Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10330047
Michael Seth
The labor movement in Korea played an enormously important role in the anticolonial/nationalist movement before 1945 and in the democratization of South Korea. Labor's significance has long been recognized by Korean historians, but most of their studies have been from a class framework that focused on men. As Hwasook Nam, in her new book Women in the Sky, states, women industrial workers (yŏgong)—their struggles, contributions, and issues—have largely been invisible. This is no longer true, however, thanks to Nam's work and that of Chun Soonok, Janice C. H. Kim, Seung-Kyung Kim, Theodore Yoo, and others. Historians now recognize that women were often at the forefront in the movement for labor rights, and for democracy and social justice while dealing with issues of gender. This book provides further evidence of this fact.Nam's book covers the women in the labor movement from around 1930 to the 2010s. It is not a survey; rather, it focuses on specific episodes and on the remarkable women associated with them. The book examines the early rubber industry in Pyongyang in the early 1930s. It also explores the labor struggle at the Choson Spinning and Weaving plant in Busan, 1951–52, and surveys women laborers in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. The book ends with the labor movement in the period of democratization and neoliberalism, when women found themselves overrepresented in nonunionized, contingent, precarious, and low-paid jobs, with a focus on a shipyard strike in Busan.Nam's research has uncovered some dramatic moments and fascinating people that illustrate the issues and roles of women in Korean labor history. She begins with her first “woman in the sky,” Kang Churyong, a rubber plant worker who on May 30, 1931, climbed to the top of the Ulmil Pavilion, which overlooked a major square in Pyongyang. While perched precariously high above, she made an eloquent, impassioned speech to astonished onlookers about the hardship that recently imposed wage cuts would bring to workers and their families. Nam ends with another “woman in the sky,” the labor activist Kim Jin-Sook, who “shocked society” with a thirty-day sit-in atop a tall crane in a Busan shipyard to draw attention to workers’ grievances. In between these two incidents, the author presents other women who spearheaded labor activism. For example, the author narrates the “extraordinary struggle of women factory workers” during the politically oppressive 1970s, when President Park Chung Hee assumed near-dictatorial powers and brutally suppressed dissent (151). Laborers at that time who attempted to organize strikes were met with physical violence at the hands of company thugs and riot police. But Nam only briefly mentions the most famous incident, the female-led strike at the YH Trading Company that was a catalyst for the unrest that preceded Park's assassination by his security chief. This brief treatment of such a key incident follows a pattern in which Nam focuses more on the lesser-known
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329989
Ron Schatz
Before reading Jennifer Delton's book, I thought of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) as a parochial, nationalist, protectionist, conservative organization that fought furiously against unions and was founded by midsized midwestern companies in the 1890s to promote American manufacturing goods overseas. This view, which I imagine is common among labor historians, is not entirely accurate. The NAM was more complicated than that, as Jennifer Delton demonstrates in her highly informative study of the association from its founding until today.To begin, although the large majority of the association's members were small and midsized manufacturers, it also enrolled the presidents of the largest manufacturing corporations in the United States. During its most influential period, in the early twentieth century, it was led by David Perry, who owned the country's largest carriage-manufacturing plant. Perry's factory covered six city blocks in Indianapolis and employed 2,800 workers. Perry also owned and directed other companies. Small companies paid low annual dues to the NAM; large ones paid far more and, not surprisingly, carried greater weight in the association's decision-making. The NAM was not exclusively midwestern either. On the contrary, the initiative for the association came from southern manufacturers as well as Ohioans; consequently, the membership encompassed both Republicans and Democrats. The formation of the NAM in 1895 was part of the larger bonding of southern and northern institutions a generation after the Civil War. It is also a mistake to view the association as systematically protectionist. Denton explains that the NAM was often internally divided on the question of tariffs, as one would expect from a mixed group of southern and northern manufacturers, and consequently often opted not to take a stand on that subject.The NAM led the Open Shop Drive against AFL unions beginning in 1903 and remained unqualifiedly hostile to unions through the mid-1930s. Over time, however, the association's leaders and staff moderated their stance. While some of the members never changed their views, the NAM staff who helped shape the Taft-Hartley Act conceded the legitimacy of unions and collective bargaining in exchange for sharp limitations on union practices. Denton describes the 1947 law as “a peace of sorts, a settlement, in NAM's long-running war against big unions” (136).By the 1980s the NAM was led by a Democrat: Alexander Trowbridge, an Allied Chemical executive who had previously served as secretary of commerce in the Johnson administration. Its chief economist, Jerry Jasinowski, was a former aide to Senator Hubert Humphrey, who in that capacity had helped craft the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978. Although the association opposed that law, NAM leaders testified in favor of affirmative action policies in the 1970s and 1980s and even earlier strove to persuade its members to hire, retain, and promote African America
在阅读Jennifer Delton的书之前，我认为全国制造商协会(NAM)是一个狭隘的、民族主义的、保护主义的、保守的组织，它在19世纪90年代由中西部的中型公司成立，旨在向海外推广美国制造业产品。我想这种观点在劳工历史学家中很常见，但并不完全准确。不结盟运动要比这复杂得多，正如詹妮弗·德尔顿(Jennifer Delton)在她对该协会从成立到今天的高度翔实的研究中所展示的那样。首先，尽管该协会的绝大多数成员是中小型制造商，但它也招收了美国最大的制造公司的总裁。在其最具影响力的时期，即20世纪初，由戴维·佩里(David Perry)领导，他拥有全国最大的马车制造厂。佩里的工厂覆盖了印第安纳波利斯的六个街区，雇佣了2800名工人。佩里还拥有并指导其他公司。小公司向不结盟运动缴纳的年费很低;大公司的薪酬要高得多，毫不奇怪，它们在协会的决策中占有更大的份量。不结盟运动也不完全是中西部的。相反，成立该协会的倡议不仅来自俄亥俄州，也来自南部的制造商;因此，委员会成员既包括共和党人，也包括民主党人。1895年不结盟运动的成立，是南北战争后一代人建立的更大的南北机构联系的一部分。将欧盟视为系统性保护主义也是错误的。丹顿解释说，不结盟运动内部在关税问题上经常存在分歧，正如人们所预料的那样，这是一个由南方和北方制造商组成的混合集团，因此经常选择在这个问题上不采取立场。不结盟运动从1903年开始领导了反对劳联工会的开放商店运动，并在20世纪30年代中期对工会保持无条件的敌意。然而，随着时间的推移，该协会的领导和工作人员缓和了他们的立场。虽然一些成员从未改变他们的观点，但帮助制定《塔夫脱-哈特利法案》的不结盟运动工作人员承认工会和集体谈判的合法性，以换取对工会行为的严格限制。丹顿将1947年的法律描述为“不结盟运动与大工会的长期战争中的一种和平，一种解决方案”(136)。到20世纪80年代，不结盟运动由一位民主党人领导:亚历山大·特罗布里奇(Alexander Trowbridge)，他是联合化学公司(Allied Chemical)的高管，曾在约翰逊政府中担任商务部长。其首席经济学家杰里·贾西诺夫斯基(Jerry Jasinowski)曾是参议员休伯特·汉弗莱(Hubert Humphrey)的助手，汉弗莱曾以汉弗莱-霍金斯充分就业法案(Humphrey- hawkins Full Employment Act)的起草工作。尽管该协会反对这项法律，但不结盟运动的领导人在20世纪70年代和80年代作证支持平权行动政策，甚至更早的时候，他们努力说服其成员雇用、保留和提拔非裔美国人、其他少数民族和妇女。丹顿指出，极端保守主义者一直在不结盟运动中有自己的根基，但二战后，不结盟运动的军官，尤其是参谋“更加务实，更多地受到商业和管理学院的影响，不再那么坚持‘粗犷的个人主义’”(188)。不结盟运动从成立之初就一直致力于在世界范围内促进对外贸易，包括早在20世纪20年代就与苏联和20世纪70年代开始与中华人民共和国的贸易。该协会正式支持马歇尔计划、布雷顿森林协定、关税及贸易总协定、国际商会、世界法院、经济合作与发展组织，甚至联合国，尽管有不少成员反对。不结盟运动是全球化的早期和一贯的支持者。然而，到了20世纪80年代，该协会陷入了两难境地。作为一个保守的商业集团，不结盟运动在1980年的总统选举中热情地支持罗纳德·里根，并在大多数领域忠实地支持他的政府。然而，就像保守的基督徒一样，他们几乎没有从政府那里得到什么，里根的胜利和他的想法“几乎没有给老牌制造商提供什么，不结盟运动的面包和黄油”(265)，丹顿观察到。20世纪80年代大规模的工厂关闭不仅伤害了数以百万计的工厂工人和美国工会，也伤害了不结盟运动的成员，他们是敌意收购的目标。事实上，到20世纪80年代中期，不结盟运动与劳联-产联有很多共同之处。两党都在努力保护“烟囱”工业，都在失去党员，都与各自的政党疏远。不结盟运动主席特罗布里奇联系了劳联-产联主席莱恩·柯克兰，看他们是否能“和解”。尽管这一恳求没有任何结果，但这一姿态本身就是不结盟运动陷入困境的一个迹象。 丹顿认为，里根的经济政策偏向于房地产、金融和技术部门，而对传统制造业的扶持很少(266)。尽管不结盟运动在克林顿政府时期恢复了活力，但到21世纪之交时，该组织已是昔日的影子，成员数量和影响力不如美国商会、商业圆桌会议、全国独立企业联合会或世界大型企业联合会。丹顿总结道:“不结盟运动将自己的财富与经济全球化联系在一起，欢迎其他国家的公司(如丰田)进入自己的圈子，几十年来与外国制造商分享自己的专有技术，不断地超越其名称中的‘国家’，最终创造了一个世界，在那里谈论美国制造业或任何其他国家的制造业都不再有意义。”这本关于全美制造商协会(National Association of Manufacturers)的深刻历史著作，与朱迪思·斯坦(Judith Stein)的《关键十年》(Pivotal Decade)、马克·林德(Marc Linder)的《消耗战》(Wars of消耗)和金·菲利普斯-费恩(Kim Phillips-Fein)的《看不见的手》(Invisible Hands)等其他有关美国商业的优秀研究一样，都属于劳工历史学家的书架。
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329904
Matt Garcia
It has been some time since I read Herbert Gutman. My version of Work, Culture, and Society, a dog-eared, used copy that I bought in the early 1990s to prepare for graduate qualifying exams, had taken on a mustiness that sent me into a sneezing fit as soon as I reopened it. They say you never know as much as the day after those exams, and in this moment, I felt the wisdom of that observation. What I remembered was that Gutman had been the foundation of the new social history in the 1970s and that a generation of labor historians in the 1980s saw him as the American equivalent of E. P. Thompson, though I recalled little else. I hoped that my handwritten notes on six-by-four index cards stuffed inside the front cover would help rekindle my memory of what made him relevant to my studies, and my generation of graduates, three decades ago. No luck. My scribbles only captured the broadest outlines of Gutman's arguments, plus a cryptic message about the “collective passivity” of Lowell mill girls that I must have picked up from his essays.As I reread it, I noted how conditions in the economy and emphases in labor history had changed since his time. Reflecting on economic transitions and labor resistance in the nineteenth century, Gutman evoked this history in a moment of despair among workers in the 1970s that had yet to be fully interpreted by scholars or union leaders. Organized labor had begun a retreat in those days that culminated in the fateful PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) strike in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan broke the union by firing air traffic controllers for violating his return-to-work order. Before he died at the far-too-young age of fifty-seven in 1985, Gutman contributed two significant books, his monograph The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 and his collection of essays in Work, Culture, and Society, both in 1976. He separated himself from previous generations by abandoning a focus on trade unionists and instead writing about a culture of adaptation and resistance among workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly immigrants and African Americans.I remember that Work, Culture, and Society was seen by my graduate professors as a paean to the American workers who first exercised their conscience as a laboring class by engaging in everyday acts of resistance to exploitation. This had been the foundation of the approach taken by a generation of scholars just ahead of me, perhaps no one more influential than Robin D. G. Kelley, whose Race Rebels taught us to respect the “infrapolitics” of everyday workers who had received scant attention from historians prior to the 1990s.1 His celebration of the resistive power of McDonald's workers reminded me of my time on the grill at my local franchise and inspired me to write about the origins and variety of working-class culture among mostly Mexican people living and working “East of East” Los Angeles in Southern California.2St
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10330032
Seth Rockman
Reckoning with Slavery has several simultaneous goals: to foreground numeracy in the early modern articulation of racial difference, to rethink Western modernity as a product of Black erasure, and to center the commodification of African and African-descended people in the history of capitalism. At its core, though, the book seeks to provide an intellectual and social history of enslaved women as clear-eyed analysts of the system of economic extraction built on their childbearing capabilities. To follow the strategic choices that Black women made within hereditary slavery, then, is to witness the theorization of racial capitalism in real time.Writing with insight and subtlety, Jennifer Morgan knits together the disparate historiographies of “racial ideology, economics, and the political lives of enslaved people” (17). Morgan, who has been at the forefront of Black feminist scholarship of the early modern Atlantic since the publication of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004), carries forward many of the commitments of that original work, while also expanding the field of inquiry to range across the Portuguese, Spanish, and English empires. Readers familiar with the earlier work will notice other departures as well. If fantastical depictions of nursing West African mothers had previously undergirded European race-making, the focus here shifts to Africans’ supposed inability to calculate correctly. The quantifying tendencies gathering in European thought under the umbrella of “political arithmetic” lent themselves to theories of African deficiency and were then deployed to justify the enslavement that followed. Europe's “newly consolidating ideas about wealth, nationhood, and population” presumed the potential value of African women's future reproduction, positioning the Black womb as always already commodified and in the service of colonial ambitions (111). Morgan makes it impossible to unsee this fixation within European political economic writing, and in doing so she advances an argument for recognizing capitalism and anti-Black racism as mutually constitutive.Morgan further entangles capitalism and race-making by foregrounding kinship, which was central to the formulation of enslavement as a hereditary condition but also at the core of a legal regime of private property that facilitated the intergenerational transfer of wealth. Generations of white prosperity would come to hinge on generations of unborn Black children transformed from “kin to inventory” (107). As Europeans denied that the affective ties of kinship held any meaning for African people, they invented another arena for articulating racial difference and an intellectual rationale for shifting enslaved women's children “out of the conceptual landscape of families and onto the balance sheets of slave traders” (134). Here Morgan suggests that racialized slavery has shaped the modern boundaries of public and private. As constructed in the early modern West,
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329820
Laura Frances Goffman
Abstract As communities tried to make sense of COVID-19, media outlets around the world reached for illustrative examples of past pandemics. In Qatif, a city on Saudi Arabia's Persian Gulf coast, memories of a 1970 quarantine surfaced in local media as the pandemic unfolded. This article investigates why COVID-19 prompted public remembering of a state-imposed cholera quarantine in Qatif in 1970 by reconstructing three formative assemblages of disease and popular politics. First, a 1953 speech by leftist activist Nasir al-Saʿid in the wake of massive strikes demonstrates how activists rhetorically connected the labor movement in Eastern Province with popular demands for health care. Second, the shift from neglect of localized epidemics to the state's expanding reach into quotidian life from the 1940s through the 1960s shows how even as public health developed as a tool of governance, local people interpreted medical services as manifestations of privilege and inequality. The final section explores how expanding state authority over Eastern Province and the state's embrace of coercive epidemic management converged on the regime's 1970 cholera quarantine in Qatif. In the twenty-first-century COVID-19 response, public memory of the 1970 quarantine has provided a space for people to articulate competing narratives. Linking together these constellations of health and politics renders visible patterns of repression and protest in a public sphere that typically silences histories of dissent.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329890
Stacey L. Smith
It has, admittedly, been a long time since I have read Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. The essays in this volume were foundational to my PhD training at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an alma mater I share with Gutman, and I remember them as core texts in the labor history seminar that I took there as a second-year graduate student. As time went on, though, my research interests during my dissertation work and as an early career professor seemingly took me far afield from Gutman's emphasis on working-class formation and culture. I primarily identified as a historian of the US West and of the US Civil War and Reconstruction. My research, which dealt with unfree and quasi-free labor systems in California from the 1850s to the 1870s, did focus on work and workers. But as with many other Civil War and Reconstruction historians, my preoccupation has almost always been with the state. I want to know how labor and immigration exclusion policies shaped the lives of workers; how workers engaged with the state by contesting these laws and policies; how the state acted violently against workers; and how the outcomes of these struggles changed the overarching political history of the United States during Reconstruction.Given my research commitments, my first impression on rereading Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America was dissatisfaction at the weak emphasis on the state. There was precious little about the law, politics, and judicial proceedings that were at the heart of my own interpretations of labor history and inherently central to the Civil War and Reconstruction.In fact, one of Gutman's most provocative claims in the title essay of this volume is that the Civil War and Reconstruction may not have mattered all that much in the broader scheme of labor history. Gutman purposely disrupted the familiar periodization of national history that pivoted around the Civil War and Reconstruction as major turning points. Instead, he treated the period from 1843 to 1893 as a single unbroken era characterized by continuity, “common patterns of behavior,” rather than change.1 The “profound tension” between “American preindustrial social structure and the modernizing institutions that accompanied the development of industrial capitalism” remained the constant theme of American life, relatively uninterrupted by the Civil War and its aftermath.2After quieting my initial kneejerk protest—how could Gutman possibly discount the impact of emancipation and the Reconstruction amendments on labor history?—I gave serious thought to his argument about continuity across the pre–and post–Civil War periods. I concluded, to my surprise, that Gutman was ahead of his time in questioning whether the Civil War and Reconstruction were actually moments of tremendous rupture in national history.For decades, historians had emphasized that the United States victory over the Confederacy during the Civil War resulted in the consolid
诚然，我已经很久没有读过赫伯特·古特曼的《美国工业化中的工作、文化和社会》了。这本书中的文章是我在威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校(University of Wisconsin-Madison)攻读博士学位的基础，这是我和古特曼共同的母校，我记得它们是我在那里读研究生二年级时参加的劳工史研讨会的核心文本。然而，随着时间的推移，我的研究兴趣在我的论文工作和作为一个早期职业教授似乎使我远离了古特曼对工人阶级形成和文化的重视。我主要研究美国西部以及美国内战和重建的历史学家。我的研究涉及19世纪50年代至70年代加州的不自由和准自由劳工制度，确实关注工作和工人。但与其他许多内战和重建历史学家一样，我的注意力几乎总是放在国家上。我想知道排斥劳工和移民的政策是如何影响工人的生活的;工人们是如何通过反对这些法律和政策与国家打交道的;国家如何对工人采取暴力行动;以及这些斗争的结果如何改变了重建时期美国的总体政治史。鉴于我的研究承诺，重读《美国工业化中的工作、文化和社会》给我的第一印象是对对国家重视不够感到不满。书中关于法律、政治和司法程序的内容少之又少，而这些正是我对劳工历史的解读的核心，也是南北战争和重建时期的核心。事实上，古特曼在这本书的标题文章中最具挑衅性的观点之一是，内战和重建在劳工历史的更广泛的计划中可能并不那么重要。古特曼故意打破了人们熟悉的以内战和重建为主要转折点的国家历史分期。相反，他把1843年到1893年这段时期视为一个单一的不间断的时代，其特征是连续性，“共同的行为模式”，而不是变化“美国工业化前的社会结构与伴随工业资本主义发展而来的现代化制度”之间的“深刻张力”仍然是美国生活的永恒主题，相对而言，南北战争及其后果并未中断。在平息了我最初下意识的抗议之后——古特曼怎么可能低估解放黑奴和重建修正案对劳工历史的影响呢?我认真思考了他关于南北战争前后的连续性的观点。令我惊讶的是，我得出的结论是，古特曼在质疑内战和重建是否真的是国家历史上巨大断裂的时刻方面走在了他的时代的前面。几十年来，历史学家一直强调，美国在内战期间对南部邦联的胜利，导致了美国自由民族国家权力的巩固。联邦政府从内战中崛起，成为一个强大的实体，能够在全国范围内粉碎对其权威的挑战。它平息了奴隶主的叛乱，在南方建立了自由劳工制度，制服并合并了西部的原住民，并镇压了北部和中西部工人的异议。然而，在过去的十年里，内战和重建历史学家已经开始拆除战后美国国家的这种形象。相反，他们的重点是美国内战前后的连续性:联邦政府权力的不平衡和无效，奴隶制结束后不自由的持续存在，以及在一个(据称)致力于自由个人主义和法律面前人人平等的共和国中，仍然构成社会关系的等级制度和暴力。从这种新的学术研究中浮现出的内战后美国的图景，比我们通常想象的要混乱和模糊得多，与南北战争前的时代有着惊人的相似。古特曼对1843年至1893年间工人斗争和工人阶级形成的描述，预示着这种对内战和重建时期的新解释。更重要的是，他的观点表明，重新关注劳工史——许多内战和重建历史学家在20世纪80年代后放弃了这一研究——可以帮助我们追踪将南北战争前后时代联系在一起的连续性线索。首先，古特曼在《工作、文化与工业化社会》和《新教与美国劳工运动》中都强调了工人对自由资本主义精神的持续抵抗，他对这一点的关注破坏了任何一种观念，即美国内战的胜利也是共和党自由公民愿景的胜利。
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329932
Joseph E. Hower
For those who came of age within driving distance of Baltimore's National Aquarium in the 1980s, a field trip or family vacation to the gilded new harbor was a rite of passage. Decades later, The Wire offered an award-winning, precedent-breaking counterpoint, depicting the systematic corruption and institutional failure that deindustrialization and divestment had wrought.While scholars have long recognized the interrelationships between the two souls of cities like Baltimore, they have rarely been explored with the kind of nuance offered by Jane Berger. Artfully integrating analysis of the political economy of the Rust Belt city with the community activism of predominantly Black welfare and human service workers, A New Working Class turns on the most unusual of declension narratives. The book's drive comes less from the erosion of a once-proud manufacturing sector than from the rise and fall of a public sector—led, “redistributive approach” to local development (3). In part a response to frustrations born of the midcentury movement's struggle to access positions in a dwindling industrial sector and in part a reflection of the ambitions of growing Black political power in the city, this vision turned on more than simply securing enough government posts to offset the manufacturing job loss, Berger argues. Rather, it reflected a deeply held belief among Black activists that public employment could serve as a mechanism to shape social policy implementation and improve the quality of public services.Though that idea had older roots, Berger argues, the Great Society's combination of increased funding and cooperative decision-making lent an unprecedented opportunity to Baltimore's Black activists to shape social policy at the local level—much to the chagrin of the city's still predominantly white elected leadership. The story of how radicals seized on the mandate for “maximum feasible participation” and transformed antipoverty initiatives like the Community Action Program into further-reaching challenges to the status quo has been told before—by Susan Ashmore, Noël A. Cazenave, Alice O'Connor, and others. What distinguishes A New Working Class is how it weaves its account of bureaucratic infighting and civil rights protest with that of a rising public sector labor movement. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 44 and the Baltimore Teachers Union emerged, sometimes awkwardly, as among the most effective critics of the very programs its members were employed to deliver. Though insufficient to meet the challenges created by decades of underinvestment and industrial job loss, the efforts of organized, militant, and disproportionately Black women workers helped secure meaningful advances in socialized services and partially alleviated the racialized and gendered burdens of life in the city.Yet even at its height, the solidaristic alliances between unionized “client advocates” and the city's low-income communities rested on the m
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10330089
Joseph A. McCartin
Despite important recent work, US historians still have much more to learn about the interaction between unions and immigrants in the years since the 1960s. One indication of this lacuna is that it is difficult to cite a US study that combines both a national narrative and a fine-grained local analysis of the subject as well as Cole Stangler's revealing new volume does for the case of France in the 1960s and 1970s.Stangler's story is enlightening on multiple levels. He focuses not on the largest French union federation, the Confédération générale du travail (CGT), but on its smaller rival, the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT), which, he convincingly demonstrates, took a much more aggressive approach to defending immigrant workers during the crucial years between 1965 and 1979.The CFDT was founded in 1964 when the bulk of unionists in the Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens (CFTC) broke from the Christian orientation of that federation to establish the CFDT on a secular footing (déconfessionnalisation). The timing of this founding was propitious. The Algerian War had recently ended; immigrants were moving to France from Eastern and Southern Europe and North Africa, increasing the proportion of immigrants in the French population from 4.7 percent in 1962 to 6.5 percent in 1975; and the nation was on the brink of the upheaval of 1968, which would famously bring workers and students together into the streets of Paris.Holding a “conférence nationale des travailleurs immigrés” in 1966, the CDFT set out to study the problems of immigrant workers and define a plan for organizing them. It then made a historic accord with the rival CGT that allowed each federation to influence the other on the immigration issue over the ensuing decade. The upheaval of 1968, which saw immigrants take to the streets alongside the French-born, crystallized sentiment among the CDFT's leaders to make immigrant organizing a priority.In the early 1970s, the CDFT strengthened its position on immigrants around the notion that “in the realm of capitalism, we are all immigrants” (au royaume du capitalisme, nous sommes tous des immigrés; 67), setting up “groupes de nationalité” to bring workers together in caucuses of their country of origin and joining with the CGT in a campaign against racism that in 1972 helped achieve passage of the Plevin Law, which criminalized racially discriminatory hate speech. That same year, the government agreed to an expansion in labor rights, allowing all foreign workers to be elected as shop stewards. By 1973, the CDFT was supporting the demands of Tunisian immigrant strike leaders threatened with expulsion for being undocumented (“sans papiers”) and was making immigrant rights central to its program (76).During these years, Stangler shows, the CDFT led the CGT in embracing the cause of immigrant workers. Unfortunately, however, the work of both federations was thrown on the defensive by the election of Valéry Giscar
如果移民在CDFT工会中受到不同的对待，斯坦格勒表明，在法国劳工历史上的激进时刻，他们在罢工中发挥了越来越重要的作用，包括Girosteel和Margoline的非传统罢工(des greves non - traditionnelles)，在这些罢工中，移民要求公平待遇是这些斗争的核心(166)。最后，他详细分析了塞纳河畔弗林斯雷诺工厂的劳工斗争案例，1973年和1978年，移民在那里领导了重要的罢工。这个丰富的案例研究讲述了年轻武装分子的故事，如塞内加尔的穆萨·迪亚洛，摩洛哥的贾马·乌拉米，以及乌克兰犹太移民的儿子丹尼尔·里希特，他后来成为CDFT在工厂的领导人，并对工厂中法国出生的工人中普遍存在的种族主义采取了强硬立场。里希特对他的移民同志的担忧有多么重视的一个标志是，他为伊斯兰工人要求在工厂建立祈祷室的要求辩护，这一要求很快蔓延到其他汽车工厂。CDFT对这一要求的辩护是“我们都是什叶派”(我们都是什叶派;215)。斯坦格勒在1979年结束了他的叙述。在接下来的几十年里，经济、政治和文化的变化将使工人们更难团结在“我们的孩子”这样的宣言周围。随着时间的推移，移民问题从20世纪70年代在法国劳工议程上占据的突出位置逐渐退居次要地位。今天，法国劳工和美国劳工一样，在新自由主义加强控制之前的关键岁月里，他们在建立一个更具包容性的运动方面取得了有限的进展。我们可以从科尔·斯坦格勒(Cole stangler)所描述的法国经验中学到很多东西，尤其是从他对这一经验的聪明、创造性和多层次分析方法中。
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329736
Leon Fink
{"title":"Editor's Introduction","authors":"Leon Fink","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10329736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10329736","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135337278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/15476715-10329975
Kaveh Ehsani
This book, by a leading social historian of modern Iran, is not an integrated and chronological general history but, as the title suggests, a collection of six case studies, five of which were previously published as articles and book chapters. Together they offer provocative insights into how modernity and social and political marginality were experienced in Iran and the wider Middle East. They cover the formative late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, during which Iran experienced major social and political upheavals of global significance, including two major revolutions, military invasions and occupations by imperial powers, the emergence of oil capitalism, the Cold War, major land reforms, and the forced de-veiling of women by the Pahlavis and their re-veiling in the Islamic Republic, among others. Cronin challenges two prevailing trends in the historiography of Iran. The first is the nation-state-centered approach that frames Iranian history as exceptional and unique to its national territory and populations. The second are the top-down state and elite-centered frameworks that overlook the role of the subaltern classes and ordinary people in shaping this contested modernity. Instead, Cronin aims to unpack the agency and historical experiences of the poor, women, political activists, prostitutes, bandits, criminals, slaves, provincial and rural populations, workers, and small traders in navigating often violent historical transformations that shaped contemporary Iran and the Middle East. Throughout the book, Cronin links the national with the regional and the global to show how Iranian history has always been an integral part of currents beyond its national borders.Each chapter covers a different topic, ranging from the paradoxical role of secular revolutionary forces in the 1979 “Islamic” Revolution to the moral economy of food and the politicization of hunger under the Qajar dynasty; the political and social dynamics and public perceptions of criminality and the dangerous classes amid rapid social change, slavery, and abolitionism in Iran and the wider Middle East; and anti-veiling campaigns and the politics of dress. The great strength of the book is its comparative approach, placing Iran's modern social history within the larger context of Middle East and global histories by challenging “the routine fracture that separates the analysis of the national history of Iran from its global context” (2). “Methodological nationalism,” as the author calls it, is a significant issue that plagues academic studies and popular perceptions of Iran, as Cronin demonstrates in the first chapter (and only previously unpublished case study). The 1979 revolution was one of the largest social revolutions of the modern era. It was the result of a sustained and largely nonviolent mass movement against the monarchy that eventually triumphed through popular protests and general strikes. Yet instead of garnering intellectual and political curiosity like other ev
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