM's goals were to address their needs as workers and claim their dignity as Indigenous people. Mixtecos organized demonstrations, press conferences, and solidarity, resembling the tactics of Chicano/a, Latino/a, and farmworker struggles. Although their activities appeared similar to historical efforts in California, this article argues that the CCPM drew from their experiences participating in their pueblos’ (community of origin) local form of communal governance. The pueblo provided the basis for their activism as they also produced new forms of social membership. The work of the CCPM at this moment demonstrates how a growing Indigenous political culture from southern Mexico in California was reconsidering ways to enact leadership, community, and activism across borders.

El biologicismo estadounidense a través de Crash

This work examines biologicism (racism) in the United States based on the film Crash. The instrumental-material nature of the phenomenon pointed out by various authors is also recognized in the film. Biologicism simultaneously moves through the planes of the obvious and the hidden. In the first, it acquires the profile of a structuring and decomposing factor of relationships, although formally it is abstract. In the second, it acts as an element that blocks the recognition of social classes, their relationships, training processes and labor hierarchies. Thus, biologicalism is a vehicle through which the interests of the hegemonic classes are promoted, and which results in the recreation and perpetuation of capitalist social relations of production.

Visibilising the underbelly of global capitalism :

At the annual Pravesi Bharatiya Diwas, the contribution of overseas Indians and the diaspora is celebrated but amidst the high achievers, presidents, and billionaires, ignored and invisible is the contribution of the low and semiskilled workers, especially female domestic workers at the lowest rung of the labour hierarchy of those who migrate to the Gulf and S. E Asian migration corridor. They expose themselves to working and living in a world of precarity, in the desperate hope of lifting their families out of poverty. The Gulf countries account for half of India's 18 million emigrants whose official remittances make up nearly a fifth of the total 87 billion USD overall remittance flows into India. Braving indebtedness, exploitative recruitment agencies, the uncertainties of fraud about jobs, wage theft, bonded labour and dire living conditions, health neglect, hunger, sexual harassment and even torture, migrant workers from South Asia risk their all to escape the hopelessness of unemployment at home in order to sustain their families living there.

Special Section on Productive Hierarchies in Global Perspectives: Gendered Skill, Labor Control and Workplace Politics

From the nineteenth century, when the new social question of women's factory labor came to preoccupy the (middle-class) public imagination, to the present times of globalized labor chains, discourses on gendered labor have been at once fluid and constitutive of labor hierarchies. These discourses and social relations affirm their centrality within processes of industrialization and workplace restructuring as well as in development policy, urban formation, and indeed, nation building. Depending on the political economy of the labor market, the images of laboring women accordingly oscillated between, for instance, helpless and exploited victims to national heroines in the service of developmental projects. At the same time, since the early nineteenth-century, the steadily accumulating social reform, labor inspection, or social scientific accounts of women's paid and unpaid labor testified to states’ and employers’ growing comfort with hiring what was and is still, in many ways, a cheap, easily exploitable category of workers, one whose profitability increased the more precarious their employment became. Such discourses and labor control practices were deeply racialized and classed. On the other side of the public imagination and employer's surveillance, women who engaged in paid work sometimes appropriated the discourses and reshaped the practices that were used to characterize their labor and judge their choices.

An Approximation of Freedom: On-demand Therapy and the Feminization of Labor

Platform labor and gig work have become key sites for understanding a nascent "future of work" hallmarked by informalization and digitization. A growing body of research emphasizes how experiences of platform work are mediated not only by algorithms and user interfaces, but also by gender, race, local cultures as well as labor hierarchies. Drawing from ongoing ethnographic research on the digital transformation of healthcare, we show how therapists' experiences of platform labor are centrally shaped by the historical and ongoing feminization of mental health work. Platforms reinscribe feminized labor conditions that are pervasive in the healthcare industry, and yet platform labor appears as 'useful' to some therapists as they navigate a set of precarious career choices fundamentally structured by feminization. We use the analytic of the stopgap to describe platforms' two-fold reproduction of the status quo: first by offering an approximation of freedom to individual workers, helping to forestall a crisis of unsustainable work conditions; and second by reinscribing the same logics of exploitation in order to make labor scalable. This stopgap analytic reorients the focus away from the impact of the platforms technologies as such, towards the conditions that make stopgap solutions necessary for survival. It also points towards the importance of intervening in the conditions of exclusion and exploitation that help to create a market for platform stopgaps.

Review: Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers, by Eli Revelle Yano Wilson

Review: <i>Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers</i>, by Eli Revelle Yano Wilson

Anti-Blackness, Black Geographies, and Racialized Depopulation in Coalfield Appalachia from 1940 to 2000

AbstractIn this article, I investigate the ways that anti-Blackness has shaped coalfield Appalachia's human geographies. I draw on Black Studies and Black geographies literature to inform my theorization of anti-Blackness. Beginning with the question of why Black people left Appalachia in greater numbers than their white neighbors, I find that Black people left the mountains largely due to the unequal effects of deindustrialization. Black communities faced a racialized hierarchy of labor in the coal mines, racialized exposure to hazards and environmental risk, and the pull of other places with friends, family, and better jobs. I argue that the experiences of Black communities in the coalfields illustrate the supposition in Black geographies literature that anti-Blackness shapes human geographies by reproducing assumptions that Black people are aspatial, as in “not producing and making space.” I conclude with a brief analysis of the narratives that white people tell about Appalachian whiteness and identity, and I argue that Black people continue to be deemed out of place in dominant narratives about the region.

The 2022 World Cup and Migrants' Rights in Qatar: Racialised Labour Hierarchies and the Influence of Racial Capitalism

AbstractSince winning the bid to host the 2022 World Cup, the Qatari government has channelled billions of dollars into infrastructural development to prepare for the tournament, which has ramped up the country's already high reliance on migrant labour. The international spotlight on migrant labour abuse has also become more intense as the date of the event approaches. Yet, human rights discourses surrounding World Cup 2022 continue to paint a simplistic and incomplete picture of migrant labour in the Gulf, where racism and its correctives are defined through the white gaze, with undercurrents of Orientalism and Islamophobia. In contrast, we offer a historical and transnational framework for understanding contemporary racialised labour and immigration systems in the Gulf. Effectively improving everyday life for migrant workers in the Gulf requires engaging both local stakeholders and the multiple actors and institutions—both inside and outside Qatar—involved in reproducing these systems.

Making and Reading World Literature in a Pandemic

Abstract This essay intervenes in a debate about world literature that pits commodity circulation against normativity and literature’s causal force. By taking into account the history of book production and circulation as intimately linked with the history of global capitalism, this essay reads Severance (2018) by Ling Ma as a critique of the logic of global logistics and its labor relations. Reading the novel during a pandemic ironically draws attention to the reader’s own position in this global labor hierarchy, highlighting that the novel itself necessarily participates in the material injustices of global print capitalism. The essay argues that paying attention to book production and circulation – in the form of global supply chains, the world market’s global reach, and particularly the human relations this produces – is in fact not antithetical to, but instead a highly leveraged way of understanding literature’s potential for transformative agency.

Does formalization make a difference in artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM)? Insights from the Philippines

Policy-makers have looked at formalization as a critical step towards resolving the social and environmental challenges associated with informal gold mining. In contrast with informal gold mines, formal mines are believed to minimize miners’ negative impact on the environment, and to offer better working conditions. Based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative data gathered in Agusan del Sur, Philippines, we argue that this overly optimistic view conceals how, at least in the domain of working conditions, formal mining may replicate rather than alleviate some of the challenges typically associated with informal mining. In the Philippines, formalization seemingly fails to address some of the structural disadvantages facing workers at the lower end of the labour hierarchy. At the same time, we find that workers do have a clear preference for non-standardized forms of remuneration. Based on these observations, we argue (1) that formalization efforts need to take into account the needs and preferences of those involved; and (2) that these preferences do not always align with mainstream notions of decent work.

Who will man the rigs when we go?” transnational demographic fever dreams between Qatar and Texas

The educational project of producing engineers in Qatar is uniquely embedded in global capitalism, particularly as a field closely tied to the development of the oil and gas industry, the military and logistics spaces across the Gulf. Over the past two decades, U.S. universities based in the region have become significant spaces where new generations of managerial engineering labor are educated. Drawing on 18 months of institutional ethnographic research, I examine Texas A&amp;M University at Qatar’s (TAMUQ) role in managing the gender demographics of Qatari engineering labor and the experiences of students navigating these institutional mechanisms. The increasing number of women studying at Texas A&amp;M’s engineering branch campus are publicly celebrated by the university as the embodiment of progress in Qatar. At the same time, TAMUQ has worked to mitigate the feminization of engineering through outreach activities that present engineering as a masculine patriotic endeavor. To unpack these contradictory tendencies, I build on the feminist concept of “demographic fever dreams.” Through an examination of contradictory population-based anxieties about Qatari engineering students, I argue that a U.S. land-grant university is a participant and driver of fantasies and fears regarding the future of racialized and gendered labor hierarchies and fossil-fueled capitalism in the Gulf. In doing so, this article offers a grounded feminist intervention to examine the connections between transnational education, U.S. hegemony, and the fossil fuel industry.

“A Colony of Alien Capital”: French Investments, Polish Identity, and a Story of Murder in 1930s Warsaw

This article explores public reactions to a murder of a foreign managing director running a French-owned textile factory in interwar Poland. The 1932 killing provoked an intense discussion in the press, which sheds light on Polish identity and narrative strategies used by the elites to rationalize the consequences of Poland's peripheral economic status. The study is based on discourse analysis of over 200 press articles. I argue that commentators saw the killing as the result of French policies in the factory, and interpreted these in turn as the result of either the Polish government's negligence, influenced by Paris's diplomats, or of global capitalism. The most dramatic arguments framed French policies in Żyrardów as a form of colonialism or slavery. This framing was based on the journalists’ perception of French actions as transgressions of two imagined hierarchies: a geo-racial division of the world, and the local hierarchy of labor.

Racialized Obsolescence: Multinational Corporations, Labor Conflict, and the Closure of the Imperial Typewriter Company in Britain, 1974–1975

AbstractThis article will explore one of the most significant strikes by migrant workers in Britain during the 1970s and the subsequent company closure the year after their victory. In May 1974, a predominantly South Asian workforce at the Imperial Typewriter Company in Leicester went on strike over unequal bonus payments and discrimination in promotion. The shop stewards committee and Transport &amp; General Workers Union branch refused their support and the workforce split partly on racial lines. The strikers stayed on strike for almost 14 weeks until they emerged victorious. Though it appears as a central reference point in histories of migrant experience in Britain, the strike and closure has garnered little systematic, primary research. This article will fill this gap through the use of published sources and extensive unused archival deposits. During the strike part of the largely South Asian workforce sought to break with the racialized division of the workforce between different groups, skill levels, and work-types. Almost immediately after the strike ended in victory the company announced its intention to close down the vast majority of its British production. In Hull 1400 jobs were lost and in Leicester over 1600 were to go. This article shows that whilst the strike might have been the start of a politically, culturally, and intellectually significant period of significant protagonism by Britain's first-generation black and racialized working class, it also marked the beginning of the end of an industrial model dependent on the hyper-exploitation and racialized subordination of their labor. The closure was framed by contemporaries and subsequent historical accounts as a dispute marked more by the end of empire than worker obsolescence. As an article in the Guardian on the closure of the plants was put it in January 1975, it was ‘The day that Imperial&amp;s empire fell'. Yet it might be more accurate to understand the strike as an early premonition of the globalisation of manufacturing production which was to emerge strongly in the 1980s and 1990s. The experience of Imperial Typewriters highlights the central importance of racialized labour hierarchies and immigrant counter-militancy in post-war Britain. The Imperial Typewriter Company provides a case study of how worker resistance to labour intensive modes of capital accumulation, in relatively low capital intensive industries, during a global crisis of capitalist profitability, was followed by the decision of a multinational corporation to immediately transfer its production overseas. The closure of Imperial Typewriters therefore offers a means to reconceptualize how we understand the 1970s as a period of interlocking crises, as well as the major shift of power from labour to multinational capital which emerged in its wake. The findings of this article indicate that British workers were significantly disempowered before the electoral victory of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Recentering labor conflict in the history of technological obsolescence can offer alternative perspectives on why the British left and trade unions were unable to resist the rise of neoliberalism.

The problem of defining the women’s status in sugar-refining industry: “woman” – “half-worker” – “worker” (on an example of sugar factories of Kyiv province, 1880s–1900s)

This article regards the problem of defining the women’s status in the sugar-refining industry of the Russia Empire post-reform period. Based on the cases of sugar factories of Kyiv province during the 1880s–1905s, the author illustrates a complicated process of determining the role and the place of female laborers in the professional structure of industrial institutions which relate to this type of industry. Due to the fact that women had been recruited to unqualified parts of the working class (in the majority of cases), they remained at the bottom of the hierarchy of industrial labor. In contrast to men-laborers, who were distributed by the qualification parameter and professional skill (qualified/unqualified labor force), women-laborers were distributed by the gender parameter. Based on the archival materials of the factory inspection funds and in-factory documentation, it was found that working women were most often identified into the category “women” (“zhenschina”), less often as “part-time workers” (“polurabochaya”), and even less often as “workers” (“rabochaya”). It is possible to say that such division differed significantly from the distribution among the male part of the working class (“rabochiy/polurabo- chiy”). After all, a woman working in an industrial space was generally perceived not as a full-fledged unit of labor but as a supplement to qualified male labor. However, the model proposed by the author of this study: “woman” – “semi-worker” – “worker”, opened a different angle, according to which a woman’s professional position was not clearly fixed and could de facto change, regardless of the type of the performed work (qualified or unqualified). As a result, all these sources and evidence allow us to state that the period of industrialization and modernization provided for women (though not significant) a space for opportunities to realize their own work.

Constructing the Racial Hierarchy of Labor: The Role of Race in Occupational Prestige Judgments*

Sociologists of culture are interested in processes of valuation, such as the way we value the division of labor. Typically measured through occupational prestige, prior research on this topic has largely neglected the potential role of race in the construction of the status hierarchy. This study asks whether and how race shapes judgments of occupational prestige, drawing on key insights from the sociology of race and ethnicity (Whiteness as a credential, strategic assimilation) to test key predictions about racial composition and a person’s own racial identity in this process. Combining data from the 2012 General Social Survey with federal administrative data, I find that Whiter jobs are, in fact, seen as more prestigious, even after taking into account an occupation’s level of required education/training, pay, industry, and gender composition. Further analyses demonstrate that this pattern is primarily driven by White and Asian raters and by raters with a college degree. Overall, then, this study indicates that the racial segregation of occupations impacts not only wages but also the status they confer to their incumbents.

Reflection on Labour Hierarchies in Peacekeeping: A Study on the Operational Experiences of Military Peacekeepers

ABSTRACT Why do the attitudes of United Nations military peacekeepers towards peacekeeping shift after their deployment from positive to negative ones and how do labour hierarchies influence this shift? Using surveys with military peacekeepers gathered within a professional military education (PME) context, we conducted an exploratory pilot study about individual attitudes towards UN peacekeeping operations (UNPKOs) after deployment. We found that a majority changed their opinion about UNPKOs as an effective tool for peacebuilding from positive to negative. Specifically, we found that 82% of troops from the Global South changed their perceptions from positive to negative after deployment; while 59% of Global North peacekeepers did not change their perceptions. This shift was on account of enduring command and control challenges, problems with analysing intelligence, and, the growing demands of robustness to protect civilians, which increasingly place peacekeepers from the Global South at the risk of armed attacks and under scrutiny for underperformance. Findings urge scholars and policy-makers to address the problem of labour hierarchies in the political economy of peacekeeping as a significant source of misalignment between the perceptions and experiences of troops from the Global South and the growing expectations of performance from them.

Labour and the temporalities of Indian design and construction

This article examines discourses of time and temporality in architectural design and construction in India’s National Capital Region (NCR). Working with data gathered from fifteen months of ethnographic research in the construction industry in NCR between 2012 and 2013, the article argues that intermingled discourses of past, present, and future in construction serve to perpetuate labour hierarchies and accumulation in design. It calls for architects and designers to critically analyse the socio-economic and political workings of their own production chains, and to pay attention to the nuances through which power operates in the profession.

‘Mr Wakefield’s Speaking Trumpets’: Abolishing Slavery and Colonising Systematically

ABSTRACT This essay examines the significance of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of ‘systematic colonisation’ within the transition from Caribbean slavery to settler colonisation to reveal the sequential relationship of these two imperial systems. In the context of industrialisation and social unrest, the anti-slavery movement performed an important purpose for Britain’s ruling classes by simultaneously accruing moral authority and sanctioning oppressive new forms of disciplined labour, including the treatment of Australian convicts as slaves. During the ‘ameliorative’ 1820s phase of the anti-slavery movement, experimental colonial schemes combined both abolitionist principles and pro-slavery interests, particularly visible in the form of arguments against free labour and the advocacy of racial, as well as class, labour hierarchies. Wakefield’s theory embodied principles of labour discipline drawn from the plantation, allied to new techniques of land commoditization, offering a solution to the looming problem of abolition. These principles were invoked in debating the emancipation bill introduced in May 1833, as all sides agreed on the need for freed slaves to work for wages; they were subsequently applied in the Caribbean after emancipation by planters attempting to maintain productivity during and beyond the apprenticeship period. After 1833, the abolitionists’ zeal could be turned to other causes, and reformers seeking to end transportation and develop the settler colonies deployed an entwined discourse of anti-slavery and systematic colonisation.

Hometown Prison: Whiteness, Safety, and Prison Work in Upstate New York State

ABSTRACTMass incarceration has been shown to be a force of racializations and class inequality in US life, but little literature has focused on the lives of prison guards. Highlighting the lived experiences of prison guards at two state maximum security prisons in Elmira, New York, a small multiracial city in central New York State, this article uses Cedric Robinson's notion of racial capitalism to show how prison expansion unfolds in New York State at the end of the twentieth century. Guard labor includes both the physical work of control and of basic social reproduction and is done by people who are connected to the cultures, histories, and political economies in which they were raised, what Elmirans often call one's “hometown.” I examine prison guards’ narratives of their racial encounters inside and outside the prison, their sense of their racialized selves, and their relationship to what they see as often boring, violent, and stigmatized work. I show how the expansion of the carceral state over the past forty years, the period most often referred to as mass incarceration, maintains Fordism's labor hierarchies in a retooled racialization: as jailer and jailed. [prisons, whiteness, carceral state, racial capitalism, post‐Fordism]