From April 22–25, 1999, the Organization of American Historians held its ninety-second annual meeting in Toronto, Canada. The theme was “State and Society in North America: Processes of Social Power and Social Change.” More than seven hundred scholars were on the program, an impressive showing; and for Canadian historians, whose community is comparatively small, a source of envy. The participants were, of course, overwhelmingly American and US specialists, but many Canadian colleagues presented papers or attended, as did other international scholars, including Americanists based overseas. While most sessions were held at a downtown hotel, organizers made use of local cultural venues and historic sites. They scheduled a session on the Underground Railroad, for instance, at St. Lawrence Hall, site of the first meeting of the Colored Free Men in Canada and an antislavery lecture by Frederick Douglas.

The aim of this paper is to analyze how Brazilian trade unions are using social memory as a tool to build up workers' collective identities, in an attempt to fight the fragmentation resulting from the impact of the industrial restructuring of the 1990s. We will draw upon two ongoing programs conducted by the ABC Metal Workers Union (SMABC) and the Oil Workers Union of Brazil's state oil company Petrobras (Sindipetro). The SMABC and Sindipetro have recently been addressing the issue of workers memory with social and public projects. These projects are building up memories, which in spite of being institution-based are also collective, framed by the unions through the use of new types of communication and electronic media.

From the 1980s to the 2000s around much of the world, organized labor scrambled to adjust to two international regimes, both propelled by the hegemonic United States and its allies: neoliberal economies and neoliberal democracies. The first framework undercut the power of unions by discouraging interference with market mechanisms from either social actors or governments. The second code of conduct hampered labor by prescribing low-intensity democracies with little mass mobilization or socioeconomic redistribution. The second model sustained the first. Thus weakened working-class movements wrestled with the dilemma of being largely unable to use democratic mechanisms to alter prejudicial economic policies.

Over the past few decades, as restless capital has moved about the world looking for cheaper production sites, labor campaigns have looked across borders for support. In a world where threats of capital mobility and outsourcing strategies are used to push wages and working conditions ever lower, local activists have called on international allies to insist that multinationals improve the treatment of workers—especially in the developing world, where local governments often seem unwilling or unable to protect their citizens at work and where workers on their own have little leverage.

Labor history and public history have had a long relationship in the United States, as James Green argues in Taking History to Heart, dating back to Progressive-era historians like Mary Ritter and Charles A. Beard. Labor historians like Phillip Foner, who identified with the “Old Left,” made labor history public history through ties to labor organizations and the Communist Party. Then, during the 1960s, historians identified with the “New Left” and inspired by E.P. Thompson, worked to extend social history and working-class history “from the bottom up” beyond the confines of the academy, even as they shifted their focus from the institutional histories of unions and political parties, to make the history of “ordinary people” and “everyday life” public history. The organization of history workshops and the proliferation of oral history projects reflect the ways in which historians of the working class made their practices public history in new ways during the 1960s and 1970s while expanding the sphere of both “the public” and “labor” to include histories of women, gender and patriarchy, and ethnic and racial minorities.

In 1915, as the Great War was consuming Europe and its colonial empires, W.E.B. Du Bois completed The Negro, one of the first comprehensive histories of Africa and its diaspora ever published in the United States. Overshadowed today by his more well-known writings, The Negro meditated on how “the problem of the color line” was nothing if not the result of centuries of global capitalist development dependent upon coerced labor, especially African chattel slavery in the Atlantic world. For Du Bois, peering back in time through the smoking ruins of total war, slavery's postemancipation legacies of political disenfranchisement, landlessness, poverty, and segregation had birthed a global proletariat of color exploited by white Europeans and Americans in an international order divided more and more along imperial lines.

The arrival of Belgian rule in the late nineteenth century initiated significant changes in the labor history of Tanganyika, a province in the southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), as well the discursive regimes used to legitimize these transformations. After the colonial conquests, unfree labor was justified by paternalistic rather than mythical discourses. Although unfree labor was less common in the postcolonial period, the state forced farmers to sell crops at low prices and build roads for no remuneration. In the Cold War context, the language and practice of developmentalism mediated the coercive practices of the independent Congolese state (known as Zaïre, 1971–1997). The floundering Zaïrian government expanded its presence in Tanganyika due to its partnership with USAID. USAID's rhetoric and practice was influenced by a “bottom up” approach to agricultural production, but the cuts to its funding in the 1980s meant it struggled to soften Mobutu's coercive administration.

This review article surveys recent studies of the state of and challenges to academic labor in the ongoing regime of academic capitalism, corporate managerialism, and neoliberalism in colleges and universities in the United States, Europe, and select other countries around the world. Some works analyze changing funding models, accountability mechanisms, and forms of administrative power, while others explore the discourses pervading higher education and impacting the self-understanding of academics. Higher education administrators, boards of trustees, and politicians have sought to create flexible and inexpensive academic labor. New studies explore the three main strategies pursued: the failed effort to promote Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the proliferation of for-profit colleges and universities (FPCUs), and the continuing expansion of contingent labor, full and part time. Other works analyze the innovative unionization efforts on the part of contingent faculty and graduate teaching assistants.

This paper analyses the influence that manpower agencies have on hiring practices and employment in Kazakhstan's oil sector. While influenced by the literature on transition from planned to market economy, this article's main argument is rooted in the understanding that labor precarization is produced through transnational capitalist practices. The influx of foreign capital through the investments of transnational companies (TNCs) also transplanted into Kazakhstan's labor market their antilabor policies and practices. This welcomed the presence of a new, dedicated actor for the establishment and curation of labor relations, namely manpower agencies, especially in the oil-rich region of Atyrau. This article argues there, the rationale for the presence of manpower agencies and the absence of trade unions is directly linked to the activities of TNCs. Manpower agencies have a decisive role in making employment and labor increasingly precarious in the oil sector. Manpower agencies function as a disaggregation force in the oil industry. Their presence stimulates a race to the bottom among workers, who have no other option but to accept precarious, unsafe, and underpaid jobs. Against this backdrop, the paper also offers a peek into “industrial gossip,” gathered during fieldwork in the Atyrau region. This more anthropological side of the argument highlights how the world of manpower agencies helps TNCs thrive by creating an atomized workforce.

This article argues that precarity partly arises from the growth of household debt in the age of rentier capitalism. It examines the mechanisms of neoliberal finance and its debt-based economic growth model in shaping precarious work and life in Kyrgyzstan. The unequal social relationship between lenders and borrowers generates considerable economic dispossession, appropriation, precarity, and harm. For debt-ridden micro-entrepreneurs, some of the pressures and consequences of debt are acutely felt within their family context, where members struggle to negotiate and ameliorate the impact. By drawing on three case studies of a small farmer, a bakery owner, and a petty trader turned petty producer, the article examines how usurious interest loans plunged them and their families into distress, insecurity, fear, loss, and powerlessness. The first-person accounts of these micro-entrepreneurs-cum-borrowers explain how debt was produced and experienced, and how it was inseparable from the country's rentier capitalist transformation. The study also draws on twenty-nine semi-structured interviews with financial institutions and thirty-three semi-structured interviews with borrowers conducted in Kyrgyzstan.

The paper explores the historical trajectory of Interhelpo, an industrial cooperative from Czechoslovakia, and its role in forging urbanization “from below” in early-Soviet town of Pishpek (now Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan). In light of scarce literature available on the success and failures of Western internationalist communes in the early Soviet period, this paper draws from intensive field work in Kyrgyzstan and understudied sources in Czech, Kyrgyz, Slovak and Russian to offer a novel, bottom-up narrative on the socialist city in Central Asia.

Founded 1914 by Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, German internationalists and Ido-learners around the mountaineer and Bolshevik Rudolf Pavlovič Mareček in the Czechoslovakian town Žilina, the cooperative actively shaped urbanization in what would be become known as the capital of Soviet Kyrgyzstan. From 1925 until its liquidation during WWII, the cooperative built from scratch a whole district including the first electric power station of the city, textile and furniture factories, workshops for tailors, shoemakers and joiners, a school, a kindergarten, a tannery, a brewery as well as unique residential district. In the process, the cooperative forged an organic patchwork language referred to as spontánne esperanto to secure translocal collaboration between internationalists from Central Europe, on the one hand, and a heterogeneous mix of workers including Armenians, Kyrgyz, Dungans, Uygurs, Uzbeks, Russians and Ukrainians, on the other.

Transcending a purely historical analysis, the paper ultimately turns to the urban landscape of present-day Bishkek. There it argues that while the district built by Interhelpo corresponds today to an exiled site dislocated by the hegemonic ethno-national memory regime, its materiality harbors relicts of another future capable of mobilizing alternative narratives on the city and her socialist and multi-ethnic past.

I was in the Netherlands and indeed at the hospital with his wife, Manoshi, and daughter, Piya, one year ago when Arvind Das, founder-editor of Biblio, died. Just one or two months previously I had seen him at the Amsterdam launch, in the Labour History Museum, of Down and Out: Labouring Under Global Capitalism, a book of photos by Ravi Agarwal, the text of which was co-authored with his longtime friend and collaborator, that one-man industry of Indian labor studies, Jan Breman. This book had been recently featured in an issue of Biblio (Vol. 5, Nos 1–2, 2000) that also carried Arvind's review of a new Oxford Book of Work (Das 2000)!