Labor Politics Research Articles

Discussing the “Most Important Question of the 20th Century”: W. E. B. Du Bois and the ILO’s Efforts for a Regulation of “Native Labor” Politics, 1919–1926

Upon its foundation in 1919, the International Labour Organization (ILO) sought to improve the working conditions of workers all over the world. Still, its work and methods were shaped by strong imperial interests that hindered the immediate emancipation of colonial workers. In this article, we study the ILO’s engagement with colonial “native labor questions” from 1919 to 1926. Following the historian Sandrine Kott, we understand international organizations as “spaces in which one can reveal the existence of networks of relationships and systems of circulation.” In this paper, we therefore analyze how activists used international organizations as a forum for advocacy of their interests. By looking at the personal entanglements between the civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, the British Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, and League of Nations and ILO staff, we seek to understand the different motives and strategies behind the negotiations for an improvement of colonial labor politics and the reasons for their ultimate failure. During the first years, some of the activist groups, particularly the British Anti-Slavery Society, could already count on their personal connections into the international sphere of the organization and exerted their influence through these networks. More marginalized actors, such as the Pan-African movement around Du Bois, argued for the need of direct representation on the expert committee based on factors of race and gender. When the ILO’s efforts culminated in the 1926 foundation of a Committee of Experts for Native Labor, however, most of the expert seats were filled by former colonial politicians, representing the interests of the imperial powers and not those of activists. Looking at these networking efforts during the early study of “Native Labor” in the ILO therefore allows us to understand the contested discourse on native labor in colonial contexts within the organization and the workings of the power structures in which the imperial networks took precedence.

Book Review: Hegemony and the Politics of Labour: Towards a Discourse Theory of Value in Contemporary Capitalism, by Simon Tunderman

Book Review: <i>Hegemony and the Politics of Labour: Towards a Discourse Theory of Value in Contemporary Capitalism</i>, by Simon Tunderman

Sí se puede: The enduring legacy of Mexico on wine and politics

Societal Impact StatementThe cultural significance of the grapevine is undeniable. However, we fail to acknowledge how the grapevine has and continues to influence the most pressing political questions of our time. From the beginning of the Conquest, Indigenous peoples were forced to plant the vine, Spain burned the vines Miguel Hidalgo used to teach the poor, and César Chávez and the Delano grape strike demanded justice for agricultural laborers. From the Grito de Dolores to Sí se puede, we demonstrate how the continuing relationship between Mexico and the grapevine influences debates surrounding labor, immigration, and human rights in the United States and throughout the world. To enhance the reach of this work, a Spanish language version of the paper is available in the Supporting Information (see Translation_ES).SummaryThe wild grapevine species (Vitis spp.) that comprise the pedigrees of rootstocks, the Americas as the source (and solution) to the Phylloxera crisis that decimated European vineyards, and California as a premier wine‐growing region are the topics that usually frame the history of grapes in North America. This Anglo‐American perspective ignores that domesticated grape varieties were first introduced to North America in what is now Mexico and the singular contributions of Mexican labor to the California wine economy that continue to influence politics. Here, we highlight the neglected history of grapevines in Mexico and argue that the politics of labor that played out during the Conquest never ceased and still shape debates surrounding immigration. Beginning with Hernán Cortés, Indigenous peoples were forced to plant grapevines and when they were successful, they were abruptly forbidden by Spain to grow grapes. This interference influenced Miguel Hidalgo, who taught the poor viticulture as a trade and who would lead the Mexican War of Independence and pay with his life. The grapevine continued its journey north to California, where Franciscans established the missions and cultivated the Mission grapes, which had lasting impacts on the genetics of grapevine varieties. Finally, it was the Delano grape strike that coalesced César Chávez and the United Farm Workers to demand justice for agricultural laborers that is the foundation of the California wine economy and still shapes the current political debate of immigration, labor, and human rights between the United States and Mexico.

The Politics of Labor and the Labor of Politics

The Politics of Labor and the Labor of Politics

Stuart Hall, the New Left, and the Labour Party

ABSTRACT This article examines the complex relationship between the New Left and the Labour Party in the United Kingdom during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Many existing accounts have for the most part focussed on the New Left’s ideational concerns. In contrast, we detail the New Left’s attitude to Labour politics, demonstrating that it was an issue that consumed its central figures, especially Stuart Hall, first editor of New Left Review, and its grassroots participants. We locate our analysis within the concept of ‘parallelism’: the extent to which figures on the New Left could hold an ambiguous position on Labour, one that might be simultaneously critical and supportive. We detail the New Left’s advocacy of nuclear disarmament: A particular focus for our empirical material concerns This Week, a daily bulletin produced by New Left Review at the Labour Party conference between 1960 and 1962. In our conclusion, we draw out the implications of our account for the historiography of both the New Left and the Labour Party. We emphasise the importance of political engagement within the New Left during the late 1950s and early 1960s in terms of an ongoing discussion about its relationship with the Labour Party.

Local Meanings of Peace: The Politics of Words and Emotional Labor among Civil Society Practitioners in Armenia and Turkey

Abstract Despite their long-lasting work in Armenia and Turkey, peacebuilding practitioners of civil society have an ambivalent relationship with the term peace and refrain from defining their role as peacebuilders. Informed by the anthropological research adopting the local turn in peace and conflict studies, we explore how civil society practitioners in Armenia and Turkey perceive the concept of “peace” (խաղաղություն or khaghaghutyun in Armenian and barış in Turkish) and how they position themselves regarding the meanings they attach to this term. In this paper, we present data collected through semi-structured interviews with civil society practitioners from both countries, investigating the perceptions and practices in the aftermath of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. We found that the flexibility of the term normalization in comparison to peacebuilding is preferred among civil society practitioners working for the Armenia-Turkey dialogue. We also show that the political context shapes local meanings of the word peace. While in Turkey, the authoritarian regime, restrictions on NGOs, and rise of ultranationalism make open advocacy for peace with Armenia difficult and risky, the war with Azerbaijan firmly structures where and how the word peace can be used in Armenia – even though it is not clear what is meant by it in either case. Finally, our research points out a neglected aspect of professionalism in this context and shows how it requires emotional labor to suppress enthusiasm and hope for peace. We close our paper with a call for further research among the youth and exploration of effective communication, alternative approaches, and terminologies that can foster meaningful dialogue and reconciliation without provoking divisive sentiments.

Book Review: The politics of migrant labour: Exit, Voice, and social reproduction by Gabriella Alberti and Devi Sacchetto

Book Review: <i>The politics of migrant labour: Exit, Voice, and social reproduction</i> by Gabriella Alberti and Devi Sacchetto

Epistemic Injustice in Budgetary Politics: A Response to Rachel Reeves's Mais Lecture

AbstractRachel Reeves's March 2024 Mais lecture was an exercise in tempering hope that Britain's threadbare public services would soon be restored to health. The message of restraint might prove to be early confirmation of Reeves's instinctive governing philosophy, but it also reflected the fact that she was called upon to speak in a context of epistemic injustice. Senior Labour politicians must always accept greater scrutiny of their fiscal policy pronouncements than their Conservative counterparts. Their statements are also susceptible to disinformation, such that what Labour's opponents insist its frontbench team are hiding from the electorate often gets treated as a more authentic account of its plans than anything Labour says for itself.

Seattle in Coalition: Multiracial Alliances, Labor Politics, and Transnational Activism in the Pacific Northwest, 1970–1999

Seattle in Coalition: Multiracial Alliances, Labor Politics, and Transnational Activism in the Pacific Northwest, 1970–1999

Seattle in Coalition: Multiracial Alliances, Labor Politics, and Transnational Activism in the Pacific Northwest, 1970–1999

Seattle in Coalition: Multiracial Alliances, Labor Politics, and Transnational Activism in the Pacific Northwest, 1970–1999

Parching for Principle: Hotel Boycotts in Regional Australia, 1901–20

This article serves as the first in-depth study of the nature, dynamics and growth of a set of consumer boycotts in early twentieth-century Australia. Labelled “beer strikes,” these targeted hotels over issues such as the price and quality of alcohol, food and accommodation, as well as the treatment of staff. The article examines how campaigners created and adapted a body of tactics and forms of organisation between 1901 and 1920, to the point where beer strikes became an established and recurring form of contestation. Identifying beer strikes as a primarily regional tactic, it also sheds new light on consumer activism outside of cities. It finds that beer strikes had continuities with other forms of working-class activism: making use of methods of organisation rooted in unions and in labour politics, and drawing on modern adaptions of ideas concerning “fair” prices and rightful compensation for work. It demonstrates that boycotts played a greater role in Australian working-class distributive and consumer struggles than has been previously acknowledged.

The Europeanization of Wage Policy and Its Consequences for Labor Politics: The Case of Ireland

This article investigates the transnational labor politics associated with the Europeanization of wage policy, based on process tracing of Irish minimum wage regulation reforms over the past two decades. The policy struggle in Ireland started as an employer-led domestic challenge to market-embedding regulation and was then affected by two EU interventions on wage policy: one with a de-regulatory orientation (during EU-IMF conditionality) and one with a re-regulatory one (with the approval of the EU minimum wage directive). Findings show that differences in collective action undertaken by employers and trade unions to influence wage policy at the national level can be explained by the intersection of each actor’s preferences toward market-constraining or liberalizing labor regulation and their access to supranational (EU-level) institutions and support. This analysis contributes to debates on how transnational opportunity structures can alter labor’s and employers’ local power resources and strategies.

Gramsci, Polanyi and the Labor Politics of Social Protection

Gramsci, Polanyi and the Labor Politics of Social Protection

Ambient citizenship and noise in the service economy: young people and the everyday politics of work

ABSTRACT This paper explores the informal citizenship practices of young service workers, and develops concepts of lived citizenship, ambient citizenship and political ‘noise’ into an analysis of the everyday politics of service labour. Drawing on interviews with young people working in retail, hospitality and call centres the paper examines the embodied interactions and relations of mutual reciprocity through which they experience and contest the power relations and gender inequalities of low-wage precarious work. The paper suggests ways of conceptualising the citizenship practices of young workers beyond the limited formal protections offered by the state, instead developing an analysis of the informal relationalities and political ‘noise’ of the service labour process.

The New Politics (and Political Science) of Workers’ Rights?: A Review Article

Abstract In this article, I review Daniel J. Galvin's Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers' Rights and situate it within a renewed scholarly interest in the politics of work and labor in the American politics subfield. I argue the book highlights several strengths and weaknesses of the literature, including the book’s attention to how America's highly polarized and fragmented governing system structures the politics of workers’ rights. Galvin’s book, I argue, also helps push the literature forward by encouraging scholars to think more deeply about the shifting institutional location of worker power, new and varying forms of worker organizations, and a set of co-constitutive problems faced by marginalized workers on and off the job. I conclude by suggesting the new wave of labor literature in the American politics subfield has underexplored implications for the growing research on democratic backsliding in the United States.

Guns, goons, and the waterfront priest: Remaking Manila's anti-communist docks in 1950

This article examines how early Cold War anti-communism transformed labor processes at the Port of Manila. In 1950 the threat of communism at the city's port gained the attention of the highest reaches of the US State Department. Shifting diplomatic discourses and a changing Cold War map imbued new meaning into trade union racketeering and Filipino dockworkers who were, it was dubiously argued, on the verge of joining the country's communists. Through archival analysis of diplomatic dispatches, intelligence reports, and newspaper sources, this article examines a series of spectacular events and covert political diplomacy. In particular it explains how an American Jesuit priest in Manila earned the trust of the State Department and played an outsized role in remaking pier-side labor politics. As concern grew in Washington, American diplomats covertly intervened to back the priest. In detailing how the piers staged global geopolitics, the article also situates these affairs in local political contexts to argue for a more nuanced understanding of anti-communism in Southeast Asia. Filipino trade union leaders and government officials colluded with but also subverted and remade American discourses and diplomacy to their own political and economic advantage.

Racial Fictions at Work in a Regional Plantation Complex

In this article, I argue for a local and regional focus on landscape racializations rather than a national lens for engaging with the Plantationocene. Racial formations on and around Indonesia’s plantations have emerged differently across regions and through varied colonial-era and contemporary land and labor politics. Inspired by diverse scholars’ historical and contemporary treatments of embodied and emplaced racialisms, I use a region in West Kalimantan Province (Indonesian Borneo) to argue that it is misleading to claim a national-level Plantationocene history relevant to all subnational regions. I then unpack racialized and gendered fictions deployed by state actors to justify the protracted political violence (1967–74) that led to the national state’s expropriation of land held by smallholders of Chinese and Chinese-Dayak descent in half the province. All seized land was reclassified as state land to mask its origins and redistributed to non-Chinese local people and transmigrants who worked the regional rubber plantation. This violent reracializing of the West Kalimantan landscape is the antithesis of the racialisms associated with plantation production in Java and Sumatra. Knowing this region-specific history can help in supporting contemporary struggles against entrenched patterns of racialized injustice.

Seattle in Coalition: Multiracial Alliances, Labor Politics, and Transnational Activism in the Pacific Northwest, 1970–1999. By Diana K. Johnson

<i>Seattle in Coalition: Multiracial Alliances, Labor Politics, and Transnational Activism in the Pacific Northwest, 1970–1999</i>. By Diana K. Johnson

Cultures of labour: aspiration, developmental futures and the materiality of memory after Chinese economic reform

ABSTRACT This article argues for attention to the affective investments that motivate working people’s life choices in contemporary China by tracing the materiality of the development of aspirations in a rapidly developing context. Turning to the work of Bernard Stiegler, the article contends that for working people, the demand to labour is based not just on the alienation of the means of production (savoir-faire), but also the means of living a good life (savoir-vivre), which is displaced into a future made knowable within the material world in the present. The article shows how the developmental standard-making that produces senses of progress and legitimizes aspiration, thus compelling economic action, is alienated within the materiality of working people’s rapidly changing worlds. By referencing these temporal displacements, developmental subjects assess their own presents by comparison, justifying difficult circumstances by making progress tangible. Understanding the mechanics of aspiration and cultures of labour is vital in light of critiques by labour geographers of the equation of labour agency with traditional, formalized labour politics, as there remains much work to be done to understand how and why people become workers in the first place.

Small work pleasures and two types of well‐being

AbstractDoes wage labor contribute to well‐being beyond providing an income? Well‐being can be understood in eudaimonic terms as the happiness derived from a socially valued life or in hedonic terms as the experience of pleasure. The eudaimonic–hedonic divide is replicated in competing progressive visions of the place of work in a good life. Laborist theories stress the centrality of paid work for a meaningful life. By contrast, for post‐work theories, pleasure is important for well‐being, and work is generally not expected to be pleasurable. Surprisingly, many of the participants in my study of diverse US job seekers described one or more of the jobs they had held as “fun.” Fun connotes enjoyment without deeper meaning, a hedonic rather than eudaimonic account of nonfinancial work rewards. What made a job fun were small work pleasures: enjoyment of the tasks and feeling competent at them, enjoyment of the physical work environment, or enjoyment of social relations on the job. These small pleasures could be found in both standard and nonstandard, precarious jobs. This study indicates the need for a labor politics that improves hedonic well‐being on the job. It also expands an “anthropology of the good” to include ordinary enjoyment.