This study is the antidote to an overdose of what the author labels “globaloney.” Undoubtedly, the term “globalization” tends to overwhelm more than it explains, and this book is designed as a guide for readers seeking to plant the seeds of a progressive future in the many fractures and weaknesses of the international economy. In place of a monolithic process of globalization, Moody reveals the gradual economic and political construction of the new world order, which contains more opportunity for change than most tend to see. Moody does not depict workers and their unions as stupefied and bewildered victims of the immense scope and pace of international change; instead, we see how recent transformations have pushed many wage earners into active resistance on the local level and how they have even managed to create crucial linkages of solidarity across the economic landscape. Workers in a Lean World frames globalization as an open-ended process, one that the world labor movement can affect profoundly.

Labor and working class historians, whether explicitly Marxist or not, have tended to use models of class and class formation that privilege urban industrial workers, depicting their lived experience as, somehow, hermetically sealed off from the countryside. Despite an awareness of the intertwined and overlapping nature of rural and urban economies, most historians have treated rural workers as either peasants or slaves, and therefore fitting subjects for separate fields of historical inquiry, or as individuals on the cusp of proletarianization, would-be or about-to-be industrial workers. Indeed, even studies focused on recent history have viewed the rural sector as a “backward” one and constructed the industrial setting as “modern.” Thus, even if few labor historians have dismissed agricultural workers with the condescension of Marx's “sack of potatoes,” as a collectivity we have paid them insufficient attention and our field is weaker as a result.

In today's liberal democracies, the “social question” and the “immigration question” have become entwined as rarely before. Elites and citizens alike ask who belongs to the national political and social community of the “we” and what belonging entails in the way of rights and obligations. Under the impact of unprecedented free mobility for both capital and labor and the crises of the social welfare state, the borders and bonds of citizenship have been changing, mostly weakening. This essay takes a preliminary look at how these two questions are intertwined in the United States, Germany, and Israel.

In January 2008, at the meeting of the American Historical Association, I had coffee with two colleagues, Gary Gerstle and George Sánchez, with whom I share an abiding interest in labor and immigration history, as well as current politics. We hatched an idea to hold a conference on immigration policy reform, which we believed would potentially be back on Congress's agenda after the new administration—we did not know at the time who would be the next president—took office. Ours certainly would not be the first conference on immigration policy. But we wanted to bring two perspectives that are not commonly aired in policy debates today: the historical perspective and the international perspective. We decided to bring together historians, social scientists, advocates, policy analysts, and journalists for a gathering in Washington, D.C., where we hoped to get the attention of those on Capitol Hill. We were fortunate that the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies agreed to host and cosponsor the event and that we were able to work with historian Sonya Michel, the center's new director for United States studies. Additional cosponsors included Columbia University, the University of Southern California, and Vanderbilt University.

The first State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook conference on working-class studies was the best structured, most enjoyable semi-academic meeting I have ever been to. Without being claustrophobic, organizers effectively matched the content of individual panels with plenary presentations in service of the subject: “How does class work?” Often conference themes get only the most nominal attention. Here, organizers apparently stuck to their guns when accepting proposals for panels and papers, and presenters largely stuck to the program. Attendees broke up into individual panels and repeatedly came together as a group throughout the day for plenaries. This worked on an informal basis as well. Plenary sessions always started off with a buzz as folks reintroduced each other in the mornings or, later in the day, compared notes on the panels they had just been to. Stony Brook is launching a working-class studies program, and its semi-yearly conference is to be the social science version of the Youngstown State University conference on class (they will alternate years). My sense is that the conferences will feed each other. Many people who had been to Youngstown also came to Stony Brook. And while at Stony Brook, they recruited for Youngstown.

In this essay, we address the educational program and experiences of the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), as found in its camps, settlements, schools, and political training courses. One of the most active organized social movements in Brazil during the last thirty years, the MST combines political struggle with the organization of worker-controlled enterprises and educational opportunities for landless workers and their families. We begin with an excerpt from a report by one of us (Janaina Stronzake), which illustrates the ways in which the material conditions of an MST encampment led to a different kind of school, focused on the needs of students from the countryside.

In one horrifying night and through the long misery of nearly eighteen years of injustice that have followed it, the city of Bhopal in India can be said to have experienced the head-on impact of world historical and political economic processes. In 1969, Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) set up a plant to manufacture the pesticide Sevin in Bhopal, with the permission and, indeed, the encouragement of the Indian government. This was the heyday of the Green Revolution, introduced in India in the mid-1960s and based on HYV (high-yielding variety) seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and vastly increased irrigation. The disastrous social and environmental consequences of this technological choice (made by Indian planners,This was done at least partially in order to avoid the political vulnerability that dependence on imported foodgrains might bring. Marshal Windmiller, conversation with one of the authors. with backing from international agencies such as the World Bank and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations) are well documented,See, for example, Vandana Shiva, Violence of the Green Revolution (New York, 1991). but it is not always remembered that the Bhopal gas tragedy has its roots in the same narrative. The design of the Bhopal plant, as well as the policies relating to its maintenance and operation, were in keeping with the double-standard often applied by transnational corporations in their Third World outposts, where environmental, worker, and community safety issues may be seen as less pressing than at home.For detailed accounts of the corporation's disregard for safety standards at the Bhopal plant, see David Dembo, Ward Morehouse and Lucinda Wykle, Abuse of Power. Social Performance of Multinational Corporations: The Case of Union Carbide (New York, 1990), 87–91; Ward Morehouse and Arun Subramaniam, The Bhopal Tragedy: What Really Happened and What It Means for American Workers and Communities at Risk (New York, 1986), 2–8; Ruth Norris et al., Pills, Pesticides and Profits, (Croton, NY, 1982).

The analysis in this study is primarily based on the author's research of the Chinese garment industry in New York over the last ten years, her visits to a number of shops in Sunset Park, and her interviews with several dozen workers in the area. By representing a complex picture of the industry, it argues that while labor organizing and law enforcement remain important ways to address labor abuse in the industry, it is imperative for the law enforcement agencies, organized labor and all concerned individuals to understand the complexity embedded in the highly competitive structure of the garment industry, the multi-dimensional impact of labor legislation and law enforcement, and the need to develop new forms of labor organizing informed and responsive to the challenge of the time. Without such an understanding, any effort to curb the sweating phenomenon is likely to be sporadic and have no lasting effect on the industry.

The Working Pupils’ Association of High Schools was founded in 1960s’ Greece as an organization of working boys and girls who attended secondary evening schools after having finished their daily waged work. Acting simultaneously as a conventional union and as a collective that encouraged artistic activity, the association elaborated new meanings about the relation between work, education, and youth. The postwar period saw the rapid expansion of secondary schooling to the lower classes, which affected deeply both youth and the working class. However, significant attention has not yet been paid to pupils generally, let alone to those of the working class. Addressing this lacuna, this article suggests a new perspective on the relation between the histories of youth, class, political acculturation, and social change in the second half of the twentieth century.

When I moved to Madison in 2001 to take a job as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, I knew embarrassingly little about my newly adopted state's historical significance. Judging from their wisecracks about the sociology of cows, neither did my friends in New York. I soon learned about Wisconsin's prominent role in many of America's social advances, from “Fighting Bob” LaFollette's opposition to powerful railroad trusts, to pioneering contributions to social insurance, to the nation's first law for public-employee bargaining in 1959, to the turbulent campus protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Little did I know that a decade after my arrival, Wisconsin would once again become “ground zero,” as some commentators now call it, in America's ongoing struggle between democratic progress and reaction.

This article discusses the effects of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 on the timber industry in Southeast Alaska from the perspective of Alaska Native “choker setters.” Choker setters form lowest wrung on the logging production hierarchy, providing much of the labor involved in deep woods harvests. The argument that emerges from this material highlights the importance of a distinction between the relations of work and the relations of production in advancing anthropological notions of culture, while emphasizing the continuing importance of culture and meaning for understanding class-based social processes. The primary material for the article is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Southeast Alaska by the author.

Following the 2014–2015 oil price crisis, service companies in Kazakhstan went through a process of industrial restructuring centered on workforce reduction and a concomitant increase of labor outsourcing. Taking the restructuring – or “optimization” – of state-owned service companies in the region of Mangystau as a starting point, this paper illustrates the heterogenous precarization effects and forms of precarity catalyzed by the process. Taking a multidimensional approach, the paper describes and analyses the effects of precarization in both socio-economic and political terms, as well as the implications for the production of differentiated laboring subjectivities. It situates the ethnographic trajectories of workers within the framework of Kazakhstan's authoritarian neoliberalism, highlighting the punitive and pastoral techniques of goverment deployed in the restructuring of the regional oil complex. In the first part, the article describes how precarization was experienced by workers as “slavery”, entailing the loss of social recognition as well as the intensification of economic exploitation and political domination, heightening their exposure to social and bodily vulnerability. The second section looks instead at the workings of a governmental agency in its effort to remake redundant workers into small business owners through the acquisition of entrepreneurial skills and the abandonment of the Soviet “dependency mindset”. The third and last section of the article concentrates on the individual trajectory of a dismissed worker joining a multi-level marketing scheme in order to cleanse himself from the bodily and social toxicity of precarized work in the oil industry.

Lacking the power to improve the terms and conditions of school teaching at home, more than seventy US women migrated to work for the Argentine government in the last third of the nineteenth century. Only a few studies have researched this episode in the history of teachers, interpreting it as an uplifting, civilizing mission and characterizing the teachers as valiant, benevolent, and occasionally misguided reformers. Yet these migrant teachers' own words suggest that the desire to uplift played little part in their migration decisions, whereas low pay and limited employment opportunities for women figured prominently. Drawing on diaries, correspondence, newspapers, and census records, this study explores how these migrant teachers understood themselves, their work, and their social location. The analysis offers new insight into these teachers' identities as workers both at home and abroad. While acknowledging how teachers' labor served reform objectives, the essay argues that the long history of teaching in the United States needs to be reconsidered as a labor history.

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.