Faced with the most up to date washing machine, the undocumented Rosa, newly arrived from Guatemala to Los Angeles, does what many resourceful Mayan women would: She handwashes clothes and lays them on the lawn to dry.1 Played for comic relief in the 1983 movie El Norte, this confrontation of the domestic worker with the machine represents how, presumably in the face of dirty wars in Latin America and rising labor force participation of mothers with small children in the United States, well-to-do households had it both ways: They purchased the latest appliances and relied upon the labor of immigrant women. Recent migrants appeared more tractable than the African Americans who historically had worked in other women's homes. New models superseded old Maytags, but domestic workers never became obsolete, despite the predictions of sociologists and the panicked laments of would-be employers.

This 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 & 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&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.

This article analyzes the lasting effects of privatization on public-sector telecommunications workers in Argentina's rural interior. I draw on over fifty hours of oral histories carried out from 2015 to 2017 with former ENTel and Telefónica workers in General Pico, in the interior province of La Pampa, Argentina. This unique source base reveals how the material objects themselves acquired symbolic weight in the minds of workers, and how the introduction of new technologies and labor regimes after privatization in 1990 eroded workers' feelings of loyalty toward and ownership over the previously state-run company. This article specifically explores notions of trauma as related to the destruction of the physical materials of work, and the association between that destruction and the mass layoffs that followed. David Harvey's engagement with creative destruction in late capitalism has suggested that “continuous innovation”—whether technological or practical—has meant the devaluation and/or destruction of existing labor relations. I expand this concept to show how this logic of “creative destruction” maps onto spatialized ideas of modernity. The trauma that workers experienced in the 1990s is most productively understood vis-à-vis the unfulfilled promises of “progress” which claimed to bring efficiency, growth, and long-term stability but instead delivered job loss, atomization, and the breakdown of social relations of labor.

This article is about the resistance and resilience of workers when confronted with the likelihood of losing their jobs and seeing the factory where they worked close down. It discusses this topic by concentrating on the particular and singular case of workers’ self-management of Fateleva – Indústria de Elevadores, a firm that specialized in the production and maintenance of elevators, located in the northern part of Lisbon Metropolitan Region, Portugal. It was occupied by its workers in the context of the Carnation Revolution (1974–1976) and then self-managed until its closure in 2016.

This paper explores an obsolescence of labor that did not take place. In the 1960s, Florida's citrus growers appeared poised to accompany farmers across the South in pursuing a strategy of agricultural modernization that would mechanize their harvesting labor, rendering obsolete the thirty thousand Black and white farmworkers who harvested the orange crop. Their efforts were coordinated by the Florida Citrus Commission's Harvesting Research and Development Committee (HRDC), a rotating group of growers, trade association representatives, researchers, and engineers, who were confident that mechanization was within their grasp. But two decades later, every Florida orange was harvested by hand and HRDC's funding had been gutted. Why did growers think that mechanizing harvesting labor was both necessary and imminent? And then why, within only two decades, did they make such an about-face, largely abandoning the project of mechanization? The answer, I argue, lies in the particularities of the citrus industry's experience of globalization. At the level of capital, Florida's growers were caught flat-footed by competition from the nascent citrus industry of the State of São Paulo, Brazil; and at the level of labor, immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti swelled the ranks of available workers. The narrative moves between Florida and São Paulo, examining the efforts of growers to control, monitor, and replace farmworkers, and farmworkers’ response, with the efforts and commentary of the HRDC providing the unifying thread. The argument is shown to bear on (1) the historiography of the South's agricultural modernization and (2) the historiography of the South's globalization (the “Nuevo South”), showing that it is necessary to join these two rarely connected historiographies to understand Florida's citrus industry, whose mechanization efforts spanned the 1960s histories of agricultural modernization and the 1980s histories of globalization.

While inherited models of industrial development and the role of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the developmental process associate urbanization and rising industrial output with the industrialization of employment, suggesting that the structural shift to a service-based job market is a sign of developmental “maturity,” such models fail to explain the secular tendency toward “premature deindustrialization” that has become increasingly evident in poor countries worldwide. These models cannot account for the deep bifurcations between output and employment, formality and informality, and industrialization and urbanization observable on the ground in the world's fastest growing cities. Meanwhile, the alternative models of critical development theorists tend to focus on failures of industrial takeoff and classic relations of dependency, none of which adequately account for the phenomenon being observed today. This paper explores an alternate explanation for premature deindustrialization, drawing from Marxian theories of technical change and the secular tendencies of capitalist development. The argument is illustrated with examples taken from the author's field work in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and the Pearl River Delta in China. Ultimately, the phenomenon of premature deindustrialization suggests that the great circle of development may collapse under its own contradictions before industrialization circumnavigates the globe.

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.”

“The worker has his own personality, his own self-respect, his own ideas, his own political opinion, his own religious beliefs, and he wants these rights to be respected by everyone, especially by the employer,” said the first leader of the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) Giuseppe Di Vittorio in 1952. Yet between this statement in the 1950s and today many things have changed: not only what the worker is and has become, but also how trade unions have represented workers. This article, focusing on the introduction of the first minimum-income scheme in Italian history, explores how the role of trade unions in representing workers and promoting welfare expansion changed in the country in the 2010s.

This paper contributes to scholarship on the long experience of deindustrialization. It emphasizes contemporary place-making in navigating the much-changed socioeconomic landscapes that the closure of mills, mines, shipyards and factories have left behind. The ‘half-life of deindustrialization' suggests these experiences have been received through understandings of labour and community with origins in the industrial era. ‘Tracks of the Past' was a school-based education project themed around workers' occupation of Caterpillar's earth-moving machinery plant in Lanarkshire, Scotland. The occupation was a response to Caterpillar's shock closure announcement and the loss of 1,200 jobs. It lasted 103 days between January and April 1987 when closure was reluctantly conceded. A Caterpillar Workers Legacy Group (CWLG) commemorated the occupation's thirtieth anniversary. During 2018, academics collaborated with the CWLG to develop a curriculum for a local high school class. ‘Tracks' produced lessons where students engaged with archival sources and physical objects, interviewed members of the CWLG and conducted online research. The ‘learning journey' montages that the students produced combined conversations in 2018 with sources from three decades earlier, often reflecting on the occupation as a historical episode in a highly localised context. Others implicated the closure within an international pattern, linking Caterpillar’s divestment to the actions of multinationals in the contemporary global economy. In neither case did the invocation of the occupation lead to a straightforward translation of the occupation into contemporary workplace justice issues as the CWLG had hoped. However, these results did suggest a creative deployment of the past that rationalised the occupation with reference to contemporary deindustrialized contexts. These findings demonstrate the utility of the half-life through a lingering industrial past, but also demonstrate the need to conceptualise agents or custodians of labour history and challenge the linearity of passing time that an incrementally receding industrial era implicates.

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.

The postwar situation in Calcutta was part of the picture of seething anticolonial popular and labor discontent in the Indian subcontinent; this was perhaps the most radical, the most potent, period for the subalterns in the country. However, this complex historical moment with varied, competing, shifting, overlapping tendencies has been reduced and flattened in the historiography. It is as if the twin events of partition and independence were inevitable. City workers, especially the port workers, emerged as a visible and powerful presence in the anticolonial movement. By reconstructing the arena of collective action—focusing on the context, the modalities, and the social content of the major strikes involving port labor or “moments” of radicalism, this article seeks to recover the role of workers in decolonization. It will show how workers contested and outstepped the politics of nationalist leadership(s) and communalism in significant ways multiple times, placing a politics of labor rights and entitlements, of struggles against exploitation and poverty on the postcolonial agenda. The article argues that a “workers’ way,” an alternative even if hazily defined pathway of decolonization, in which new citizens would not be divided on religious lines, was concretized and became a part of the political imagination of the time. The port strike of 1947, a swing-back from the deadliest episode of communal riots, in a matter of months, signifies the extreme fluidity of the political situation in the late 1940s, which is unsurprisingly missed in the conventional historiography. The article finally highlights the limits of postwar radicalism: the “historic” port workers’ strike was ultimately channelized as a legal industrial dispute by the communist leadership of port workers’ union. With their key demand of parity of wages and allowances with government employees, port workers staked their claim to labor institutions offered by the postcolonial state, which was to cordon large sections of them as a privileged layer from rest of the laboring classes in the city.

“To articulate the past historically. . . . It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. . . . Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.

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.

The four books under review challenge the revolutionary leadership-centered view of the Russian Revolution from various perspectives. Specifically, they highlight the influence on revolutionary politics of seemingly peripheral groups such as workers and Jewish revolutionary activists. Each of the authors claims that the agendas of these groups were considerably more important than the agendas of the revolutionary leadership in ensuring the success or the failure of revolutionary policies.