The role of collective mobilization in the divergent performance of the rural economies of China and India (1950–2005)

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the divergent performance of the rural economies of China and India after 1950 was a product of the different capabilities of the Chinese and Indian governments to mobilize the labor force and financial resources of the rural population. By mobilizing unpaid labor and the financial resources of the villagers through mediation by the collectives (before 1984) and local administrations (from 1984 to the abolition of agricultural taxation and compulsory rural labor mobilization in 2006), the Chinese state developed rural infrastructure and the quality of the labor force at a pace and geographical scope that was far beyond its limited fiscal capacity. Efforts by the Indian state to establish rural organizations with similar mobilization capabilities failed due to the effective opposition of well-entrenched political and economic interests in the countryside. Unable to mobilize the labor and financial resources of the villagers, the Indian government relied primarily on its limited fiscal resources, which produced a much slower development of physical infrastructure and labor force quality. These are the primary reasons why China’s rural economy developed much more rapidly than India’s, which contributed significantly to the divergence of their national economies in the post-1950 era.     

European capitalism and the effects of agricultural commercialization on slave labor in Tunisia, 1780s–1880s

Abstract

The paper argues that while the significance of Tunisian state economic and political reforms during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has reflected the changing patterns of the caravan slave trade in previous research, much of this research has not considered the role of slaves in the emergent Tunisian economy. Nowhere is this negligence more apparent than in the agricultural sector, which was predominantly responsible for strengthening economic growth from the late eighteenth century until its weakening as a result of encroaching European capitalism by the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on Tunisian state population data known as the Majba Census and the extant economic literature, the paper addresses this gap by exploring the implications of the Tunisian state economic reforms on enslaved labor in the agricultural sector. Exploring this research gap will enable us to ascertain the extent to which enslaved labor contributed to Tunisia’s burgeoning agricultural sector in a manner that has dodged academics’ attention. After providing a historical context of European capital penetration and its implications on political and economic reforms from the Ottoman conquest through the Husaynid periods, the paper looks at how European capital infusion after the first quarter of the nineteenth century transformed the agricultural sector and examines the role of slave labor prior to the European capital infusion and commercialization of the agricultural sector. Using the Majba Census records’ regional distribution of blacks in the Regency the paper sheds light on the implications of the precarious economy engendered by agricultural commercialization under the aegis of European capitalism on the structure of enslaved labor.     

Daniel Tobin’s famous ‘rubbish’ comment and the need for a reconsideration of AFL national union leaders in the new deal era

ABSTRACT

Daniel Tobin led the Teamsters Union from 1907 to 1952. He guided its transformation from a dwindling set of locals representing horse-drawn wagon drivers to the nation’s largest union. However, Tobin is best remembered today for a comment he made during an American Federation of Labor (AFL) Convention in 1934, when he denigrated new members flooding into the labor movement as ‘rubbish.’ The quote has been used to illustrate depictions of the AFL leadership as racist, nativist, sexist and elitist. This article argues that the quote has been taken out of context and used to misrepresent Tobin’s meaning. He did intend to denigrate some of the new members coming into the labor movement, but his criticism had nothing to do with ethnicity, race, level of skill, or opposition to organizing the mass production industries.     

Labor radicalism and the local politics of Chinese exclusion: Mayor Jacob Weisbach and the Tacoma Chinese expulsion of 1885

ABSTRACT

The 1885 Chinese expulsion from Tacoma, Washington Territory highlights the importance of local political economy in shaping how a wider anti-Chinese movement played out in a particular community. Tacoma was a newly emerging city where white residents felt the threat of corporate domination in the form of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In this context, the city’s German immigrant mayor, Jacob Weisbach, could draw upon his longstanding labor radicalism to mobilize a broad anti-Chinese coalition that blurred the divide between white workers and the local business class. The result was the forceful removal of Chinese residents following a year-long campaign that culminated in mob action and became known as the ‘Tacoma Method’. This local violence in turn fed into ongoing national efforts to secure Chinese exclusion. Tacoma’s Chinese expulsion illustrates how radical labor traditions could be turned, under particular conditions, to the politics of racial repression even as the proponents of expulsion framed their efforts in terms of an egalitarian and democratic agenda. The participation of the Knights of Labor and other labor radicals in a politics exemplified by the Tacoma Method was accordingly tied to the larger racialized American state-building project as it unfolded in the late 19th Century.     

Building shared power: the Trans-Arabian Pipeline and the technopolitics of anti-sectarian labor mobilization in Lebanon, 1950–1964

ABSTRACT

This article examines anti-sectarianism and the technopolitics of labor mobilization at the facilities of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline) company in Lebanon between 1950 and 1964. It argues that although Tapline helped sustain a Lebanese elite strategy of cross-sectarian power-sharing, it also unintentionally fostered specifically anti-sectarian labor mobilization. Pursuing a line of inquiry into the technopolitics of worker mobilization around oil infrastructure opened by Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, this article specifically examines how Lebanese Tapline workers construed their actions, and did so in anti-sectarian terms. It also proposes that similar studies of labor and the technopolitics of infrastructure could offer productive avenues for inquiry into the origins of anti-sectarian politics in Lebanon.     

‘This fair lady,in her laces’: Margaret Howie Strang Hall,the first woman in Scotland to try to become a lawyer

ABSTRACT

Margaret Howie Strang Hall was the first woman in Scotland, and the youngest woman in the UK, to try to become a lawyer through the same formal process open to her male contemporaries. This examination of Hall’s attempt aims to set it in context, using contemporary court documents and newspaper reports, while expanding on what is known of her life. Hall’s story is an important one in the struggle for equal professional opportunities and her experience in the Scottish legal system provides a counterpoint to the better-known English examples.     

Workers,parties and a “New Deal:” A comparative analysis of corporatist alliances in Mexico,and the United States, 1910–1940

Mexico experienced the twentieth century’s first social revolution, a decade of struggle from which emerged a new political regime – a post-revolutionary authoritarian or single-party state one – with President Lázaro Cárdenas as leader by 1934. This post-revolutionary creation included organized labor and peasants, a strong interventionist state and a hegemonic party. Cárdenas’ U.S. counterpart, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, too, was leading dramatic ‘New Deal’ institutional and political revolution in the 1930s and 1940s that spawned a new order of expanded federal government, a renovated Democratic Party, and new movements and interest groups, notably, labor. Both nations featured the same major actors: the state, political parties, and organized labor. Both presidents calculated that preserving labor alliances was crucial for formation and legitimization of a new political order, for maintaining conditions conducive to private-sector investment and economic growth, and for political and economic crisis management. Labor’s growing role reshuffled corporatist alliances within and between international neighbors. This study places Mexico and the United States in comparative context in the early twentieth century and analyzes elite control and inclusion of organized labor in transformation of political landscapes in two different political regimes – a democratic one couched in an established constitution and a post-revolutionary authoritarian one born of a bloody upheaval.     

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.     

Spatially strong: Dead Sea Works Ltd. and the building up of the southeast of Israel, 1948–1964

This is the story of the formative years of one of Israel’s big corporations – the Dead Sea Works Ltd. (DSW). It concerns the interrelations between space and labor, told through an account of four transitions: (1) The transfer of the company from England to Israel with its establishment in 1952; (2) The move of its central office from Jerusalem to Be’er Sheva; (3) The dismantling of the original workers’ camp near the factory (in Sodom) and the move of the workers’ dwellings to three different towns; and (4) The transfer of representation from Tel Aviv to Be’er Sheva. The case of the DSW, I argue, is a ‘geohistory’ of labor that exemplifies the construction of the northeastern Negev’s social space, especially the making of scale. This ‘scale-making’ was an ongoing process of scaling up (from the local to the regional) and scaling down (from the global to the state level, and from the center to the periphery). Through this process of scale-making, the workers of the DSW gained a great deal of power and became spatially strong.     

‘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.     

The origins of severance pay in unemployment compensation: a comparative analysis

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to an under-developed field in the social policy literature through an analysis of the origins of severance pay (SP)/redundancy pay schemes and, more specifically, their first designs in nine countries—Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal. It has two objectives: first, to identify the key actors who shaped the design of the first SP schemes; second, to explain variations in terms of their mode of regulation, generosity and coverage. By building on the state-centric and power-resource perspectives, it identifies the conditions under which the state had an autonomous role vis-à-vis organized labour in SP reforms and the circumstances under which organized labour was the main actor. When the state was the key actor, it preferred legislation for the regulation of SP either to legitimize its apparatus in a ‘revolutionary’/‘potentially revolutionary’ context or to facilitate structural transformations of the economy in a ‘reformist’ context. When organized labour was the key actor, its preference was to regulate SP through ‘only collective bargaining’ or ‘legislation’, subject to the degree of unionization. Lastly, the paper argues that key actors (the state or organized labour) took into account the distributive structure of existing UI schemes when designing the coverage and generosity structure of the first SP schemes during the post-war era.     

Ted Shawn’s Labor Symphony: aesthetic work and productive performance

Ted Shawn’s all-male modern dance company, Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, toured extensively throughout the United States from 1933 to 1939 with the explicit goal of making concert dance a legitimate career for men. Shawn trained his dancers and choreographed their performances with careful attention to theme and movement aesthetic, proffering a version of modern dance meant to counter prevailing cultural prohibitions against men dancing. One of the company’s early works, Labor Symphony (1934), depicts the evolution of work from field to factory while critiquing the equation of the male body with labor power within capitalist economic systems; it also presents itself as labor, countering modern preoccupations with bodies enervated through repetitive movement or sedentary work, and with alienation from community through overly individuated tasks. The dance exemplifies Shawn’s novel movement aesthetic while expanding notions of productive labor by placing work itself in the context of performance. Emphasizing its status as productive work for men, the four sections of Labor Symphony display the Men Dancers’ strength, agility, and musculature prominently, exposing the piece as both means and end: it produces both the dance itself and bodies capable of performing it, much as agricultural and manual labor offer both product and a body disciplined to produce it.     

Violence and visibility in oil palm and sugarcane conflicts: the case of Polochic Valley,Guatemala

ABSTRACT

Over the last two decades, the expansion of oil palm and sugarcane plantations in the Polochic Valley (Guatemala) has exacerbated the historical struggle of Maya-Q’eqchi’ peoples for land rights. Based on a mixed-methods approach, I examine the dynamics of the conflict between 1998 and 2014, focusing on the visibility, manifestation and intensity of violence and the role of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and peasant organizations in opposition to oil palm and sugarcane plantations. I show that the evolution of the conflict can be explained by changes in the strength of organizations' alliances due to tensions and lack of coordination, as well as the fear of state repression and the funding context of these organizations. These results allow me to discuss how violence, the role of these organizations and the dynamics of related events have influenced the visibility of the conflict associated with the expansion of oil palm and sugarcane plantations in the Polochic.     

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.     

Relating rationality to context: interinstitutional complexity and embedded individual agency within industrial training in the UK tableware sector

ABSTRACT

The central contribution of this paper lies in showing a need to consider the complexity of interinstitutional systems, thereby more effectively relate rationality to context. Drawing on an institutional logics perspective, it presents a study of workplace training in a particular industrial sector in the UK: ceramic production. While identifying a vicious circle in the form of, what can be termed, a ‘high-quality/low-(formal-)skill’ system state, rather than simply privileging structure over action, findings show embedded individual agency. Besides being directed by goals, interests and self-seeking behaviour, a dominant logic for senior management personnel towards technology and home-based production was guided by issues of social identity and identification. ‘Nested’ in different opportunities and constraints presented at the levels of organizations and institutions, this individual-level logic was translated into not one, but two alternative corporate logics towards existing state-led intermediate-level workforce training arrangements. Both perpetuated a low-(formal-)skill situation in the sector.     

当好娘家人:协调劳动关系的工会视角

工会是职工自愿结合的工人阶级的群众组织。中国工会组织在政府的支持下,在国家法律法规机制下规范运行。工会组织维护职工权益,保护广大工人群众的合法权利。工会组织与职工群众的天然联系决定工会是广大职工的娘家,工会工作者是劳动者的娘家人。在劳动关系中,工会是劳动者一方的利益代表。工会协调劳动关系,实际是代表劳动者一方与用工单位利用调解、协商、沟通的方式进行。工会维权的结果是共同发展,是企业和职工的利益双赢。     

中国工人阶级与工会的历史使命——兼论现阶段工会在协调劳动关系中的作用

人类是在劳动中起源的,生产劳动决定了人类社会的存在状态。“阶级”是人类社会关系的表现形式,对阶级及其组织的研究首先要从分析劳动、分析人们在劳动中形成的相互关系入手;工会是工人阶级自愿结合的群众组织,研究工会现阶段的使命就要从我国工人阶级形成的独特性及我国现阶段劳动关系的特点切入。     

劳动法的能与不能--一种语境论进路的解析和思考

目前,我国正处于社会转型时期,对我国劳动法的作用、意义、宗旨应有冷静客观的认识,尤其要意识到劳动法的局限,劳动法不能的一面.我国劳动法的生存和发展的语境与西方劳动法是迥然不同的,其作用的发挥应立足我国当前的实际,重视对劳动法实践过程中我国广大民众的实践经验的累积和提炼.     

Workers and technological change in the United States

Abstract

In this paper, we put forward a theoretical framework for understanding a positive relationship between labor laws and innovation and rigorously test it against both historical and empirical data. We show how several periods in the economic history of the United States – like the increase in slave-field hand productivity in cotton picking in the Antebellum South, the transition in the North from artisanal shops to nonmechanized factories, the increase in productivity in mechanized textile factories in the Northeast in the late Antebellum period, and the increase in productivity in sharecropping after the Civil War – can be understood, at least partially, through our theoretical framework. To build further support for the framework, we empirically analyze how change in labor laws during the early twentieth century affected patent issuance by state. And we also look at how changes in worker power, as proxied by strike activity, affected patent issuance by industry between the early twentieth century and 1980.     

Wage labor in historical perspective: a study of the de-proletarianization of the African working class in Zimbabwe, 1960–2010

Abstract

This paper traces the rise and fall of wage labor in Zimbabwe between c.1960 and 2010. Building on Giovanni Arrighi’s seminal study, ‘Labour supplies in historical perspective: a study of the proletarianization of the African peasantry in Rhodesia’, we argue that the 1950s were the highpoint of African wage labor participation in the Southern Rhodesian/Zimbabwean economy. From that point, the percentage of wage labor as part of the economically active population fell consistently until the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy from the late 1990s onward, when it shrunk emphatically. This process is observable elsewhere in southern Africa over the second half of the twentieth century. Writing in the 1960s when the Southern Rhodesian economy was diversifying and absorbing large numbers of African workers from within and beyond the country’s borders, Arrighi overstated the stability and longevity of the proletariat. From that point, though, combined internal and external forces resulted initially in the stagnation of secondary and primary industry and commerce, and latterly in their contraction. The ensuing processes of de-proletarianization, falling wages, and heightened livelihood precarity have been the norm for an ever-increasing proportion of the African working class up to the present.