Citizens on the Shop Floor: Negotiating Class,Citizenship and National Identity in a Turkish State Factory

ABSTRACT

This paper examines discourses on citizenship and nation at shop floor level through Bak?rköy Cloth Factory – a state-owned factory in Istanbul, Turkey. Founded as a private enterprise in 1850, Bak?rköy became the State Industrial Office’s property in 1932 and of Sümerbank, the young Turkish state’s bank and industrial holding company in charge of textile production in 1933. Having survived such a drastic regime change, the factory’s first two decades under Sümerbank were shaped by the ruling classes’ zealous and simultaneous efforts of nation-building and industrialization. In the ruling classes’ popular projection, the alleged conversion of an unproductive industrial relic of the imperial past into an example of Republican hard work and patriotism provided opportunities for workers to repay their debt to the nation and its forefathers. In the context of the displacement and mediation of class conflict via nationalist discourses, this study explores how this industrial national space became the site of discursive struggles on national belonging and citizenship. Material from parliamentary debates and media coverage is linked with workers’ files to offer a micro-historical perspective on the interactions between class and nation.     

The factory and the welfare state: redundancy,benefits and workers’ organization at Alfa Romeo Arese, 1963-1986

ABSTRACT

The article tracks the relationship between the Italian welfare state and the social relations of production at a Fordist factory, showing how social policy influenced the pattern of workers’ contention on the industrial shop floor. Welfare state analysis has concentrated on the institutional aspect of social policy but neglected the role that state benefits played in industrial organization and workplace relations. The article ‘nests’ the analysis of social policy in a micro-history of the factory, using the case study of Arese – a plant owned by the carmaker Alfa Romeo – Milan, Italy. Tracking the history of Arese, the article shows how the Italian system of short-time work subsidies, the Cassa Integrazione Guadagni (CIG), served to quell industrial unrest and target unions’ organizational resources. From the late 1960s, the CIG was used by managers to suspend workers during strikes and acted as a deterrent against their mobilization. As redundancies increased during the 1980s, workers were put on short-time for prolonged periods and prevented from entering the factory. This degraded their professional identity and eroded their political ties with the workplace, curtailing the basis of unions’ organizational strength within the factory.     

Chinese migrant factory workers across four decades: shifts in work conditions,urbanization, and family strategies

ABSTRACT

Today about 90 million urban Chinese factory workers are migrant workers from the countryside, comprising the largest and most rapidly expanded industrial working class in history. Before the mid-2000s, these workers from the countryside were employed only temporarily in factories, and almost all were young, very poorly paid and exploited. But as labor shortages have developed and as restrictions against residing in China’s cities have relaxed, they are not as vulnerable as they were in previous decades. More of them are older, married, and have children, and many of them would like to settle on a permanent basis near their workplace with their families. Drawing on three decades of on-site interview research up through November 2018, the authors examine the changes that have occurred and the obstacles – such as the remaining difficulty of obtaining an affordable urban education for their children – that still stand in the way of migrant Chinese families remaining intact and settling permanently in urban areas. As a means of conceptualizing the implications of the shifts in migrant workers’ circumstances, especially for work relations and labor disputes, their evolving situation will be analyzed through the paradigm of Albert O. Hirschman’s concept of Exit vs. Voice.     

Occupational safety and health of factory workers in European countries in the nineteenth century: historical and legal analysis

ABSTRACT

Historical and legal analysis of factory workers’ occupational safety and health in Europe in the nineteenth century has been carried out. In particular, the main causes of industrial injury and occupational diseases among factory workers of those times were analyzed and classified. The main negative consequences of child labor in factories are determined. The distribution of industrial injury and occupational diseases by age group is shown. The influence of labor conditions at the factories on the health of the descendants of factory workers of those times was analyzed. The features of the organization of control over compliance with the safety requirements of workers’ health are highlighted. The issues of introduction of legal regulation of factory workers’ safety and health, as well as child labor regulation (i.e. working hours limits and working conditions regulation) in factories, are analyzed. The issues of implementation of legislation that established compensations for factory workers in the event of industrial injury and occupational diseases of those times are analyzed.     

Post-socialist deindustrialisation and its gendered structure of feeling: the devaluation of women’s work in the Croatian garment industry

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the devaluation of women’s industrial work during the transition from market socialism to capitalism in Croatia. On the basis of oral history interviews with former workers from the Arena knitwear factory in Pula, it explores the gendered structure of feeling created by socialist industrialisation, and its transformations during post-socialist deindustrialisation. In socialist Yugoslavia, female industrial workers participated in the discourses and practices of workers’ self-management. Despite their hard work and their low wages, most workers fondly remember the factory as a space of socialisation, solidarity and empowerment. The factory functioned as a redistributive centre for accessing welfare rights. After post-socialist transition, workers experienced worsening social rights, precarity and exploitation as a result of deindustrialisation, privatisation and the neo-liberal withdrawal of the welfare state. Workers’ nostalgic narratives about their work experiences during socialism are mobilised to reclaim the dignity and value of work in post-socialist times.     

Global capital and local labour. Strategies and labour relations in the Hex River Textiles factory from the 1940s to the early 1990s

ABSTRACT

This article analyses labour relations and management strategies in the Hex River Textiles factory in Worcester, South Africa, from the 1940s to the early 1990s. The factory was established by a French textile manufacturer in 1946, who relocated an entire mill from Bradford in England, to exploit the low wage labour provided by primarily coloured women. The strategy also included investments in new technology. The workers who were drawn into capitalist production resisted exploitation despite government attempts to crush the trade unions. In the late 1980s, trade union activity was rekindled, not least because there was a core group of coloured workers, who carried on the tradition. The strategy in the 1980s was less militant than in the 1950s, but, arguably more successful.     

Fight for meaning. Representations and work experiences in a greenfield automotive plant

ABSTRACT

This article retraces the history of a FIAT factory located in a greenfield site in the South of Italy through representations of industrial work that have evolved over time. Relying on ethnographic research that I conducted in the towns of Melfi and Potenza, I describe how different forms of understanding the work done there oppose, affect and modify each other. The factory’s history from the early 1990s to recent years is divided into three main phases. The first section shows that external and self-produced representations of work were widely opposed in the first decade following the opening of the factory. The second section focuses on a strike that broke out in 2004, and its consequences in terms of collective memory. Finally, the third section demonstrates how some images shared by workers and local community have evolved from negative to positive, in a context of economic crisis. For each of the phases of the history of the factory, this article highlights local, national and global factors that determine the frames of reference within which perceptions of work are built.     

Navigating class power and inequalities: new deal liberals and the Los Angeles regional labor board, 1933-1934

ABSTRACT

This article examines how local state officials operated the Los Angeles Regional Labor Board, 1933-1934, a regional branch of the National Labor Board. Amid a surge in workers mobilizing strikes and organizing unions, which faced fierce business opposition in LA, one of the period’s most anti-union cities, local state officials discarded initial solutions to industrial conflict – solutions based on state paternalism and involved parties’ voluntary compliance – and proposed more robust state interventionist tools. Such efforts were to enhance state authority and power and forge greater class equality by accepting worker rights and limiting business prerogatives, while the officials also obsessively encouraged the economic ‘wheels be kept turning and the pulse quickened.’ Drawing on regional-based archives, we trace local officials navigating and shaping social relations, and investigate the unpredictable, everyday workings of local responses to national-level policy-making. Earlier scholarship on the period highlights the role of leaders, like FDR or Senator Wagner, or business elites crafting seemingly pro-working-class policy, alongside the accounts of structural political economy. We emphasize local state agencies tasked with policy implementation becoming sites of contention for class actors and state officials, reflecting more general patterns but also initiating institutional procedures with enduring implications for US capital-labor relations.

Abbreviations: LA: Los Angeles; NLB: National Labor Board; RLB: Regional Labor Board; NLRB: National Labor Relations Board; AFL: American Federation of Labor; LACC: Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce; M&M: Merchant and Manufacturers Association; NRA: National Recovery Administration     

The Women's Movement and ‘Class Struggle’: gender,class formation and political identity in women's strikes, 1968–78.

ABSTRACT

Women workers’ industrial disputes were of fundamental importance to the WLM, reflected in the deeds of activists and early participant-histories. These disputes were sites of worker-employer conflict and conflict between feminists and the wider Labour Movement. This article considers how these differing interpretations related to the striking women themselves. It focuses on four key disputes and analyses contemporary reports and the accounts of those involved. It argues women strikers' particular experiences of trade unionism, class politics and feminism resulted in gendered, but still fundamentally class-based, identities, and concludes by considering the position of women workers' industrial actions in feminist histories.     

Forging feminism within labor unions and the legacy of democracy movements in South Korea

Abstract

Although most scholarship stresses that ‘male regular worker-centeredness’ is a trait of mainstream Korean labor unions, the specific reasons why feminism has failed to spread within Korean unionism have not been clarified. In order to answer this question, this article focuses on the entangled interrelations of feminism with broader social movements, maintaining that the historical legacy of the victory of the 1987 Great Worker Struggle – led by male workers from the heavy and chemical industries – is still a powerful factor in discouraging the spread of feminism, even though a fundamental transformation in the nature of Korean labor unions from being primarily class conscious to economistic has taken place. This article also highlights that Korean women’s movements have raised little criticism against the gender-blindness of labor unionism largely because Korean labor unions have been positioned as a ‘moral force’ in bringing about democratization. Furthermore, I stress that conflict between old feminists (socialist feminism) and young feminists (radical feminism), who tend to reflect on the dichotomous relations between gender and/or class, has actually been counterproductive to the proliferation of feminism within Korean labor unions.     

Labor rights are civil rights: inter-racial unionism and the struggle to unionize Nissan in Canton,Mississippi

Abstract

On 4 August 2017, workers at Nissan’s plant in Canton, Mississippi, voted 2244 to 1307 against being represented by the United Automobile Workers of America (UAW). The organizing campaign in Canton – which began shortly after the plant opened in 2003 – was one of the most important in recent labor history, and it attracted national and international media coverage. It also mobilized some high-profile supporters, including actor Danny Glover, musician Common, Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez, and presidential contender Bernie Sanders. This article uses interviews with Nissan workers and UAW staffers, together with the records of the long organizing drive, to provide the first detailed examination of this landmark campaign, revealing problems that press accounts did not cover. While the UAW and its supporters blamed Nissan’s fierce opposition for the outcome, this article reveals that the reasons for the loss were more complex. Apart from corporate opposition, community hostility, the increasing number of temporary workers – who were unable to vote in the election – and racial divisions were all important factors. Most of the UAW’s supporters were African-American, and they were mobilized by a campaign that declared that, ‘Labor Rights are Civil Rights.’ This slogan alienated many whites, however, weakening the union. While the UAW pledged to fight on, the defeat was another blow to its long campaign to organize foreign-owned automakers in the U.S., an increasingly important sector.     

Teacher Unions conflict in New York City, 1935–1960

Abstract

While studies of the New York City Teachers Union (TU) generally attribute its eventual demise to the Red Scares of the 1940s and 1950s, this article situates the TU in the history of New York City teachers’ associations more generally. It argues that the Union’s fate was a consequence not simply of anticommunism, but of competition between the Union and other city teachers’ associations. In particular, the Teachers Guild fought with the Union for the mantle of teacher radicalism. While the two organizations fought for some of the same issues, the liberal Guild was accommodating to the government, while the radical Union was confrontational. When it came to the Union’s ideology, however, the Guild consistently sacrificed its commitment to academic freedom by collaborating with public authorities to reveal the extent of the Union’s Communist commitments. Using archival data – private correspondence of teacher unionists, minutes of Union meetings, and articles from the teachers’ unions’ official periodicals – this article documents the Guild’s efforts at subverting the Union, particularly at moments when the Union’s political commitments became salient in public affairs.     

The Soviet Reception of Selma Lagerlöf

Abstract

The focus of this paper is Selma Lagerlöf’s literary presence in Soviet Russia. Despite being one of the most translated and published foreign authors in pre-revolutionary times, Lagerlöf made very infrequent appearances on the Soviet literary scene for 40-odd years between 1917 and the end of the 1950s. The process of literary production is examined in this paper in search of an explanation for the changing pattern in the publication of Lagerlöf’s texts. To problematize the process of literary production in the newly established Soviet state, Foucault’s conceptualization of the process of knowledge construction is utilized to describe, understand, and explain the interplay between critical resources, such as linguistic and literary expertise, individual initiative, and the government-controlled publishing enterprise in the Soviet state. I argue that the agency of literary workers remained relevant to the literary process, despite increasing ideological pressure on literary production, and that they paved the way towards the official reintroduction of Lagerlöf to the Russian Soviet readership during the 1950s.     

Look at Detroit: The United Auto Workers and the Battle to Organize Volkswagen in Chattanooga

ABSTRACT

On February 14, 2014, workers at Volkswagen’s new plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted 712 to 626 against being represented by the United Automobile Workers of America (UAW). The result capped one of the most high-profile organizing campaigns of recent years, with most media accounts anticipating a UAW victory, especially as VW had declared that it would not oppose the union. The VW election is also now attracting scholarly interest, with accounts stressing the role of external opposition – especially from conservative politicians and lobby groups – along with the UAW’s over-reliance on partnerships with German actors. Providing a detailed analysis of the campaign, this article recognizes the importance of these factors, but also argues that an important role was played by the UAW’s strong association with the domestic automakers, and especially with Detroit, their historic base. Citing the fact that foreign automakers had expanded since the 1980s while the domestics had contracted, opponents effectively linked the UAW with economic decline. These arguments swayed many workers. Placing the VW story within the broader struggle of the UAW to organize a foreign-owned auto plant, the article also stresses structural obstacles, especially the location of Greenfield plants in areas of low union density.     

Organizing teachers in Pennsylvania, 1935–1941

ABSTRACT

By eliminating mandatory agency fees, the US Supreme Court’s Janus decision has created an opportunity for the American teachers’ unions to renew their commitment to organizing teachers. This article returns us to the pre-agency fee era, when on-the-ground organizational work was essential for building teachers’ unions. Drawing from archival documents, it shows how dedicated activists from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh reached out to Pennsylvania’s classroom teachers to draw them into the AFT during the later Depression years. It details the changes in their organizational strategy, the challenges organizers faced in the field, their successes and failures, and the work accomplished by a paid AFT organizer – Vivian Dahl – in 1938. Above all, it documents both the dividends of face-to-face interactions between organizers and prospective unionists and the difficulties of such work in an ideologically polarized political environment, among a group of workers dominated by the hierarchical ethos of professionalism.     

Back to the factory: the continuing salience of industrial workplace history

ABSTRACT

Factories remain significant sites of employment, crucial to capitalism. In the twentieth century, scholars registered achievements in documenting their history, but since the late 1980s, and for a generation, the field lost impetus within labour history although insights continued to accumulate through work in adjacent disciplines. The factory has not featured on the agenda of ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ labour history, but we suggest that it can and should contribute to that broader global project, reinvigorating labour history, not least by contributing a dimension close to workers’ everyday experience.     

“We feel that our strength is on the factory floor”: Dualism,shop-floor power,and labor law reform in late apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article explores the transformation of South African labor relations during the 1980s. In 1979, prompted by new shop-floor militancy, the Wiehahn Commission recommended that black workers, previously excluded from state labor machinery, be permitted to join recognized trade unions. Most discussions of this shift in apartheid labor relations focus on the ensuing debate within the black unions, torn between preserving their independence or securing state legitimation. This article looks instead at the related debate about ‘levels of bargaining’: should emergent black unions demand to negotiate at the factory level, where they had secured shop-floor strength through organizing and democratic practice, or pursue the benefits of the corporatist bargaining structures that had long excluded them and had privileged white workers? The eventual drift towards corporatism, I argue, imprinted the character of the South African labor movement into the post-apartheid era. An understandable desire to wield influence at the level of the national political economy eroded the tradition of workers’ control, shop floor democracy, and struggle unionism that black unions had forged during the 1970s and 1980s.     

Employee benefits,migration and social struggles: an Indian coalfield, 1895–1970

ABSTRACT

During 1895–1970, in the Indian coalfield of Jharia, circular migration of the mineworker coexisted along with the fact that workers became regular over time. This article suggests that the development of employee benefits influenced the patterns of migration and settlement of workers. Employers, guided by a new industrial sensibility, came up with specific employee benefits, with an objective of continuous production from a group of settled workers. The workers’ approach to social security and the pressure exerted by them shaped the expansion of employee benefits. My finding takes an issue with the thesis of cheap migrant labour. The latter argument has insufficiently revealed the actual preferences of employees. My work critiques another thesis which suggests that workers maintained a preference for investment in rural homesteads; therefore choosing to remain oscillating migrants. My study suggests that workers developed a notion of the civilised and human form of life from the 1920s onwards. The self-respect campaign amongst the unprivileged caste groups, the movement for industrial democracy and national reconstruction and the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO’s) advocacy of civilised and human life for workers, gave a spur to new reproduction preferences. Now, they sought employee benefits regarded as necessary for a dignified living.     

A pivotal role? The AFL–CIO and the 2008 presidential election

This article explores the role that organized labor played in the landmark presidential election of 2008. In particular, it explores the work of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO), which ran its biggest ever election campaign in 2008, spending upwards of $250 million. While there is a vibrant emerging literature on the election, particularly from political scientists and former reporters, labor’s role in the story has been largely overlooked. Drawing on new parts of the AFL–CIO’s papers, as well as interviews with key staffers and federation leaders, this article highlights the important – and overlooked – role that labor played in putting Barack Obama into the White House. Especially important were its extensive efforts to educate – and pressure – white members, many of whom had backed other candidates during the Democratic primaries, to support Obama. Indeed, the Washington Post asserted that union members played a ‘pivotal role’ in Obama’s victory, especially in terms of delivering the white vote. It was a conclusion largely supported by exit polls, which showed that white union members were much more likely to support Obama than whites who were not in unions. The article highlights that despite the decline in union density – by this time only about 12% of American workers belonged to unions, compared to 35% in the 1950s – the labor movement retained considerable political influence, chiefly because of reforms carried out by AFL–CIO President John J. Sweeney. While Obama was unable to fulfill many of the expectations generated by his campaign, the story of labor and the 2008 election is an important one in its own right, showing that contemporary labor could still be a powerful and constructive force.     

‘Belles from Bristol and Bournville in New Surroundings’: female confectionery workers as transnational agents, 1918–1928

ABSTRACT

In existing histories of the development of multinational business, women are usually absent. Yet when the British confectionery companies of Cadbury, Fry and Pascall took the bold step to build an entirely new factory in Tasmania in the early 1920s, women workers were important, and mobile, actors. This article draws on business history archives and genealogical material, from both Britain and Australia, to explore how a select group of British women became the ‘pioneers’ of the Cadbury-Fry-Pascall company. It examines why women were key to the formation of an Australian subsidiary, how they influenced, and sometimes challenged, the creation of workplace culture and practice, and the consequences of this mode of female labour migration.