Ira Katznelson urges labor historians to respond to a crisis in their field by returning to political, institutional, and state-centered history. This state of affairs has come about, he and others tell us, because of the dual challenge of “new social movements” and then the decline of labor movements, the crisis of social democracy, and collapse of communist states. Labor history is in crisis, he concludes, because class no longer provides the best categories with which to describe the world and the working class is no longer the principal historical actor.

Frank Tannenbaum (1893–1969) was a man of many parts. He was brought up by immigrant parents on a New England farm, which may explain his sympathy for small farmers. At the same time, however, he embraced the cause of urban workers and became a Wobbly and an anarcho-syndicalist theorist. In fact, Tannenbaum first made a name for himself as an advocate for the unemployed, the homeless, and the imprisoned—the latter after being jailed for his role organizing those at the bottom of United States urban society. Yet he also studied with John Dewey at Columbia University and got a doctorate at the Brookings Institution with a thesis on the Mexican agrarian reform, inaugurating three decades of engagement with the Mexican Revolution. During this time Tannenbaum became the friend and adviser of ministers and presidents.

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.

This article examines the evolution of the Autonomous Union of the Vine (Sindicato Autónomo de la Vid [SAVID]), a radical wine industry union that operated in the Jerez area (Spain) between 1979 and 1987. The SAVID was born as a result of a series of internal conflicts and splits in the trade union Unión Sindical Obrera (USO), which was founded by Christian groups that were influenced by self-management ideas in the province of Cádiz during the 1970s. Drawing on the life stories of two union members, this article analyzes the creation, evolution, and decline of the SAVID labor union of the sherry wine industry in the Jerez area, which can be categorized as a paradigmatic case of “militant particularism.” The biographical narratives of the union members make the identification and analysis of factors involved in both the rise and the decline of this trade union possible. These narratives will also help in contesting the dominant narratives on the role of the trade union movement and the radical Left during the Spanish Transition by providing empirical evidence of labor militancy on a local scale.

This issue celebrates the fortieth anniversary of International Labor and Working-Class History. A relative youngster, it was a product of the second of two waves that resulted in the foundation of many labor history journals and societies.1 The first wave, between roughly 1956 and 1962 included the Dutch-based International Review of Social History; 2 the Feltrinelli Institute's Annali in Italy; Le mouvement social in France; Labor History in the United States; the British Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History;3 the West German Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte; and Australia's Labour History. These journals developed at a time when organized labor and left-wing politics were strong and confident of their future,4 although many who were active in these journals were highly critical of the political strategies of the existing Left and, in Eric Hobsbawm's words, viewed them “as an attempt to find a way forward in Left politics through historical reflection.”5 The second wave of journal creation in labor history took place in the 1970s and included not only ILWCH (1972), but Radical History Review (1975), Labour/Le Travail (1976), and History Workshop Journal (1976). These journals were especially shaped by the radicalism of the 1960s—the Vietnam War, the Cuban revolution, and the wave of student, feminist, and left-wing unrest in Europe and the world in 1968 and subsequently.6 The new journals were more transnational and more comparative; malleable youths, these journals were more susceptible to the influence of the social movements evolving around them. They were more attentive to the relationship between metropole and colonial territories and more focused on the burgeoning fields of black studies and women's history than was true earlier. Drawing upon the work of sociologists, political scientists, and demographers, they were also animated by the tremendous explosion of social history in the 1960s and 1970s and new research underway on social protest movements, race, and social conditions.7

All praise to Jeff Cowie and Nick Salvatore. They've dared to look deep into the pit of progressive hopes in modern US history and have emerged with something important and new to say about that much debated, much lamented subject. And they get certain big things right. The hegemony of individualism, the historic weakness of the labor movement, divisions of race, and the ways in which most white Christians apply their religious faith have all interacted to limit what, in Europe, are called the prospects of social-democracy and, in this country, usually go under the name of modern liberalism. Their concluding suggestion that reformers may find in “the fluid alliances of the Progressive Era” a more helpful analogy than in the class-based coalition led by FDR is a welcome provocation, although they don't choose to elaborate on it.

This article explores tensions within the Democratic Party's uneasy alliance of grassroots labor and blue-collar evangelicalism that collapsed in heated confrontation during California's postwar political realignment. The context in which this played out is Ham and Eggs, one of California's largest old-age welfare movements during the 1930s which, in the midst of economic reconstruction, found new (but short-lived) relevance in the late 1940s. From spring 1945 until summer 1946 Ham and Eggs rallied workers behind its message of economic redistribution and Christian Americanism in hopes of forcing new legislation on behalf of pensions for the elderly. In the process, it stirred a political storm that thrust it into a significance exceeding its original intent. At issue was the “labor question,” the vexing uncertainty animating American politics at this juncture about the extent to which New Deal liberalism's labor-friendly initiatives and progressive impulses for economic freedom, racial equality, and social justice would be extended. Caught between a labor-Left movement within the Democratic Party that looked to extend New Deal liberalism and a galvanized Christian Right, which looked to roll it back, blue-collar evangelicals affiliated with Ham and Eggs confronted a new political reality that compelled them to choose between their class and faith commitments. With reluctance they chose the latter over the former. The decision marked the beginning of blue-collar evangelicalism's shift to the Right and ultimately the formation of a broader evangelical political alliance that would prove instrumental in the rise of California's conservative Republican movement.

In the past decade or so, “globalization” has become a firmly entrenched catch-phrase in such diverse worlds as industry, academia, and popular culture. Businessmen and economists tend to laud the coming global era, while critics (including many labor historians) worry about its effects. However, both sides of the debate often share assumptions about the nature of globalization. They agree that it is a fairly new process which involves coordination of massive flows of capital, goods, and labor across national borders, the increasing impotence of national governments in regulating those flows, the increasing eradication of local cultures by a homogenous Westernized world culture, and the increasing powerlessness of local people in every corner of the world (or, depending on one's point of view, empowerment of local people through access to Western goods and ideas).

This essay illuminates the worldwide transition to free labor from various forms of unfree labor by examining that process in the particular conditions of Southern Africa's encounter with Britain. Dr. David Livingstone's servants—whose descendants in Malawi have been called “Magololo,”1 a term used throughout this essay to distinguish them from the “Kololo” conquerors of Bulozi in contemporary Zambia and parts of Namibia—exemplify this global development. Between 1853 and 1861, over a hundred young Magololo men worked as porters, deckhands, and guides and showed Livingstone the very places in southern Africa whose “discovery” (for Britons) made Livingstone famous. Owing tribute labor to their king, Sekeletu, they initially performed these tasks as subjects. But, after Livingstone's return from England in 1858, they labored for wages; they were among the first groups of Africans in the region to make the emblematic modern move from formally unfree labor to formally free labor. This transition, which would form the core conflict of indirect rule in British Africa, radically altered Livingstone's relationship with his guides: They rebelled against him in 1861. This is one side of the story. The other side follows from the fact that one cannot sensibly speak about workers without the story of their employers. Accordingly, this essay revisits the well-known story of Livingstone's life but offers a different perspective than other biographies. It is the first study to combine the long-familiar documentary evidence with oral sources, for the specific purpose of retelling the Livingstone narrative (in its many renderings) from the viewpoint of his relations with the Magololo workers. In that way, it can shed light on the beginnings of the transition to wage labor in this region.

For a century after 1870, labor unions and working-class political movements grew steadily in virtually all industrialized capitalist economies. By the late 1970s, unions enrolled 40 percent of the total labor force in Germany and New Zealand; 50 percent in Australia, Italy, and the United Kingdom; over 60 percent in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway; and over 80 percent in Finland and Sweden (24). In addition, unions' political allies held important political offices in many of these countries, including control of the government in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Scandinavia.

African labor history is undergoing a resurgence judging by the appearance of these three important books. During the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century, historians working in East, West, and southern Africa published a remarkable number of first-rate histories of migrant laborers, rural workers, and the emerging urban working class, notably in the innovative Heinemann Social History of Africa series founded by Allen Isaacman and Jean Hay. Other historians published fine works elsewhere. Labor history of all kinds flourished. However, with new academic trends and the demise of the Social History series in the mid-2000s, African labor history seems to have entered a decline, although studies of precolonial slavery have continued to appear regularly. It is therefore gratifying to see a number of new labor histories published in the last two or three years.

The twentieth annual North American Labor History Conference (NALHC), held at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, October 15–17, 1998, offered three days of intellectual forays into the history of workers in the United States, Latin America, Africa, Canada, Poland, and New Zealand. Conference participants enjoyed discussions concerning the ways in which race, ethnicity, gender, skill, nationalism, communism, masculinity, education, political economy, imperialism, and citizenship have shaped labor history from the seventeenth century through the 1990s. The following is small sample of some of the panels and events included at the 1998 NALHC.