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Through historical and anthropological inquiry, this paper addresses the issue of memory antagonisms involving cultural landscapes in the context of a former mining region: the Belgian Black Country. This region, which became increasingly industrialized in the 19th century through the massive development of coal mining and steel industry, subsequently experienced deindustrialization, and now finds itself mobilized in a process of 'post-industrial' mutation. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, it examines how the landscapes inherited from industry, and in particular the slag heaps of the coalfield, have over time become repositories of a working-class memory, through the living and working practices of the communities surrounding the mines. It also documents the various representations attached to these landscape objects, whose contradictions echo the oppositions between capital and labor that have marked the development of industrial capitalism. The second part of the paper, which focuses on the present situation, examines how these representations are remobilized in the valorization processes that are initiated by different actors, in the context of a 'post-industrial' urban transition strategy that seeks to produce a unified and pacified historical narrative. We'll be looking at how historical conflicts still permeate the representations of these landscapes, the question of their conservation, and their possible future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the prevalence and impact of nativist and anti-labor narratives built on the claim that the ‘Molly Maguires’, a vague 1860s and 70s militant Irish labor phenomenon of the Pennsylvania anthracite region, was still active between the 1880s and the 1910s. It finds that such narratives were widespread until the late 1890s, and still regionally significant until the late 1900s, finally fading into obscurity in the 1910s. ‘Molly Maguirism’ as a media narrative was primarily directed at organized labor and the (Irish) working class; it is best understood as a form of ethnicized proto-Red Scare tactic, but could incorporate other elements, such as broader nativist ideology and sectarianism. Based on these findings, prevailing models of Irish acculturation, such as Painter’s ‘second enlargement of whiteness’, are obsolete; the paper recommends a thorough revision of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish American working-class history, accounting for the continued and hitherto massively underestimated presence of anti-Irish sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the necessity of promoting national childcare development and establishing corporation childcare within the context of China’s low fertility rate. It emphasizes the significance of traditional Chinese cultural values as foundational elements for promoting corporation childcare initiatives and their growth. It examines the evolving responsibilities of corporations in China’s childcare development amidst varying government policies over time. Given the increasing innovation and responsibility among Chinese corporations. the article categorizes three modes of corporation childcare based on current trends: corporation self-built childcare, collaborative childcare with third parties, and embedded childcare. It advocates for customized childcare services, nurturing the happiness of children, fostering parent-child interactions, building childcare brands, and creating a conducive business environment tailored to each mode. Building these modes, the paper offers recommendations across five dimensions: customizing childcare services, supporting the joyful upbringing of young children, promoting parent-child interaction, branding childcare facilities, fostering a conducive business environment, aiming to establish a comprehensive corporation childcare network. Lastly, the paper explores future development prospects, focusing on promoting the expansion driven by corporation childcare, addressing homogenization among corporation childcare facilities, considering the integration of elderly and childcare to leverage the experience of the elderly and fulfill social responsibilities in elder care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1987-88 strike at International Paper's Androscoggin Mill in Jay, Maine severed a longstanding 'social contract' where workers and community residents tolerated the mill's air and water pollution in return for good-paying jobs and a robust local economy. This article traces the development of environmental consciousness among union workers and community residents during the strike and their efforts to protect the environment from the pollution of the mill. The union publicized environmental problems at the mill and the state's failures to regulate pollution when the strike began. After a series of environmental accidents during the strike, including a massive chlorine dioxide gas leak that threatened the safety of the town, Jay residents formed a community environmental organization and pressured the company and the state to close the mill. The environment remained an important issue after the strike, as labor and environmental activists joined forces to uphold a municipal ordinance that allowed the town to enforce state and federal environmental laws. This article studies how labor and environmental politics converged on a local level and also explores the broader themes of the conflict between job prosperity and environmental protection in industrial communities, labor and environmental movement alliances, and the current issues surrounding the 'green economy'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the analysis of decolonization process and nationalist struggles for political independence of Africa, labour agitations and the press activism for human rights are common features. But most studies have treated labour crisis and the press activism during the period of decolonization as mere subsets of the linear narrative of independence movement. Drawing on the empirical data of the Enugu Colliery Shootings incident, this paper examined labour agitation as an independent event and reviewed the area of overlap with the nationalist struggles. It re-examined the Colliery Shootings beyond the preponderant nationalist view that lumped every social, economic and political protest of the decolonization period as a single metanarrative of nationalist movements. Lastly, the roles of Nigerian newspapers as mediators in the crises between the labour unions and the colonial government, and the nationalists with the colonial government were appraised. The paper argued that, despite the interconnection of labour agitations with nationalist movements of the period, the former was both characteristically independent and coincidental with the latter. Similarly, not all human rights agitations by the newspapers were independence-focused. Finally, the nationalists, through networking process, benefited from labour agitations and press activism by expanding and molding local protests as independence movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 1987, managers at International Paper Company (IP) permanently replaced more than 2,200 union members who had gone on strike after resisting the firm's demands for extensive concessions. Previous accounts of this dispute, which lasted until October 1988, have focused on Jay, Maine, where around half the strikers were located. This study gives a fuller history, detailing the involvement of strikers in De Pere, Wisconsin and Lock Haven, Pennsylvania as well. In addition, it highlights the important part played by 1,200 IP workers in Mobile, Alabama. In March 1987, IP executives locked out the Mobile workers, precipitating the entire conflict between the two sides. Blending oral history interviews with unprocessed archival material and local newspaper accounts, Minchin shows that the company's use of permanent replacements tipped the balance in its favor, despite the union's efforts to launch a corporate campaign against IP. Although the strikers held firm, they had little bargaining power once they had been replaced. The dispute graphically highlights how difficult it is for unions to win strikes in the contemporary US, confirming union leaders’ complaints that the hiring of permanent strike replacements has left them with an ‘empty gun.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This life history account illustrates the covert politics of sabotage, purging, and the defeat of defecting and rival factions that occurred within the United Farm Workers in Texas. I draw on Robert Michels’ framework of competing leadership to illustrate the mechanisms established leadership can use to sabotage, purge, and the eliminate rival leaders, in particular maverick and threatening leaders. This case study draws on the history of the Texas Farm Workers Union, led by Antonio Orendain in the 1970s, and its conflict with the United Farm Workers led by Cesar Chavez. I argue that Orendain’s maverick leadership and independent union activity led the UFW leadership to 1) actively block resources such as money and supplies to Orendain, 2) leverage political connections to blacklist Orendain’s campaign for collective bargaining, and 3) write Orendain out of the UFW narrative and memory in Texas. These moments provide an opportunity to reveal the covert and complex politics of controlling the direction, resources, and objectives of labour movements. Moreover, this paper also seeks to document the organizing career of one of the founders of the UFW who earned the moniker ‘The Cesar Chavez of Texas’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several recent European studies conducted over the past 50 years have documented a positive connection between a person’s height and their salary. However, there are very few studies for earlier periods and for southern Europe. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between the height of conscripts born between 1888 and 1907 and their daily wages in 1924. Data for the Spanish city of Zaragoza was used. The results showed that for every additional 10 cm of height, an individual earned approximately 3% more. Furthermore, the shortest 25% of individuals suffered a considerable penalty in their income (about 15%). To understand the causes of this discrimination, we then analyzed the data by socioeconomic group. We found that people in low socioeco nomic groups essentially suffered wage discrimination. This finding could be linked to the fact that a tall stature conveys an image of strength and productivity. It should be noted that these results were found mainly for the urban areas, with their relatively large labor supply and weak blood ties rather than rural areas or among immigrants. In other words, the height penalty affected the weakest groups of society (low socioeconomic level and immigrants). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study calls for greater scholarly engagement with the generational experiences of the socialist working class in China. Through an analysis of collective actions in response to the reform of state-owned enterprises at the turn of the century, the paper divides the Chinese socialist working class into the Revolution Generation and the Transition Generation. Amid the restructuring of the state sector, workers from the Revolution Generation exhibited a proclivity for civic activism and petitions, while the Transition Generation, though grappling with unemployment, largely refrained from public dissent, instead expressing sentiments of bewilderment and resignation. The study illustrates how the differing lived experiences of two working-class generations played a pivotal role in shaping their interpretation of grievances and contention repertoire. The article underscores the significance of generational perspectives in gaining insight into the destiny of the Chinese working class, advocating for the integration of such perspectives into the broader fields of deindustrialization and labor studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the racialized experiences of industrial closure and economic restructuring of the former Pilpilco coal mine through oral histories and feminist arts-based methods. We argue that Pilpilco's industrial closure illuminates the layers of historical violence exerted on bodies and land as inseparable categories to colonize and extract resources and labour in the Chilean coal basin in Mapuche land. Pilpilco's industrial closure illustrates how coloniality operates in Latin America, perpetuating racial, gender, political and social hierarchical orders and prescribing value to certain peoples and territories while disenfranchising others (Quijano, 2000, Lugones, 2008). The article reflects on the colonial wounds that continue to harm inhabitants and their environments, prolonging their inability to heal intergenerational pain. Finally, we analyse residents' creative strategies to reclaim Pilpilco's land through heritage recognition, women's solidarity, and alliances with indigenous struggles. The study expands the reach and depth of deindustrialization studies, providing insights into how processes of industrialization, deindustrialization, and reindustrialization unfolded through the entanglements of settler colonialism and indigenous dispossessions, authoritarian regime and political repression, and neoliberalism and social demobilization. It also contributes to the field by providing a perspective on industrial closure from women's experience – those unpaid care workers who sustained life in coal mining communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the divergent trajectories of automotive investment and employment in Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario. Located on opposite shores of the Detroit River, in the United States and Canada respectively, Detroit and Windsor are the founding cities of the North American auto industry. Long dominated by the Big Three, their factories have produced vehicles for the same continental market since 1965. Each has weathered parallel challenges since then, including spikes in the price of oil, the Big Three's loss of market share, the transition to lean production, and the near-collapses of Chrysler and GM. Yet Detroit began deindustrializing decades earlier and lost much more employment than Windsor. To determine why, we compared their automotive sectors from 1900 to the 2010s. Since the Depression, each city has repeatedly confronted the prospect of deindustrialization, but three factors have made Windsor more resilient: (1) federal and provincial interventions on its behalf, (2) Windsor's greater competitiveness with respect to factor costs, quality, and innovation, and (3) Windsor's annexation of outlying territory to capture new factories. These differences show how national, subnational, and regional/local policies have mediated corporate decision-making to produce a variegated North American Rust Belt, with Canada outperforming the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on something not previously addressed by the literature, labour inspection in Spain in the first decades of the Franco dictatorship. Despite the Franco dictatorship's fascist-style approach of regulatory interventionism, this research shows a relapse into an abstentionist conception of labour inspection that led to worker vulnerability. The study has not only found, as was already known, normative similarities with the contemporaneous Italian and German dictatorships, but also similar (although more severe) limitations to the functioning of the inspection service. The slight improvement registered from 1947 onwards and the effort to achieve a limited equivalence with Western democracies also failed to notably improve working conditions, occupational safety and worker protection. The Labour Inspectorate suffered from understaffing and a lack of resources up to the very end of the dictatorship, something which the incipient democracy then inherited. These human and material resource shortages continue to be a problem and are currently debated in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a novel dataset on working-time regulation for 197 territories between 1789 and 2010 to document how working hours have become globally standardised through public policy. Descriptive analysis shows that working-time reforms are global in scope, rare events, sizable once undertaken and tend to reduce hours. Democracies were historically more likely than autocracies to regulate hours, but this is not the case now, and there has never been a large gap in the content of their regulations. Whereas independent states always regulated hours to a greater extent, over half of all dependent states just prior to decolonisation regulated hours with more generous regulations than independent states. Based on these patterns, the paper first makes a methodological plea for more long-term historical studies and, second, sketches two possible explanatory frameworks for working-time reforms. One highlights shocks to the powerbase of antiregulation coalitions; the other highlights international normative change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'new mobilities paradigm' formulated in the early 2000s allowed scholars of labor to explore the possibilities of the concept of im/mobility as an interpretive framework for understanding processes of work and labor. This paper contributes to the continued cross-fertilization between mobility studies and labor studies by exploring the theoretical and methodological prospects of focusing on assemblages of temporal-spatial practices that simultaneously compel and confine movement. The article suggests that means, processes, and extent of labor coercion can be understood by analyzing how people are compelled to move or are confined to specific sites temporarily or permanently. It discusses how employing space and im/mobility as conceptual tools uncover the role of diffused, hierarchical layers through which labor coercion emerges. In this regard, environment emerges as a significant factor. The paper examines how mobility becomes a line of flight from sites/fields of coercion, or locks people into new forms of coercive relations; the legal/formal or informal frameworks that regulate or govern labor im/mobility within specific sites; and how the logics of deployment and coercion overlap and mutually reinforce one another. Ultimately, it aims to contribute to the calls for nonlinear, newly spatialized histories of labor processes and labor coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores experiences of temporary labor migration that entailed Yugoslav export of know-how (highly skilled knowledge and expertise) between 1980 and 1991, a result of industrial collaboration between Mining and Smelting Combine Bor, a state-owned copper-processing 'giant' in former Yugoslavia, and the biggest copper company in Iran, National Iranian Copper Industries Company. Based on interviews with individuals engaged in the Yugoslav project, supplemented by analysis of documents and historic newspapers from that period, the paper analyzes everyday practices of managerial bureaucratic improvisations and improvisations at work. The article shows how such improvisations helped overcome excessive and rigid Yugoslav socialist bureaucracy and made Yugoslav entrepreneurial capitalist ventures possible. Moreover, it argues that the export of know-how was constitutive of silent acceptances of reproduction of capitalist relations, which helped consolidate the process of liberalization of the socialist market in the late 1980s. We argue that such temporary labor migration and the often improvised work carried out by the Yugoslav workers cannot be seen as a resistance or alternative to the Western/Northern hegemonies. Rather, we argue that such practices were facilitators of the capitalist ventures at semi-peripheries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes how (post)-migrant media outlets discussed the position of (post)-migrant people in France. (Post)-migrant media are periodicals, radio stations, and other forms of media produced by (post)-migrant actors and addressed to them. I argue that changes in the Global Cold War order, French national politics, and social changes in French (post)-migrant communities fostered a transition from anti-imperialist to multicultural understandings of migration in the examined media. The paper shows how these changes affected the experiences and identities of (post)-migrant people and adds a global history perspective to existing explanations about generational change and national political developments. It tracks how (post)-migrant media offered a space to negotiate the position in France against the backdrop of global developments such as the Cold War, decolonization, the disillusion with postcolonial governments, and the rising human rights movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While in recent decades there have been growing bodies of literature on gender and war, on war and military labor, and on various forms and degrees of labor coercion, rarely have these areas – gender, coercion and war labor – been analyzed together as intersecting and interdependent themes. The special issue on Gender, War and Coerced Labor aims to fill this gap, and this introduction to the issue will not only present the five papers but also establish the three intersecting themes uniting these papers. Together the introduction and the papers contribute toward larger debates about the place of coercion, of degrees of exploitation, and of free/unfree continuums in a variety of gendered war work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion paper is presented to be read in three simultaneous and different modalities. At one level, it is a historiography of British Bengali women’s labour power and hence an exploration of the historical constraints that vis-a-vis appear as a natural logical consequence but on closer examination performed as part of a broader structure of inequality. At another level, it intervenes, utilising the theoretical lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ to inform an awareness that does not pathologize, but instead reads against the constructed layers of assumptions to foreground the social conditions that appear as social structures in diminishing Bengali women’s labour power. Finally, the discussion expands the site of analysis, arguing under Sunni orthodoxy based upon the recitation, women have significant labour rights, moreover those rights have diminished in Bangladesh. At the same time, in Britain, social conditions have superseded religious limitations that have benefitted British Bengali women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 19th century, the British colonial state in Sri Lanka embarked on an experiment in deploying convict labour for salt collecting. 'Criminals' from all parts of the island region convicted mainly for robbery and vagrancy and sentenced to hard labour by various courts of justice, were sent to an isolated outpost in the district of Hambantota in the deep south of Sri Lanka to labour at a naturally formed saltern known as the Maha Levaya. Executive, judicial, and administrative actors of the state played a key role in mobilising and immobilising the convicts at the saltern in order to fulfil the dual functions of punishment and profit. This paper contends that the inter-regional and local practice of im/mobilizing convicts to worksites as seen in Hambantota was a microspatial process of punishment, exile and labour extraction that was integral to larger processes of social control and labour coercion. However, despite the attempts at confining the convict labour force at the saltern through military and judicial means, the men condemned to labour for salt resisted the conditions of servitude through multiple strategies ranging from flight to evasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Goli Otok (Barren Island) was a site of the master political prison and forced labor camp of the socialist Yugoslavia between 1949 and 1956. The imprisoned, accused of siding with Stalin in the Tito-Stalin political rift, were sent to undergo 'self-managed re-education' through 'socially beneficial labor' in the island's limestone quarries. The inmates were forced to build their own prison out of that very limestone - the first known human dwellings on the previously uninhabited island. They were also often forced to break, crumble and to carry massive stone loads from one place to another and back, with no constructive or productive purpose. However, the labor camp authorities also operated a lucrative business, oriented towards country-wide distribution, and sometimes towards international export of the island's limestone. The quarried stone of the island therefore travelled more widely than its excavators, whose movements were limited to their island-prison. Set at the intersection of labor history and environmental history and drawing on the archival materials of the Yugoslav State Security Service, oral history interviews with the former prisoners, and their published and unpublished written memoirs, this paper examines the interrelations of the prison-island, its stone material, and the prisoners' laboring bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on both archival material from the European colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence, Madrid, and London and documents held at the Archivo Nacional de la República de Cuba, this paper analyses court cases related to petitions submitted by enslaved people to foreign diplomacy in Cuba, exploring the entanglement between mobility in trans-imperial Caribbean space and the use of law by enslaved people in the Age of Abolition. Drawing mainly on legal sources, it emphasizes how slavery and freedom remain ambiguous and contested concepts in the shifting boundaries between free and unfree labor. (Im)mobility - understood both as the transition from one legal status to another and as migration - represented a practice to escape coercion and a tool of control, through which new forms of coercion emerged and were regulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important component of China's social security system, the housing provident fund (HPF) scheme has seen its fairness called into question. Based on the data from the China Household Finance Survey in 2017, this paper uses the least squares method and the unconditional quantile regression and decomposition method to study the wage gap between the state and non-state sectors from the perspective of the HPF. Its findings suggest that the HPF is an important component of the state-sector wage premium. That is, whether wages include the HPF affects the direction and significance of the sectoral wage gap. A closer look reveals that in the state sector, low-income workers benefit less from the HPF scheme than middle- and high-income workers. The breakdown of the wage gap within the state sector indicates that the wage premium for the middle- and high-income bracket and for the high-income bracket are mainly credited to the differences in individual characteristics of state-sector workers, while the wage premium obtained by the middle- and low-income bracket takes the form of the sectoral wage level, which benefits from the HPF system to some extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the hypothesis, put forward by several historians and IR academics, that the 1980s decline in British union membership and strike frequency, was driven by major industrial defeats, a cultural shift away from collectivism, and the adverse effects of the Conservative Government's anti-union legislation. In contrast, this paper argues that international economic developments, most notably the globalisation of manufacturing production, along with the British Conservative Government's economic policies, which resulted in mass unemployment in heavily unionised areas of the economy, were the principal reasons for the declines in union membership and strike frequency during the 1980s. In support of this theory, my article draws upon extensive contemporaneous research, which I conducted when I worked in the Industrial Relations Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the late 1980s. This research illustrates how strike frequency and union membership fell in the early and mid-1980s, before membership stabilized, and the frequency of strikes relative to the number of unionised workplaces increased, during the short-lived economic upturn of the late 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the labor history of the S.D. Warren Company, a leading producer of high quality coated and plain publication paper that employed over 3,000 by the mid-twentieth century at its principal Westbrook, Maine site. The company was an anomaly, staying non-union for decades after paper had become one of the most unionized manufacturing industries in the U.S., particularly in its home state of Maine. The key to its success in rebuffing unionization and quelling dissent for over a century lay in a distinct mix of paternalistic and corporate welfare practices. Beginning with founder Samuel Dennis Warren, S. D. Warren's executives blended paternalistic familiarity with a nascent welfarism; his descendents and, later, professional managers continued and deepened this hybrid approach to eliciting employee loyalty and warding off worker dissent. S. D. Warren continued to rely on the paternalism of its mill managers and on various forms of generosity and leniency to stay non-union. The company's failure to adopt a systematic approach to supervision, combined with the expectations created by its paternalism, made it vulnerable to worker dissatisfaction and dissent. Such dissent erupted in a 1916 organizing drive and strike, which was nevertheless skillfully defeated by the company. Dissent emerged again in the 1950s and 1960s, when workers and paper unions made several attempts to unionize, finally succeeding in 1967.

The opening of new archival sources often turns up surprising and interesting information. For example, one of political activist Lillian Hellman's biographers discovered in intellectual Joseph L. Rauh Papers statements by Hellman confirming her Communist Party membership in the late 1930's, an affiliation previously vigorously denied in some circles although suspected in others. Rauh, a leading civil liberties lawyer, had been Hellman's counsel when she prepared for a confrontation with the United States Congress House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952. Hellman was prepared to testify regarding her own Communist activity but not to name others. Rauh's files contain drafts of a statement regarding her Communist affiliation that Hellman would give should HUAC agree to her condition. Joseph Rauh handled many important internal security cases in the late 1940's and 1950's, and historians will find much of interest in his legal files on his successful defense of playwright Arthur Miller, his removal of the Independent Socialist League from the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations, and his files on the hotly debated lawyer William Remington prejury case. The Ludwig Donath file in the Rauh Papers is an example of chance discovery of an unknown episode in the history of Hollywood Communism and the show business blacklist.

The relationship between economic development and inequality has been closely examined by researchers. From the seminal work of Kuznets to the more recent work of Piketty, market forces in boom cycles, on the one hand, and institutional action, on the other, have been featured as the main drivers of change in income distribution towards more egalitarian societies. In the Spanish case, previous research has described varied processes with regard to the period of growth that followed the approval of the Stabilisation Plan during the Franco dictatorship (1959–1973). Thus, Alcaide reportedly detected a limited capacity of the developmentalist growth model to reduce inequality, which he attributed to institutional limitations. In contrast, later studies have highlighted the decline in inequality during the same period. This paper aims to investigate the effects of this growth cycle by examining the behaviour of wages in the most dynamic sector of the Spanish economy, industry. Specifically, by using the wage survey compiled by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, the paper nuances previous research and shows how despite explosive growth, the developmentalist model and the peculiar institutional framework built within the Franco dictatorship contributed to increasing wage dispersion and income inequality in most industrial sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's employment policy has been continuously improved,and the employment situation has undergone tremendouschanges. Based on the economic system and typical employmentpolicy since the founding of China in 1949, this paper dividesthe employment system into five stages: the period ofplanned economic system featuring 'unified contracting anddistribution' (1949-1977), the period of dual-track system featuring'three-in-one combination' (1978-1991), the period of promoting the're-employment project' (1992-2001), the period of implementingactive employment policy (2002-2011), and the period of promotinghigher quality and fuller employment (2012-present). In these fivestages, while China has made great achievements in employmentwork, the pressure still exists and the quality of employmentremains the focus of attention. Can the development of employmentpolicy improve China's labor market? To study the effectivenessof employment policy in each stage, this paper uses two keyindicators of the unemployment rate and structural deviationdegree, then it reflects the economic effect in each stage andconcludes that the coordination degree between employment andindustrial structure is improving, but it still has a long way to go.Finally, the paper puts forward solutions to the remaining problemsand points out the direction for future employment work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labor history and international relations (IR) each offer insights regarding the extent to which women contribute to non-state armed groups and the value of their labor. Yet questions remain about how agency in joining armed movements – and, conversely, the forced participation of women – are operationalized and even fetishized by observers. Positivist empirical work in IR has operationalized agency and coercion as a dichotomy in gendered wartime labor, implying that where women's labor is coerced it may have a lesser impact on the conduct of conflict or conflict outcomes. This paper challenges the existence of an agency-coercion binary, drawing on the case of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Analyzing archival sources in a manner informed by both feminist international relations and labor history scholarship, I show the complex interplay of agency and coercion in women's lived experience within a non-state armed group. I further reflect on how a temporal understanding of labor relations, examining coercion and choice at the moments of entry, work, and exit, contributes to a more complete understanding of the gender dynamics of wartime labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of World War Two 1.2 million people were officially labelled Displaced Persons (DPs). Stateless, or refusing to return home, the majority were resettled in other countries including Australia which, like most receiving nations, saw these refugees primarily as a labour force for post-war economic recovery and expansion. However, unlike other nations, DPs destined for Australia signed a work contract which committed them to two years of assigned labour after arrival. This paper considers two specific subsets of these DPs, the 'unsupported mothers' (single, widowed, and divorced mothers with young children) and female unaccompanied teenagers. It illuminates the intersections of gender and displacement on the labour status of female DPs in post-war Australia and traces the continuities of coerced labour in their experiences of war and migration. We argue that the early life of female DPs in Australia provides an example of a continuum of forced and coerced labour which had begun under the shadow of war in Nazi Germany and continued after migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides empirical evidence on the effect that occupational segregation by gender (excessive or insufficient representation of women/men in certain occupations) has on the probability of employment and underemployment of women in Spain in 2008 and 2018. The results seem to contradict the findings of previous studies and show that in female-dominated occupations, there is a greater risk of underemployment only for wage earners in the private sector, but not for wage earners in the public sector. In this type of occupation, seniority, working in the private sector and living with an employed partner with higher education are the factors that have the greatest influence on the probability of underemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper assesses the prevalent assumption in Malaysia, which equates certain ethnic groups with particular labour roles. It looks at how this situation has developed over the years to the extent that today certain ethnic groups are seen as the ones with the requisite guile and mastery of some particular skills and, therefore, with the ability to fill those roles. The paper investigates this phenomenon and provides a theoretical effort to unpack how ethnicity intersects with other forms of work. The resulting new framings of identity (ethnic, work and otherwise) provide the basis for our paper. The paper finds that this social construction of ethnicity has facilitated its appropriation by ethnic groups and employers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade union unity was a central idea around which the debate in the labor movement coalesced during the later stages of the Franco regime. The initial aim of this paper is to examine the positions and actions of the protagonists of the new workers' movement, Comisiones Obreras, that emerged in the 1960s, and then to interpret its evolution from the following decade onwards. The aim is to identify the antinomies and paradoxes of the projects for the creation of a unitary trade union organization during the period. With the transition from dictatorship to democracy between 1975 and 1982, a plural model of trade union organization finally became consolidated in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the penetration of sovereign power in regulating Vietnamese labour migration to the French colonies and Establishments in the Pacific Islands in the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. It argues that the French colonial authorities in Vietnam played an overt and directly intervening role in the labour migration system in their colonies, in contrast to the British approach, which was much more hands-off. First, this paper shows the interaction between the French colonial states to solve the labour shortage problem in the Pacific Islands under Metropolitan France's regulations. Then, it provides a detailed account of how the French colonial government exercised its power over the inhabitants by organising, monitoring, and transforming Vietnamese migrants into docile subjects even when they were in other French colonies. Finally, this study points to some legacies of the colonial government's migration policy for Vietnamese migrants in decolonisation. From there, it provides new insights into studying the relationship of the colonial state with migrant workers and adds more knowledge about Vietnamese indentured labourers under the domination of French colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-indenture has largely been neglected in historical examinations of Chinese indentured labour in colonial contexts. We know little about what happened to workers after their contracts expired. Through the life of one Chinese man, Chi, and his small farming community in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Illawarra, New South Wales, Australia, I consider this issue. Drawing chiefly on church and other records usually used for research into local and family history, sources in which Chi's voice is often audible, this paper highlights a continuity between indenture and post-indenture. Indeed, Chi's 'freedom' after indenture was qualified. This indicates, I argue, that further attention to post-indenture could enable us to better understand indenture itself, as a system that may have endured well beyond the expiration of the labour contract. Concentrating on the individual and small community, I also contend, holds value in this respect, as a way of further exploring the continuity between the two states, and as a means of incrementally forming a fuller picture of post-indenture in its own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The declaration of war in August 1914 seemed to sanction the impotence of the organized labor movement and these international bodies. The First World War would prove 'the gigantic force of imperialism', accelerating and intensifying a new period of globalization. Thus, while at the beginning of the twentieth century John Atkinson Hobson described inter-imperialist entente as one of the consequences of what he called 'patriotic parasitism' and, like Karl Kautsky, excluded the risks of a global war, other commentators saw precisely in the imperialism of the great powers, and in particular in their unequal development, the reasons for future conflict. The First World War also promoted an 'offensive war of self-defense' by the state and the ruling classes against the organized labor movement. This paper proposes to discuss the conflicting and contradictory links between internationalism, globalization and war by taking a transnational approach, conceived as necessarily attentive to the 'unequal and combined geographical development' of the world. The combined nature of the transformations affecting the various societies at war thus becomes essential in attempting to grasp the apparently simple idea that the processes at work in certain advanced societies 'irrevocably transform the conditions and character of similar processes about to take place elsewhere'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negotiations over wages have always been a central part of industrial relations in capitalist economies. The unstable value of money in the 19th and 20th centuries has made these negotiations both crucial and complex. Linking contemporary understandings of monetary values to wage bargaining provides an important historical background for a better understanding of real wage developments and the agency of workers. Adopting a comparative perspective, this paper discusses how managers and workers dealt with changing monetary values in Germany and the United States from the 1870s to the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The paper also discusses the extent to which actors understood the instability of their respective currencies' purchasing power and whether their perceptions changed over time. The paper reveals that negotiations were never exclusively shaped and guided by concepts such as inflation or the 'cost of living' in both countries but that the importance of the concepts changed with the level of price fluctuations and institutional setting. Indices could achieve a dominant role only in exceptional circumstances due to their artificial and contestable nature, their neglect of the complexity of workers' job contexts and living environments, and their normative implications concerning wage demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent developments in the evolution of 'labor history' as an academic field have injected new direction into theories of Gender, Sex and Bodies. Incidents of sexual violence and gender oppression have long been a brutal part of human history. In contemporary times, plantation societies are finally receiving critical attention as historians embark on gendered reappraisals of history, especially in countries like India. This article sets out to retrieve several accounts of sexual violence in the tea plantations of Assam during the colonial period. It also shows how the colonial masters (Sahibs) of the tea gardens have oppressed/sexualized the bodies of men/women workers in the tea gardens of Assam. An attempt is also made to reconstruct the forgotten stories of two tea-garden working-class women, Mangri Orang alias Malati Mem and Durgi Bhumij alias Durgi Mem, who were sexually abused by the European tea planters. From their objectification as sexualized bodies, the duo later showed their abilities of agency when they joined India's freedom struggle and transformed into freedom fighters. The paper analyzes the connections between oppressed/sexualized bodies of women tea plantation workers and the colonial capitalist patriarchy in the history of Assam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the political history of the failed struggle to require companies to justify their plant closing decisions in Canada's industrial heartland of Ontario. Demands for the public review of plant closing decisions began, locally, in the auto town of Windsor in the 1950s and 1960s and reached Toronto with the closure of Dunlop Tire in 1970. Another wave of closures struck in 1980, this time reaching deep into rural and small-town Ontario as well as larger industrial towns and cities, generalizing concern. The resulting Select Committee on Plant Shutdowns and Employee Adjustment, created by the Ontario legislature, took it upon itself to conduct the kind of public review of recent closures that was long demanded. Due to the strength of the political opposition to any interference with management rights, it was essential that proponents could point to precedents in Western Europe. Trade unionists also grounded their argument in favour of government regulation in the moral economy idea that long-service workers accrued a proprietary right to their jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 200 years of British labour history there have been frequent examples of aggressive and sometimes violent mass picketing aimed at stopping non-striking scab or so-called 'blackleg' labour [sic]. Yet remarkably little detailed attention has been given within the field of British industrial relations or even labour history to the contributory causes, characteristic features, impact and broader implications of this violent dimension of the strikers/scabs relationship within industrial militancy. This paper attempts to fill the gap, focusing on one of the most intense and graphic illustrative time periods, the pre-First World War Labour Revolt between 1910-14. Drawing on an extensive range of secondary literature and new archival material, it explores the way in which working class violence as a form of active collective defence became justified by the way in which it was directly provoked by the employers' encouragement and/or importation of scab labour, combined with the partisan intervention of police, troops, civil authorities and government as a means of attempting to defeat workers' struggles. In challenging the legitimacy of public order and state power, such action encouraged a culture of community solidarity and self-defence that embraced many local supporters in the mass picketing against 'blacklegs'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live animal export has developed into a trade on an international scale and one that has attracted criticisms and protests to protect animal welfare and rights by groups and organisations over several decades. This paper analyses a little-known role played by a blue-collar trade union and its campaign to ban live animal exports from Australia. Using social movement theory, the paper argues that the Australasian Meat Industry Employees' Union (AMIEU) chose strategically to invite representatives of an animal welfare and rights organisation to speak at a 1980 blockade in order to buttress a traditional industrial campaign to achieve its objective. Yet after developing links with such groups and organisations, the union found itself increasingly alienated from these strategic alliances as time passed. This case study, although grounded in social movement literature, remains a labour history study of changing union strategy and adaptability to circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes two major contributions: firstly, following on recent research, it offers a more detailed critical analysis of the historical role and structure of Employers' Associations (EAs), concentrating on a detailed analysis of the range of member services offered by a local Employers' Association within the Engineering Employers Federation (the EEF) during the 1970s. This focus is in contrast to the literature which has concentrated on the EAs national or 'central peak' level. It secondly addresses the 'countervailing power' hypothesis, and in so doing it illustrates the key roles of the disputes procedure. The study, as a typical or representative case, uses a qualitative methodology of documentary research combined with triangulation interviews of former officials: evidence which has so far not been prominent in the literature. This paper is, therefore, a significant addition to our understanding of these institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes simultaneous strikes during the first half of the 20th century in North America. The transformation of production in copper, lead, zinc, and silver mining districts determined the formation of a working class that operated between Mexico and the United States. Therefore, the labor conflicts combined market circumstances and management-imposed homologation of work structures across firm divisions with the international coordination of miners. The paper describes the emergence, growth, and demise of a regional industrial system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much recent literature has focused on the environmental cost of carbon fuels, these sources of energy generated large human costs in the work environment as well. Work in coal mines was famously dangerous. And while petroleum, gas extraction and refining were also risky, this paper demonstrates that they were far less dangerous than was coal, while energy productivity per worker was also higher in oil than coal. Relying in part on previously unexploited data, the paper also shows that on the eve of World War II, the human costs of energy – measured by fatalities per btu of output – were sharply less in oil and gas production than in coal mining. Thus the great twentieth century energy transition from coal to liquid and gaseous fuels reduced both the environmental and the workplace costs per unit of energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We remain without an adequate understanding of the process through which militant dissent was managed, and marginalised, during the inter-war development of British industrial relations. The industrial cooperation conferences between trade unions and business associations during the late 1920s reduced industrial conflict and reinforced the state's strategies to avoid a crisis during the interwar years in Britain. The TUC's involvement in the cooperation talks helped to legitimise trade unionism in the view of the state and capital. Furthermore, in joining the industrial conversations, the TUC reinforced its strategy of side-lining industrial dissident organisations, notably the National Unemployed Workers' Movement (NUWM). Scholarship on industrial relations has inadequately grasped the relevance of the industrial cooperation talks in reducing industrial conflict and marginalising dissent during the interwar years in Britain. Using archival research and documentary analysis, this paper contributes to the literature on British industrial relations, highlighting the TUC's attitudes against the NUWM during the late 1920s. In doing so, it advances an Open Marxist account, emphasising the role of the state in seeking to oversee smooth processes of exchange, distribution and production, which in turn has an impact upon the operation of trade unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After decades of the fight against gender discrimination in Sub-Saharan Africa in general and in Uganda in particular, gender disparities in labor markets persist. This paper provides a new empirical evidence of the gender wage gap in the Uganda labor market. Results show that men continue to enjoy a wage premium over women at the mean and across the wage distribution. Findings further indicate that the gender wage gap is wider at the lower tail of the distribution thereby revealing the existence of a sticky-floor phenomenon in the Ugandan urban labor market. Despite the actions and strategies put in place in Uganda to reduce the gender gap in education and training in the country, human capital variables still have a strong mitigating effect through returns to endowments (discrimination). These results imply that highly feminized jobs should be upgraded given the low representativeness of women in valuable jobs compared to men. Innovative strategies to promote the human capital development of women are also necessary in eliminating gender-based disparities in labor market. Specific public policies are suggested in conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Tocopilla, a port in northern Chile, a thermoelectric plant was installed to supply with electricity the Chuquicamata mine, the world's largest copper mine during most of the twentieth century. In a context of strikes and socioeconomic demands against labour exploitation and work precariousness, the American owners of Chuquicamata took advantage of an anti-communist law to prevent workers' organizations and their claims. Moreover, the workers who were labelled as 'communists' were also labelled as 'Indians' in the context of mining colonialism. The paper examines the historical process of construction of 'race' in a political situation that had a profound impact on the lives of Chilean workers in the Atacama Desert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how home care workers in Oregon, a predominantly female, geographically dispersed, and economically undervalued workforce, were brought together to engage in collective action and extend their reach beyond the local union to civil society. Drawing on qualitative interviews with union staff and member activists, along with archival data, it documents how home care workers used social movement unionism to improve their working conditions in the early 2000s. The lessons from this case are especially relevant today given the growing demand for in-home care as a means to avoid being placed in institutionalized settings and the shortage of workers to meet the rising demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Departments of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations in Turkey have their roots in social policy education in the Turkish university system dating back to a pre-republican (1923) period. The social policy discipline, which was influenced by the German and in part by the French approaches during its establishment, has over time been exposed to intense Americanization efforts, which led to the creation of departments of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations. The paper analyses this transformation in two dimensions. The first dimension is related to the historical development of the institutionalization process. The second is that under whose influence was this institutionalization process shaped? It argues that Labour Economics and Industrial Relations as an academic discipline has come to be represented by two different traditions involving four generations of academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great deal of literature focuses on exogenous forces transforming industrial relations in liberal and neoliberal contexts. Further, most scholars claim that the transformation occupies a similar trajectory of convergence across the globe. However, very little is known about the evolution of industrial relations in Nepal. Therefore, this paper considers the labor movement of 1947, the royal coup d'état of 1960, the ban on the trade unions, and the alliance of the trade unions with the political parties and political economy as endogenous drivers in explaining the evolution of industrial relations in Nepal. Thus the objective of the paper is to investigate the evolution of industrial relations in Nepal through an evolutionary perspective. This analysis shows that the evolution of industrial relations in Nepal is a 'punctuated' (discontinuous or revolutionary) one compared with a traditional, incremental model, which employs the construct of the institutionalization of industrial relations, using a standard, union-based paradigm of employment relations against the growing nonstandard employment model of more flexibility and irregular work that is growing in the West and Asia. Further, the theoretical contributions are put into perspective in the context of the broader industrial relations backdrop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1970s and 1980s, important transitions took place in Germany in both migration and labor market policies. The so-called recruitment of 'guest-workers' came to an end, and the patterns of cross-border movement changed significantly – and with them the ways unions as well as migrant organizations articulated their political claims. Taking these aspects into account, I examine union strategies concerning migrant workers' interests. I discuss how migration challenged and changed the agenda of local trade unions in terms of content and processes. This paper puts forth the hypothesis that local trade union organizations could react to such challenges by broadening or narrowing their agenda. I draw on material gained from empirical research on trade unions and migrant organizations in Hamburg. Analyzing insights from qualitative interviews and primary sources, I discuss trade union activities regarding the inclusion of migrants, collective bargaining, and labor market policies, as well as migrants' access to social and political rights. I also present initiatives against racism both within and outside of trade unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]