A few years ago, the global consulting firm McKinsey and Company began issuing a series of increasingly urgent reports concerning “automation” and the future of work. Defining automation broadly as artificial intelligence and “other digital technologies,” the company promised in its reports that it could advise companies how they might prepare. Amidst this flurry of publication, McKinsey produced several articles specifically on the theme of “The Future of Work in Black America.” With “a new and proprietary data set”—a data set so proprietary readers were not privileged to see it—McKinsey claimed that “automation” would hurt the job prospects of Black Americans, and in particular Black men, more deeply and more broadly than any other demographic group in the United States. The jobs Black people held, McKinsey seemed to believe, were precisely those best performed by robots. For McKinsey's analysts, this conclusion was all but obvious when one considered, first, the racist exclusion of Black Americans from the resources of society, and second, the levels of education required to obtain the jobs Black people in America disproportionately hold, like “truck drivers, food service workers, and office clerks.”

This article delineates a hitherto eclipsed labor history of the Northwest Borneo oilfields. In 2018, Brunei Shell Petroleum (BSP) in an unprecedented move, released to Brunei's national archive two labor registers of the British Malayan Petroleum Company (BMPC-renamed BSP in 1958), with entries dating between the 1940s and 1950s. These registers provided a rare glimpse of the workers who were recruited to the Brunei oilfields as labor, a category distinct from staff. As BMPC labor they worked to rehabilitate the company town and the oilfields that were destroyed during the Second World War by the Japanese army and allied bombing in the British protectorate of Brunei. Like colonial records that amassed information for the control and rule of colonized subjects, each entry in BMPC's ledger meticulously noted the date of engagement, place of employment, wages, work history, as well as some biographical information about its workers. Inadvertently, these entries also revealed modes of worker resistance and assertions of agency, thus providing a glimpse of the hidden transcripts of a labor history shaped by the policies of BMPC in this colonial outpost. My article draws on these two BMPC labor registers to trace a micro-spatial history of “Dayak” labor in the emergent Borneo oilfields. Often obscured in historical records, the registers made visible the ways in which Indigenous workers negotiated and resisted the company's control of its labor force. I explore Dayak labor recruitment within the context of the 1880s-1941 when state borders irrevocably shifted and regional economies were increasingly drawn into a global market. In doing so, I chart migrant labor routes across varied regional economies in Northwest Borneo, BMPC's management of a multiethnic labor force, and company workers' agency.

In June 1926, Shanghai cotton-mill workers initiated strikes at Japanese-owned factories in Xiaoshadu, protesting the dismissal of workers accused of arson in the workshop. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recognized that Chinese workers’ actions should be aligned with their labor movement strategy, and tried to control the scale of the strikes. In August, responding to an incident where Japanese sailors killed a Chinese man, the CCP redirected to launch a large-scale combined strike, catering to Chinese laborers’ demands of Japanese employers, but not accounting for practical market conditions. Drawing on a variety of sources, this article reveals that dissidence in leadership, weaknesses in grassroots organizations, and unrealized alliances made it impossible for the Communists, so-called the vanguard of the working class, to lead the summer strike. Contrarily, the cotton workers coerced the Communists and their controlled labor unions to maximize their benefits. By mid-September, it had failed, causing a serious setback for the CCP. Compared to the CCP's improvisation and confusion, the capitalists took wise countermeasures in the favorable economic climate of 1926, ultimately triumphing over the Communists and workers.

On September 19, 1922, Beulah M., a thirty-year-old cook, saved a “small child from a vicious cow on Angola.” This event occurred only a few months after her admission to the Louisiana State Penitentiary (LSP), where she was serving a life sentence for alleged murder. The infant was one of the many of the white prison staff's children raised on the penitentiary plantation nestled in a large meander of the Mississippi river. This happy-ending drama featuring a Black woman prisoner and a free white child arose from the “cohabitation” of free white households within the incarcerated population. The incident, quite unexpected in a carceral setting, prompted the penitentiary general manager to place Beulah M. on the “eligibility list” for parole and to grant her “full single good time for meritorious service,” which meant the possibility of an earlier release by a few months. Beulah's action might also have motivated authorities to assign her to be “servant” in the Camp D Captain's house in July 1923, and later to be a nurse in the nine-bedroom “Big House,” occupied by one of the penitentiary staff of higher rank. The peculiar nature of her alleged crime, the beating to death of her seven-year-old Black step-daughter, was apparently not perceived as a deterrent to entrust her to care for white children. Her courageous action toward a white child at Angola might even have been a compelling argument for her early pardon and discharge, which she received only after nine years at Angola, although her plea for a pardon had been rejected at least once before. Beulah M.'s story is the story of a coerced African American domestic laborer in white homes, rewarded for her perceived subservience to the Jim Crow order. It exemplifies one aspect of Black women's experiences of hard labor for the state of Louisiana during the first half of the twentieth century.

The carceral history of Rikers Island, which now houses nine of the New York City jails, begins with garbage and forced labor. The Municipal Farm on Rikers Island, operated by the Department of Public Charities and Correction, opened in 1884 and served as a “prison farm.” Penal farms were common at that time, but what was not common was the simultaneous use of the island as a landfill. Most of the landmass that now comprises Rikers was formed from the refuse of New Yorkers. As the amount of garbage grew the initially productive farm became plagued by rats and other pests—not to mention fetid smells and poor air quality. This history is felt today on the island, as there are shunts into the earth that spew sickening steam, a constant reminder of its origins.

In April 1968, two Berkeley campus unions—the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1695 representing clerical, technical, and professional workers, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 1570 representing graduate students—held a work-stoppage and a teach-in on “campus racism” to honor the memory of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. who had been tragically assassinated in Memphis. Inspired by King's work and the AFSCME sanitation workers strike that he supported, the teach-in became a series of workshops that ultimately led to the development of a “white paper” with statistical data highlighting the ways the university harbored racism in its employment practices and in its admission of undergraduate and graduate students. Among its many demands, it called for the University: “to hire black, brown and red workers until the ratio of employees from these groups equals the ratio in the population; bring minority student enrollment and employment up to population ratios . . . publish the University census report showing the percentage of black, brown, and red employees by department; and make an additional report showing the classifications and promotions of black, brown, and red people in each department.”

For centuries, the maritime cargo passing through the port of Barcelona was handled by the men of a half-dozen guilds. Collectively, these ancient corporations enjoyed monopolistic privileges over the various types of cargo and areas of operation—in the shallow harbor, to and from the Customs House, and throughout the city and beyond. At the end of the eighteenth century, the advances of economic and political liberalism began to question, challenge, and eventually dismantle the guild structure: a process that came to fruition in the early nineteenth century with the abolition of most guilds throughout Spain. However, some of the cargo-handling guilds had been defended by the Navy against abolition until the second half of the nineteenth century, when their orderly world collapsed into competitive companies able to hire men of their choosing (former guildsmen or otherwise). In this article, we look at the harbor-based guilds and the process by which guildsmen became the unorganized workers and capitalistic directors of the new dockworker companies. We offer a vision of the transformation of the guild system into a private system for organizing the labor of maritime-cargo handling. In this account, we examine technological changes in the means of production, changes in the organization of labor, the appearance of a new capitalist class in the sub-sector, and the rise of a capitalist mode of production based on the proletarianization of cargo handling.

This paper revisits the development of the canonical Swedish wage bargaining model, from the 1930s to the 1950s. The question at the core of the debate is: how did Sweden achieve “good” wage bargaining institutions -- good, in the sense of facilitating investment, employment, and controlled inflation? The conventional account focuses on the actions of employers and trade unions in export industry, and a cross-class alliance between the two. This paper questions this account. The paper builds on archival sources in the Swedish Labour Movement's Archives and Library in Stockholm: the minutes from the main trade union confederation's yearly wage policy discussions, in preparation for bargaining rounds. In total, some 1,500 pages of wage policy discussion. I find that the export sector cross-class alliance played a very small role, and that macro-corporatist concerns, that the labour movement had to take responsibility of all of society and pursue a planned wage policy, was much more important. This has theoretical implications for the analysis of wage bargaining institutions in general and the Swedish model in particular.

In the decade since International Labor and Working-Class History (ILWCH) published its special issue on “Labor and the Military,” treating military service as a problem of labor has grown from a provocation into a major debate. By surveying five recent books on soldiering as a form of labor, this essay poses a set of questions about warfare and work. Is military service best understood as a form of labor, and what might that perspective reveal, or occlude? How do militaries draw the line between those who work and those who fight? Where does that line become blurry? How do soldiers themselves understand the peculiar forms of “work” that war demands? War and work are not separate domains of experience, as these books show. But in some respects, they still demand different tools of analysis.

This review article proposes new directions for the field of labor studies in the Middle East and Islamic world. It does so by examining a diverse array of recent works that are not framed as studies of labor and class per se, but that illustrate what this field might look like through their respective concerns with space and materiality. Taking such concerns together unites these otherwise disparate studies of class, oceanic connections, gender, urban transformation, and the environment. We have organized this essay around the themes of space and materiality because of the utility that they hold for the study of labor and class in the Middle East and Islamic world. They enable us to attend to the basic aims of older scholarship on labor and political economy while also internalizing the critiques of that tradition mounted by scholars of race, gender, and colonialism. We moreover suggest that the theoretical developments outlined here can inform scholarship on labor and class across regional divides.

In many ways, the vast industrial complexes that developed on the Central African Copperbelt and the Fushun coalfields in the early twentieth century were very different places. One on a high plateau stretched out across the border between what is now Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia with a sub-tropical climate; the other on the rolling foothills of Changbai Mountains in what is now Liaoning Province, northeastern China, with a humid continental climate. Yet anyone who visited either of these places would immediately and unavoidably have become aware of a basic fact about both: that racial hierarchies governed life and work on the mines. This article is about that basic fact, and in it we aim to make a two-fold contribution: First, it is a comparative history of mining regions, which, although it might seem an area of study ripe for comparison, is seldom undertaken. Second, through this comparison to argue that the prevalence and significance of race as a way of organizing life and work in the mining industry has been underestimated. We support this claim with an overview of production and everyday life in two seemingly very different mining regions: the Fushun coalfields and the Central African Copperbelt (see figure 1).

The history and iconography of trade union banners has been surprisingly under-explored since it was first taken seriously as a subject of study in the early 1970s. The nostalgia evident in these early accounts for an age that seemed to contemporaries then to be fleeting seems particularly incongruous given the more recent reinvigoration of the trade union demonstration. This article seeks to redress the balance by focusing on the Follonsby miners’ lodge banner. First unveiled in 1928, in a pit village on the northern edge of Durham coalfield in northeast England, the Follonsby miners’ banner was later hailed as a foremost candidate for the most revolutionary trade union banner in British history. This unsubstantiated claim is important in itself, as mass trade unionism in Britain is characterized by moderation and a reluctance to engage in radical politics; an observation that broadly stands for the influential British coal miners’ unions and, more specifically, for the miners of the Durham coalfield itself.

The article's argument has both narrow and broad dimensions. Narrowly, it argues that the Follonsby banner has a strong claim to be regarded as the most revolutionary in Britain, albeit with “revolutionary” understood in certain theoretical and context-specific ways. The broader argument develops the claim that the iconography of the Follonsby banner is more significant for what the process of interrogating its “revolutionary” credentials reveals about the complexities of the political culture of the mainstream British Left in the twentieth century and after. In this broader respect, the Follonsby banner—iconography, birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth—is more important for its curious representatives rather than its individuated existence as an “extreme revolutionary” outlier.

Marble mosaic and terrazzo were a very common type of stone paving in Venice, Italy, especially between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout the period, migrant craftsmen from the nearby Alpine foothills area of Friuli (in northeastern Italy) virtually monopolized the Venetian marble mosaic and terrazzo trade. Thus, on February 9, 1583, the Venetian Council of Ten granted maestro (master) Sgualdo Sabadin from Friuli and his fellow Friulian workers of the arte dei terazzeri (art of terrazzo) the capacity to establish a school guild dedicated to St. Florian. The first chapters of the Mariegola de’ Terazzeri (Statutes of the Terrazzo Workers Guild), which set the rules for the guild of terrazzo workers, was completed three years later, in September 1586.

From the 1830s onward, Friulian craftsmen began to export their skills and trade from Venice across Europe and later, at the turn of the twentieth century, overseas to several American cities. Prior to reaching America, mosaic and terrazzo workers left from their work places outside Italy, initially from Paris. Friulian mosaic and terrazzo workers were regarded as the “aristocracy” of the Italian American building workforce due to their highly specialized jobs: This contrasted with the bulk of Italians in the United States who were largely employed as unskilled. The New York marble mosaic- and terrazzo-paving trade was completely in the hands of the Italian craftsmen, who demonstrated a strong tendency to become entrepreneurs. They made use of their craftsmanship comparative advantages to build a successful network of firms that dominated the domestic market, in a similar fashion to what had already been occurring in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other European countries.

This paper argues that immigrants can be powerful conduits for the transfer of skills and knowledge, and emphasizes the importance of studying skilled migrant artisan experiences. A closer look at ethnic migration flows reveals a variety of entrepreneurial experiences, even in groups largely considered unskilled. The Italian marble mosaic and terrazzo workers’ experience sheds new light on ethnic entrepreneurship catering for the community as a whole, it reveals a remarkable long-lasting craftsmanship experience, thus demonstrating the successful continuity in business ownership and the passing down of craftsmanship knowledge across family generations. Creativity skills and innovative productive methods adopted by firms appear as a key factor that allowed these artisans to control the trade for such a long time.

This essay stitches together the fragments of Marx's work on the United States that are scattered in newspaper articles, letters, notes, in some digressions in his early writings, in his economic manuscripts and in Capital (1867). The main aim is to show that what we can call a “global history of the Civil War” emerges from his pen: a history that is global not simply in a geographical sense, that is, because it expands the European space beyond the Atlantic and towards the Pacific, but also because of the general meaning it takes on in the history of capitalism. The essay highlights how the Civil War opened the Marxian issue of emancipation, his vision of class struggle and his view of the working class, to the presence of a black proletariat that interacted with the struggle of the white working classes, the latter of which until then had been the main focus of his work. It also highlights how the different and disarticulated voices of labor – slave and free, black and white – on both sides of the Atlantic effected a revolutionary shift in the Civil War: interjecting a “revolutionary turn” into what we can call the “long constitutional history” of the political conflict between North and South that changed the economic and social shape of the nation. More importantly, the essay reconstructs what can be termed the “state moment,” which was entangled with the “long constitutional history” and the “revolutionary turn” of the Civil War. As the transnational calls for emancipation from slavery and wage labor impacted the transnational processes of accumulation of industrial capital, the American state became a player in the world market: its financial and fiscal policies became socially linked to the government of industrial capital. In this sense, as the essay underlines in the conclusion, the “global history of the Civil War” that Marx effectively drafted, outlined the theoretical and political hypothesis that formed the basis of his mature reflection in the pages of Capital: the “emancipation of labour” should be thought of as a global issue, “neither a local nor a national, but a social problem.”

In November 1918, the labor movement of Bavaria, Germany, overthrew the monarchist government and, in April 1919, proclaimed a Bavarian Council Republic (BCR). This article analyzes the revolution and its defeat through the lens of class composition theory, thereby suggesting some revisions to the latter. The technical composition of the Bavarian working class fostered the concept of self-management, which lay at the heart of the councils as the organizational form of the revolution. However, it also nurtured authoritarian potentials, which were more in line with-counter revolutionary positions. The article suggests that class composition theory must be expanded by the notion of social composition, taking into account struggles over reproduction and consumption: Inflation, unemployment, food shortages, and disease led to a crisis in material reproduction, which in turn led large parts of the unemployed and of the women's movement to become radical revolutionaries. The article argues to conceptualize technical and social class composition to be in a dialectical relationship with political composition. It thus emphasizes the role of ideologies of anti-Semitism and anti-feminism, both within the counter-revolution and the revolution itself. While the combination of different struggles for emancipation contributed to the early successes of the revolution, their ideological division was as an important factor in its defeat.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when the Ottoman state launched an industrialization campaign within the context of increasing contacts between the Ottoman and British governments, hundreds of British industrial workers migrated to Istanbul to work in Ottoman military factories, along with technology transfer from Britain. This article narrates the history of these workers and of the community they established in Istanbul in a period spanning four decades, from the beginning of the mechanization efforts in the 1830s until the economic crisis in the mid-1870s. Drawing on archival evidence from Ottoman and British sources, it analyzes the larger context of British workers’ migration from Britain, their relations with the Ottoman state officials and local workers, and their experiences and struggles in the workplace and the city. Although both British and Ottoman historians have largely ignored their experiences due to their marginal numbers and distinct statuses, these workers actively took part in the Ottoman industrialization process, in the development of capitalist class relations, and in the social, cultural, and spatial transformation of the capital city in the Ottoman age of reforms. By means of this analysis, the article aims to highlight the significance of immigrant workers as actors of the history of large-scale transformations in the late Ottoman Empire as well as underlining the role of trans-imperial labor migration in the history of modernity.

Given the significance of strikes in the history of communist Poland, the strikes that occurred during the era of high Stalinism (1948-53) have received remarkably little scholarly attention. This article deals with one of the most significant strike waves of that period: the occupational strikes that broke out in the Dąbrowa basin after the regime extended the working day in the mines by one hour in April 1951. What lent additional salience to these strikes was that the Dąbrowa basin, nicknamed the “Red Basin” on account of its radical traditions of industrial protest, had been a communist stronghold in interwar Poland and that many card-carrying communists participated in the strikes. The article demonstrates that the strikes were the culmination of a process whereby the “aristocracy of labor” of seasoned activists turned against a regime that increasingly relied on younger migrants from the rural provinces in its campaigns to raise production. If the historical struggles of the miners in the Dąbrowa basin were instrumental in triggering the strikes, however, the article also makes clear how representatives of the regime could invoke these struggles to bring the strikes to an end.

Łódź and Tampere share an industrial and political past. Part of the Russian empire, the cities became major textile hubs crucial for Tsarist industrial economy.1 The cities were also Red strongholds. Historically, they can be seen as socio-economic “experiments” and “islands of modernization” within largely rural societies. Since the 1980s (in case of Tampere) and the 1990s (in case of Łódź) both cities have undergone substantial social and economic transformations connected with the collapse or decline of traditional industries. How do the two cities choose to represent their working-class heritage today? This essay compares how city museums in Tampere and Łódź represent their working-class history in selective and contradictory ways.

The rapid spread of COVID-19 interacted with long-unfolding economic trends to set a global tinder box aflame. Over the past thirty years, the world's workforce has increasingly found employment in low-wage, low-productivity jobs in the global services sector. The pandemic lockdowns hit these sorts of activities the hardest. Opportunities to work evaporated, spreading both poverty and hunger around the world. The same rise in global service sector employment shares, which amplified the pandemic lockdown's destructive effects, will now slow the pace of the recovery. The transition to a services-based economy has accelerated, due to what José Antonio Ocampo and Tomasso Faccio call “too much excess capacity and too little certainty about future demand,” which have depressed levels of investment and ushered in a period of economic stagnation. COVID-19 will make these tendencies worse. Weak economic recoveries will further entrench an economic order in which employers pay little attention to workers’ demands, deepening employment insecurity and economic inequality. The future for labor looks bleak. What that means for the future of working people remains an open question. Their fight for dignity, in the midst of the pandemic and post-pandemic eras, will prove decisive.

The huge parastatal sectors in postcolonial African societies interested sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s, but have never found a historical discussion – and the experience of change towards the democratization (eventually) has not yet been interpreted by historians. This study attempts to bring both elements together for the case of Benin, a country particularly shaken by massive economic decline, lay-offs and unemployment in the second half of the 1980s. It relies on an unusual and spectacular source, a series of petitions sent by workers and workers’ delegates to the presidential office of Mathieu Kérékou in 1989/90 (the presidential office partly added to these petitions whole dossiers of comments and correspondence with other authorities, i.e. ministerial directorates and the police). This analysis highlights how parastatal workers and their spokesmen tried to communicate about economic and social disaster with the authorities, how they protested and attempted to make claims about social norms and justice, and how they attacked “corruption”. I would hold that the cases studied cannot stand for a model of experiences, but they nevertheless represent a number of elements of a social history of decline: as well as protests and arguments, and views on the practice of petitioning, the discussion will also highlight individual trajectories that nevertheless exemplify, in my view, representative experiences and a history of daily life in Benin's parastatal sector. The interpretation also attempts to show how imminent democratization, through the creation of a National Conference in early 1990, changed the strategies and the context of workers’ protest. It includes a number of exemplary, and quite spectacular, cases of mismanagement and closing of parastatal companies, such as the Société Sucrière de Savè and SONICOG. I would think that the approach is unique so far for both Beninese and West African history.