Pub Date : 2022-05-19DOI: 10.1017/S0147547922000011
Ewan Gibbs, Susan Henderson, V. Bianchi
Abstract This paper contributes to scholarship on the long experience of deindustrialization. It emphasizes contemporary place-making in navigating the much-changed socioeconomic landscapes that the closure of mills, mines, shipyards and factories have left behind. The ‘half-life of deindustrialization' suggests these experiences have been received through understandings of labour and community with origins in the industrial era. ‘Tracks of the Past' was a school-based education project themed around workers' occupation of Caterpillar's earth-moving machinery plant in Lanarkshire, Scotland. The occupation was a response to Caterpillar's shock closure announcement and the loss of 1,200 jobs. It lasted 103 days between January and April 1987 when closure was reluctantly conceded. A Caterpillar Workers Legacy Group (CWLG) commemorated the occupation's thirtieth anniversary. During 2018, academics collaborated with the CWLG to develop a curriculum for a local high school class. ‘Tracks' produced lessons where students engaged with archival sources and physical objects, interviewed members of the CWLG and conducted online research. The ‘learning journey' montages that the students produced combined conversations in 2018 with sources from three decades earlier, often reflecting on the occupation as a historical episode in a highly localised context. Others implicated the closure within an international pattern, linking Caterpillar’s divestment to the actions of multinationals in the contemporary global economy. In neither case did the invocation of the occupation lead to a straightforward translation of the occupation into contemporary workplace justice issues as the CWLG had hoped. However, these results did suggest a creative deployment of the past that rationalised the occupation with reference to contemporary deindustrialized contexts. These findings demonstrate the utility of the half-life through a lingering industrial past, but also demonstrate the need to conceptualise agents or custodians of labour history and challenge the linearity of passing time that an incrementally receding industrial era implicates.
{"title":"Intergenerational Learning and Place-making in a Deindustrialized Locality: “Tracks of the Past” in Lanarkshire, Scotland","authors":"Ewan Gibbs, Susan Henderson, V. Bianchi","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper contributes to scholarship on the long experience of deindustrialization. It emphasizes contemporary place-making in navigating the much-changed socioeconomic landscapes that the closure of mills, mines, shipyards and factories have left behind. The ‘half-life of deindustrialization' suggests these experiences have been received through understandings of labour and community with origins in the industrial era. ‘Tracks of the Past' was a school-based education project themed around workers' occupation of Caterpillar's earth-moving machinery plant in Lanarkshire, Scotland. The occupation was a response to Caterpillar's shock closure announcement and the loss of 1,200 jobs. It lasted 103 days between January and April 1987 when closure was reluctantly conceded. A Caterpillar Workers Legacy Group (CWLG) commemorated the occupation's thirtieth anniversary. During 2018, academics collaborated with the CWLG to develop a curriculum for a local high school class. ‘Tracks' produced lessons where students engaged with archival sources and physical objects, interviewed members of the CWLG and conducted online research. The ‘learning journey' montages that the students produced combined conversations in 2018 with sources from three decades earlier, often reflecting on the occupation as a historical episode in a highly localised context. Others implicated the closure within an international pattern, linking Caterpillar’s divestment to the actions of multinationals in the contemporary global economy. In neither case did the invocation of the occupation lead to a straightforward translation of the occupation into contemporary workplace justice issues as the CWLG had hoped. However, these results did suggest a creative deployment of the past that rationalised the occupation with reference to contemporary deindustrialized contexts. These findings demonstrate the utility of the half-life through a lingering industrial past, but also demonstrate the need to conceptualise agents or custodians of labour history and challenge the linearity of passing time that an incrementally receding industrial era implicates.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42655791","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 : 2022-05-03DOI: 10.1017/S0147547922000035
S. Daly
Abstract In the decade since International Labor and Working-Class History (ILWCH) published its special issue on “Labor and the Military,” treating military service as a problem of labor has grown from a provocation into a major debate. By surveying five recent books on soldiering as a form of labor, this essay poses a set of questions about warfare and work. Is military service best understood as a form of labor, and what might that perspective reveal, or occlude? How do militaries draw the line between those who work and those who fight? Where does that line become blurry? How do soldiers themselves understand the peculiar forms of “work” that war demands? War and work are not separate domains of experience, as these books show. But in some respects, they still demand different tools of analysis.
{"title":"War as Work: Labor and Soldiering in History","authors":"S. Daly","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000035","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the decade since International Labor and Working-Class History (ILWCH) published its special issue on “Labor and the Military,” treating military service as a problem of labor has grown from a provocation into a major debate. By surveying five recent books on soldiering as a form of labor, this essay poses a set of questions about warfare and work. Is military service best understood as a form of labor, and what might that perspective reveal, or occlude? How do militaries draw the line between those who work and those who fight? Where does that line become blurry? How do soldiers themselves understand the peculiar forms of “work” that war demands? War and work are not separate domains of experience, as these books show. But in some respects, they still demand different tools of analysis.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43521697","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 : 2022-03-08DOI: 10.1017/S0147547921000065
Cecilia L. Allemandi
Abstract This article analyzes the characteristics of domestic service in the city of Buenos Aires at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, showing the importance it had in a porteño society undergoing profound societal transformation. It reconstructs the changes in the sociodemographic profile of the sector and investigates the living and working conditions therein. It describes how that particular labor market was structured. It shows that the complexity of the sector was not only due to the existence of different occupational categories, functions, and hiring conditions, but also to the coexistence of various remuneration concepts, “arrangements” in which work and family life were interwoven in a particular way. It explores domestic service in the light of phenomena such as immigration, urbanization, family dynamics and child-rearing practices, state assistance policies, and the social reproduction processes of the working classes.
{"title":"Gender, Ethnicity, and Circulation of Children: Domestic Service in the City of Buenos Aires in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries","authors":"Cecilia L. Allemandi","doi":"10.1017/S0147547921000065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547921000065","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyzes the characteristics of domestic service in the city of Buenos Aires at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, showing the importance it had in a porteño society undergoing profound societal transformation. It reconstructs the changes in the sociodemographic profile of the sector and investigates the living and working conditions therein. It describes how that particular labor market was structured. It shows that the complexity of the sector was not only due to the existence of different occupational categories, functions, and hiring conditions, but also to the coexistence of various remuneration concepts, “arrangements” in which work and family life were interwoven in a particular way. It explores domestic service in the light of phenomena such as immigration, urbanization, family dynamics and child-rearing practices, state assistance policies, and the social reproduction processes of the working classes.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46222141","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 : 2022-02-15DOI: 10.1017/S0147547921000120
Selda Altan
Abstract The Yunnan–Indochina railway, built by France across the China–Vietnam border between 1898–1910, never realized the expansionist dreams of French colonialists in Indochina and therefore has been studied as a failure of French imperialism. Taking a labor perspective, this article examines the labor conflicts along the Yunnan railway against the backdrop of the emergence of a global labor market where different colonial powers competed for cheap Chinese labor after the emancipation of black slaves. At the time of the railway's construction, access to cheap labor was so central to colonial competition that the metropolitan, colonial, and business agents of the French empire found themselves in a dire conflict over labor shortages in Yunnan. To the extent that France failed to restrain the railway company agents from abusing the labor force, other European colonial powers used worker misery to dispute French claims to conducting a “civilizing mission.” At the same time, both Qing imperial officials and Chinese nationalists advanced their arguments for national sovereignty in the name of protecting their national subjects, i.e., the railway workers. As a result, French recruiters had to reconsider the terms of Chinese coolie employment, increase wages, improve worker contracts, and invest in welfare systems. In sum, worker resistance during the construction of the Yunnan railway not only delayed the railway's completion and diminished French colonial prestige in the region but also empowered the workers, giving them leverage to increase the value of their labor in a market extending beyond Chinese national borders.
{"title":"Politics of Life and Labor: French Colonialism in China and Chinese Coolie Labor During the Construction of the Yunnan–Indochina Railway, 1898–1910","authors":"Selda Altan","doi":"10.1017/S0147547921000120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547921000120","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Yunnan–Indochina railway, built by France across the China–Vietnam border between 1898–1910, never realized the expansionist dreams of French colonialists in Indochina and therefore has been studied as a failure of French imperialism. Taking a labor perspective, this article examines the labor conflicts along the Yunnan railway against the backdrop of the emergence of a global labor market where different colonial powers competed for cheap Chinese labor after the emancipation of black slaves. At the time of the railway's construction, access to cheap labor was so central to colonial competition that the metropolitan, colonial, and business agents of the French empire found themselves in a dire conflict over labor shortages in Yunnan. To the extent that France failed to restrain the railway company agents from abusing the labor force, other European colonial powers used worker misery to dispute French claims to conducting a “civilizing mission.” At the same time, both Qing imperial officials and Chinese nationalists advanced their arguments for national sovereignty in the name of protecting their national subjects, i.e., the railway workers. As a result, French recruiters had to reconsider the terms of Chinese coolie employment, increase wages, improve worker contracts, and invest in welfare systems. In sum, worker resistance during the construction of the Yunnan railway not only delayed the railway's completion and diminished French colonial prestige in the region but also empowered the workers, giving them leverage to increase the value of their labor in a market extending beyond Chinese national borders.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42721723","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 : 2022-02-09DOI: 10.1017/S0147547921000168
Zachary Davis Cuyler, Gabriel Young
Abstract This review article proposes new directions for the field of labor studies in the Middle East and Islamic world. It does so by examining a diverse array of recent works that are not framed as studies of labor and class per se, but that illustrate what this field might look like through their respective concerns with space and materiality. Taking such concerns together unites these otherwise disparate studies of class, oceanic connections, gender, urban transformation, and the environment. We have organized this essay around the themes of space and materiality because of the utility that they hold for the study of labor and class in the Middle East and Islamic world. They enable us to attend to the basic aims of older scholarship on labor and political economy while also internalizing the critiques of that tradition mounted by scholars of race, gender, and colonialism. We moreover suggest that the theoretical developments outlined here can inform scholarship on labor and class across regional divides.
{"title":"Space and Materiality in Recent Studies of Labor and Class in the Middle East and Islamic World","authors":"Zachary Davis Cuyler, Gabriel Young","doi":"10.1017/S0147547921000168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547921000168","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This review article proposes new directions for the field of labor studies in the Middle East and Islamic world. It does so by examining a diverse array of recent works that are not framed as studies of labor and class per se, but that illustrate what this field might look like through their respective concerns with space and materiality. Taking such concerns together unites these otherwise disparate studies of class, oceanic connections, gender, urban transformation, and the environment. We have organized this essay around the themes of space and materiality because of the utility that they hold for the study of labor and class in the Middle East and Islamic world. They enable us to attend to the basic aims of older scholarship on labor and political economy while also internalizing the critiques of that tradition mounted by scholars of race, gender, and colonialism. We moreover suggest that the theoretical developments outlined here can inform scholarship on labor and class across regional divides.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43000461","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 : 2022-02-02DOI: 10.1017/S0147547921000132
D. Money, L. Teh
In many ways, the vast industrial complexes that developed on the Central African Copperbelt and the Fushun coalfields in the early twentieth century were very different places. One on a high plateau stretched out across the border between what is now Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia with a sub-tropical climate; the other on the rolling foothills of Changbai Mountains in what is now Liaoning Province, northeastern China, with a humid continental climate. Yet anyone who visited either of these places would immediately and unavoidably have become aware of a basic fact about both: that racial hierarchies governed life and work on the mines. This article is about that basic fact, and in it we aim to make a two-fold contribution: First, it is a comparative history of mining regions, which, although it might seem an area of study ripe for comparison, is seldom undertaken. Second, through this comparison to argue that the prevalence and significance of race as a way of organizing life and work in the mining industry has been underestimated. We support this claim with an overview of production and everyday life in two seemingly very different mining regions: the Fushun coalfields and the Central African Copperbelt (see figure 1).
{"title":"Race at Work: A Comparative History of Mining Labor and Empire on the Central African Copperbelt and the Fushun Coalfields, ca. 1907–1945","authors":"D. Money, L. Teh","doi":"10.1017/S0147547921000132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547921000132","url":null,"abstract":"In many ways, the vast industrial complexes that developed on the Central African Copperbelt and the Fushun coalfields in the early twentieth century were very different places. One on a high plateau stretched out across the border between what is now Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia with a sub-tropical climate; the other on the rolling foothills of Changbai Mountains in what is now Liaoning Province, northeastern China, with a humid continental climate. Yet anyone who visited either of these places would immediately and unavoidably have become aware of a basic fact about both: that racial hierarchies governed life and work on the mines. This article is about that basic fact, and in it we aim to make a two-fold contribution: First, it is a comparative history of mining regions, which, although it might seem an area of study ripe for comparison, is seldom undertaken. Second, through this comparison to argue that the prevalence and significance of race as a way of organizing life and work in the mining industry has been underestimated. We support this claim with an overview of production and everyday life in two seemingly very different mining regions: the Fushun coalfields and the Central African Copperbelt (see figure 1).","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44230285","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 : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1017/S0147547922000199
Matt Myers
Abstract This article will explore one of the most significant strikes by migrant workers in Britain during the 1970s and the subsequent company closure the year after their victory. In May 1974, a predominantly South Asian workforce at the Imperial Typewriter Company in Leicester went on strike over unequal bonus payments and discrimination in promotion. The shop stewards committee and Transport & General Workers Union branch refused their support and the workforce split partly on racial lines. The strikers stayed on strike for almost 14 weeks until they emerged victorious. Though it appears as a central reference point in histories of migrant experience in Britain, the strike and closure has garnered little systematic, primary research. This article will fill this gap through the use of published sources and extensive unused archival deposits. During the strike part of the largely South Asian workforce sought to break with the racialized division of the workforce between different groups, skill levels, and work-types. Almost immediately after the strike ended in victory the company announced its intention to close down the vast majority of its British production. In Hull 1400 jobs were lost and in Leicester over 1600 were to go. This article shows that whilst the strike might have been the start of a politically, culturally, and intellectually significant period of significant protagonism by Britain's first-generation black and racialized working class, it also marked the beginning of the end of an industrial model dependent on the hyper-exploitation and racialized subordination of their labor. The closure was framed by contemporaries and subsequent historical accounts as a dispute marked more by the end of empire than worker obsolescence. As an article in the Guardian on the closure of the plants was put it in January 1975, it was ‘The day that Imperial&s empire fell'. Yet it might be more accurate to understand the strike as an early premonition of the globalisation of manufacturing production which was to emerge strongly in the 1980s and 1990s. The experience of Imperial Typewriters highlights the central importance of racialized labour hierarchies and immigrant counter-militancy in post-war Britain. The Imperial Typewriter Company provides a case study of how worker resistance to labour intensive modes of capital accumulation, in relatively low capital intensive industries, during a global crisis of capitalist profitability, was followed by the decision of a multinational corporation to immediately transfer its production overseas. The closure of Imperial Typewriters therefore offers a means to reconceptualize how we understand the 1970s as a period of interlocking crises, as well as the major shift of power from labour to multinational capital which emerged in its wake. The findings of this article indicate that British workers were significantly disempowered before the electoral victory of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Recentering labor conf
{"title":"Racialized Obsolescence: Multinational Corporations, Labor Conflict, and the Closure of the Imperial Typewriter Company in Britain, 1974–1975","authors":"Matt Myers","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000199","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article will explore one of the most significant strikes by migrant workers in Britain during the 1970s and the subsequent company closure the year after their victory. In May 1974, a predominantly South Asian workforce at the Imperial Typewriter Company in Leicester went on strike over unequal bonus payments and discrimination in promotion. The shop stewards committee and Transport & General Workers Union branch refused their support and the workforce split partly on racial lines. The strikers stayed on strike for almost 14 weeks until they emerged victorious. Though it appears as a central reference point in histories of migrant experience in Britain, the strike and closure has garnered little systematic, primary research. This article will fill this gap through the use of published sources and extensive unused archival deposits. During the strike part of the largely South Asian workforce sought to break with the racialized division of the workforce between different groups, skill levels, and work-types. Almost immediately after the strike ended in victory the company announced its intention to close down the vast majority of its British production. In Hull 1400 jobs were lost and in Leicester over 1600 were to go. This article shows that whilst the strike might have been the start of a politically, culturally, and intellectually significant period of significant protagonism by Britain's first-generation black and racialized working class, it also marked the beginning of the end of an industrial model dependent on the hyper-exploitation and racialized subordination of their labor. The closure was framed by contemporaries and subsequent historical accounts as a dispute marked more by the end of empire than worker obsolescence. As an article in the Guardian on the closure of the plants was put it in January 1975, it was ‘The day that Imperial&s empire fell'. Yet it might be more accurate to understand the strike as an early premonition of the globalisation of manufacturing production which was to emerge strongly in the 1980s and 1990s. The experience of Imperial Typewriters highlights the central importance of racialized labour hierarchies and immigrant counter-militancy in post-war Britain. The Imperial Typewriter Company provides a case study of how worker resistance to labour intensive modes of capital accumulation, in relatively low capital intensive industries, during a global crisis of capitalist profitability, was followed by the decision of a multinational corporation to immediately transfer its production overseas. The closure of Imperial Typewriters therefore offers a means to reconceptualize how we understand the 1970s as a period of interlocking crises, as well as the major shift of power from labour to multinational capital which emerged in its wake. The findings of this article indicate that British workers were significantly disempowered before the electoral victory of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Recentering labor conf","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56987758","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 : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1017/S0147547922000072
Lisa W. Phillips
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Disney and other United States-based companies found themselves in the position to create a “new world order.” The National Labor Committee (NLC), Haitian grassroots labor organizers, a multimillion member international labor community, concerned shareholders, members of the U.S. Congress, and activists around the world pressured Disney to lead the way to a new global standard by paying a living wage and investing in local infrastructure wherever it did business. Whatever standards Disney enacted, they argued, the rest would follow. Rather than assume the “corporate mantle of responsibility,” Disney ran from the United States to Haiti, then to China, in search of cheap labor, a bigger profit margin, and the ability to do business without scrutiny. Seeing itself as just one entity in a global garment supply chain, Disney claimed responsibility only for licensing its brand to the contractors (U.S.-based) and subcontractors (in Haiti and later China) who handled the actual production of Disney merchandise.
{"title":"Mickey Goes to Haiti and Leaves: Disney's Transnational Quest for Cheap Labor in the post-Cold War Era","authors":"Lisa W. Phillips","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000072","url":null,"abstract":"After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Disney and other United States-based companies found themselves in the position to create a “new world order.” The National Labor Committee (NLC), Haitian grassroots labor organizers, a multimillion member international labor community, concerned shareholders, members of the U.S. Congress, and activists around the world pressured Disney to lead the way to a new global standard by paying a living wage and investing in local infrastructure wherever it did business. Whatever standards Disney enacted, they argued, the rest would follow. Rather than assume the “corporate mantle of responsibility,” Disney ran from the United States to Haiti, then to China, in search of cheap labor, a bigger profit margin, and the ability to do business without scrutiny. Seeing itself as just one entity in a global garment supply chain, Disney claimed responsibility only for licensing its brand to the contractors (U.S.-based) and subcontractors (in Haiti and later China) who handled the actual production of Disney merchandise.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56986925","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 : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1017/S0147547922000102
Nathalie Rech
On September 19, 1922, Beulah M., a thirty-year-old cook, saved a “small child from a vicious cow on Angola.” This event occurred only a few months after her admission to the Louisiana State Penitentiary (LSP), where she was serving a life sentence for alleged murder. The infant was one of the many of the white prison staff's children raised on the penitentiary plantation nestled in a large meander of the Mississippi river. This happy-ending drama featuring a Black woman prisoner and a free white child arose from the “cohabitation” of free white households within the incarcerated population. The incident, quite unexpected in a carceral setting, prompted the penitentiary general manager to place Beulah M. on the “eligibility list” for parole and to grant her “full single good time for meritorious service,” which meant the possibility of an earlier release by a few months. Beulah's action might also have motivated authorities to assign her to be “servant” in the Camp D Captain's house in July 1923, and later to be a nurse in the nine-bedroom “Big House,” occupied by one of the penitentiary staff of higher rank. The peculiar nature of her alleged crime, the beating to death of her seven-year-old Black step-daughter, was apparently not perceived as a deterrent to entrust her to care for white children. Her courageous action toward a white child at Angola might even have been a compelling argument for her early pardon and discharge, which she received only after nine years at Angola, although her plea for a pardon had been rejected at least once before. Beulah M.'s story is the story of a coerced African American domestic laborer in white homes, rewarded for her perceived subservience to the Jim Crow order. It exemplifies one aspect of Black women's experiences of hard labor for the state of Louisiana during the first half of the twentieth century.
{"title":"Black Women's Domestic Labor at Angola (Louisiana State Penitentiary) during Jim Crow","authors":"Nathalie Rech","doi":"10.1017/S0147547922000102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000102","url":null,"abstract":"On September 19, 1922, Beulah M., a thirty-year-old cook, saved a “small child from a vicious cow on Angola.” This event occurred only a few months after her admission to the Louisiana State Penitentiary (LSP), where she was serving a life sentence for alleged murder. The infant was one of the many of the white prison staff's children raised on the penitentiary plantation nestled in a large meander of the Mississippi river. This happy-ending drama featuring a Black woman prisoner and a free white child arose from the “cohabitation” of free white households within the incarcerated population. The incident, quite unexpected in a carceral setting, prompted the penitentiary general manager to place Beulah M. on the “eligibility list” for parole and to grant her “full single good time for meritorious service,” which meant the possibility of an earlier release by a few months. Beulah's action might also have motivated authorities to assign her to be “servant” in the Camp D Captain's house in July 1923, and later to be a nurse in the nine-bedroom “Big House,” occupied by one of the penitentiary staff of higher rank. The peculiar nature of her alleged crime, the beating to death of her seven-year-old Black step-daughter, was apparently not perceived as a deterrent to entrust her to care for white children. Her courageous action toward a white child at Angola might even have been a compelling argument for her early pardon and discharge, which she received only after nine years at Angola, although her plea for a pardon had been rejected at least once before. Beulah M.'s story is the story of a coerced African American domestic laborer in white homes, rewarded for her perceived subservience to the Jim Crow order. It exemplifies one aspect of Black women's experiences of hard labor for the state of Louisiana during the first half of the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":14353,"journal":{"name":"International Labor and Working-Class History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56987197","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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