Editor's Introduction

IF 0.3 Q4 INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS & LABOR Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas Pub Date : 2023-09-01 DOI:10.1215/15476715-10581251
Leon Fink
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Yet even as Qing dynasty officials, whom Yung Wing represented, registered a compelling critique of Western hubris in international relations, that critique, Tinsman indicates, did not fully resonate with the perspective, or aspirations, of the contract laborers themselves.Fifty years on from the debate over whether conditions of immigrant contract laborers were like or unlike slavery, Second International socialists meeting at the World Migration Congress of 1926 in London believed that they had transcended a blinkered and racist past and arrived at a moment of “color-blind solidarity among all peoples of the world.” Their enthusiasm, as historian Lucas Poy documents in an exhumation of discussions among socialist parties and trade unions, was of course premature. While happy to declaim in principle against colonialism and imperialism, Western worker representatives betrayed deep assumptions of racial hierarchy and social Darwinian justifications for national just deserts, as most evident in “White Australia” rhetoric and broader defenses of immigration restrictions. Poy concludes that within the “inter-nationalism” of the period, the delegates’ “common sense of belonging to International Labour . . . never included the coloured/colonial peoples.”Kelly Lytle Hernández's Bad Mexicans, our Bookmark selection for books published in 2022, not only offers a vivid retelling of the roots of the Mexican Revolution through the transborder perspective of the anarchist movement centered on the Flores Magón brothers but also sets up—as our three reviewers attest—a fascinating discussion of the broader public purposes of historical research and writing. As a group the reviewers are at once enthralled by Lytle Hernández's narrative power and divided on her claims as to the significance of Ricardo Flores Magón and the Partido Liberal Mexicano in the larger events that led to revolutionary upheaval in Mexico that began in 1910. Especially given the magonistas’ focus on the machinery of US repression, Elliott Young wonders why “they mostly stayed in the United States after the bullets started flying in Mexico.” An accomplished transborder scholar herself, Sonia Hernández also seems to draw more lessons from the “defeat” of a “potentially transformative democratization” by Magón and company than from any putative victory on their account. Notwithstanding the principled radicalism and derring-do of anarchist leaders like Flores Magón, John Tutino insists that readers must look elsewhere for the roots of popular resistance in a land “steeped in religious traditions” and commitment to Indigenous land claims. In her response, Lytle Hernández does not deny the historical defeat of the magonistas; rather, she questions whether that defeat proves their irrelevance. By bringing the story of cross-border rebellion to a new generation of readers, she identifies as one of the “fire tenders of this rebel history.” “I believe,” she writes, “in the magonistas and the power of their story. For me, the knowledge that a small group of ordinary men and women in the borderlands, my homeland, challenged a tyrant and stirred a revolution that ousted him from power is enough. They did not go on to lead the revolution, but there is no doubt they helped kickstart it.”Following a five-week strike in December 2022, graduate student workers organized into the United Auto Workers across the University of California system rocked the labor world with a pathbreaking collective bargaining contract affecting some thirty-six thousand employees across the ten-campus University of California system. Far less recognized, yet still notable for its precedent-setting inventiveness, was the April 2022 certification—by a vote of 327 to 6—of the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. The UGSDW instantly became “the nation's first campuswide undergraduate union to win legal recognition” and “the nation's largest undergraduate union.” The breakthrough, in fact, dated to the union's initial organizing efforts among the college's dining hall workers—many on work-study grants—beginning in 2016. In a valuable interview with four of the union's founders, John W. McKerley, an oral historian with the University of Iowa Labor Center, documents not only what was distinctive but also what is likely transferable about the Grinnell “self-organizing” experience.If you glanced at the list of reviews for this issue, you could be forgiven if you thought you had wandered into the back pages of the American Historical Review rather than Labor. The point is that Labor has become mighty comprehensive in its topical (as well as geographic) coverage. Start, for example, with the early modern Spanish Caribbean, and then move on to the US Civil War, the Paris Commune, disability in industrial Britain, unruly youth in post-Victorian Britain, and economic development in the Western world since 1970. And how about the United States? Don't worry, still plenty to sink your teeth into. That includes labor museums, Black workers in Harlem, Mexican migrants, Polish steelworkers in West Virginia, Texas farmer-labor radicals, and even a political biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg that focuses on the redrawing of employment law. The most highly touted by reviewers include a collection of essays on racial capitalism edited by Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy; Toni Gilpin's treatment of “ceaseless class warfare” at International Harvester; Erin Woodruff Stone's recasting of Columbus as an early slave trafficker; and Matthew E. Stanley's ambitious reconsideration of the multiple meanings of postslavery realities during the Long Gilded Age.","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581251","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS & LABOR","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

Abstract

Three very different projects discussed in this issue highlight the political challenge of perceived racial difference for liberal and social democratic forces in the twentieth-century West. In the first article Latin American specialist Heidi Tinsman probes the issue of labor control and lack of rights among Chinese contract laborers in postslavery 1870s Peru from an original angle. Through the activities of special Chinese envoy Yung Wing, sent to survey the conditions of Chinese contract workers on Peruvian plantations, we gather at once the contemporary power and the limitations of an antislavery discourse as applied to a new migrant workforce. Yet even as Qing dynasty officials, whom Yung Wing represented, registered a compelling critique of Western hubris in international relations, that critique, Tinsman indicates, did not fully resonate with the perspective, or aspirations, of the contract laborers themselves.Fifty years on from the debate over whether conditions of immigrant contract laborers were like or unlike slavery, Second International socialists meeting at the World Migration Congress of 1926 in London believed that they had transcended a blinkered and racist past and arrived at a moment of “color-blind solidarity among all peoples of the world.” Their enthusiasm, as historian Lucas Poy documents in an exhumation of discussions among socialist parties and trade unions, was of course premature. While happy to declaim in principle against colonialism and imperialism, Western worker representatives betrayed deep assumptions of racial hierarchy and social Darwinian justifications for national just deserts, as most evident in “White Australia” rhetoric and broader defenses of immigration restrictions. Poy concludes that within the “inter-nationalism” of the period, the delegates’ “common sense of belonging to International Labour . . . never included the coloured/colonial peoples.”Kelly Lytle Hernández's Bad Mexicans, our Bookmark selection for books published in 2022, not only offers a vivid retelling of the roots of the Mexican Revolution through the transborder perspective of the anarchist movement centered on the Flores Magón brothers but also sets up—as our three reviewers attest—a fascinating discussion of the broader public purposes of historical research and writing. As a group the reviewers are at once enthralled by Lytle Hernández's narrative power and divided on her claims as to the significance of Ricardo Flores Magón and the Partido Liberal Mexicano in the larger events that led to revolutionary upheaval in Mexico that began in 1910. Especially given the magonistas’ focus on the machinery of US repression, Elliott Young wonders why “they mostly stayed in the United States after the bullets started flying in Mexico.” An accomplished transborder scholar herself, Sonia Hernández also seems to draw more lessons from the “defeat” of a “potentially transformative democratization” by Magón and company than from any putative victory on their account. Notwithstanding the principled radicalism and derring-do of anarchist leaders like Flores Magón, John Tutino insists that readers must look elsewhere for the roots of popular resistance in a land “steeped in religious traditions” and commitment to Indigenous land claims. In her response, Lytle Hernández does not deny the historical defeat of the magonistas; rather, she questions whether that defeat proves their irrelevance. By bringing the story of cross-border rebellion to a new generation of readers, she identifies as one of the “fire tenders of this rebel history.” “I believe,” she writes, “in the magonistas and the power of their story. For me, the knowledge that a small group of ordinary men and women in the borderlands, my homeland, challenged a tyrant and stirred a revolution that ousted him from power is enough. They did not go on to lead the revolution, but there is no doubt they helped kickstart it.”Following a five-week strike in December 2022, graduate student workers organized into the United Auto Workers across the University of California system rocked the labor world with a pathbreaking collective bargaining contract affecting some thirty-six thousand employees across the ten-campus University of California system. Far less recognized, yet still notable for its precedent-setting inventiveness, was the April 2022 certification—by a vote of 327 to 6—of the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. The UGSDW instantly became “the nation's first campuswide undergraduate union to win legal recognition” and “the nation's largest undergraduate union.” The breakthrough, in fact, dated to the union's initial organizing efforts among the college's dining hall workers—many on work-study grants—beginning in 2016. In a valuable interview with four of the union's founders, John W. McKerley, an oral historian with the University of Iowa Labor Center, documents not only what was distinctive but also what is likely transferable about the Grinnell “self-organizing” experience.If you glanced at the list of reviews for this issue, you could be forgiven if you thought you had wandered into the back pages of the American Historical Review rather than Labor. The point is that Labor has become mighty comprehensive in its topical (as well as geographic) coverage. Start, for example, with the early modern Spanish Caribbean, and then move on to the US Civil War, the Paris Commune, disability in industrial Britain, unruly youth in post-Victorian Britain, and economic development in the Western world since 1970. And how about the United States? Don't worry, still plenty to sink your teeth into. That includes labor museums, Black workers in Harlem, Mexican migrants, Polish steelworkers in West Virginia, Texas farmer-labor radicals, and even a political biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg that focuses on the redrawing of employment law. The most highly touted by reviewers include a collection of essays on racial capitalism edited by Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy; Toni Gilpin's treatment of “ceaseless class warfare” at International Harvester; Erin Woodruff Stone's recasting of Columbus as an early slave trafficker; and Matthew E. Stanley's ambitious reconsideration of the multiple meanings of postslavery realities during the Long Gilded Age.
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本期讨论的三个截然不同的项目突出了20世纪西方自由主义和社会民主主义力量所面临的种族差异的政治挑战。在第一篇文章中,拉美问题专家海蒂·廷斯曼从一个原创的角度探讨了1870年代后奴隶制时期秘鲁中国合同工的劳动控制和权利缺失问题。中国特使容闳被派去调查秘鲁种植园中国合同工的情况,通过他的活动,我们立刻了解到当代的力量和反奴隶制话语在适用于新移民劳动力时的局限性。然而,尽管以容闳为代表的清朝官员对西方在国际关系中的傲慢态度提出了令人信服的批评,但廷斯曼指出,这种批评并没有完全与合同工本身的观点或愿望产生共鸣。五十年后,在1926年伦敦举行的世界移民大会(World Migration Congress)上,第二国际社会主义者相信,他们已经超越了狭隘和种族主义的过去,来到了一个“世界各国人民不分肤色团结一致”的时刻。正如历史学家卢卡斯·波伊(Lucas Poy)在挖掘社会主义政党和工会之间的讨论时所记录的那样,他们的热情当然为时过早。虽然西方工人代表乐于在原则上反对殖民主义和帝国主义,但他们却背叛了种族等级制度和社会达尔文主义对国家正义沙漠的深刻假设,这在“白澳”的言辞和对移民限制的广泛辩护中最为明显。Poy总结道,在那个时期的“国际民族主义”中,代表们“属于国际劳工的常识……从未包括有色人种/殖民地人民。”凯利·利特尔Hernández的《坏墨西哥人》是我们的书签选书,出版于2022年,它不仅通过以弗洛雷斯Magón兄弟为中心的无政府主义运动的跨国界视角生动地重述了墨西哥革命的根源,而且还建立了——正如我们的三位评论家所证明的那样——对历史研究和写作的更广泛的公共目的进行了有趣的讨论。作为一个群体,评论家们立刻被利特尔Hernández的叙事力量所吸引,但对于里卡多·弗洛雷斯Magón和墨西哥自由党在导致1910年开始的墨西哥革命动荡的重大事件中的重要性,她的说法存在分歧。特别是考虑到magonistas对美国镇压机器的关注,Elliott Young想知道为什么“在子弹开始在墨西哥飞行后,他们大多留在了美国”。索尼娅Hernández是一位颇有成就的跨界学者,她似乎也从Magón及其公司的“潜在变革民主化”的“失败”中吸取了更多的教训,而不是从他们所谓的胜利中吸取教训。尽管弗洛雷斯Magón等无政府主义领袖有原则性的激进主义和胆识,但约翰·图蒂诺坚持认为,读者必须从其他地方寻找民众抵抗的根源,在这片“浸透了宗教传统”的土地上,并致力于土著土地的主张。在她的回应中,Lytle Hernández并不否认magonistas的历史性失败;相反,她质疑这次失败是否证明了他们的无关紧要。通过将跨境反叛的故事带给新一代读者,她认为自己是“反叛历史的五名投标者之一”。“我相信,”她写道,“magonistas及其故事的力量。”对我来说,在我的祖国边疆,一小群普通的男女向暴君发起挑战,并掀起了一场将他赶下台的革命,这就足够了。他们没有继续领导革命,但毫无疑问,他们帮助启动了革命。”在2022年12月为期五周的罢工之后,研究生工人组织成加州大学系统的全美汽车工人联合会,通过一项开创性的集体谈判合同震撼了劳工界,影响了加州大学系统10个校区的约3.6万名员工。2022年4月,爱荷华州格林内尔市格林内尔学院的格林内尔学生餐饮工人联盟以327票对6票通过了认证,这一认证鲜为人知,但仍以其开创先例的创造性而闻名。UGSDW立即成为“全国第一个获得法律认可的校园本科工会”和“全国最大的本科工会”。事实上,这一突破可以追溯到工会从2016年开始在学院食堂工作人员中进行的初步组织工作,其中许多人依靠勤工俭学奖学金。在对工会四位创始人的一次有价值的采访中,约翰? 麦凯利是爱荷华大学劳工中心的口述历史学家,他不仅记录了格林内尔“自我组织”经历的独特之处,还记录了可能具有可转移性的地方。如果你扫了一眼这期杂志的评论列表,如果你以为自己翻到了《美国历史评论》的最后几页,而不是《劳工》,那也情有可原。关键在于,工党在主题(以及地理)覆盖方面已经变得非常全面。例如,从近代早期的西班牙加勒比地区开始,然后转到美国内战、巴黎公社、英国工业社会的残疾、后维多利亚时代英国不守规则的青年,以及1970年以来西方世界的经济发展。那美国呢?别担心,还有很多东西值得你去钻研。其中包括劳工博物馆、哈莱姆区的黑人工人、墨西哥移民、西弗吉尼亚州的波兰钢铁工人、德克萨斯州的农民劳工激进分子,甚至还有一本专注于重新制定就业法的露丝·巴德·金斯伯格(Ruth Bader Ginsburg)的政治传记。评论界最推崇的包括一本由德斯汀·詹金斯(Destin Jenkins)和贾斯汀·勒罗伊(Justin Leroy)编辑的关于种族资本主义的文集;托尼·吉尔平(Toni Gilpin)在《国际收割机》(International Harvester)上对“无休止的阶级斗争”的论述;艾琳·伍德拉夫·斯通(Erin Woodruff Stone)将哥伦布重新塑造成一个早期的奴隶贩子;马修·e·斯坦利(Matthew E. Stanley)对长期镀金时代后奴隶制现实的多重意义进行了雄心勃勃的重新思考。
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