In April 1929, the French authorities in Algeria commissioned a “general survey of the native female workforce,” as part of broader reforms in vocational education and handicrafts policy. Drawing on a wide range of administrative and missionary sources, this article traces the origin and implementation of the survey, showing how Algerian women’s work was made visible, classifiable, and governable in the service of colonial economic and ideological goals. It argues that cultural and statistical representations of Algerian women defined the forms and conditions of their integration into state-sponsored handicrafts, specifically through the promotion of home-based labor. It also explores how the data were shaped by the practices, interpretations, and agendas of the men and women who requested, collected, formatted, and transmitted them. Situating the survey within longer standing practices of quantification, this article shows how Algeria functioned as a colonial laboratory for experimenting with new categories aimed at transforming women into human resources in the service of colonial mise en valeur. After outlining the political goals of the survey in the 1920s, this article examines the measurement criteria used, which reveal the difficulty of capturing forms of work that blur the boundaries between home-based labor and wage labor. It then reconstructs the chain of information production, highlighting the political and personal factors underlying it, as well as the intermediaries on whom administrators relied. Finally, it turns to one of these actors, the missionary congregation of the White Sisters, whose private archives offer valuable insight into everyday practices of quantification.

Using Côte d’Ivoire as a case study, this article examines how the abolition of forced labor in the French colonies of Africa in 1946 put statistics at the heart of tensions between the colonial administration, European planters, and African planters. The first section suggests that figures were instrumentalized to serve competing group interests: on one side, those of European planters eager to show the iniquity of the measure to abolish forced labor, which undermined their economic activities due to the resulting labor shortages; on the other side, those of Ivorian planters, who produced figures to argue for the rights of workers and to convince the colonial administration of the need to move toward a system of freedom of labor. The article thus puts the focus on a blind spot in the academic literature, namely, the role of African agency in the production of figures and their capacity to resist colonial domination. It also examines how West African workers managed to circumvent the colonial recruiting system that had been set up by European planters in the form of the Syndicat interprofessionnel d’acheminement de la main-d’œuvre (Interprofessional union for the transport of labor, or SIAMO). It is this in particular that leads me to question the data produced by SIAMO, which attempted to direct migrant workers toward European farms in the south from 1950 onward.

This article examines the local production of statistics of workers recruited by the Portuguese colonial administration in Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau) during the last years when the Native Labor Code was in force. By enquiring the statistics produced by commissioners of post in the district of Cacheu in their monthly service journals, it consideres the purposes of the workforce statistics at a moment Portugal had just ratified the International Labor Organization’s Convention on forced labor and compiling reliable statistical records became crucial. Examining statistical production and registration allows us to explore the expectations and tensions within the colonial state regarding the management of forced labor and the functioning of the colonial administration. Rather than a tool for controllling the African workforce, counting workers was a way of controlling and monitoring the performance of colonial administrators. Moreover, statistics could become part of a strategy of hiding and concealing less palatable aspects of daily colonial rule and labor recruitment practices. Indeed, the workforce recruited by the colonial state remained fairly invisible (and thus subject to abuse), be it due to inconsistent record-keeping or the lack of statistics on workforce recruitment altogether.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the concepts of surplus labor, disguised unemployment, and underemployment emerged as key tools for thinking about economic development in the emerging “Third World.” This article examines how these concepts were developed and debated in Egypt, a country that was at the forefront of postcolonial planning efforts internationally. To this end, the article examines the statistical construction of the “labor problem” and the way it shaped competing visions of economic development among national, colonial, and international actors. Using a variety of sources—including Egyptian government archives, documents from the British Foreign Office, and the International Labour Organization—the article contributes to the global history of development and quantification, and contributes to the scholarship on Nasserism in Egypt.

This article examines how the International Labour Office (ILO) tried to disseminate one of its statistical tools, the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO), in sub-Saharan Africa, in the context of decolonization and development planning. It sheds light on the changing relations in the late 1950s and early 1960s between the ILO, late colonial and then national administrations, and a regional organization, the Combined Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of the Sahara (CCTA). Although characterized by rivalry, misunderstandings, and sometimes indifference, these relations were also marked by partially overlapping interests. Focusing on the successive ILO experts responsible for developing occupational classifications, this paper shows how their interactions with local actors reshaped the project which they had to carry out. For instance, it gave a greater place to the training of national civil servants or contributed to the realization of the 1962 Nigerian census. In particular, the article analyzes the connections made with other international programs (relating to demography and economic planning) on the ground, and the resulting interdependence among them. By doing so, the ILO expert responsible for the project on occupational classifications benefited from the resources of other technical assistance programs and tried to demonstrate to national authorities the importance of the project which could apply in various fields. While unexpected difficulties limited the scope of the initial project to Nigeria alone, the paper discusses how ILO officials inscribed occupational classifications in the general framework of development planning.

This article examines the construction of statistics on labor emigration to France and the attempt of the Algerian state to integrate this emigration into development planning after independence. It draws on extensive primary sources in France, Algeria, and Switzerland, including colonial records, the ministries and offices of independent Algeria, international organizations and academic studies. To trace colonial legacies, it first considers the colonial expertise of the 1950s before turning to the Algerian emigration planning projects in the 1960s. Extending the work of James Scott and Timothy Mitchell, it argues that Algerian planners both recognized the biases embedded in colonial representations of migration, and sought to develop a form of statistical modernity that was critical and reflexive. They engaged in careful assessments of available data while simultaneously valuing it as a tool for action. In particular, critiques and reflections within the Algerian Ministry of Labor on the 1969 emigration planning model point to the need for a nuanced understanding of statistical modernity. Rather than perpetuating a colonial gaze on society, the introduction of this model primarily sought to address the limited informational capacities of the independent state. Demographic statistics thus became the main instrument for regulating emigration, but they were valued out of pragmatism rather than ideology. Given the limitations of other socio-economic indicators, such as unemployment rate, population statistics were among the few reliable sources available to allocate exit permits fairly across the regions of origin of prospective emigrants.

The suspension of Palestinian work permits after October 7, 2023, exposed the long-standing fragility of Palestinian labor in Israel and illuminated the political purposes this labor regime serves. This article situates Palestinian workers within a historical continuum of exclusion and conditional incorporation that has structured Zionist and Israeli labor policy since the Mandate period. Drawing on archival, historical, and contemporary sources, we show that Palestinian labor has functioned not as a neutral economic exchange but as a central instrument of colonial governance.

We argue that Israeli labor policy toward Palestinians combines three interlocking logics—elimination, exploitation, and discipline—through which workers are rendered simultaneously indispensable to key sectors and permanently vulnerable to surveillance, disposability, and political sanction. The permit regime, tolerated informality, and externalized social reproduction constitute a technology of control that manages mobility while fragmenting collective agency.

By analyzing Palestinian labor as a colonial apparatus, the article contributes to wider debates on the coloniality of labor and demonstrates how labor regimes can be mobilized to restructure dependent economies and pacify subordinated populations.

This essay examines the overlooked 1979 strike by Palestinian workers at the Jerusalem District Electricity Company (JEDC) as a pivotal moment of anti-colonial resistance. It argues that the strike, which fused demands for better wages with a political struggle against Israel’s erosion of the company’s concession and autonomy, demonstrates the inextricable link between class and national liberation. By mobilizing broad popular solidarity to defend a critical national infrastructure, the JEDC workers’ union articulated a mode of resistance in which labor solidarity became a primary vehicle for asserting sovereignty and contesting the political economy of settler colonial occupation. Their actions foreground the central role of an organized urban working class in the broader Palestinian struggle for development and liberation.

The word taʿawuniyya (“cooperative”) in Palestine today can mean multiple things. It can mean a registered cooperative, or can loosely refer to any initiative based on collective labor and possession, geared toward a collective societal benefit—a communal garden, for example. This vernacular usage of the term, close to the concept of the commons, is borne out of Palestinian history and is an invitation to go beyond the formal definition of a cooperative when searching for a Palestinian “cooperative movement.” Registered cooperatives in Palestine have historically played a role that ranged from subordination and placation by ruling authorities to reformist and survival mechanisms for a colonized population. Informal cooperatives, on the other hand, played roles that surpassed survival and attempted to upend the basis of colonial control. Apart from structure and labor relations, what unites both senses of the term “cooperative” is the political role they have played, as well as their tendency to focus on basic necessities such as food and housing. The history of the cooperative movement in Palestine tells a story of social production and reproduction as an arena of struggle, particularly against Zionist colonization. This essay will give an overview of this history, focusing mainly on the areas of Palestine occupied in 1967.

This brief paper aims to consider the impact of Israel’s settler-colonial measures on workers in the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) after October 2023. Although the ongoing war has been waged on the Gaza Strip, with devastating repercussions for lives and livelihoods in the Strip, Israeli colonial measures in the West Bank have had a grave impact on all segments of Palestinian society, including workers. These measures include: First; closure of the Israeli labor market in the face of tens of thousands of Palestinian workers. Second, broadening the system of movement restrictions within the West Bank which led to disruptions in local production and trade thus damaging private sector operations. Third; Israel’s continued withholding of Palestinian custom duty revenues with adverse impacts on workers in general but particularly public sector workers. To assess the impact of these measures, the paper utilizes a number of indices to assess the situation of these workers; including labor supply, unemployment, wage levels, distribution across sectors, informality, and workers’ rights. The paper finds a grave deterioration in the situation of workers in the labor market at all levels, with dire repercussions for workers and their families.

What is happening in Gaza now is a total displacement of any form of normality. This displacement of the normal has been effected by a population-wide project of social reproduction. Every Gazan, including children, is solicited to reproduce life, to survive. At the same time, social reproduction in Palestine has always also entailed insurgent possibilities, where this form of labour has indeed sustained and reproduced Palestinian revolutionary action. From collective kitchens to local initiatives of care for children, to using drones as musical instruments to distract children from the deafening violence of its soundscape, social reproduction is iterated as both survival and insurgency. This short intervention tries to think through the question of how to make sense of social reproduction as capitalist oppression through the unwaged housework, and as colonial violence through the mass extermination of a population, without leaving behind its potential for insurgency?

Labor historians, particularly in the United States, have given unique attention to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Emerging out of a series of tumultuous strikes on the West Coast during the early Depression years, the ILWU won trend-setting employment contracts, survived Second Red Scare-era persecution despite keeping avowedly leftwing leadership, and maintained its presence on the docks even after containerization dramatically reshaped the longshore industry. This review examines multiple recent works on the ILWU, noting new interventions—both in ILWU history and labor history, more broadly. All three reviewed works offer invaluable insight for how contemporary unions can adapt to technological changes in the workplace, foster internal democracy, and build labor power while fighting for social justice. The review concludes by offering potential avenues for further scholarly research, particularly on the nature of leftwing unionism and labor-generated alternatives to deindustrialization and workforce displacement.