Pub Date : 2023-12-22DOI: 10.1017/s0147547923000443
Thomas Fleischman
A survey of recent works of labor and environment reveal the centrality of hybridity to analyses of human and nonhuman natures. These are most apparent in analyses of labor, technology, and nature. While ways of knowing nature amongst the powerful have been oriented toward the ever-greater domination of workers and nonhuman nature, interspecies entanglements and solidarity erupt through the marginal, overlooked spaces. Taken together, the books included in this review suggest a way toward finding alternative, more just futures for living alongside nonhuman nature.
{"title":"The Entangled Nature of Work: Histories of Humans and Nonhuman Labor","authors":"Thomas Fleischman","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000443","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 A survey of recent works of labor and environment reveal the centrality of hybridity to analyses of human and nonhuman natures. These are most apparent in analyses of labor, technology, and nature. While ways of knowing nature amongst the powerful have been oriented toward the ever-greater domination of workers and nonhuman nature, interspecies entanglements and solidarity erupt through the marginal, overlooked spaces. Taken together, the books included in this review suggest a way toward finding alternative, more just futures for living alongside nonhuman nature.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"6 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138945085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-18DOI: 10.1017/S0147547923000340
Görkem Akgöz, Bridget Kenny
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.
{"title":"Special Section on Productive Hierarchies in Global Perspectives: Gendered Skill, Labor Control and Workplace Politics","authors":"Görkem Akgöz, Bridget Kenny","doi":"10.1017/S0147547923000340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547923000340","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":" 40","pages":"1 - 10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138994757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-18DOI: 10.1017/s0147547923000376
Franco Barchiesi, Aaron Benanav, Carolyn Brown, Jacob Eyferth, Lori Flores, Jennifer Klein, Talitha LeFlouria, Mae Ngai, M. Nolan, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Amy Stanley, Abosede George, Barbara Weinstein, Peter Winn, Xiaodan Zhang, Robert F. Wheeler, K. Brown, M. Kars, Marcel van der Linden, Joshua Frens-String, Izzy Plowright
{"title":"ILW volume 104 Cover and Front matter","authors":"Franco Barchiesi, Aaron Benanav, Carolyn Brown, Jacob Eyferth, Lori Flores, Jennifer Klein, Talitha LeFlouria, Mae Ngai, M. Nolan, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Amy Stanley, Abosede George, Barbara Weinstein, Peter Winn, Xiaodan Zhang, Robert F. Wheeler, K. Brown, M. Kars, Marcel van der Linden, Joshua Frens-String, Izzy Plowright","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000376","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"20 3","pages":"f1 - f5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138995315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-18DOI: 10.1017/S0147547923000248
Görkem Akgöz
Abstract 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.
{"title":"Metaphorical Machines or Mindless Consumers: Young Working-Class Femininity in Early Postwar Turkey","authors":"Görkem Akgöz","doi":"10.1017/S0147547923000248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547923000248","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract 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.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":" 39","pages":"32 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138964314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-13DOI: 10.1017/s014754792300039x
Eyal Weinberg
Studies exploring health and medicine in military Brazil (1964–1985) frequently focus on the struggles of public health activists to advance substantial healthcare reforms during the country's gradual transition to democracy. In the 1960s, the Brazilian dictatorship installed a market-oriented system that outsourced healthcare to private providers, mostly servicing urban and employed benefactors. Without proper government oversight, the healthcare administration was overbilled and national public health indicators lagged. Scholars have highlighted the efforts of the Sanitary Reform Movement (Movimento da Reforma Sanitária) to dismantle the dictatorship's health system. Forming professional associations and assuming leadership positions in governmental agencies, sanitaristas promoted research and policies of collective health, laying the foundations for Brazil's universal healthcare system, established after the return to democracy.
探索巴西军事时期(1964-1985)的健康和医学研究经常关注公共卫生活动家在该国逐步向民主过渡期间推进实质性医疗改革的斗争。上世纪60年代，巴西独裁政府建立了一个以市场为导向的体系，将医疗保健外包给私人供应商，主要服务于城市和受雇的捐助者。由于没有适当的政府监督，医疗保健管理部门的费用过高，国家公共卫生指标滞后。学者们强调了卫生改革运动(Movimento da Reforma Sanitária)为废除独裁统治的卫生系统所做的努力。卫生工作者成立专业协会并在政府机构中担任领导职务，促进了集体卫生的研究和政策，为巴西恢复民主后建立的全民卫生保健系统奠定了基础。
{"title":"White Coats with Blue Collars: Doctors’ Labor Protests and the Struggle for Democracy in Brazil, 1978–1982","authors":"Eyal Weinberg","doi":"10.1017/s014754792300039x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s014754792300039x","url":null,"abstract":"Studies exploring health and medicine in military Brazil (1964–1985) frequently focus on the struggles of public health activists to advance substantial healthcare reforms during the country's gradual transition to democracy. In the 1960s, the Brazilian dictatorship installed a market-oriented system that outsourced healthcare to private providers, mostly servicing urban and employed benefactors. Without proper government oversight, the healthcare administration was overbilled and national public health indicators lagged. Scholars have highlighted the efforts of the Sanitary Reform Movement (Movimento da Reforma Sanitária) to dismantle the dictatorship's health system. Forming professional associations and assuming leadership positions in governmental agencies, sanitaristas promoted research and policies of collective health, laying the foundations for Brazil's universal healthcare system, established after the return to democracy.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"9 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136348418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-16DOI: 10.1017/s0147547923000133
Thivya Ranie, Sivachandralingam Sundara Raja
Abstract We explore the socioeconomic experience of a group of south Indian Tamil laborers and their families who established the Chuah Tamil agricultural settlement in British Malaya during the Great Depression. These were laborers who, though unemployed, refused to be repatriated to south India. Progressing from subsistence farming to small-scale agricultural production, their settlement evolved into an organized, socioeconomic system. It was also a critical field experiment for the British to assess the viability of a self-generating labor pool. In this article, we examine the social history of the settlers and the development of the Chuah Tamil colony within the context of Britain's overarching desire to create a labor source. Our study contributes to the reconciliation of microsocial history and colonialism, as well as to global labor history more broadly, by situating the settlers’ experience and the settlement itself in relation to historical contemporaries.
{"title":"A British Labor Settlement Experiment and the Socioeconomic Experience of the Chuah Tamil Settlement in British Malaya","authors":"Thivya Ranie, Sivachandralingam Sundara Raja","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000133","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We explore the socioeconomic experience of a group of south Indian Tamil laborers and their families who established the Chuah Tamil agricultural settlement in British Malaya during the Great Depression. These were laborers who, though unemployed, refused to be repatriated to south India. Progressing from subsistence farming to small-scale agricultural production, their settlement evolved into an organized, socioeconomic system. It was also a critical field experiment for the British to assess the viability of a self-generating labor pool. In this article, we examine the social history of the settlers and the development of the Chuah Tamil colony within the context of Britain's overarching desire to create a labor source. Our study contributes to the reconciliation of microsocial history and colonialism, as well as to global labor history more broadly, by situating the settlers’ experience and the settlement itself in relation to historical contemporaries.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136113682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-07DOI: 10.1017/s0147547923000273
G. Montalbano
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.
{"title":"Tunis in the Global Radical Web: Diasporas, Transnational Anarchism, and Labor Movements (1887–1912)","authors":"G. Montalbano","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000273","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49574544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-29DOI: 10.1017/s0147547923000224
Rossana Tufaro
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.
从1960年代末到内战爆发(1975年)，黎巴嫩经历了一个相对持续的工业扩张阶段。尽管“繁荣”并没有显著地改变黎巴嫩的三化经济结构，但它无论如何都足以为一个新的激进工人阶级的出现创造结构性条件，这个工人阶级有能力成为当时最具争议性的行动者之一。这个新的工人阶级主要是由非常年轻的、最近城市化的农村失业人口组成的，他们被残酷地注入了一个原始的、高度剥削的生产周期，在这个周期中，正式的工会在很大程度上是缺席的，或者几乎不起作用。在黎巴嫩资本主义矛盾产生的更广泛的“革命阶级”激进渗透过程的框架内，黎巴嫩共产主义行动组织(organization for Communist Action in Lebanon, OACL)，即所谓的黎巴嫩新左派中最重要的力量，向以工厂为基础的工人委员会的基层越界组织提供了输入。这创造了一个先决条件，使委员会不仅可以肯定自己是黎巴嫩劳工运动的激进先锋派，而且还可以肯定自己是由该国正在经历的结构和文化变化所产生或激发的下层群体对现有现状进行辩论的更广泛进程的组成部分。通过检索被遗忘的工人委员会的历史，本文想要考察这样一个新的工人阶级成为这一过程的组成部分的形式和轨迹。特别是，通过采用葛兰西的方法，文章将首先揭示黎巴嫩工业部门在审查期间的结构变化及其对劳工的影响。然后，它将集中讨论取代委员会的诞生和肯定的动力，并特别注意美洲国家协调委员会所发挥的作用。最后，报告将审查其机构对该国正在经历的政治发展的影响。本文认为，反霸权和变革的工人阶级行动主义在内战前夕的出现和肯定，以及代表结构压力和约束的直接副产品，也是阿拉伯新左派的出现有助于普及和部署的新意识形态和战斗基础设施的重要欠债者。本文还想介入关于黎巴嫩内战的史学辩论，强调次要角色和阶级现象在其爆发中的重要性，这些通常被对冲突的主流理解所广泛忽视。
{"title":"“Workers do not liberate themselves other than with their own hands”—The Political Experience of Workers' Committees in the Industrial District of Beirut (1970–1975)","authors":"Rossana Tufaro","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000224","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42805527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-23DOI: 10.1017/S0147547923000029
Paolo Sorbello
Abstract This paper analyses the influence that manpower agencies have on hiring practices and employment in Kazakhstan's oil sector. While influenced by the literature on transition from planned to market economy, this article's main argument is rooted in the understanding that labor precarization is produced through transnational capitalist practices. The influx of foreign capital through the investments of transnational companies (TNCs) also transplanted into Kazakhstan's labor market their antilabor policies and practices. This welcomed the presence of a new, dedicated actor for the establishment and curation of labor relations, namely manpower agencies, especially in the oil-rich region of Atyrau. This article argues there, the rationale for the presence of manpower agencies and the absence of trade unions is directly linked to the activities of TNCs. Manpower agencies have a decisive role in making employment and labor increasingly precarious in the oil sector. Manpower agencies function as a disaggregation force in the oil industry. Their presence stimulates a race to the bottom among workers, who have no other option but to accept precarious, unsafe, and underpaid jobs. Against this backdrop, the paper also offers a peek into “industrial gossip,” gathered during fieldwork in the Atyrau region. This more anthropological side of the argument highlights how the world of manpower agencies helps TNCs thrive by creating an atomized workforce.
{"title":"Hiring, Firing, Atomizing; Manpower Agencies and Precarious Labor in Kazakhstan's Oil Sector","authors":"Paolo Sorbello","doi":"10.1017/S0147547923000029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547923000029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper analyses the influence that manpower agencies have on hiring practices and employment in Kazakhstan's oil sector. While influenced by the literature on transition from planned to market economy, this article's main argument is rooted in the understanding that labor precarization is produced through transnational capitalist practices. The influx of foreign capital through the investments of transnational companies (TNCs) also transplanted into Kazakhstan's labor market their antilabor policies and practices. This welcomed the presence of a new, dedicated actor for the establishment and curation of labor relations, namely manpower agencies, especially in the oil-rich region of Atyrau. This article argues there, the rationale for the presence of manpower agencies and the absence of trade unions is directly linked to the activities of TNCs. Manpower agencies have a decisive role in making employment and labor increasingly precarious in the oil sector. Manpower agencies function as a disaggregation force in the oil industry. Their presence stimulates a race to the bottom among workers, who have no other option but to accept precarious, unsafe, and underpaid jobs. Against this backdrop, the paper also offers a peek into “industrial gossip,” gathered during fieldwork in the Atyrau region. This more anthropological side of the argument highlights how the world of manpower agencies helps TNCs thrive by creating an atomized workforce.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":"103 1","pages":"8 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56987427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-17DOI: 10.1017/s0147547923000169
T. Reifer
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.
{"title":"Like a Meteorite: The Life of Mike Davis","authors":"T. Reifer","doi":"10.1017/s0147547923000169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547923000169","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42290902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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