Labor Movement Research Articles

Reaching into the Community to Interpret Labor History

Reaching into the Community to Interpret Labor History

Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank

Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank

Editor’s Corner

Editor’s Corner

Social Policy Development Revisited: The Interplay between Push and Pull Factors in the Indonesian Healthcare Expansion

Established theories of social policy development, such as industrialisation and power resources, have been extensively used to explain the expansion of social policy, predominantly in developed economies. We argue that they may not always be applicable in the Global South. Our article examines multiple factors at play in Indonesia’s healthcare policy expansion using qualitative content analysis of historical sources, literature, and nine interviews with key policy architects. Using the pull-and-push factor model, we examined the interactions between policy entrepreneurs and centre-right political parties in creating national healthcare policy architecture and expansion. Our findings confirm that the window of opportunity for expansion was augmented when the political party of the ruling government experienced a decline in public trust, while clientelistic motives among elites facilitated the reform process. Drawing the lesson from Indonesia, we contend push prevails over the pull factors (labour movement and cross-class alliances) in social policy development.

From hatred to hope: Emotions, memory and the German labour movement in the late-nineteenth century

Over the past few years, scholars from a broad range of disciplines have started to explore the role that emotions play in the collective memory of social movements. Against this backdrop, they have proposed that activists do not necessarily commemorate failed struggles by drawing on negative emotions such as suffering and grief. As a case in point, the interdisciplinary literature has drawn attention to the fact that the historical labour movement commemorated even events that ended in bloodshed and defeat, such as the Paris Commune of 1871, through performances and writings that evoked feelings of hope and joy. Analysing commemorative practices by the German labour movement in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article shows that Commune memory differed considerably in Germany. In a first step, the article shows that during the two decades following the Commune’s bloody demise, German socialists remembered the Paris Commune by drawing on hatred, anger, and grief – not hope or joy. In a second step, the article demonstrates that while the 1890s did see the rise of memory practices that emphasized hope, this was a peculiar kind of hope largely detached from the historical event that was commemorated. By the turn of the century, the German labour movement had established a memory tradition that saw the Commune as a painful but necessary step in the forward march of the movement. In a short conclusion, the article explores some of the reasons why memory traditions by the German labour movement differed from the pattern detected elsewhere. In so doing, it shows that the change in the affective repertoire corresponded to a change in the political needs of the movement. The conclusion thus points to how the historical examples discussed here contributes to a better understanding of role of emotions in social movements more generally.

Networked Unionism: Reframing the Labour Movement and Starbucks Workers United’s Hybrid Organising Practices


 
 
 Union organising is surging in the United States, especially among younger workers in the service industries. This article examines this uptick in labour organising through a case study of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU). I studied this campaign from March to December 2022 using a variety of online and offline methods: conducting twenty-three in-depth interviews with SBWU organisers; attending strikes, direct actions, and planning meetings; and following these groups on social media. This study addresses two main questions: How are SBWU organisers communicating unionisation with their co-workers and to broader publics? And, how are social media influencing workers’ organising practices? Despite claims that social media are “a great radicalier”, this study demonstrates how workers were politicised by their material conditions in an industrialising workplace. While media helped organisers amplify their messages and recruit new members, the social relationships among organisers were central to SBWU’s early growth. By detailing how organisers navigated the contradictions within networked media, this study shows how worker-led campaigns like SBWU are reshaping the structure and composition of the US labour movement.
 
 

Jenny Carson. A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice.

In A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice, Jenny Carson puts Black women laundry workers and union organizers at the center of US history. Both hand and “power” laundries saw their heydays in the United States from the 1910s to the 1950s, in the years before household washing machines became the norm. “Mini-hells,” power laundries were massive factories where women sorted through disgusting dirty laundry; lifted heavy, wet piles of clothing; ironed sheets, drapery, bedding, and other hard-to-handle items; then sorted it for delivery—all in hot, humid conditions for ten or more hours per day. Although the work was extremely difficult, Black women preferred it to domestic work. The anonymity provided by the factory setting—becoming “proletarianized,” in Joe Trotter’s terminology—was better than working under white women’s microscopes. Carson tells us that the 1930s proved the pinnacle of what was a cross-race union movement. Building on the grassroots efforts of the communist Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), the National Negro Congress under A. Philip Randolph’s leadership, and a burgeoning Left-leaning, Black-oriented labor network, Charlotte Adelmond, Dollie Robinson, Jessie Taft Smith, Beatrice Shapiro Lumpkin, and Noah Walter, among others, pushed the larger labor movement to recognize the connections between race and economic exploitation and to organize purposefully to combat them. In doing so, Carson corrects the narrative that the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) was “the driving force behind the unionization of New York City’s laundry workers” (6). This alone is an important contribution to the literature, but Carson’s detailed study explains how Black women worked with white men at the local and national levels; how they “pursued a civil rights agenda that included equal pay for equal work”; and how, despite its shortcomings, industrial unionism proved a better model than craft unionism for organizing laundry workers (7). By the end of the 1940s, the white men who led the ACWA opted for labor “stability,” as historians have argued about other Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions. Carson claims that that choice privileged white working-class men over the more radical organizing drives that were crucial to building cross-race alliances, bringing Black workers into the labor movement, and keeping the focus on the economic component of racism. By 1950, the very architects of those more radical, left-wing, race-focused drives, including Adelmond and other Black activists, were ousted from the ACWA.

The structural power of workers in influencing energy transitions: Examples of the Green Bans (Australia) and the Lucas Plan (United Kingdom)

Energy transitions represent a process of economic restructuring that will change regional economies and patterns of employment. In many countries, this process is occurring in a context of industrial action, cost-of-living crises, and concerns about jobs being left ‘stranded’ by decarbonisation. This commentary piece follows recent scholarship to illuminate the importance of work and workers in contemporary energy transitions. There is a need to make space for those pushing for better working conditions and to find new areas of overlap between such demands and wider policies of decarbonisation. To do so, this piece stresses the importance of the structural power of workers in building links between the labour movement and those calling for energy transitions. It details two historical cases of worker action in the 1970s. First, the Green Bans movement in New South Wales, Australia, demonstrates how labour might be withdrawn at key points of pollution or environmental destruction. Second, the Lucas Plan in the United Kingdom, illustrates how workers can devise new forms of work. Whilst grounded in specific historical contexts, such episodes provide important examples of how those calling for energy transitions might amplify the narratives and role of workers in decarbonisation.

Historians and the Decade of Centenaries in Modern Ireland

The Irish ‘Decade of Centenaries’ is, at last, drawing to a close, ending the ‘interminable round of national soul-searching’ which one prominent historian warily anticipated in 2013.1 The final major event to be commemorated is the Civil War of 1922–3, when the Irish republican movement split bitterly and violently over the terms of the treaty granting the southern part of Ireland partial independence from Britain. As it turns out, the government in charge of overseeing that commemoration is a coalition made up of the two principal political parties that emerged from the aftermath of that civil war. Where for a century these parties had formed the binaries of the Irish political division, now their peaceful cooperation in government could be seen as proof of the ‘end of history’, Irish-style. Even erstwhile political enemies – whose ancestors one hundred years ago executed and assassinated each other – could unite in a shared project of ‘inclusive’ and ‘ethical’ commemoration informed by an expert advisory panel made up of prominent academic and public historians. Their unprecedented political cooperation would be encapsulated by the peaceful swapping of the position of Taoiseach (Prime Minister) half-way through the government's term. The third great strand of the Irish Revolution, the labour movement, was fortuitously represented by the election to the Irish Presidency in 2007 of Michael D. Higgins, an academic sociologist and former Labour Party TD (member of parliament). Casann an roth, as Higgins declared in one of his many addresses during the ‘Decade’, as it is colloquially known in Irish history parlance.2 The wheel turns, and this time had come full circle, repairing the fractures in the national movement and restoring national political unity.

Social Movements and Development

Social movements are of critical importance in bringing about social change nay development. Social movements are large groupings of individuals or organizations that focus on specific political or social issues. Deprived groups consisting of peasants, tribals, Dalits, backward classes, youth, and women have been organizing themselves to fight against inequalities, discrimination, and deprivation. The United States has a long tradition of social movements that have sparked major changes in bringing about social change and development. The movements have been of various types as labor, civil rights, Black nationalism, anti-globalization, environmental, etc. The French Revolution in the 18th century can be termed as a radical movement which brought about social change and development not only in France but also in Europe and in other nations. In the 19th century Europe, labor movements were based on Marxism, that is, based on the class struggle. Unification of Germany in 1990 and the collapse of Soviet Union are the two important events in Europe which brought about development in Europe. India too has witnessed several movements as Backward Classes, Nationalist, Dalits, Caste, Youth, Tribal, Farmers’, Environmental, and Women’s movements. The social movements as collectivities attempting to change the social order cannot be analyzed simply in terms of success or failure. Some have succeeded to reach the desired goals and others have failed. Failure may come as a result of ruthless suppression of the movement or through widespread apathy. A movement may wither away because very few take it seriously, and it does not develop enough power to force its program on society. Success is most apparent when a movement manages to have its power legitimized as authority.

A timeline of freedom of movement in the European Economic Area.

The European Economic Area (EEA) provides a common market for goods, labour, services, and capital. Promoting integration between countries through the free movement of labour, or more generally persons, pre-dates the previous forms of the EEA. However, during the Southern and Eastern Expansions of the European Union, there have been transition agreements on persons, designed to restrict immigration. Opening up labour markets to the new member states with significantly lower GDP per capita than existing states, has been contentious. This is why the use of transition agreements have permitted periods which existing members can limit immigration. Not all existing member states impose restrictions, and during the Eastern Enlargements, the restrictions were imposed for varying lengths of time by different existing members up to a maximum of seven years. During the transition agreement, the economies of new members and existing members can converge, which is ultimately designed to limit the pull factor of migration. In this note, we provide a concise resource of the timeline of the expansion of full free movement of persons for countries in the EEA and Switzerland.

Het transnationale begin van de Nederlandse mijnwerkersvakbonden. Een voorbeeld van de nationalisering van arbeidersbewegingen (1907-1926)

The Transnational Origins of Dutch Miners’ Unionism. A Case-Study in the Nationalization of Labour Movements. Several authors have argued that from the late nineteenth century onwards labour markets became increasingly organized and regulated nationally, by national social security arrangements, collective agreements, systems of labour exchange and migration control. As a consequence, members of the working classes began to consider themselves, and to be considered, as national citizens, and labour movements became nationalized. The First World War marked a watershed in this process. In this article, I want to explore to what extent this development influenced attitudes of the two Dutch miners’ unions, of which the originally inter-confessional one would become the most prominent. Until the First World War labour markets in the Limburg coalmining district and in the adjacent German Aachen district were fully integrated, and so were the nascent miners’ unions. On the eve of the First World War the Dutch inter-confessional union even became a branch of the German Christliche Gewerkverein. This all changed after the War, until in 1922 all ties with the Germans were severed, and the soon to become officially Catholic union reoriented on the Dutch state and the Limburg region. This article describes the transnational origins of the miners’ unions against the background of the cross-border labour market in the borderlands, and the effects of the territorialisation of labour markets on the originally transnational orientation of the unions after the First World War.

Communes and Other Mobile Commons

The article is the introduction to the special issue of Theoretical Practice which is dedicated to “the communes and other mobile commons”. The editors of the issue explain how we could conceptualize various attempts to create communes in terms of mobile commons and mobile commoning. Since the exemplary case of the Paris Commune many social movements – urban, rural, indigenous, feminist, or migrant – experimented with communes as alternatives to state and capitalism and redefined in this way the meaning of spatial practices, work and the labor movement. Against the assumption that the commune is a necessary localized and sedentary political form, the authors who contributed to the special issue propose to grasp it from the perspective of subversive mobilities: as kinetic entities. The introduction presents the common ground on which these proposals meet each other and come into dialogue. Various models of mobile commons described here – communal, insurgent, liminal, temporary, latent, care, fugitive, maroon, black, indigenous, undercommons, uncommons, and many more – testify of a recent mobility turn in the theories of the commons.

Situating platform gig economy in the formal subsumption of reproductive labor: Transnational migrant domestic workers and the continuum of exploitation and precarity

In conversation with critical platform and labor studies, which tend to focus on drivers and food delivery workers, this article seeks to expand our understanding of the platform gig economy from the perspective of reproductive labor and migrant domestic workers. The exploitation of women’s unpaid and low-paid reproductive work has persisted throughout various stages of capitalist development. Migrant domestic workers’ underpaid reproductive labor becomes an essential site for primitive capital accumulation and the production of the labor force in the contemporary neoliberal global economy. Building upon analyses of the historical and contemporary circumstances of transnational migrant domestic workers in Canada, I argue that digital labor platforms become a technology-enabled, capital-driven force in the larger commodification and exploitation process of migrant workers’ reproductive labor, and such processes are underpinned by entangled structural and institutional forces of the uneven capitalist development, racism, patriarchy, and the state’s discriminatory (im)migration and labor policies. The article suggests that understanding the seeming prevalence of platform work should be situated in the continuous formal subsumption of reproductive labor and the class immobility of migrant domestic workers, and labor activism and movements should contest the entwined power dominations beyond merely demanding regulations over platforms.

Adjustment of self-initiated and organizational expatriates: The moderating role of cross-cultural training.

Globalization and the international labor movement made the ability to work anywhere globally. These individuals are usually organizational expatriates (OEs) deployed to overseas assignments by their employers or self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) who choose to relocate and work in a foreign country. Therefore, this study examines and contrasts the variations in cross-cultural adjustment (CCA) between Chinese SIEs and OEs in Pakistan. Furthermore, it aims to understand how cross-cultural training (CCT) influences the adaptation of Chinese SIEs and OEs. Data were obtained from 35 Chinese expatriates with 17 SIEs and 18 OEs employing a qualitative technique and were analyzed via thematic analysis in MAXQDA 20. According to the study, both SIEs and OEs face distinct hurdles to their CCA in Pakistan, including cultural taboos, language obstacles, and work variations. While numerous aspects that will favorably affect their CCA, including the accessibility of necessities, the friendliness of the Pakistani people, and the brethren relations between Pakistan and China, assist them in making a smooth transition to life in Pakistan. Furthermore, the results indicate that the mediating role of pre-departure CCT and the host country mentors' support and facilitations acquired through online resources contribute to both Chinese SIEs and OEs' CCA in Pakistan.

Anarchism, colonialism and the question of “race” in Portugal (c.1890-1930)

ABSTRACT This article explores, through a close reading of newspapers and publications connected to the Portuguese libertarian movement, anarchist discourses and practices around understandings of “race” in Portugal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A contribution is made both to studies of Lusophone anarchism as well as broader labour movement history where analyses of the interconnections between race and colonialism have been sparse. Portuguese anarchist understandings of race are placed within the context of broader ideas on internationalism within the anarchist movement, contemporary theories of the inheritance of racial characteristics and contestations against notions of nationhood and nationalism. The specific context of Portuguese colonialism and the development of anthropology in the country form the backdrop against which anarchist ideas are analysed. The article argues that while anarchism disrupted certain tropes within racial and colonialist discourse, it also reinforced some cultural categories and rigidified understandings of race, culture and social development.

The Liverpool Dockers and Reclaim the Streets: Creating Spaces of Solidarity

ABSTRACT This essay examines the unlikely alliance forged between environmentalist group Reclaim the Streets and a group of Liverpool dockworkers. I propose that excavating historical collaborations between the environmentalist and labour movements offers ways forward for thinking about solidarity. The Liverpool dockers’ dispute was one of the longest running in the history of British industrial relations; however, it has received little academic attention, compared to The Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985, for example. The attention it has received primarily discusses the, admittedly significant, internationalism of the campaign. But the dockworkers’ alliance with Reclaim the Streets is rarely commented on. Using interviews I conducted with activists and dockworkers between 2019 and 2022, and interviews conducted in 2004 by those involved in the dispute, I offer a way of reading this collaboration by attending to its spatial politics and intersections with performance, thereby pointing to the generative character of these political relations.

The Revue International Anarchiste's World Survey (1924–1925)

The Revue International Anarchiste's World Survey (1924–1925)

Reproductive Rights at the Bargaining Table

Reproductive Rights at the Bargaining Table Maggie Carter (bio), Dee Dunn (bio), Rebecca Kolins Givan (bio), Rebekah Nelson (bio), Sara Nelson (bio), and Martha Valadez (bio) The following conversation on labor's response to Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization took place on October 19, 2022. The panel was organized by the Labor Campaign for Single Payer. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Click for larger view View full resolution Rebecca Kolins Givan: Abortion is healthcare, and healthcare is a workers' issue. What do you do when your employer controls healthcare access? Conversations about the despicable state of access to abortion and other reproductive care have to lead us to bigger conversations about the inherent flaws in our healthcare system, and what we must do as workers and as a labor movement about that. Sara Nelson: The rollback of abortion rights is not just a healthcare issue. It's not just a choice issue. It's fundamentally an issue of freedom, humanity, and dignity. What can we do to help maintain reproductive rights at the bargaining table? We have to understand that taking away a woman's right to access healthcare, a woman's right to make her own decisions in her life, is taking half of the population off the table. And it allows the boss to divide people along lines that weaken the working class and make it harder for people to organize. In my union, the flight attendants I represent may take off in one state with one set of rights and land in another state with another set of rights. [End Page 39] They're in danger every single day that someone could deny them the right to basic healthcare, to save their lives, to make their own decisions. When I first started doing union work, I had the honor of interviewing the number-one flight attendant at United Airlines. She flew for almost sixty years. She flew all over the world in the 1950s and talked with aircraft manufacturers, governments, and civil aviation bodies, to get evacuation standards and safety equipment onto planes. She had an amazing life, but what she really wanted to talk to me about was something that I had never experienced because I was born in 1973. She wanted to tell me about what it was like when women had to have illegal abortions in order to keep their jobs as flight attendants or to get out of abusive relationships. She would have to help them do that. Though she did not believe in abortion herself, she understood her duty to represent these women and get them to safety. So we can't just talk about this as another issue on the ballot. We have to understand that this is an attack on our very right to organize, an attack on our ability to build power for the working class, an attack on our ability to put a check on the unchecked capitalism that is controlling our politics and sending us on the road to fascism. It is fundamental that we fight with everything that we have for the rights of women to make their own decisions in their own lives. Click for larger view View full resolution Dee Dunn: I'm a member of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, the women and men who build and maintain America's railroads. The United Passenger Rail Federation Women's Caucus has gone on record as being 100 percent pro-choice. Even though some of us have beliefs in our personal lives that will prevent us from getting an abortion under most circumstances, we believe that reproductive healthcare decisions, like all healthcare decisions, should be made between patients and their doctors without interference from the government or any other outside force. The fight for the right to abortion is part of a greater fight for reproductive and healthcare justice, which also includes the fight for singlepayer healthcare, universal child care, a living wage, and affordable housing. All of these factors influence the ability of a working woman to raise a child [End Page 40] or to decide not to go ahead with a pregnancy because the child...

Ricardo Flores Magón. Un radical en la Rotonda de los Hombres Ilustres

The article examines the 1945 state funeral of Ricardo Flores Magón, a prominent figure in the Mexican labor movement, and his inclusion in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men, during president Manuel Ávila Camacho’s administration. This study delves into the symbolic analysis of state funerals within the scope of cultural history, and reflects on how this type of rituals are fundamental to the transformation of the labor movement and the focus on national unity. Furthermore, I explore how the funerary ritual, at least in this case, can be used as an interpretive framework to understand the symbolic construction of a ‘civic-religious-heroic’ imaginary.