Not your average fraternal organization: the IBPOEW and labor activism, 1935–1950

In writing about working-class activism, scholars frequently study labor organizations and workplaces from which African Americans have been mostly excluded. Consequently, the uniqueness of black labor activism is not captured and is often misinterpreted. This article posits that black fraternal organizations, specifically the Improved, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World (IBPOEW), offer an alternative site for studying black workers and their struggles for employment during the 1930s and 1940s. By analyzing the Elks participation in the continuous battle to gain work while resisting union exclusion, workplace segregation, unemployment and other labor issues central to the African American experience, this study concludes that black men and women often developed labor solidarity not in the workplace or labor unions but in a cross-class organization that participated in coalitions whose members’ ideologies ranged from Christianity to Communism. Cross-class alliances, male/female solidarity, racial unity, a willingness to join coalitions across ideologies and to engage in multiple forms of struggle, especially militant mass mobilization, distinguish Elk labor activism from that of other fraternal orders.     

‘We Want Both!’: pressuring Philadelphia unions for inclusion and equity during the long 1970s

ABSTRACT

This article examines local labor insurgency in Philadelphia between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s. Drawing on alternative press sources, it traces the efforts of Black, Puerto Rican, and female workers to reshape their unions as stable employment opportunities declined. Across industries and job sites, workers pressured both their unions and their employers through public criticism, running slates of candidates in union elections, and taking part in picketing and wildcat strikes. Existing scholarship has privileged rank-and-file activism among White men focused on wages and working conditions. Enlarging our view to include a more representative workforce at the local level while following workers’ resistance forward through time recharacterizes the rank-and-file rebellion to include defiant, multiracial coalitions demanding progressive reform. That broader rebellion, in turn, challenges some long-held assumptions about US labor during the 1970s.     

“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.     

社会运动工会主义的形成和发展 ——非洲工会的发展历程及其在劳动雇佣管制中的作用

在“一带一路”倡议中，非洲国家不可或缺。非洲国家工会的发展可以分为 3 个阶段，即殖民 时期、独立运动后初期及政治民主化转型时期。非洲工会发展与政治斗争密不可分，这也决定了其社会运动工 会主义的“激进”特性。现在非洲工会力量普遍薄弱，一方面是由于经济自由化导致了正式经济中的大量失业 和工会成员人数的急剧下降，另一方面是因为许多非洲国家政府对劳动法的改革，在承认工会合法地位的同时 又极大限制了工会行动。虽然非洲工会在劳动雇佣管制中的作用有限，但是当发生严重侵犯工人权利的行为时， 非洲工会仍然会通过组织工人罢工、静坐等形式来进行反抗。研究建议，对于在非投资的中资企业来说，要更 加关注东道国的工会运行情况，充分尊重员工的权利，加强与工会的沟通，提升员工的归属感。     

Command and control at work: the evolution of the rules of work on Mexican railroads, 1883–1923

Abstract

This article examines the evolution of written work rules on the railroads in Mexico from 1883 to 1923, looking at three sets of work rules from the Porfiriato and three from the Revolution. Just as foreign investors, British and American, and foreign skilled workers, mostly American, played an important role in the establishment of Mexico’s first railroad companies, these same foreign businesses brought their written rule books, necessary for the impersonal management of labor in companies with large, diverse, and a far-flung labor force like the railroads, to Mexico. The first rules are often Spanish translations of the English-language originals and paid no attention to the workers’ opinions. Through the Porfiriato, however, Mexican railroad workers unionized, in part following the pattern of the American Brotherhoods, and their unions, through labor activism and strikes, fought to transform work rules from company commands to negotiated terrain, with some success before the Revolution broke out. When the Revolution did break out, however, it radically transformed the terrain of work rules, first because railroad companies, even before they collapsed in the face of revolutionary violence, lost the support of the state that they so needed to impose their work rules, and second, because the new state that emerged from the Revolution allied with organized workers to provide them with many of their revolutionary demands: legal trade unions, mandated work benefits, and collective bargaining. Thus, newly powerful railroad unions through strikes and activism and in alliance with the new state made work rules not only negotiated terrain between companies and workers, but terrain in which workers and their unions held the upper hand. As a consequence, the work rules of 1923, where unions are powerful and impose significant benefits to workers, bear little resemblance to those of 1883, where unions are not recognized by the companies, which felt no obligation to provide any benefits at all.     

中非工会差异及中资企业在非应对劳资矛盾的行为逻辑 —— 基于对坦桑尼亚的调研

在"中非合作论坛"、"一带一路"倡议的推动下,越来越多的中资企业进入非洲。随着企业在非洲的经营活动的日趋活跃,企业面临的劳资问题也不断增加。然而大多数在非的企业管理者在处理劳资矛盾时,并没有正确评估当地工会的角色与作用,也没有积极处理场域内的劳资矛盾,这不但给企业带来经济损失,也对国家形象造成了影响。本文以坦桑尼亚为例,通过调研分析,认为造成在非中资企业处理工会问题不力的根源是中非工会的差异,包括两国工会的本质、制度安排、日常活动差异等。面对中方管理者的工会经验缺失,一些立足于长远发展的企业已经开始尝试与当地工会合作,并以其在中国的工会经验为切入点,通过表彰先进、节日慰问等形式来培养员工中对中国友好的代表,通过他们的带动作用团结凝聚工人,尽管这些做法起到了一定的团结作用,但因这些措施具有临时性、随机性等特征,并不能持续发挥作用。     

Bringing the State's Workers in: Time to Rectify an Imbalanced US Labor Historiography

This article considers the reasons why labor historians have continued to neglect the history of workers and unions in the US public sector. It argues that the most compelling explanation for historians’ failure to examine the history of public sector unions is that conducting such an examination would challenge a number of deeply rooted preconceptions regarding the history of American labor since World War II. The article goes on to suggest what we might learn if US labor historians began to probe the experience of public sector workers more fully.     

论“工会法治化”的中国特色社会主义工会制度发展新途径

＂工会法治化＂,包括工会法律制度的建立健全和工会法律角色的合理设定,能够促进工会在市场经济劳动关系中切实履行其维权职能。无论是工会工作适应新时代的转变,还是＂组织起来、切实维权＂工会新方针,得以经由＂法治化＂的工会制度实现;并且工会制度适应国内外劳工法律环境也需＂法治化＂发展。所以,＂工会法治化＂应成为中国特色社会主义工会制度发展新途径。     

Trade unions and workplace organization: regulating labour markets in the Belgian and American flat glass industry and in the Amsterdam diamond industry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

In all three industries, internal subcontracting as a way to organize the workplace determined the emergence of craft unionism in the nineteenth century. In both Belgian and American window-glassmaking craft unionism, originally based on exclusion of low-skilled workers who had been underhands in the system of subcontracting, persisted well into the twentieth century, until full mechanization made artisanal glassblowing obsolete. Only then all workers could be united in an industrial union. In diamond manufacturing, craft unions were replaced by a unified industrial union already in the 1890s. In all three industries, trade unions had the biggest impact when they were able to regulate product markets and industrial competition through labour market control. Methods, time frames and duration of labour market control differed considerably, however.     

From colony to oil producer: US oil companies and the reshaping of labor relations in Libya during the Cold War

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the labor relations the US government and American oil companies introduced in Libya between the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the rise of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in 1969. It argues that labor policies played a crucial role in American Cold War efforts to place Libya in the Western bloc and assure access to its oil resources. Like in other contexts, the American government relied on anti-Communist trade unions, in particular the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), to oppose radical forms of labor organizing. Bini examines the ways in which Libyan oil workers resisted the forms of segregation and discrimination introduced in oil camps and company towns, by demanding the right to redefine labor relations through trade unions, and establishing ties with other trade unions in Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria. This article shows that despite American efforts to repress Libyan trade unions, in the second half of the 1960s oil workers were a crucial force in redefining international oil politics. During the Six Day War of 1967, they constituted one of the main forces behind Libya’s support of oil nationalism and set the stage for the emergence of Qaddafi’s regime in 1969.     

American labor history prior to the civil war: Sources and opportunities for research

In a single European aviation market that is open to innovative new business strategies, most notably the (ultra) low-cost model developed by Ryanair, nonterritorial forms of sovereignty have been used to redefine employment relations, exert control over labor, and extract surplus value. Although aviation unions recognize the need to shift scale from a predominantly local focus on their national (flag) airline, they have yet to develop effective strategies at the supranational level as low-fare airlines continually extend their geographical reach in the open skies over Europe and beyond. Union strategies are considered at different levels (national and EU) as well as the different processes to enact these strategies (technocratic and democratic). Unions need to develop a Euro-democratization strategy if they are to arrest the anti-unionism and social dumping of European “sky pirates” such as Ryanair and Norwegian Air Shuttle.     

中国入世后,工会面临的挑战及其应对

工会是站在工人一方 ,通过对劳动价格的议价来调节供给与需求关系的。经济全球化削弱了工会的调节能力。企业跨国经营是资本对付工会的现代手段。经济全球化使工会在更高层次上凸现了各国工会的竞争 ,也为中国工会发展提供了新的机遇。产业结构调整必然伴随结构性失业。政府也为此付出了巨大的机会成本。利用WTO缺陷 ,维护企业正当权益也是维护工人的利益。工会也应该研究世界经济和国际贸易规则 ,培养自己的专门人才 ,规避不利于工会及工人的风险。     

Rural unions and the struggle for land in Brazil

Studies of Brazil's agricultural labor movement have generally neglected its relationship to the struggle for land, but this is neither fair nor accurate. Analyzing the rural labor movement's historical contributions to the land struggle in Brazil, this contribution has been organized into three main periods, emphasizing social relations, institutional activism and policy changes. It argues that despite the peculiarities of different historical contexts, rural labor consistently provoked protest against policies that privileged large landholders, whose concentration of power over land and labor resources continually worsened Brazil's ranking as one of the most unequal of nations. For more than half a century, the most constant opponent of this situation among the peasantry has been the National Confederation of Workers in Agriculture (CONTAG), a corporatist organization of rural labor unions founded in 1963.     

关于建立劳动关系协调预警机制的思考

稳定职工队伍 ,要从建立基层劳动关系协调预警机制入手 ,在预测、预审、预报、预防上下功夫 ,做好群众的思想工作 ,及时解决群众的实际问题 ,尽量防止矛盾的激化。     

平台经济下网约工集体劳动权行使机制革新探讨

平台经济对网约工集体劳动权的行使提出了挑战.集体劳动权行使机制形成于大工业时代,工会会员资格与劳动关系结合紧密.平台经济颠覆了企业传统用工方式,网约工面临"劳动者"身份认定困境,既难以加入企业工会,又难以通过基层行业工会与跨区域经营的平台企业进行集体协商.研究认为,面对平台经济引发的挑战,有必要破除劳动关系"迷思",将...     

The centrality of labor time in South African gold mining since 1886

Labor time, as a dimension of South African mining labor history, has been ignored, both conceptually and historically. This article remedies this yawning gap by presenting primary and secondary evidence which demonstrates the centrality of labor time in South African gold mines since the discovery of gold in 1886. To this end, labor time is traced in two ways. Part I tracks industrial working time by tracing the length of the working day and week. Part II tracks the ever-increasing length of the African migrant labor contract. While industrial working hours remain remarkably stable for almost a century, the migrant labor contract systematically increases over a similar period. These two measures of labor time eventually coincide when the migrant labor system dissolves and black African workers take annual leave together with their compatriots across the racial divide. The explanation for the mining industry’s long struggle to both maintain relatively long working hours and increasingly maximize the length of the migrant labor contract is construed as completing the received wisdom of Harold Wolpe's much celebrated and criticized `cheap- labor' thesis. (Wolpe, “Capitalism and Cheap Labor Power.”)     

Great Plains harvest: evolution of the US public employment service,transnational labor,and nonimmigrant visas

Government H-2A visa data and employer surveys show that Great Plains custom harvesting operations now rely on the US public employment service (PES) and private labor agencies to hire transnational labor. Wheat harvest labor problems and private labor bureau abuses during the Progressive Era were a driving force in the formation and development of the local, state, and federal PES agencies that are now used to secure foreign workers. The PES addressed harvest labor problems from the late nineteenth century until the 1930s when mechanization and drought sufficiently reduced labor demand. The PES became active in the wheat harvest again during WW II and into the 1950s until mobile custom combining crews eliminated the need for the federal government’s involvement. Beginning in the 1990s, domestic labor scarcity caused custom harvesting employers to hire foreign labor through the H-2A and J-1 visa programs. The PES is part and parcel of the H-2A visa program, but unlike most agricultural employers that use H-2A labor, foreign workers in custom harvesting are from South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and numerous European and other countries rather than Latin America. Transnational custom harvesting employees that use H-2A visas occupy a niche within the program and thereby maintain Great Plains harvesting’s unique place in the labor market. This article traces the concurrent evolution of Great Plains harvesting and the PES from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1950s and examines the role of the PES and private labor agencies in today’s global labor market.     

组建工会是新建企业劳动关系规范化的重要标志

新建企业由于没有组建工会 ,劳动关系处于不规范状态 ,侵害职工合法权益的现象时有发生。把新建企业广大职工组织到工会中来 ,是工会工作的当务之急。只有把工会组织起来 ,才能建立起调整劳动关系的机制 ,才能从政治上、经济上维护职工的合法权益 ,使新建企业的劳动关系向规范化的方向发展。     

灵活性与稳定性:中国开发区工会组织情况调查

随着全球化的发展,发展中国家纷纷设立以吸引外国资本进入为目的的各类开发区(如保税区、出口加工区等),同时向外国投资者提供各类经济和社会优惠政策以换取资本输入.最主要的优惠政策之一是限制区域内的工会活动或工人结社的权利.国际劳工组织注意到了这一现象并在各国开展了有关开发区劳动条件和工会组织情况的调查研究.本文在对中国开发区内进行调研的基础上,主要对中国地区开发区内的工会组织情况进行了分析,对开发区内工会组建过程中面临的困难、工会组建策略及集体协商的基本情况进行了梳理.通过研究发现,中国开发区内的工会活动既存在迎合资本活动的灵活性,也承担着维持开发区内劳动关系和谐的稳定性.     

党在全国产业工人中成功建党的光辉范例——安源工运时期党组织建设发展的历程与现实启示

中国共产党成立后即在产业工人中建立党的组织,以领导产业工人运动。毛泽东、李立三、刘少奇等人在安源路矿创建了全国产业工人中的第一个党组织。安源党组织在领导和开展整个安源工运的历史进程中,发挥了党对工人阶级和工会组织的领导核心作用,卓有成效地开展了产业工人党组织的各项建设,引领安源路矿工人俱乐部的各项事业全面发展,最终率领数以万计的安源工人走上了中国革命的正确道路。通过近十年的探索和实践,党在产业工人中积累了较为丰富的、宝贵的建设发展的历史经验,至今仍具有重要的现实意义。