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Under which conditions can combative labor in the Global South negotiate state and society relations and constrain the encroachment of their respective militaries on politics? This article argues that the domestic and international legitimacy these militaries enjoy during the transition away from authoritarianism is a key factor shaping labor movements' organizational and mobilizational capacity, labor alliances with other social classes, and labor's capacity to negotiate democratic citizenship. The argument is investigated by examining Egypt and Brazil, where labor strikes delegitimized authoritarian capitalism and inspired the rise of independent and anti-corporatist unions and federations. In Brazil, the military lost its legitimacy domestically and internationally, providing opportunities for labor's democratizing role. Conversely, the Egyptian military held power locally and internationally, thwarting prospects for independent unions to maintain their autonomy from the military and to forge alliances. The research combines historical and archival research with qualitative methods, including interviewing and fieldwork in Egypt and Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the labor upsurge of the early 2020s and places it in an historical context. In the early 2020s, workers across the U.S. protested, organized, and walked out, part of an upsurge that produced remarkable results. There were union victories at some of the country's best-known corporations, including Starbucks, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Trader Joe's. Between 2021 and 2023, more than 360 Starbucks stores unionized, most through independent worker action. Over 8,000 workers also organized an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, doing so with a grassroots union and a budget of just $120,000. Across the country, the number of strikes surged, petitions for National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections rose sharply, and union density increased for the first time in decades. Opinion polls also showed record levels of public support for unions. Rather than seeing the upsurge as new – as media accounts stressed – the article links it to longer-term trends, particularly many decades of bargaining givebacks, increasing income inequality, and long-term union decline. Across the U.S., workers reached their breaking point, and hit back. Short-term conditions – particularly the labor shortage produced by the pandemic – were important, but the upsurge also reflected longer-term grievances that built up over decades. [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]

Confederación de Sindicatos Unitarios de Trabajadores (CSUT, Confederation of Unitary Workers' Unions) and Sindicato Unitario (SU, Unitary Union) were two unions promoted by the largest Maoists parties in the Spain of 1970s: Partido del Trabajo de España (PTE, Labor Party of Spain) and the Organizacion Revolucionaria de Trabajadores (ORT, Workers' Revolutionary Organisation), respectively. Both trade unions, if they had been presented together, would have been the third trade union force in Spain during the Transition to democracy. The following text presents two parts: In the first, a general approach to unitary unionism is set out, in order to understand its emergence, development, difficulties and disappearance. Through this text we will try to understand the unitary and assembly-based proposal of CSUT and SU in its context, considering the dynamics of the labor movement in the previous years, the change of cycle of the struggle of the revolutionary left, the transformations that were taking place in labor relations and the labor movement in the late 1970s. In the second part, however, we will focus on a specific case, that of Navarre, the region where these unions obtained the best results. [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]

The International Working Men's Association was the prototype of all organizations of the Labor movement. It helped workers to grasp that the emancipation of labour could not be won in a single country but was a global objective. The International spread an awareness in their ranks that they had to achieve the goal themselves, through their own capacity for organization, rather than by delegating it to some other force. And it also promoted the idea that it was essential to overcome the capitalist system itself, since improvements within it, though necessary to pursue, would not eliminate exploitation and social injustice. This article reconsiders the main issues broached or advanced by the International – such as internationalism, labor rights, and the critique of capitalism – in light of present-day concerns. It also includes relevant information about structure and membership of the International, and presents an overview of the main theoretical debates, and discussions about political organization, that have agitated this organization throughout its intense history. With the recent crisis of capitalism, the political legacy of the organization founded in London in 1864 has regained profound relevance, and its lessons are today more timely than ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite U.S. labor-management history having long been recognized as the most violent and bloody of any Western industrialized nation, unanimity has failed to materialize regarding its impact on concomitant labor protests, organizations, and politics. We examine the impact of striker fatalities on the strength and trajectory of the early American labor movement against the null hypothesis that such bloodshed is largely random and/or inconsequential by building recently constructed measures of fatal strike violence into time-series regression models of strike frequency, union membership, and membership within the Socialist Party of America. The results suggest that killing strikers, labor organizers, and strike sympathizers had deleterious consequences for labor: dampening strike activity through the long-term cumulative history of picket-line deaths – particularly strikes for union recognition; and hampering union and Socialist Party organizational growth. Thus, repressive elite violence appears to have contributed, in part, to propelling the American labor movement along what has traditionally been characterized as an 'exceptional' path of weakening labor's potential power during its formative decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Working Men's Association was the prototype of all organizations of the Labor movement. It helped workers to grasp that the emancipation of labour could not be won in a single country but was a global objective. The International spread an awareness in their ranks that they had to achieve the goal themselves, through their own capacity for organization, rather than by delegating it to some other force. And it also promoted the idea that it was essential to overcome the capitalist system itself, since improvements within it, though necessary to pursue, would not eliminate exploitation and social injustice. This article reconsiders the main issues broached or advanced by the International – such as internationalism, labor rights, and the critique of capitalism – in light of present-day concerns. It also includes relevant information about structure and membership of the International, and presents an overview of the main theoretical debates, and discussions about political organization, that have agitated this organization throughout its intense history. With the recent crisis of capitalism, the political legacy of the organization founded in London in 1864 has regained profound relevance, and its lessons are today more timely than ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the controversy that surrounded the employment of Chinese-indentured labourers on the rubber estates of British North Borneo during the 1920s and 1930s. Using North Borneo as a case study, the article seeks to challenge the assertion made by historians that Chinese indenture had been abolished by the 1920s. I argue that Chinese-indentured workers made up a significant component of the workforce until the 1940s. My study of British North Borneo is part of a project that seeks to historicise the abolition of Chinese indenture across the Asia-Pacific region. While there is a wealth of rich work on the emergence of Chinese-indentured labour in the nineteenth century, analysis of the processes by which it was abolished have been neglected. The case of North Borneo brings to light the role of British and American activists in the anti-indenture movement and the resistance work of the Chinese labourers themselves. The article contests the assumption that the end of indenture was straightforward, highlighting the fractured and fragmentary process of abolition. It suggests the need to reconsider existing timelines associated with indenture globally which indicate that this form of labour recruitment was all but over by the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the external and organizational factors behind the coalition dynamics of two labour unions representing different types of employment contracts – temporary and permanent – that led the 2007 Irregular Workers Movement in South Korea. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, video footage, newspapers and internal document data, we find that while political opportunities drove the two unions to come together, broad alliances that formed around the coalition on the issue of job security for irregular workers caused the union of predominantly regular workers to become marginalized. Organizational differences that initially seemed complementary prevented a shared identity from forming despite collective strikes and became a source of resentment. The varying progress of negotiations not only reduced the benefits of claims coordination and collective action but also invoked otherness between the two unions. Lack of trust and recognition did not allow for even a loose relationship of cooperative differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the years immediately preceding the First World War Britain experienced mass social unrest on a scale not seen since the early nineteenth century. Despite their distinctive priorities of gender and class, respectively, both the women's suffrage revolt for the vote (embracing suffragettes and suffragists) and the labour unrest of 1910–14 (involving strikes in pursuit of higher wages, better working conditions and trade union recognition) utilised dramatic extra-parliamentary 'direct action' forms of militant struggle from below that represented a formidable challenge to the existing social and political order of Edwardian Britain. Although the two militant movements effectively co-existed side-by-side on parallel tracks, with a huge and frustrating gulf between them, there were nonetheless some very important linkages between the struggles of women and labour that have often been missed, ignored or downplayed by feminist and labour historians alike. This article re-examines the historical record to deploy both new and previously utilised evidence to foreground neglected aspects of the subject, reveal fresh factual insights, and provide a more detailed than hitherto available assessment of the cross-fertilisation that existed between the women's and labour movements and for the broader linking of class and gender issues, even if these were not always fully recognised, pursued or developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of Catalonia has involved a complex articulation between the national and the social questions. The history of Catalonia must be understood in terms of the complex divorces and marriages between Catalanism and the labor movement that has presented major strategic crossroads and struggles for the political leadership of the country, that overlap with the internal fights inside the labor movement and Catalanism. The currents of the labor movement that has best dealt with the national question in the history of Catalonia have been those that have understood its political and strategic dimension and the need not leave it in the hands of the bourgeoisie and the middle classes, while seeking to develop an independent approach to the question. This article explores the link between the national and the social question in the history of Catalonia since late 19th Century till the rise of contemporary independence movement, through the strategic debates of the labor movement. First, it begins by formulating an overview of how the both issues have been linked. Second, it presents a historical overview in several phases: from the end of the 19th century to the Second Republic; the Republican period (1931–1939) and the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975). Finally, it briefly looks at the post-Franco period, culminating with an analysis of the phase that began in 2012 with the rise of the independence movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several historians have placed the roots of the Swedish model and the Swedish spirit of consensus back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The present study is an attempt to problematize the image of Sweden as the homeland of consensus on earth. I argue that there is no specifically Swedish spirit of consensus. My thesis is that the Swedish model as manifested in the Saltsjöbaden Agreement of 1938 was the result of the political power relations that prevailed just then between the parties on the labour market. The thesis is pursued based on a study of developments in Sweden from the 1880s until 1938, that is, from the emergence of the socialist labour movement to the signing of the Saltsjöbaden Agreement. I show that conflict was the normal state on the labour market for several decades, and until the mid-1930s, Sweden was the country in the industrialized world with the most strikes. As regards democracy, Sweden was not a pioneer. Every step on the road to democracy was achieved through struggle. When Swedish history is presented as a history of consensus, it is an undervaluation of the efforts that many thousands of people expended in the struggle for civil rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daniel Tobin led the Teamsters Union from 1907 to 1952. He guided its transformation from a dwindling set of locals representing horse-drawn wagon drivers to the nation's largest union. However, Tobin is best remembered today for a comment he made during an American Federation of Labor (AFL) Convention in 1934, when he denigrated new members flooding into the labor movement as 'rubbish.' The quote has been used to illustrate depictions of the AFL leadership as racist, nativist, sexist and elitist. This article argues that the quote has been taken out of context and used to misrepresent Tobin's meaning. He did intend to denigrate some of the new members coming into the labor movement, but his criticism had nothing to do with ethnicity, race, level of skill, or opposition to organizing the mass production industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpenetration of nationalism and socialism is a seminal problem for understanding 20th century labour movement history. This article approaches the issue of ideological interpenetration by way of a close examination of the relationship between minority nationalism and socialist unity during a formative phase for the Finnish labour movement in the post-war period. More precisely, the article investigates the Swedish-speaking minority within the Finnish labour movement and its attempt to unify different ideological factions in the labour movement through minority nationalism. The article contributes to the study of the relation between socialism and nationalism by extending the discussion to include national minorities and their relation to the socialist labour movement. The main theoretical innovation of the article is the concept of socialist minority nationalism. This concept will function as a heuristic tool for analysing the intersection of nationalism and socialist class-consciousness within the Finnish labour movement. The Swedish-speaking agents of the Finnish labour movement, and their socialist Finland-Swedish identity-project, has hitherto been neglected in Finnish labour history. Through historical investigations of national or ethnic minorities, or other past and present marginalized groups and individuals in labour history, it is possible to problematize the hegemonic historical narratives of the majority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines local labor insurgency in Philadelphia between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s. Drawing on alternative press sources, it traces the efforts of Black, Puerto Rican, and female workers to reshape their unions as stable employment opportunities declined. Across industries and job sites, workers pressured both their unions and their employers through public criticism, running slates of candidates in union elections, and taking part in picketing and wildcat strikes. Existing scholarship has privileged rank-and-file activism among White men focused on wages and working conditions. Enlarging our view to include a more representative workforce at the local level while following workers' resistance forward through time recharacterizes the rank-and-file rebellion to include defiant, multiracial coalitions demanding progressive reform. That broader rebellion, in turn, challenges some long-held assumptions about US labor during the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to discussion of continuity and change in the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) history, asking how the organisation and worker activities have been depicted in film. Since the 1920s, the films in which the organisation portrays itself have placed less emphasis on its European base, the largely male culture that once dominated it and the precise nature of its role in the world. In more recent years, the ILO's cinematic output has made an effort to emphasise work, workers and their collective activity. Their short films have also come to overtly advocate 'partnership' trade unionism within a wider international and perspective while paying much more attention to matters of racial and gender diversity. These changes have been framed within the organisation's constant assertion of continuity in its values and explicit use of its own history. Film has therefore contributed to consistency and continuity in its self-projection, providing parameters within which change has occurred. [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]

After the British-Soviet occupation of Iran during the Second World War, Iran became the key battleground for the international labour movement. The plight of the workers had become an important political issue with the Iranian government in conflict with the socialist Tudeh party for leadership over the trade unions. The Labour government in Britain was also deeply interested in the matter but regarded the Tudeh as too dangerous and too aligned with the Soviet Union to be supported. Within this climate, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) made an official visit to Iran. With its international delegates, they represented different views over the Tudeh, which caused much conflict during the visit. This article sheds crucial light on this important visit and reveals how international the Labour questions were in Iran and how the WFTU visit brought the various tensions to light. This research will also show how the timing of the visit may have impacted on the removal of the Iranian strong-man Ahmad Qavam by the end of 1947. This work is of particular significance as it looks at the previously understudied role and interest of the British government on the Iranian labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The labor strike of 13 May 1998 was an historic event for the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA). Under the leadership of Bhairavi Desai, 98% of New York City’s 24,000 yellow cab drivers refused to work. The strike disrupted the flow of city life, but it also shattered the belief that taxi drivers were atomized and therefore unable to organize, effectively exercise power, or earn basic working rights for themselves. This unprecedented strike was thus an act of self-assertion for taxicab drivers in the 1990s, who were predominantly of South Asian origin and had been victims of unjust violence and discrimination in the city. This article questions how immigrant taxi cab drivers came to cooperate with one another in the late nineties to fight for fair wages. It also explores how members of the NYTWA overcame class disparities and ethnic differences among themselves to serve common goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the historical evolution of worker cooperatives in South Korea from the years of Japanese colonialism to the current era. It argues that the evolution of the worker cooperative movement from radical agitation to state-sanctioned accommodation has been structured by the nature of state response to cooperative activity. Vigorously resisted by an authoritarian state from the colonial era until the late 1990s, the Korean worker cooperative movement before the 1997 economic crisis was ideologically radical, waging a classbased struggle to overcome poverty, resist the authoritarian state, and transform Korea's economic foundations in socialist directions. Since democratization in 1987, and the Asian economic crisis in 1997, worker cooperative movements have gradually shifted their once transformational and politicized labor ontology to a deradicalized and more economically focused job-conscious ontology, partly as a result of the state-directed growth of civil society. The worker cooperative movement became less contentious as the state emerged as a collaborator of social economy initiatives. The gains won by radical worker cooperatives in opening space for pluralistic civil society in Korea in the 1980s and 1990s ultimately resulted in the depoliticization and re-incorporation of worker cooperative activists into a moderately reformed political economic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the transnational role of Malawian (Nyasa) migrant laborers in the emergence and development of African labor and proto-nationalist movements in Southern Africa. Using both archival and secondary evidence mainly from Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, it argues that the history of Southern Africa's labor consciousness from the early to mid-twentieth century can be enriched by exploring the place of Nyasa migrants in shaping anti-colonial processes across the region. Nyasa migrants, a product of the colonial labor migration system (chibaro/mthandizi), laid the foundations for, and influenced trade unionism in the region, especially between 1910 and 1960. The colonial wage economy created ambiguities of dependence for Africans forcing many into a migrant and capitalist world laden with dilemmas, tightropes, and frustrations that fueled social movements. Malawian migrants who were at the core of such movements within a regional colonial economic system, gained a reputation for being 'ringleaders and troublemakers' to the colonial governments. Existing literature has not fully historicized the centrality of Nyasas in molding this critical episode of Southern African history. The historiography has dealt with these dynamics in an ad hoc manner, approaching this Nyasa 'annoyance' on a national basis, without drawing on the underlying regional connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State-socialist academics have been highly sceptical of worker co-operatives. Following the Webbs’ classic studies, they assume that capitalist market competition renders them either inefficient or undemocratic. The experience of the Britishco-operative co-partnership(COCP) movement, from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, suggests a more optimistic reading, with implications for future alternative forms of work organization. COCP worker co-operatives were long-lived and participative, while advancing other social goals, such as good wages and working conditions, union membership and better housing. This article introduces the theory of COCP, stressing the stakeholder model and the predominance of employee representatives. Next, I establish Leicestershire as a major regional centre for both shoemaking and COCP, linked to the wider institutions of consumer co-operation. Six co-operatives are discussed: three Leicester city societies, Equity, Anchor and Self-Help; and three village societies, Barwell Sperope, Glenfield Progress and Sileby Excelsior. The article concludes that footwear COCP was a relatively successful small-scale endeavour, not subject to the fatal contradictions predicted by the Webbs. The movement died out because the bureaucratic ‘spirit of the age’ in the British co-operative and wider labour movement, turned against these initiatives from below, which therefore failed to rejuvenate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic and political crisis of 1931 provoked the reappearance of rank and file movements in Britain. This article examines the unofficial organisations that developed in building, engineering, passenger transport and the railways – as well as more ephemeral bodies. It critically synthesises the existing historiography and replenishes it with new material from the Russian archives. The progress of rank and filism to 1939 is surveyed and the largely forgotten project of a new Communist-led rank and file organisation, a Trade Union Militant League, which would supersede the National Minority Movement, is recuperated. The article stresses the role of Comintern policy in harnessing and moulding grass-roots rebellion. It validates that strand in the literature which argues that Moscow’s subsequent turn to the popular front and aspirations to alliances with labour movement leaders predominated over, and legitimated, indigenous influences, enhanced existing adaptation to trade unionism, and encouraged subordination of oppositional movements to activity in official structures. By 1939, the Communists had abandoned the idea of a national rank and file movement they had pursued since 1923. Little survived of the revolutionary enterprise launched in 1931. Rank and filism endured only as a handful of sectional, party-sponsored, trade union ginger groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The period that spanned the Gilded Age to the onset of the Great Depression saw the rise and relative decline of the US labor movement. The salient events of labor movements over these years undoubtedly shaped public perception about labor issues, and some scholars have been attempting to unpack the mechanisms through which depictions and characterizations of the ‘labor problem’ were produced in authoritative venues that could have shaped the future of the movement. This study goes beyond the standard practice of explaining news report volume to feature the political valance of the reports on the labor problem over a 63-year time period. The aforementioned period also saw significant changes in news reporting practices, with the rise of objective informational writing and the embrace of journalism as a profession. The change within journalism itself could potentially shape the depiction of the labor problem, yet such change has been overlooked by existing literature pertaining to the topic. This research makes a theoretical case for integrating social processes central to the labor movement and journalism from 1870 to 1932 and explains patterns in the cultural production of the labor problem in theNew York Timesby analyzing these two tracks of history in conjunction using both qualitative and quantitative data. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper presents preliminary findings of qualitative research, case study based, on the organization and collective mobilization of two groups of precarious workers in the city of Buenos Aires. Contrary to research that looks at trade unions’ institutional strategies for organizing precarious workers and at workers’ responses to these, the article starts with a bottom-up approach centred on workers’ self-activity. This helps to show empirically how a complex net of structural and contextual factors, which includes the spatial organization of the labour process, the institutional and legal framework and the socio-political context, creates material circumstances that generate processes of workers’ association. This approach is rooted in long-standing theoretical debates about the structuring of workers’ collective interests and action and helps to ground debates on the perspectives of precarious workers’ organization within the context of currently and locally existing capitalist relations rather than in more abstracted trade unions’ strategies and responses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although insecure work may be found everywhere, the general lack of secure work in emerging economies is a particularly striking feature of the contemporary condition, undermining the continued viability of the labour movement in such countries. Yet, this topic is rarely tackled directly in African studies or business history journals. The two key questions addressed in this paper are, first, to what extent does the labour movement’s past define their present and future, and second, what are the challenges and opportunities affecting their ability to mobilise workers, influence government and effectively tackle employment security? This article details how in Mozambique, unions’ ability to mobilise has been affected by: the post-colonial, post-conflict and post-socialist historical context; the resulting legacies of regional and racial discrimination; international imperatives for liberalisation and privatisation; challenging relationships with the country’s African neighbours; and high levels of informal sector work. In order to remain viable, key imperatives include: effectively influencing national government, engaging internationally and working with organisations representing informal sector workers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the first and the most recent coups d’état in Burkina Faso, focusing on the pivotal role played by trade unions in both January 1966 and October 2014. Both events reveal the potency of trade unionism in the country, and both illustrate the political bind in which the country finds itself. The political history of Burkina Faso represents an ever-shifting, intractable passion play between a political elite with a strong tendency towards authoritarian rule, a military that sees itself as the bulwark of political stability and a powerful trade union movement capable of toppling governments but incapable of redeeming the nation’s political life. The similarities between the two coups d’état are remarkable and demonstrate the extent to which the politics of the country are locked in a cycle from which it apparently cannot escape. Through its role as the vanguard of civil society, trade unionism has rid the country of political ogres, but it has failed to fundamentally alter the nature of political power. As a result, Burkina Faso remains mired in crushing poverty, riven by high levels of corruption and economic inequality, and under the thrall of neoliberal structural adjustment that has proven unable to promote meaningful growth. Both coups therefore reveal the surprising strength of trade unionism as well as its limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The outbreak of the 15M or indignado movement in Spain in 2011 was the biggest episode of social unrest since the end of the Transition in the 1970s. Its emergence caught the political parties, media, trade unions and the most important community-based organisations and pre-existing social movements off guard. It targeted those who were identified as responsible for the recession and how it was handled – politicians and bankers –, and represented a global criticism of the existing political system and institutional framework. The 15M was not a youth movement, but a general movement criticising the current economic model, though it did have a large youth component in its initial stages. It was plural and diverse, and a wide broad spectrum of criticism and degrees of radicality and political awareness coexisted in the squares and camps. In general terms, the links between the indignados and the labour movement were weak and marked by mutual mistrust. The 15M movement was a milestone in the political trajectory of Spain and opened up a regime crisis that would deepen thereafter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1936–1937 General Motors sit-down strike may be the most famous work stoppage in American history. The victory in Flint so heartened workers that a veritable “sit-down fever” wave spread across America. But are labor scholars guilty of unintentionally spreading a Whiggish view of history? Just 7 weeks after the victory in Flint, Hershey Chocolate workers sat down. Within 7 days they were forcibly ejected from the factory and beaten by a mob. This article takes a look at the events in Hershey with an eye toward raising questions about the overall efficacy of sit-down strikes. Although it by no means wishes to diminish the heroism or the usefulness of the Flint sit-down, it argues that a balanced look at the past requires a deeper look into the strikes that failed. The question is of the utmost importance for the contemporary labor movement, as some activists have called for a revival of sit-down militancy as a tactic for organized labor to reverse decades of decline. This may not be wise strategy, as past sit-down strikes are too narrowly filtered through the triumphant lens of Flint. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Compared with the activities of its European counterparts, the sporting and recreational pursuits of the British labour movement are less well known. Yet the co-operative movement organised an impressive range of sports clubs, competitions and events. Whereas previous studies have examined the relationship between the labour movement and working-class leisure during the interwar years, this article considers the interactions of the co-operative moment with popular discourses on recreation in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. In so doing, it challenges assumptions about the Left's disconnection from sporting culture. The Co-op used sport to create a collective co-operative identity amongst its employees. Examining the social and political context of these activities in post-war Britain can inform debates on the construction of female identity through sport, the use of recreation for business advantage and the extent to which the co-operative movement shaped working-class leisure patterns. Although the article highlights that co-op sport formed a source of tension between the retail and wholesale sections of the movement and could be adversely affected by popular affluence, it argues that a reappraisal of the co-operative movement's recreational activities contributes to a broader understanding of post-war working-class culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues against the prevalent notion that sport was insignificant to inter-war Welsh labour by showing that it was in fact a ‘vital area of interest’ for local activists associated with leftist organisations. In South Wales, numerous sporting opportunities provided by the local labour movement were taken up with notable enthusiasm by local workers. It is demonstrated that this represented a ‘vibrant attempt to forge a coherent alternative to mainstream sporting activity by fusing it with political allegiance’ and that sport became ‘an articulation of working class self-awareness … [and] a mechanism through which working class desires and visions could be expressed’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the rise of the Independent Workers Union (IWU) in Ireland, North and South, in relation to the bifurcation of trade unionism on the Island, from 1900 until the demise of the so-called Celtic tiger in the early years of the twenty-first century. It is argued that two competing ideological and political trajectories defined the major divisions in the Irish labour movement and where given added impetus with the formation of two separate states after 1920. One tradition was committed to an idea of a progressive British empire, while the other was born of a movement linking together trade union, class and national autonomy. A trade union with a long history and recent past, the IWU represents a labour movement formation whose tradition extends the latter: it is committed to developing forms of opposition to state and capital. If more subdued since the partition of the island, this tradition was reignited with the implosion of Social Partnership in the South and the rise of the new sectarianism in the North. Neoliberalism, with its consequent assault upon labour and its various institutions more broadly, provided additional impetus to the creation of the IWU in 2004. The article also assesses its various alternative union and community organising strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Orthodox depictions of a fraught labour–environmental relationship privileging class, ideological and programmatic differences are problematised by newly quantified evidence of British unions' pro-environmental policy-making since 1967. The following narrative blends widely accepted accounts of the fortunes of both movements with an evaluation of Britain's shifting political opportunity structure and coalition theory to identify an alternative range of constraints and opportunities influencing the propensity and capacity of both movements to interact effectively, culminating recently in unions' emergence as environmental actors in their own right. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since its creation in 1973, the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) has sought to integrate Europe's diverse labor movement within a single organization for the purpose of influencing political developments at the European level. This article examines the ETUC's 40-year history, focusing on internal debates around three fundamental – and contentious – questions: who belongs in a European organization of trade unions? what objectives should the ETUC prioritize? and what tactics will be most effective to advance the interests of workers at the European level? It concludes with an assessment of how enduring internal divisions are likely to limit the ETUC's influence into the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1985–1987 dispute at Silentnight bed factories in the north of England was an exceptionally long and bitter strike, lasting for 20 months from June 1985 until February 1987. A total of 346 workers were sacked for taking part in the strike, which gained a high profile with remarkable levels of support and solidarity action, largely due to its emblematic status as an extreme example of punitive treatment of workers taking industrial action in the period immediately following the defeat of the miners in 1984/1985. Workers took lawful strike action in 1985 over the non-implementation of agreed pay rises and compulsory redundancies counter to an existing agreement between the firm and the union, with the company responding to the dispute with mass dismissals. Pickets were maintained at the two factories in question for nearly two years, with the strikers gaining wide-ranging support from across the labour movement, but the company stood firm against the dismissed strikers who were ultimately defeated. Based on archival research and interviews with participants in the strike, the article analyses in detail how the dispute was sustained for so long, the legal context and the weakness of legal protections for strikers in the period, and the widespread political mobilisation and networks of support and solidarity that arose around the strike and in opposition to the policies of the Conservative government of the day. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The trade union movement in sub-Saharan Africa during the struggle against colonial rule in the 1950s has long commanded the attention of historians. Numerous books and articles have detailed the growing strength and critical role of trade unions in France's vast West African colonial federation, l'Afrique occidentale française (AOF). Far less is known about the fate of these trade unions in the nine newly independent countries that emerged from the demise of AOF. In the 15 years following independence, most autonomous trade unions in French-speaking West Africa were either marginalised or integrated into the political structures of ruling parties. With the exception of Burkina Faso, single national trade union federations controlled by ruling political parties existed everywhere in francophone West Africa by 1975. Whether capitalist, military or socialist, all political elites sought to create a trade unionism that would serve as a transmission belt for party control over the workforce, a type of unionism that was referred to as ‘participation responsable’. This article details the experience of Dahomey (now Benin), where independent trade unions struggled against responsible participation and continued to play a pivotal political role until 1975, when the state socialist regime of Mathieu Kérékou finally succeeded in imposing state-controlled trade unionism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gerald Friedman'sReigniting the Labor Movementwas a highly ambitious, unashamedly partisan, historical and transnational comparative analysis of the rise and demise of the labour movement, which identified the way in which rank-and-file workers' spontaneous and innovative strike militancy represents an ‘incipient rebellion against the capitalist system’. In the process, the book made a compelling case for the restoration of past militant worker action as an essential means of ‘reigniting’ the contemporary labour movement. While I find myself in considerable sympathy and agreement with much of the overall analysis, there are distinct but related features of Friedman's thesis that are critically explored in this article. These concern the nature of the relationship between strike movements and union membership growth, and the process by which the unions that emerge from periods of radical labour unrest then seek to dampen down worker militancy in order to bargain with employers/state within the confines of capitalism. My reassessment of Friedman's analysis, framed specifically within the national context of the UK during the historical window of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (specifically 1889–1920), aims to illustrate what I regard as five of the main problematic features of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines self-management in the wider context of political economy and the role of the state. Most literature focuses either on labour process analysis or on social movement aspects of the phenomenon. Most importantly, there appears less emphasis on understanding the role of the state in shaping or reshaping practice, or the state is even eschewed as an inevitably conservative and bureaucratic independent agent. In developing our understanding, we utilise documents from Titoist Yugoslavia, and surveys and case study interviews conducted in Argentina and Venezuela. First, we examine self-management in Titoist Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the Tito–Stalin split of 1948. Self-management was a central policy of the Titoist regime as it sought to distance itself from authoritarian and bureaucratic Communism. Indeed, Yugoslavia has been used as a comparator yardstick in recent discussions of other experiments such as those in Chávez's Venezuela. To pursue this comparison, and make more sense of the role of the state and the market, we examine the particularities of the new movements for self-management and cooperative working in the contemporary Latin American arc of protest against neoliberalism, focusing on both Argentina and Venezuela. The national specificities of each of these two countries are different, with the recovered companies having emerged ‘from below’ in Argentina contrasting with the movement ‘from above’ as part of Hugo Chávez' Bolivarian Revolution and ‘Twenty First Century Socialism’ in Venezuela. In our examples, we present a model of spectrum and trajectory from which self-management can be judged within a frame of socialist transformation. We record the contextual factors which shaped the movements, and isolate the state's influence to either promote or contain them. In our conclusion, we analyse factors of continuity and change, and discuss the state's role in relation to these different episodes of workers' self-management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The North American Free Trade Agreement's side accord – the 1994 North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation – has been portrayed as providing an ineffective, bureaucratic procedure for dealing with labor complaints about infringements of national labor legislation. This paper reviews two decades of experience. It argues that after an initial period of formal activity, which did indeed expose the accord's severe limitations, a new era of intensified international links at grassroots level commenced. Despite its limitations, the accord initiated positive learning processes and intensified exchanges between the trade union movements in the USA, Canada and Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences has had slender impact on the study of trade unionism in Britain. In industrial relations and labor history, the fields where most research into trade unions has been conducted, approaches have remained insular. This article reaffirms that national unions are building blocks in a global movement. Despite manifest failings, past and present, that movement remains potentially important in counteracting neoliberal globalisation. This paper examines the transnational paradigm adumbrated by labor historians and its relative lack of resonance among British academics. It demonstrates that there is an existing corpus of literature developed by specialists outside established fields. This work incompletely reflects recent theorizing about transnational historiography. Nonetheless, it provides a basis for developing studies of global trade unionism which use a plurality of approaches – rather than one-route recipes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article responds to Jean-Christian Vinel's assessment of the ‘critical synthesis’ whose proponents created labor law history as a new and flourishing field of scholarship in the decade after 1978. Vinel accords my book,The State and the Unions(1985) a key role in the development of this new field. Here, I situate my book in relation to the critical synthesis, and assess the capacity of critical legal scholarship to address the current parlous state of the U.S. labor movement. I look to current labor historians to engage with and build on the work that the labor law historians undertook. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the first two decades of the twentieth century, syndicalism (revolutionary trade unionism) was the most vigorous of the left's challenges to the capitalist order in many parts of the world. In Britain, syndicalism was reckoned to have had most impact in the South Wales coalfield but there have been no detailed studies of its influence in other British coalfields. This article explores the various ways in which syndicalism's influence can be gauged in the Durham coalfield, comparing it with the South Wales experience. While the two coalfields had a good deal in common, a number of considerations, most importantly relating to the agency of syndicalists on the one hand and Independent Labour Party (ILP) activists on the other, militated against syndicalism's relative influence in Durham. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the summer of 1997, organized labor won a major strike against United Parcel Service. Staying out for just over two weeks, more than 185,000 members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) crippled UPS's operations, securing pay increases and more full-time positions as a result. At the time, observers widely predicted that the strike would lead to a revival of organized labor's fortunes, especially as it showed that American unions could still win public support. Revisiting the strike more than a decade later, this article re-assesses its impact and explores why the predicted labor revival did not happen, as union density has continued to fall since 1997. It argues that observers exaggerated the strike's transformative impact, overlooking the structural barriers that have continued to cause organized labor to decline. The strike was a defensive victory that helped uphold the pay and conditions of the UPS workers themselves but unions in general have continued to be undermined by broad trends such as the growth of the service sector, the decline of manufacturing, and ongoing corporate hostility to organized labor. In addition, there were many unique features of the UPS strike, including the favourable economic climate at the time and public sympathy for UPS drivers, which have ensured that the strike has not provided a blueprint for most American workers. Finally, ongoing political divisions within the IBT also thwarted efforts to capitalize on the strike. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It has been argued that support for the First World War by the important French syndicalist organisation, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) has tended to obscure the fact that other national syndicalist organisations remained faithful to their professed workers’ internationalism: on this basis syndicalists beyond France, more than any other ideological persuasion within the organised trade union movement in immediate pre-war and wartime Europe, can be seen to have constituted an authentic movement of opposition to the war in their refusal to subordinate class interests to those of the state, to endorse policies of ‘defencism’ of the ‘national interest’ and to abandon the rhetoric of class conflict. This article, which attempts to contribute to a much-neglected comparative historiography of the international syndicalist movement, re-evaluates the syndicalist response across a broad geographical field of canvas (embracing France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Britain and America) to reveal a rather more nuanced, ambiguous and uneven picture. While it highlights the distinctive nature of the syndicalist response compared with other labour movement trends, it also explores the important strategic and tactical limitations involved, including the dilemma of attempting to translate formal syndicalist ideological commitments against the war into practical measures of intervention, and the consequences of the syndicalists’ subordination of the political question of the war to the industrial struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The relationship between Communism and Americanism during the Popular Front period is now largely perceived as a positive one. By promoting the idea that Communism was an extension of specifically American political traditions, the argument runs, Communists were able to advance their participation in the unions and in a left-oriented cultural-political alliance with broad popular appeal. Against this perspective, this article highlights the repressive significance of liberal nationalism as a resource for the narrowing of political culture in the New Deal labor movement. In particular, the analysis focuses on the importance of Americanism to attacks by the Reuther caucus on the Communist Party in the United Automobile Workers (UAW) from the end of the 1930s through the war. Such factional politics are significant both as a reflection of more general developments in the Congress of Industrial Organizations and because of the UAW's centrality to the political trajectory of the labor movement. More broadly, this history reveals how a liberal anti-Communism embraced the demonizing politics typically associated with the post-war red scare, linking New Deal political culture to a long tradition of countersubversive discourse in America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]