On the basis of anthropological fieldwork carried out in South Gujarat in the early 1960s, I described and analyzed a system of bonded labor that dominated the relationship between low-caste farm servants and high-caste landowners (Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India, 1974). More recently, I have gone back to the study of agrarian bondage of the past in order to explore in greater detail the emergence of unfree labor in the precolonial era and comment on its demise as a result of efforts made by the colonial state, the nationalist movement, and peasant activists (Labour Bondage in West India from Past to Present, 2007). A recurrent research theme during my fieldwork in the last few decades has been drawing attention to practices of neo-bondage (neo because the relationship between bosses and workers is less personalized, of shorter duration, more contractual, and monetized) at the bottom of India's informal-sector economy. Additionally, the elements of patronage that offered a modicum of protection and security to bonded clients in the past have disappeared while the transition to a capitalist mode of production accelerated.

The long-running deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields, the consequence of political decisions, took place in three distinct periods analyzed here: “restructuring,” 1958–1967, when, in response to union activism, a large number of closures was offset by government and industry initiatives to provide or stimulate alternative employment; “stabilization,” 1968–1977, when closures were minimized as the broader industrial economy slowed; and then “accelerated contraction,” 1978–1987, within the larger program of economic restructuring engineered by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative UK governments. Moral economy arguments shaped the debate about deindustrialization in the first two phases: closures were legitimate only where agreed to by the workforce, who would in turn receive guaranteed economic security. These factors did not apply in the final phase, when closures were enforced and redundant miners had limited employment alternatives.

This article investigates the memories and lived experiences of those who dwell in the deindustrial landscape of Chernobyl in north Ukraine. Taking a visual approach to an invisible issue, the article explores the use of photography as a research tool to examine the ‘hidden spaces of everyday life’ in the shadow of Chernobyl.1 The article finds that many people have suffered a ‘double exposure’: once from radiation and then again from the failures of the Ukrainian state. While these communities are exposed as “bare life”2 to the risk of nuclear pollution, they also contest official conceptions of radiation through local knowledge, shared memory, and informal activity. The article interrogates the complex ways people perceive, negotiate, and come to terms with the ever-present but unseen menace of radiation. Through these memories, images, and lived experiences of the marginalized, we can begin to make the invisible threat of radiation appear more tangible. Finally, the article provides a short discussion about the use of participant photography in researching the invisible.

A growing body of contemporary American literature, “deindustrialization literature,” most of it by writers who grew up after major plant closings, is set in former industrial areas, such as Detroit and Youngstown. These texts focus on the lives and perspectives of those who have inherited the physical, economic, and cultural landscapes of the rust belt. For these writers and their characters, the past is always an important part of the present. The deindustrialized landscape provides not only the setting but also significant plot elements, themes, and symbols through which these writers narrate stories about young adults wrestling with their identities, affiliations, and opportunities during a period of economic decline and social change. These narratives complicate the relationship between past and present through characters' observations of and interactions in the deindustrialized landscape. With a complex, ambivalent perspective, they suggest the possibility of revival for both communities and individuals. A novel and works of creative non-fiction by Youngstown's Christopher Barzak and the short stories of Detroit's Michael Zadoorian illustrate how representations of abandoned mills and decaying commercial and residential sites can reveal the complex and persistent significance of deindustrialization, decades after closings began, while also pointing toward a future that uses the past as a resource.

This special issue on “Crumbling Cultures,” the first to appear on deindustrialization in a labor history journal, confirms the historiographical trend away from displaced industrial workers themselves and the cultural meaning of job loss, to a wider reflection on the cultural consequences and representations of deindustrialization. The subject, here, is the cultural agency or resilience of working-class communities broadly defined. This shifting focus reflects the evolving baseline, as the political heat of the 1980s and 1990s cools and rates of unionization plummet. For the most part, the sense of cultural continuity, or working class persistence, so evident in this issue, is found in places where not much has filled the economic and cultural vacuum. As a result, nobody in this issue speaks to the deindustrialization of large metropolitan cities. There, the actions of the state, and middle-class gentrifiers, are weighed and measured as old mills and factories are demolished or converted into condominiums or art spaces. In effect, deindustrialization and the subsequent postindustrial transformation deliver a one-two punch against working-class neighbourhoods and the old culture of industrialism. The resulting break with the industrial past may therefore be greatest where the outward signs of industrial ruination are least visible. The rise of middle-class ruin-gazing within popular culture and the academy, and the global circulation and commodification of these images and experiences, nonetheless raises important questions about its underlying politics. As historian Jackie Clarke has noted elsewhere, what is rendered visible and invisible in a post-industrial era is highly significant.

“The Long Exception” examines the period from Franklin Roosevelt to the end of the twentieth century and argues that the New Deal was more of an historical aberration—a byproduct of the massive crisis of the Great Depression—than the linear triumph of the welfare state. The depth of the Depression undoubtedly forced the realignment of American politics and class relations for decades, but, it is argued, there is more continuity in American politics between the periods before the New Deal order and those after its decline than there is between the postwar era and the rest of American history. Indeed, by the early seventies the arc of American history had fallen back upon itself. While liberals of the seventies and eighties waited for a return to what they regarded as the normality of the New Deal order, they were actually living in the final days of what Paul Krugman later called the “interregnum between Gilded Ages.” The article examines four central themes in building this argument: race, religion, class, and individualism.

The conventional historiography on popular and labor protest in the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf since the Second World War tends to ascribe a negative role to migration. Migrants—dragooned into the service of expanding oil economies—are often depicted as undermining the cohesion and efficacy of indigenous labor activism and popular protest. This article adopts a different perspective. It revisits the most important twentieth-century wave of pan-Arab, secular, republican, and socialist protest in the region—that of the 1950s and 1960s—and highlights the positive contribution migrants made. They were not just quotients of labor power, but interpretive and political subjects. Palestinians, Yemenis, and others, along with return- and circular-migrants, exiles, and visitors, transmitted pan-Arab and Leftist ideas, helped build activist organizations, and participated in a variety of protests. I suggest that standard forms of endogenous socioeconomic determinism in the labor history of the region need rethinking.

This article examines how self-employed workers are organizing in the garments and waste collection industries in India. Although the question of who is profiting from self-employed workers’ labor is complex, the cases outlined in this paper highlight telling instances of how some self-employed workers are organizing as workers. They are fighting labor exploitation by redefining the concept to include additional exploitation axes (from the state and middle class) and forms (including sexual). In doing so, they are redefining potential solutions, including identities and material benefits, to fit their unique needs. By expanding the category of “workers” beyond those defined by a narrow focus on a standard employer-employee relationship, these movements are also fighting exclusion from earlier labor protections by increasing the number of entitled beneficiaries. These struggles provide an important corrective to contemporary analyses of labor politics that focus too heavily on the precarious nature of employer-employee relationships and too little on broader definitions of work, exploitation, and protection. These broader definitions better represent the world's mass of vulnerable workers and are being articulated from below.

The idea that the histories of different regions in the world are interconnected is not particularly novel; it already existed several centuries ago. Thus, for example, when the German historian and playwright Friedrich Schiller was granted a chair at the University of Jena in 1789, he declared in his inaugural address that “the most remote regions of the world contribute to our luxury.” After all, he continued, “The clothes we wear, the spices in our food, and the price for which we buy them, many of our strongest medicines, and also many new tools of our destruction—do they not presuppose a Columbus who discovered America, a Vasco da Gama who circumnavigated the tip of Africa”?2 Nevertheless it took quite some time before professional historians began to consider these global connections seriously in their research. Colonial and “imperial” historians led the way. They were joined by economic historians. Labor historians became interested in intercontinental perspectives only more recently; until the 1970s, they typically locked themselves into the framework of individual nation-states. Even great innovators in the discipline, such as E. P. Thompson, thought mostly in terms of “national” working classes.

On the afternoon of August 2, 2014, I walked into Hossain Market, one of the many nondescript multistoried buildings lining the commercial thoroughfare in Uttor Badda, Dhaka. I had gone to show solidarity with hunger-striking garment workers of the Toba Group, three of whose units were housed in the building. Since July 28, several hundred workers had occupied the upper floors, demanding payment of three months back wages, overtime, and a festival bonus. The market entrance looked deserted, not exactly the hotbed of industrial action I'd expected. “Is this where the strike is?” I asked no one in particular. A couple of young women immediately escorted me up several flights of stairs – past the inevitable collapsible gates and oversized padlocks adorning each floor. On the seventh floor landing, young student volunteers were buzzing around a media and communications desk they had set up. Inside, I found half a dozen workers sprawled across cutting tables and makeshift beds, being administered saline by a medical team provided by a well-known health rights NGO. Hundreds of others, mostly women but also some men, milled across the room. Before I could speak to the workers, Shahidul Islam Shabuj, a labor organizer and sometime acquaintance, spied me from a distance and whisked me away to the top floor for an audience with Moshrefa Mishu, president of the Garment Workers Unity Forum and the prime mover behind the “fast unto death.” For Shabuj, my presence was fortuitous—an opportunity to get the workers’ formal message out.

This essay focuses on the emergence of an international labor market connecting Europe with southern Africa and south and southeast Asia, showing the intertwining of commercialization and proletarianization in the institution that created and coordinated perhaps the most important international labor market connecting Europe to the Far East.

This article considers the highly contested and contradictory uses of the industrial past that continue to animate questions of place-based identity in the wake of large-scale deindustrialization. Drawing on media accounts as well as qualitative interviews with city residents, the representations surrounding Youngstown, Ohio's former middleweight boxing champion, Kelly Pavlik, and his asserted relationships to the city are considered. It is argued that through the various depictions of Pavlik, we see how deindustrialization has led to a more complex interaction of space and time—rather than marking a material and symbolic break from the era in which heavy industry dominated the city and its sense of identity—as aspects of the past are alternately disavowed, recovered, rearticulated, and reconstructed in relation to shifting economic, social, and cultural contexts.

In 1972, a group of tired stewardesses tried to explain their concerns to the incredulous male transit union officials who led their union. No, the primary issues were not wages and benefits, they insisted, but the particular cut of their uniforms and the sexual insinuations made about their occupation in the new airline advertisements. Their words fell on deaf ears. Despite their commonalities as transportation workers, the gender gap separating the two groups was simply too wide to cross. Indeed, male subway drivers could not understand why the stewardesses would object to their glamorous sex-object image. Deeply held gendered notions of unionism and politics also stood in the way of communication. For even if the complaints of stewardesses were accepted as “real,” to many male union leaders they seemed petty: matters not deserving of serious attention, let alone concerted activity.

This article analyzes the process of working-class formation under the ongoing industrialization in China by studying how the trade union has been contested by migrant workers in their strikes in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) over the past three decades. The cases presented here are emblematic of workers’ struggles that have aroused public attention in the specific period of analysis. The author suggests that the trade union as a class organization has been a contested domain for migrant workers’ struggles in the PRD. Through their collective actions, workers’ class consciousness and strategies towards class organization have steadily advanced in the process of China's integration into the global economy.

This article examines evaluates the strength of the Labor-Environmentalist alliance of the late twentieth century. It traces the evolution of trade unionists' thinking about nature and the human relationship to the environment by examining intellectual and political sources of labor involvement in United Nations' environmental policy making from the 1950s through the 1980s. The article explores the reasons trade union organizations, notably the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the International Trade Secretariats (Global Union Federations) and the European Trade Union Confederation, participated in a variety of international conferences and institutions such as the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Environment, the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development. It finds that environmentally conscious trade unionists developed their own version of environmentalism and sustainable development based on a reworking of basic trade union principles, a reworking that emphasized solidarity with nature and made central the protection of the health and safety of workers, communities, and environments.

From its origins in the industrial fairs and emporiums of the 1870s and 1880s, the department store, by the 1920s, had become a fixture of the modern cityscape and a key agent for the cultural production of the new middle class in Japan. Central to this role was the equation of the department store with the culture of consumption that became one of the hallmarks of the Taishō (1912–1926) and Shōwa (1926–1989) periods. In their search for a growing mass market, department stores worked to commodify and modernize the material culture of everyday life. In the process they sold a vision of the modern defined as the totality of consumer products available at their stores. The cultural authority of the department store assured the spread of this particular definition in the 1920s and 1930s, supplanting earlier ideas that embodied modernity in such things as parliamentary government, railroads, and a colonial empire. In other words, department stores shaped an idea of the modern that associated it with the daily practices of private life rather than the public institutions of the nation-state and industrial capitalism.For a discussion of this earlier concept of the modern, see Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, 1985).

This article presents a nuanced social history of how reclaimers at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa, organized against each other on the basis of nationality instead of uniting to combat the effects of the 2008 global economic crisis. Through this narrative of struggles at one particular dump, the article contributes to debates on informal worker organizing by theorizing the importance of the production of identities, power relations, space, and institutions in understanding how and why informal workers create and maintain power-laden divisions between themselves. The article argues that organizing efforts that seek to overcome divisions between informal workers cannot simply exhort them to unite based on abstract principles, but must actively transform the places and institutions forged by these workers through which they create and crystallize divisive identities and power relations.

In contrast to the mid-twentieth century era of transnational commerce, in which the US or European manufacturing multinationals played the leading role, twenty-first century globalization is increasingly structured by a set of retail-dominated supply chains, that of Wal-Mart first among them. This strategic shift in the locus of corporate power has arisen out of two conjoined phenomena: first, the logistical integration made possible and necessary by the revolution in information/transportation technology (bar codes, data storage, containerization, global communications), and second, the neoliberal transformation of the worldwide political economy, which in the US has facilitated the massive expansion of a low-wage, import dependent retail sector, while in coastal China it has generated a huge export-manufacturing boom. But the global supply chain linking Guangdong Province to Bentonville, Arkansas may well be an increasingly fragile one, because the proletarianization of tens of millions of Chinese peasants is unlikely to go smoothly, especially under conditions of authoritarian governance.

Desirable dress on the job, whether pants, sweaters, or mini-skirted uniforms, contains symbolic meaning, but whose sexual subjectivity it expresses is not always clear. Appearance may be a proxy for other forms of contestation or just be a conveyer of pleasure that makes work just a little more humane. This essay rethinks two cases where issues of self-fashioning, appearance, sexuality, employer strictures, and state policy intertwined: the shop floors of the Second World War and the flight cabins of postwar airlines: the first, male dominated manufacturing in which women labored “for the duration”; the second, a prototypical female service industry in which fierce competition led to selling sexual allure along with comfort and safety. However mediated, voices of wage-earning women in both the 1940s and 1960s announced new expectations of womanhood, beauty, and sexual expressiveness. But while management attempted to suppress women's bodies in the shipyards and other wartime workplaces, by the 1960s airlines promoted the body of the flight attendant. In both examples, state mediation—through sources available as well as actual public policies—complicates our attempt to unravel pleasure and constraint in dressing, grooming, and sexual presence on the job. Whether or not dress requirements disciplined employee bodies, served as a guarantee of efficiency or a check against accidents and the expense of worker compensation, or opened new possibilities for sexual or gendered identities was hardly predetermined. Employers could demand slacks, women could wear them, but what dress was desirable varied with the beholder.