From the nineteenth century, when the new social question of women's factory labor came to preoccupy the (middle-class) public imagination, to the present times of globalized labor chains, discourses on gendered labor have been at once fluid and constitutive of labor hierarchies. These discourses and social relations affirm their centrality within processes of industrialization and workplace restructuring as well as in development policy, urban formation, and indeed, nation building. Depending on the political economy of the labor market, the images of laboring women accordingly oscillated between, for instance, helpless and exploited victims to national heroines in the service of developmental projects. At the same time, since the early nineteenth-century, the steadily accumulating social reform, labor inspection, or social scientific accounts of women's paid and unpaid labor testified to states’ and employers’ growing comfort with hiring what was and is still, in many ways, a cheap, easily exploitable category of workers, one whose profitability increased the more precarious their employment became. Such discourses and labor control practices were deeply racialized and classed. On the other side of the public imagination and employer's surveillance, women who engaged in paid work sometimes appropriated the discourses and reshaped the practices that were used to characterize their labor and judge their choices.

In this article, I choose struggles over skill development as an entry point to uncovering features of women's labor activism in state-owned tobacco factories in Romania, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. I look at the processes that constructed women tobacco workers, especially those at the Tobacco Manufactory in the city of Cluj, as non-skilled workers, and examine the forms of labor activism in the tobacco industry that challenged those constructs. I describe how women's work at the Cluj Tobacco Manufactory, from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s, was shaped by successive waves of production intensification and rationalization, demonstrating that these reorganizations affected female workers more than they affected their male coworkers. I point out that although they were considered non-skilled laborers, female tobacco workers exercised an amount of control over their work and were important contributors to their families’ maintenance. I show that spanning two different political regimes, matters of skill were at the core of labor activism. For female workers, in the interwar period, labor activism in male-dominated organizations and structures entailed skill-mediated political strategies that emphasized experience and shopfloor status besides skill. By the 1950s, labor activism encompassed engaging in confrontational politics over seasoned women workers’ lack of access to skill training programs. I show that both in the late 1920s and in the early 1950s, illiteracy and women's more limited access to formal schooling in general shaped new experiences of participation in labor politics.

The simultaneous processes of secular state-building and state-led industrialisation resulted in a new ideology of women's labor in Turkey in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. As the country moved away from protectionist, state-led industrialisation in the post-war period, female industrial labor received increasing and contradictory attention from policy makers, employers, the new trade union movement, and middle-class feminists. On the one hand, there emerged an idealized image of factory women that emphasized their productive potential by metaphorically linking them with technology and mass production. However, this proud, progressive message was counterbalanced by an anxious, conservative view of young women's work—one that criticized factory girls’ consumption choices as posing a threat to respectable femininity. Weaving together lines of inquiry such as the change in industrialisation policy, women's access to technology, the sexual division of labor, and the emergent consumption patterns, I unpack the tropes of working-class productivity and femininity against the backdrop of the post-war expansion of capitalism in Turkey.

Based on media stories and union campaigns, this paper tracks the discourses from the 1930s to the 1970s around the ‘shop girl’ in Johannesburg. It argues that the shop girl was a figure of white femininity that complicates the now extensive literature on white women in South Africa through its reproduction of the enduring tension of class difference. Through archival research and interviews, the paper shows how the ‘shop girl’ contributed to an ideology of white nationalism, focused more traditionally around motherhood and domesticity. The embodied labor of white women workers in Johannesburg both relied on their femininity and ensured that the affective labor of service work was a site of contradiction and contestation with white middle class women consumers. Class difference could therefore be contained within the semiotics of white nationhood through the site of consumption and retailing.

Tea plantation workers in India have historically been a part of the feminized workforce, constituting somewhat exceptionally formal labor in a country with high informalization of women's employment. In the past decade, however, a combined fallout of neo-liberalization and globalization contextualized within the local history of varying phases of incorporation, accumulation/dispossession and shifting relations of production brought about a crisis in the tea plantations leading to closures, retrenchment, and casualization. The women workers from tea plantations joined the burgeoning casualized urban labor force. Through ethnography and interviews I traced women workers from tea plantations in West Bengal, India, who migrated to the beauty industry in Hyderabad and Delhi-NCR. The paper focuses on the construction of women's labor in the beauty industry with continuities and contrasts from the tea plantations to understand the makings of gendered labor and skill. The women's frequent invocation of femininity as skill foregrounds the woman's body as central to woman's labor and the workplace but also provides a scope to unsettle understanding of femininity as a specific and naturalized concept. Using the lens of migration from one sector of feminized labor to another, this paper interrogates the production of the feminine worker and the workplace in different but related contexts. Their reflections on their work, skill, and workplace allows us an insight into the ways in which the body as the woman and the worker is deployed as skilled/natural and how they themselves co-construct, negotiate, and subvert the construction of femininity and feminine labor in the workplace.

This study focuses on welfare capitalism and workers’ housing policy in the Habsburg Empire on the eve of the Great War. It deals with the concessions for buildings containing healthy and affordable workers’ flats. The study argues that the existing research on welfare capitalism concentrated mostly on the entrepreneurs and industrialists as key actors in the building of workers’ flats. As the concessions for the building of workers’ houses suggest, the imperial authorities also maintained welfare capitalism and played a certain role in supporting the construction of workers’ housing. Through the concessions, authorities tried to regulate the company construction and to intervene into places of the everyday. They sought to enforce an appropriate lifestyle and to separate spaces for people of workers’ background, male and female workers, single workers, and workers’ families.

In 1983, the arrest of Noureddin Kianouri, the first secretary of the Tudeh Party of Iran came as a shock to the international community. In a letter of condemnation, communist parties from Indonesia to Jamaica pledged solidarity with their Iranian comrades. The optimism initially brought by the 1979 revolution was severely reversed and the suppression of the Iranian Left by the Islamic government was regarded as an attack on the international Left. A significant voice of opposition came from Britain, with the Communist party of Great Britain (CPGB), the British Labor party, the trade unions and solidarity groups coming out in full support of the Tudeh and to take on the cause of Iran as their own. Although interest had existed since the 1940s, it was the 1979 revolution that firmly placed the Tudeh within the discourse of the British Left, energizing the movement and solidifying its internationalist credentials. Similarly, for the Tudeh, which had become side-lined in Iranian politics and had lost members to more radical strands of the Iranian Left, the attention it received helped renew its activism and sense of purpose.

From the end of the 1960s until the outbreak of the Civil War (1975), Lebanon experienced a phase of relatively sustained industrial expansion. Albeit the “boom” did not modify significantly Lebanon's tertiarized economic structure, it was anyway sufficient to create the structural conditions for the emergence of a new militant working-class able to become one of the most relevant contentious actors of its time. This new working class was made primarily of very young and recently urbanized unemployed of rural origin, brutally injected in a crude and hyper-exploitative productive cycle where formal labor unions were, for the most part, absent or scarcely effective. The input for their grassroots, transgressive organization into factory-based Workers’ Committees came from the Organization for Communist Action in Lebanon (OACL), i.e. the most important force of the so-called Lebanese New Left, within the framework of a broader process of militant penetration of the “revolutionary classes” produced by the contradictions of Lebanese capitalism. This created the precondition for the Committees to affirm themselves not only as the radical avant-garde of the Lebanese labor movement but also as an integral part of a broader process of contestation of the existing status quo by the subaltern groups emerged from - or activated by - the structural and cultural changes that the country was experiencing. By retrieving the forgotten history of the Workers’ Committees, the article wants to examine the forms and the trajectories whereby such a new working class became an integral part of this process. In particular, by adopting a Gramscian methodology, the article will first expose the structural changes in the Lebanese industrial sector in the examined period and their labor implications. Then, it will focus on the dynamics which superseded the Committees' birth and affirmation, reserving particular attention to the role played by the OACL. Finally, it will conclude by examining the impact of their agency on the political developments that the country was experiencing. The paper contends that the emergence and the affirmation of counter-hegemonical and transformative working-class activism on the eve of the Civil War, along with representing a direct by-product of structural stresses and constraints, was significantly debtor also of the new ideological and militant infrastructures that the emergence of an Arab New Left had contributed to popularize and deploy. The paper wants also to intervene in the historiographical debate on the Lebanese Civil War, stressing the importance of both subaltern actors and class phenomena in its outbreak, which have generally been widely disregarded by the dominant understandings of the conflict.

The paper focuses on the Italian-speaking anarchists of the end of the nineteenth century and their involvement and legacy in trade union movements and strikes in Tunis during the first decade of the twentieth century. A perspective privileging the internationalist and trade-unionist activities, and their impact on that specific colonial context, avoids the dangers of a rigid ethnoscape and methodological nationalism. Even though most of the actors of this story were considered by the states as Italian nationals, their conflictual (at least for the anarchists) nationality helps us to understand the complexity of the national-cultural belonging of subversive migrants in the Imperial Mediterranean. The ideological struggle on the subversive legacy of Giuseppe Garibaldi at the end of the nineteenth century and the conflictual relations of the trade unions with consular authorities at the beginning of the twentieth century showed an Italian-speaking internationalism in the Southern Mediterranean shore, tightly connected with the European and the American areas. Based on understudied diplomatic, colonial, and police records, this research aims at analyzing the attempts of an international working-class movement in a hierarchical colonial situation also through Italian, French, and Tunisian sources.

In Capital, Karl Marx provides an immanent critique of capitalism. The text offers a rendering of a political economy that is at times “synchronic” as it describes how capital works irrespective of any given moment in history, but also “diachronic” when it accounts for the historical development of capitalism as Marx knew it. These affordances equip Marx with a language essential to characterizing an “antagonism” between the worker and the capitalist. This antagonism subtends capitalism's demise since the proletariat possesses the numbers to overthrow the bourgeoisie. However, Marxism's assumptive logic only holds water when considering the structural position of the worker. The structural position of the slave entails no such denouement. In his 1983 book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson notes that “slave labor” helped scaffold “what Marx termed ‘primitive accumulation,’ [but] it would be an error to arrest the relationship there, assigning slave labor to some ‘pre-capitalist’ stage of history . . . this meant that the interpretation of history in terms of the dialectic of capitalist class struggles would prove inadequate”—inadequate, that is, to the task of understanding forms of racial alienation, exploitation, and suffering that lose visibility in class-reductionist discourses.1 In a critical divergence from Robinson's Black radical tradition, Frank Wilderson's contributions to the framework of Afropessimism pose a different yet nonetheless crucial intervention to Marxism. Importantly, Robinson throws into relief the concomitance of slavery and racialization with the logic of capitalism, proclaiming that “the Atlantic slave trade and the slavery of the New World were integral to the modern world economy. Their relationship to capitalism was historical and organic rather than adventitious or synthetic.”2 Wilderson argues, however, that the concomitance of slavery and racialization (particularly for Blackness) circumscribes capitalism on the level of paradigm.

In the Spring of 2020, the onset of the global pandemic intensified existing inequalities, but also accelerated organizing within some of the most precarious economic sectors. The neoliberal university was no exception to this general trend, and from 2020 until 2022, student workers organized for union contracts, just pandemic responses, independent arbitration for harassment and improved conditions at their workplaces. In those years, while neoliberal universities issued empty calls for “community,” and a prompt return to normalcy, student workers mobilized themselves and won unprecedented gains from their institutions, rejecting administrative pleas for the defense of the status quo. The following “Report from the Field,” details the struggle of student workers organizing from 2020 to 2022 at the University of New Mexico, the University of Michigan, New York University, and Columbia University, and offers a collectively authored reflection on the challenges, victories and future concerns of its respective movements.

Until recently, historians, including labor historians, tended to view biography as an inferior genre of historical writing. This has started to change, as biography moves away from its narrow focus on “great men.” Historians increasingly see it as a way to explore, as Marx famously suggested, how men make their own history albeit not under circumstances of their choosing. This essay examines recent biographies of three of the most important labor leaders in Latin America: Chile's Luis Emilio Recabarren, Mexico's Vícente Lombardo Toledano, and Brazil's Lula. Although they approach the study of the interplay of the personal and the political in different ways, all three studies provide strong evidence that biography has an important role to play in sharpening our understanding of the history of labor.

This article surveys the lifetime work of scholar-activist Mike Davis, and his attentiveness to the wide-ranging synthesis of the global political economy and ecology of capitalism and militarism, focusing on labor and social history, and to inequalities of race, class, gender, and nation, and struggles for diversity and inclusion, marking his distinctive style. Covering themes ranging from American exceptionalism, working-class formation, struggles for the eight-hour workday, the political economy and ecology of the Third World, and the growth of today's informal proletariat, the article underlines the author's deepest commitments to a lifetime of scholarship. These include democratic control over the means of production, and the remaking of the global system on new and enlarged, more peaceful and just socioecological foundations, now essential if humanity and other sentient beings are to survive and thrive.