Contirbuted papers presented at 10th International Conference on Labour History, organized by the Association of Indian Labour Historians and the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute held during 22-24 March 2014; includes selected paper of 9th internationa conference.
This work explores some of the constitutive elements in the life and mind of Bengal in the twentieth century. The author addresses some frequently unasked questions about the history of modern Bengal. In what way was twentieth-century Bengal different from 'Renaissance' Bengal of the late-nineteenth century? How was a regional identity consciousness redefined? Did the lineaments of politics in Bengal differ from the pattern in the rest of India? What social experiences drove the Muslim community's identity perception? How did Bengal cope with such crises as the impact of World War II, the famine of 1943 and the communal clashes that climaxed with the Calcutta riots of 1946? The author has chosen a significant period in the history of the region and draws on a wealth of sources archival and published documents, mainstream dailies, a host of rare Bengali magazines, memoirs and the literature of the time to tell his story. Looking closely at the momentous changes taking place in the region's economy, politics and socio-cultural milieu in the historically transformative years 1920-47, this book highlights myriad issues that cast a shadow on the decades that followed, arguably till our times.
This edited collection is a global history of workers’ organisations since 1919, the year when the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the Comintern and the International Federation of Trade Unions were formed. This historical moment represents a caesura in labour history as it epitomises the beginning of what the editors and the contributors in this book call the internationalisation of the labour question. The case studies in this centenary volume analyse the relationship between global workers’ organisations and the new ideological confrontation between liberal capitalism, socialism and communism since the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Workers’ organisations, trade unions in particular, grew in importance and managed to organise internationally, forming alliances cemented by ideology and sustained by international institutional bodies or centrals. In the nascent capitalist versus communist struggle, trade unions thrived. Is it mere coincidence that today’s decline of unionism coincides with the end of ideological antagonism? This book emphasises important global labour issues such as gender as well as international workers’ histories from Latin America, Asia and Africa.
In this new edition of Why Unions Matter, Michael D. Yates shows why unions still matter. Unions mean better pay, benefits, and working conditions for their members; they force employers to treat employees with dignity and respect; and at their best, they provide a way for workers to make society both more democratic and egalitarian. Yates uses simple language, clear data, and engaging examples to show why workers need unions, how unions are formed, how they operate, how collective bargaining works, the role of unions in politics, and what unions have done to bring workers together across the divides of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. The new edition not onlyupdates the first, but also examines the record of the New Voice slate that took control of the AFL-CIO in 1995, the continuing decline in union membership and density, the Change to Win split in 2005, the growing importance of immigrant workers, the rise of worker centers, the impacts of and labor responses to globalization, and the need for labor to have an independent political voice. This is simply the best introduction to unions on the market.
This book provides a focus on some of the main markers and challenges that are at the core of the study of structural transformations in contemporary capitalism and their implications for labour in the Global South. It examines the diverse perspectives and regional and social variations that characterise labour relations as a result of the uneven development which is an important facet of the intensification of capitalist accumulation.. The book provides important insights into the impact of the crises of capitalism on the wellbeing of labour at different historical junctures. Some of the issues covered by it include the conditions of work, and the changing composition of laboring classes and/or working people. The chapters also throw light on the multiple trajectories in the development of labour relations and employment in the Global South, especially after the ascendancy and domination of neoliberal finance capitalism. Some of the major aspects considered by the essays include the decentering of production and development of global value systems, crisis of social reproduction, and the rising informalisation of work.
Coffee from East Africa, wine from California, chocolate from the Ivory Coast - all those every day products are based on labour, often produced under appalling conditions, but always involving the combination of various work processes we are often not aware of. What is the day-to-day reality for workers in various parts of the world, and how was it in the past? How do they work today, and how did they work in the past? These and many other questions comprise the field of the global history of work – a young discipline that is introduced with this handbook. In 8 thematic chapters, this book discusses these aspects of work in a global and long term perspective, paying attention to several kinds of work. Convict labour, slave and wage labour, labour migration, and workers of the textile industry, but also workers' organisation, strikes, and motivations for work are part of this first handbook of global labour history, written by the most renowned scholars of the profession.
The Anthropology of Parliaments offers a fresh, comparative approach to analysing parliaments and democratic politics, drawing together rare ethnographic work by anthropologists and politics scholars from around the world. Crewe’s insights deepen our understanding of the complexity of political institutions. She reveals how elected politicians navigate relationships by forging alliances and thwarting opponents; how parliamentary buildings are constructed as sites of work, debate and the nation in miniature; and how politicians and officials engage with hierarchies, continuity and change. This book also proposes how to study parliaments through an anthropological lens while in conversation with other disciplines. The dive into ethnographies from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Region demolishes hackneyed geo-political categories and culminates in a new comparative theory about the contradictions in everyday political work. This important book will be of interest to anyone studying parliaments but especially those in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology; politics, legal and development studies; and international relations.
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class people across northern India found themselves negotiating rapid industrial change, emerging technologies, and class hierarchies. In response to these changes, Indian Muslim artisans began publicly asserting the deep relation between their religion and their labor, using the increasingly accessible popular press to redefine Islamic traditions “from below.” Centering the stories and experiences of metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, press workers, and carpenters, Pious Labor examines colonial-era social and technological changes through the perspectives of the workers themselves. As Amanda Lanzillo shows, the colonial marginalization of these artisans is intimately linked with the continued exclusion of laboring voices today. By drawing on previously unstudied Urdu-language technical manuals and community histories, Lanzillo highlights not only the materiality of artisanal production but also the cultural agency of artisanal producers, filling in a major gap in South Asian history.
The recent global pandemic highlighted the crucial role played by (mostly female) care workers in providing health services across the world. At the same time, it exposed the deep vulnerabilities and precarities of their lives—abysmally low wages, long working hours, social prejudice, notorious undervaluation—at the hands of an uncaring and exploitative economic system. The editors of this volume identify this as ‘care extractivism’, a strategy that enables the simultaneous extraction and undervaluation of care work, something in which governments and societies are both complicit. Further, they point to the impact of liberalization and professionalization on the political economy of nursing wherein the market principle of cost efficiency leads to informalization, contract labour and hierarchization of nursing in both private and public hospitals. The contributors to this important and timely book draw attention to the varied histories of health care work in India and of Indian nurses abroad. They look also at the recent struggles through which workers have tried to improve their working conditions and which represent a silver lining as they imbibe the potential to disrupt the chain of undervaluation, cost cutting, and poor quality healthcare.
Touts is a historical account of the troubled formation of a colonial labor market in the Gulf of Guinea and a major contribution to the historiography of indentured labor, which has relatively few reference points in Africa. The setting is West Africa’s largest island, Fernando Po or Bioko in today’s Equatorial Guinea, 100 kilometers off the coast of Nigeria. The Spanish ruled this often-ignored island from the mid-nineteenth century until 1968. A booming plantation economy led to the arrival of several hundred thousand West African, principally Nigerian, contract workers on steamships and canoes. In Touts, Enrique Martino traces the confusing transition from slavery to other labor regimes, paying particular attention to the labor brokers and their financial, logistical, and clandestine techniques for bringing workers to the island. Martino combines multi-sited archival research with the concept of touts as "lumpen-brokers" to offer a detailed study of how commercial labor relations could develop, shift and collapse through the recruiters’ own techniques, such as large wage advances and elaborate deceptions. The result is a pathbreaking reconnection of labor mobility, contract law, informal credit structures and exchange practices in African history.