Turn-of-the-century America witnessed many forgotten risk-making experiments that probed the limits of insurability by stepping beyond the familiar fields of life, fire, and marine insurance. One attempted to underwrite firms’ lost profits during strikes.

The ensuing debates on strike insurance’s practicability revealed scientistic expectations of never-ending actuarial progress that united an otherwise-divided business community. Yet attempting to realize strike insurance quickly meant grappling with the limits of insurability. Labor strife’s fuzzy causality involving human agency forestalled the homogenous classification that underlay actuaries’ averaging. Thus, strike underwriters sidestepped actuarial ratemaking to offer uniform premiums to those deemed acceptable risks. This solution not only left them susceptible to adverse selection and moral hazard but also highlighted the limits of insurers’ ability to transform uncertainty into commoditized risk, more broadly.

Recognizing these limits has important historiographical implications. Based largely on studies of life insurance—the gold standard of insurability—the rise of financial risk management has claimed a central place in the history of American capitalism. This literature thus threatens to obscure the ongoing significance of unclassifiable, unquantifiable uncertainty. Uncovering forgotten risk-making projects like attempts to establish strike insurance, where Americans grappled with the limits of insurability, is thus a crucial corrective.

In this essay, I turn to the example of the 1919 Elaine Massacre—the deadliest incident of anti-Black violence in U.S. history—in order to better understand how its economically motivated, state-sanctioned, and brutally indiscriminate violence were nearly erased from history. I find that white journalists, military officials, as well as the Governor of Arkansas himself, drew upon long-standing race-based fears in their characterizations of what took place in Elaine. In so doing, they were able to simultaneously glorify and obfuscate the anti-Black violence, as well as further protect the property and economic interests of the white residents who had putatively been “under threat.” The scale of the violence in Elaine and the near totality of its erasure from the official record make the Elaine Massacre a chilling example of what Lindsay Schakenbach Regele has described as “martial capitalism”: the use of concealed military violence to wrest economic resources away from marginalized communities and toward their white counterparts.

The Wiehahn Commission, a government body that proposed a multipronged 1979 South African labor reform, accelerated the corporate recognition of Black trade unions in apartheid era South Africa. Gradually implemented over the course of two years, the reforms complemented international workplace codes and the burgeoning reformist push for ethically sound business practices in the workplace. Although U.S. multinational firms in South Africa did not initially voice support for Black trade unions, in the aftermath of Soweto, many were faced with cascading internal and external pressures to negotiate with these emerging unions. By incorporating the Sullivan Principles, a U.S. code for ethical business conduct, into the broader scholarship on the South African trade union movement and the late apartheid era Wiehahn Commission reforms, this article examines how corporate reforms landed in South Africa, probing the business response to worker demands. South African workers were not merely passive recipients of workplace reform, but rather active participants, shaping the form and direction of U.S. and South African policy.

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 analyzes the attitudes of Dutch employers toward social policy in the early twentieth century. Recent literature has evolved from an emphasis on power to an emphasis on preferences. Moving away from the traditional view that unions and social democrats forced social laws on employers, recent scholars suggest that firms saw specific advantages in the introduction of social laws. However, I show that the attitudes of Dutch business representatives, rather than seeking these specific advantages, merely reflected a willingness to consult, inspired by their macroeconomic view. Employers expressed the wish to attain an organized form of capitalism and accepted regulated forms of codetermination. Once the consultative platforms were in place, employers pursued strategic goals, such as labor peace and disciplining the unions. This paved the way for accepting welfare state expansion. In sum, mid-twentieth century business interests were strongly oriented toward coordinated capitalism.

This paper studies the transformation of the worker-peasant to reluctant revolutionary industrial worker during the establishment of Iran's copper industry at the Sarcheshmeh copper mine from 1966 to 1979. It explores the procedural rules implemented by mine management, such as coercion and paternalism, and the nature of the employment relationship, including methods of control, bargaining, and dispute resolution. Consideration is given to engagement of different agents with welfare policy and industrial relations, including the nature of capital, the structure of ownership, the path of traditional labor relations, and international contributors on one side and workers’ agency and their structural power in the context of evolving domestic and international environments on the other. Also highlighted is the role played by the workers’ background and economic improvement and how these factors affected their political stance during the 1979 revolution.

This article examines the industrial relations systems constructed by Ford and United Automobile Workers (UAW) leaders for the Ford Motor Company in the 1940s. Ford’s industrial relations systems extended privileges to men and male-dominated groups to the detriment of their female counterparts and women seeking employment and advancement. Systemic male privilege was integral to Ford’s operations throughout conversion to military production for World War II and reconversion back to civilian production.

Unwilling to wait decades for the political decline of New Deal liberalism, the core industries of post–World War II America repurposed collective bargaining as a means to reduce the costs of organized labor. New industrial relation strategies known as “wage-price policies” linked labor compensation with productivity in order to stabilize unit labor costs and prices. After reviewing the emergence and diffusion of wage-price policy within the managerial community, the article analyzes its implementation during the tumultuous 1959 bargaining round between the steel industry and the United Steelworkers. The union claimed that the industry's goals centered on management's antipathy to work rules, but industry records reveal that work rules were only part of its broader efforts to contain the inflationary consequences of the New Deal.

China's Labor Contract Law came into force on January 1, 2008. One of several important legislative acts aimed at improving the processing of labor grievances through mediation, arbitration, and litigation, and averting collective labor protest, it provides that all employed persons must work under written individual employment contracts. We evaluate the legislation's impact nationally and by province for the years before and after the law's adoption. Observing that the law's effect varied substantially across provinces, we estimate the effects of the law, controlling for time, development level, export intensity, and migrant labor share, on the volume of disputes by province using a cross-sectional time series design. We also examine the law's impact on the incidence of collective disputes and the grounds for disputes. We find that the law significantly increased the volume of labor disputes, raising questions about the relative costliness of the government's strategy for managing employment relations.

Our goal in this article is to explain how South Korea's Hyundai Motor Company successfully transferred its production system to the United States. When a production system is transferred to another country, it is modified under the influences of different institutional environments. The key to the success of Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama, Hyundai's transplant in Montgomery, Alabama, is found in Hyundai's relatively low dependence on skill formation and high reliance on numerical flexibility of its production system relative to its Japanese counterparts. While Japanese automakers had difficulties transferring their production system to their US transplants, Hyundai did not because its production system did not require highly skilled labor. Alabama's flexible labor market and the absence of labor unions enabled Hyundai to more efficiently utilize the numerical flexibility of production workers than was possible at its original plant in Korea, which suffered from adversarial labor relations. This case study casts doubt on the convergence model of technology and globalization, because it shows varieties of production systems developing under different institutional environments.