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.     

An early attempt at labor regulation in the Global South: the Argentine Ley Nacional del Trabajo of 1904 and the response of working-class organizations

ABSTRACT

In the first months of 1904, in a context of intense labor unrest, the Argentine executive branch presented to Congress a bill that became known as the ‘National Labor Law’ (Ley Nacional del Trabajo). It comprised a very extensive set of rules designed to regulate the labor market, the labor process and workers’ organizations. By that time, Argentina had a growing capitalist economy, a young and radical labor movement and no labor regulations whatsoever – in this context, the bill was the first attempt of regulating the relations between capital and labor and, not surprisingly, it sparked an important debate. Although it never became a law, the bill became an iconic reference in the history of labor regulations in Argentina. This article introduces the main characteristics of the proposed bill and focuses on the reactions that working-class organizations developed toward it. While anarchist-oriented groups and unions made clear its complete rejection toward an initiative that was seen as another intervention of an authoritarian state, the Socialist Party found itself in a much more complicated position. This article addresses these debates and tensions in order to better understand the reactions of working-class organizations with regard to the first attempt of labor regulation made by the Argentine state.     

Wet and wobbly harmonies: music and saloon-life in the industrial workers of the world, 1905–1920

ABSTRACT

During the first fifteen years of its existence, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) gained a reputation for being an exceedingly musical labor organization. Where did this proclivity originate? This article complements and elaborates existing explanations by sourcing the roots of IWW music to the institution that was both historically and contemporaneously integral to working-class culture – namely the saloon. It demonstrates strong and persistent links with the culture of proletariat drinking establishments. First, it investigates the ease with which individuals and songs travelled between the recreational environments of the barroom and activist environments of the IWW. Second, by comparing the values and attitudes associated with the musical cultures of the IWW and the saloon, it demonstrates an enduring compatibility between these two working-class institutions. Finally, it demonstrates the value of these findings for historians of the IWW organization, labor historians, and theorists of social movements.     

A nexus between labour movement and labour movement: the Knights of Labor and the financial side of global labour history

The rise of global and transnational labour history has revolutionised the study of working-class movements and individuals and the global forces that shaped them. Some of the more mundane considerations of these movements, however, have so far been neglected in this rapidly growing field. One of the most important of these considerations was money, or in other words the financial affairs of transnational movements such as trade unions and political parties. This article is a call to write the financial side of global labour history. It focuses on a global working-class movement that is itself often neglected in the historical literature, the Knights of Labor, and their outposts in Britain and Ireland. It examines the history of the British and Irish Knights through the prism of their financial history, so far as we can reconstruct it from the scanty sources that are available. This article argues that their financial ties with the United States and a series of embezzlement cases became major causes of their decline and, ultimately, their dissolution. Finally, this article draws conclusions from the financial misadventures of the British and Irish Knights of Labor that are relevant to the study of other international working-class movements and to the writing of global labour history in general.     

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。     

Revolutionary Spaces: Photographs of Working-Class Women by Esther Bubley 1940-1943

This article had several purposes. First, I wanted to highlight the work of Esther Bubley, an American photographer whose documentary work for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information in the early 1940s is largely unknown. Second, I wanted to show how her images complicated and undermined the traditional themes of Depression era photography in the United States. Third, by looking at her images of women, my intention was to reveal how she worked against depictions of femininity during the Depression, and in confrontation with one-dimensional portrayals of women as America entered the Second World War. In conclusion, I contend that Bubley's images were fundamentally portrayals of working-class femininity represented as being an individual - rather than a symbolic - experience. Most specifically in the images I have examined, Bubley deconstructs an ideological image of female working-class identity which was central to documentary photography in 1930s America. For example, unlike in photographs by Dorothea Lange, Bubley did not portray working-class women as metaphoric sites of passive endurance which would eventually lead to the rejuvenation of American nationalism. Rather, she showed working-class women to be potentially subversive in the ways they defined themselves against the legacy of 1930s photography and in opposition to the ideological impositions of wartime propaganda. As a result, Bubley's images of working-class women waiting in bars for lonely soldiers, or looking for a future beyond the confines of their boarding house existences while remaining outside the middle-class boundaries defined by capitalist consumerism, set out a pictorial foundation for working-class female identity which exists beyond the context in which the photographs were taken. Consequently, Bubley's work highlights individual self-identity, personal empowerment and self-conscious desire in working-class women which was - and still is - confined and repressed by economic disadvantage and systematic marginalization from an American society defined from a middle-class point of view.     

Gender and the transition from school to work in belfast

This article is based on interviews carried out in 1991 with 122 school pupils between the ages of 15 and 18 from a Catholic working-class area characterised by high, long-term unemployment located in Belfast. It includes further research carried out in 1998. The article focuses on three main aspects of young people's lives: their intended career aspirations, their involvement in term-time employment while at school and their participation in paid work within the household. The article suggests that the transition from school to work plays a crucial role in the reproduction of gender relations. The article demonstrates the ways in which young people at times accept and at other times challenge taken-for-granted assumptions regarding traditional gender stereotypes.     

Dis-Assembly Lines: gestures,situations, and surveillances

In “Americanism and Fordism,” Antonio Gramsci offers a brief meditation on the gestural performances of assembly-line workers who, rather than become subordinate to the disciplinary flow of the machine, cultivate perfectly timed gestures that allow workers to hide in plain sight: or, in other words, to inhabit the scene of management otherwise. Rather than extend Gramsci's investment in virtuosic, masterful performances of gesture, this article considers the potentiality of gesture through Lucille Ball's and Tehching Hsieh's performances of bad timing. As different as these performances are in terms of genre and historical situation, each uses gesture as a technique to performatively divide the labor process, producing fleeting temporalities of waste within rhythms marshaled toward production and accumulation. While it tracks the effects of these itinerant gestures, this article reconsiders the oppositions between productive and reproductive work, rationality and emotionality, and work and home that sustain Gramsci's theory, as well as how the collapse of such oppositions introduces alternative historical and artistic trajectories into theories of precariousness.     

Working for Jewish girls: Lily Montagu,girls' clubs and industrial reform 1890-1914

Lily Montagu was involved in social work and religious ministry with the London Jewish community for over sixty years. This article considers the significance of her involvement in the girls' club movement and her efforts towards workplace reform. It argues that the specific circumstances of working-class Jewish girls in the early twentieth century enabled her to develop a comprehensive view of both industrial organisation and social work. Her approach was submerged as social work and trade unionism diverged along fault lines of gender, but continues to raise issues of relevance today.     

Women in Defense of Workers: Ella Winter,the literary left,and labor journalism in California

Left-wing, middle-class journalists such as Ella Winter contributed decisively to the labor rebellion of the 1930s. In contrast to mainstream labor reporting, they practiced a form of anti-fascist, working-class journalism that consistently linked the drive for collective bargaining to a larger movement for social and economic justice. Winter and other writers such as Miriam deFord and Emily Joseph carried forward a tradition of labor defense, socialist feminism, and free speech advocacy that originated in the bohemian left of the early twentieth century. Rather than reducing women’s activism to communist intrigue or the exigencies of the economic crisis, this essay seeks out the deeper roots of women’s working-class journalism in the 1930s. It finds them in the democratic and aesthetic aspirations of the pre-Bolshevik left, even while it addresses the critical impact that the crisis of capitalism and the rise of fascism had on socialist feminist writers. Functioning as mediators, organizers, and witnesses to the movement, they bridged the gap between the middle and working classes, chronicling the experiences and articulating the aspirations of a multiracial proletariat. For these writers, radical commitment and responsible social commentary seemed entirely compatible. Out of this conviction, Winter and others helped build a cross-class coalition in California. In addition, they carved out lives of social purpose that allowed them to achieve a measure of female independence and professional achievement.     

Reeducation through work? Mountain roads in the Spanish concentration universe (Western Pyrenees, 1939–1942)

This article deals with the forced labor system within the Spanish Concentration Universe, mainly that related to work battalions that were under the control of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate, involved in work consisting of opening roads along the Western Pyrenees after Spanish Civil War. After underlining the importance of road construction works in the contemporary history of forced labor, we analyze the different kinds of propaganda tools that the regulations of these battalions mentioned in order to enforce the reeducation of these prisoners of war. After that, we have contrasted these regulations with some other historical sources related to the everyday life in the battalions, mainly Inspection reports and oral testimonies, both of captives and of guardians, so that we can better understand to what extent these propaganda tools worked, and the attitudes of captives toward them.     

对英国集体谈判制度形成过程的历史考察

英国是资本主义的先行者,也是最早成立工会、最早进行集体谈判的国家。随着工人运动的发展,英国的集体谈判也经历了萌芽、非法到合法的过程,并形成了独特的传统：自由放任。这一传统既是英国资本主义经济政治特征的体现,也是工人与资本家斗争的结果,对英国劳资关系的发展有着深远影响。     

The business of leisure: sport,labour and co-operation in post-war Britain

Compared with the activities of its European counterparts, the sporting and recreational pursuits of the British labour movement are less well known. Yet the co-operative movement organised an impressive range of sports clubs, competitions and events. Whereas previous studies have examined the relationship between the labour movement and working-class leisure during the interwar years, this article considers the interactions of the co-operative moment with popular discourses on recreation in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. In so doing, it challenges assumptions about the Left's disconnection from sporting culture. The Co-op used sport to create a collective co-operative identity amongst its employees. Examining the social and political context of these activities in post-war Britain can inform debates on the construction of female identity through sport, the use of recreation for business advantage and the extent to which the co-operative movement shaped working-class leisure patterns. Although the article highlights that co-op sport formed a source of tension between the retail and wholesale sections of the movement and could be adversely affected by popular affluence, it argues that a reappraisal of the co-operative movement's recreational activities contributes to a broader understanding of post-war working-class culture.     

‘Political conditions in wales are quite different …’ party politics and votes for women in Wales, 1912–151

Abstract

In 1912, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies adopted a policy of electoral support for the Labour Party, known as the Election Fighting Fund (EFF). The most determined opposition to this policy came from the South Wales Federation of Women's Suffrage Societies. The article re-examines the story of that opposition, as well as the attempt by the EFF Committee to work in the North Monmouthshire constituency of the Home Secretary, Reginald McKenna, against the wishes of local suffragists. The article suggests that accounts of this period in British suffrage history have presented a too simplistic account, which masks the diversity of women's politics in Wales; and that the nature of coalfield communities combined with the parliamentary focus of the EFF to marginalise the working-class and Labour movement women of the area.     

Heteronormative Foundations of Modern Citizenship in Early-twentieth-century Denmark

During 1906–1907 the Great Morality Scandal shocked Copenhagen’s general public by disclosing a handful of respectable bourgeois men as secret homosexuals. This article examines how the city’s working-class newspapers attempted to politicize the scandal by questioning the bourgeoisie’s privileged citizen status on the grounds of their supposed homosexuality, and by claiming that the partly disenfranchised working classes were worthy of full citizen status since they were heterosexual members of society. The article draws upon a theoretical framework that includes queer theoretical critiques of heterosexual norms and ideas of citizenship as a series of performative acts. It argues that working-class writings about the Great Morality Scandal constructed access to full Danish citizenship around the embodiment and enactment of heterosexual desire. They thus contributed to the foundations of modern Danish citizenship as distinctly heteronormative.     

rethinking the boundaries: towards a Butlerian ethics of vulnerability in sex trafficking debates

Feminist debates on sex trafficking have become entrenched and polarised, with abolitionists producing images of helpless abused victims, while sex worker advocates work hard to achieve some recognition of the agency of migrant sex workers. This article explores constructions of embodiment, subjectivity and agency in the debate, showing how abolitionist views, in spite of their efforts to challenge liberal pro-sex perspectives, rely on a familiar vision of the body as a singular, bounded and sovereign entity whose borders must be secured against invasion. The result is a vision in which victimisation is taken to epistemically compromise the subjectivities of sex workers, forcing them and their advocates to argue for recognition of their agency according to familiar liberal models of consent in order to be able to enter the debate. Drawing on the recent work of Judith Butler on consent and vulnerability, this article argues that what is needed is a rethinking of bodily ontology so that the vulnerability of sex workers is not opposed to their agency, but rather seen as an inevitable aspect of embodied sociality, constituting a call to ethical engagement and a recognition of the inequitable global distributions of precarity that produce sex trafficking as part of contemporary geopolitics. From this perspective, the alignment between radical feminist efforts to secure women’s bodily borders and global efforts to secure national borders no longer appears as coincidence.     

The National and International in Making a Feminist: the case of Alexandra Gripenberg

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the interdependence of the national and international in Alexandra Gripenberg's (1859–1913) feminist activism in her native country Finland, as well as in her international work, particularly within the International Council of Women, and in doing so contributes to the research on transfers and networking across borders in the formation of feminist politics. The national and international were seen by Gripenberg as inseparable and both aspects were particularly intertwined in her work to encourage the establishment of national councils of the ICW in various countries. The analysis discloses how the negotiation between the national and transnational was intersected and complicated by class-related politics, exemplified by Gripenberg's ambivalence towards the introduction of universal suffrage in 1906 Finland. The article also sheds light on the difficulties in creating a shared sisterhood across borders and how nation was used as a criterion in classifying more and less advanced nations in terms of gender equality. Influenced by the prevalent manner many Western European and US feminists had of viewing themselves as superior, Gripenberg defined Protestant, Anglo-American and Scandinavian countries as models for other nations. Finally the article addresses how Gripenberg responded to occasions when her national and international loyalties conflicted and shows the importance of internationalism in coping with the distress on home ground. International feminist sisterhood offered an opportunity to enjoy life with social equals.     

Why did organized labor struggle for shorter hours? A diachronic comparison of trade union discourse in Germany

ABSTRACT

Shorter-hour struggles are a key element in the historical study of organized labor. Little attention has been paid, however, to long-term changes in the rationale underlying demands for work time reductions. Comparing arguments formulated by German workers around 1900 with arguments put forward half a century later, this article detects a fundamental narrowing of discourse in twentieth-century labor disputes. While trade unions once drew on a strikingly broad rationale when demanding work time reductions, the post-WW II decades witnessed a strategic departure from arguments that had long constituted the bedrock of shorter-hour rhetoric. Analyzing a leading theoretical labor organ as well as the members’ publication of West Germany’s largest single-industry union, the article reveals that work time reductions were increasingly framed as a powerful measure to improve workers’ health and safety and to increase leisure and family time. In so doing, West German trade unions abandoned a crucial link between work time reductions and the vision for a more democratic and participatory society. The article thus shows how strategic bargaining decisions helped undermine the rich legacy of the historical struggle for shorter hours.     

Organizing a wildcat: the United States postal strike of 1970

This article, part of a larger work in progress, uses archives, key secondary sources, and oral histories from participants in the 1970 United States postal wildcat strike for better pay and working conditions to argue that this was a monumental event both unique and representative of the times. It was a rank-and-file effort that began in New York City – with a history of labor militancy – and rapidly spread across the country. The strike defied federal statute outlawing federal employee strikes, and also union leaders who opposed striking. A spike in 1960s hiring of blacks, veterans, women, and young people, combined with established labor unity tradition, a nationwide workplace and long-simmering frustrations produced the strike. But its dual character (both spontaneous and organized by local union officials and activists) allowed it to grow and maintain for eight days with no central coordination. Besides winning a living wage, the strike triggered the transformation of the US Post Office Department into the US Postal Service (USPS) with full collective bargaining rights for postal unions representing its employees. Moreover, it brought rank-and-file politics into postal unions while contributing to the increased strength of postal unions, public union organizing, and the labor movement in general.