Between 1967 and 1977, the American auto industry suffered under a wave of wildcat strikes and worker militancy, an autoworker rebellion that took aim at both industry management and the United Auto Workers, both inspired by a unique form of working-class environmentalism. The language moving autoworkers to the picket line developed from the shared experience of working in car assembly plants between the 1950s and 1970s. Through their labor, autoworkers developed an environmental consciousness which eventually informed the demands and tactics of the autoworker rebellion. Using oral history and contemporary autoworker writing, this article uncovers a shared working-class environmentalism and demonstrates its role in sustaining worker militancy. In analyzing this process, the article contributes to scholarship on the role of working-class environmentalism in labor history, how environmentalism can support solidarity between industrial workers, and the role of strikes in labor-environmental mobilization.
Existing research on platform labor tends to frame workers either as subjects of algorithmic control or as agents of everyday resistance, leaving the middle ground underexplored. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with ride-hailing drivers in Shanghai, this article examines how workers act under conditions where open confrontation is costly and exit is difficult. It introduces the concept of tactical agency to capture practices through which drivers mobilize platform procedures, switch regulatory identities, draw on informal networks, and exploit algorithmic affordances to create room for maneuver within the systems that constrain them. The findings build on Scott's 'weapons of the weak' and older labor history insights into workers' informal control of the labor process by showing how such practical knowledge operates in the algorithmic and regulatory context of Chinese ride-hailing.
This article considers the global politics of deindustrialization within the trade union movement during the 1970s and early 1980s. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, which represented non-Communist union centrals, sought to forge a one-world strategy focused on multinational corporations, rather than imports, in order to reconcile often-conflicting regional interests as countries industrialized or deindustrialized. One country's runaway factory was another's runaway development. Most trade unionists, no matter where they lived, however, could agree that multinational corporations, especially American ones, represented a potential danger. On the one hand, multinationals moving jobs elsewhere were the primary concern of European and North American workers. On the other hand, many trade unionists in developing countries saw multinationals as the source of political interference, even if they brought needed jobs and new technologies. The perceived dangers posed by multinationals were therefore variable, an elasticity that made global trade union political action possible, albeit difficult to achieve, highly unstable and limited in scope. The resulting strategy sought to promote unionization in the global south by entrenching labour standards in trade agreements and by regulating multinationals through international bodies such as the United Nations, the OECD, and the International Labour Organization. These efforts were timid at best and failed miserably, leading trade unionists in Europe and North America to turn inward. Deindustrialization scholars can learn much from these early efforts, even if they failed to counter corporate control over geography.
This paper examines the reconstruction that followed the Majella earthquake of 26 September 1933 in Italy to explore how natural disasters can reshape labor relations under authoritarian regimes. Drawing on archival sources from central and local institutions, including ministerial records and the documentation of the Civil Engineering Department, the study analyzes the organization of reconstruction sites in Abruzzo during the Fascist period. The article argues that post-earthquake reconstruction functioned not only as a technical response to destruction but also as a mechanism of labor governance. Through the centralization of authority within the Ministry of Public Works, strict deadlines, and systems of piecework and subcontracting, the Fascist state intensified work rhythms while compressing wages and fragmenting employment relations. To interpret these dynamics, the article introduces the concept of an Emergency Labor Regime (ELR), understood as a configuration in which extraordinary legislation, accelerated temporal frameworks, and administrative control enable the reorganization of labor during crises. The Majella case shows how disaster reconstruction could serve as a political and economic instrument for regulating labor within an authoritarian political economy.
This article argues that labor law development follows not a simple linear trajectory toward greater protection for employees, but a spiraling progression shaped by a recurring cycle between contract-based and status-based employment. Employing the 'contract - status' relationship as an analytical framework, this article re-examines the developmental logic of Chinese labor law since the modern era through a comparative analysis with Western countries, represented by the United Kingdom. The evidence shows that although Chinese labor law emerged later than its Western counterparts, both trajectories exhibit the same cyclical swing between the contractualization and status-based regulation of employment relationship. This convergence is not coincidental; rather, it reflects the enduring tension between labor market liberalization and state protection that underlies labor law development. This tension continues to manifest in the contemporary era: the rise of the platform economy and the expansion of flexible employment have further reinforced the contractualization of employment relationship, thereby prompting labor law to reassert institutional protections for employees' status and rights.
This article examines how institutional documents produced within the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) system have defined the roles of the ACFTU from its establishment in 1925 to the present. Drawing on union constitutions, congress reports, union resolutions, and union newspapers, the article reconstructs how successive institutional texts defined the roles assigned to trade unions. During the revolutionary period from 1925 to 1948, union documents described trade unions as organizations responsible for mobilizing workers in support of revolutionary struggle. During the period of socialist construction from 1949 to 1977, union documents emphasized participation in national production and economic development. During the reform era from 1978 to 2012, official texts gave attention to mediation of labor disputes and the protection of workers' legal rights. After 2013, union documents have highlighted political education and ideological guidance among workers in a rapidly changing labor market. By reconstructing these successive descriptions across a century of union documents, the article shows how the roles assigned to Chinese trade unions were repeatedly redefined in response to changing political and economic priorities.
Drawing on 25 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Hyderabad (India), including being a delivery worker, this article examines how stigma is produced, felt, and navigated by the delivery workers in the platformized food delivery ecosystem. The findings reveal that the portrayal of workers as ‘delivery heroes,’ ‘essential workers,’ or ‘partners,’ by the platform does not match with the experience of stigma that arises from everyday interactions of the workers with the platform, restaurants, and customers. It further demonstrates that platform-mandated dress codes, which is presented as marker of professionalism, in reality stigmatizes workers. The paper argues that occupational stigma forces workers into routine practices of tactical invisibility and moral reframing to preserve their dignity within India’s rigid social hierarchies. The article extends scholarship on platform labour by foregrounding stigma as one of the aspects of platform labour and by demonstrating how global processes of platformization intersect with locally embedded norms of class, status, and respectability.
This article focuses on Shanghai's rickshaw pullers from the 1920s-1940s, treating them as a key labor group within the modern city. It analyses why rural migrants entered the trade, how they organised labor and social networks, and how urban modernisation reshaped their working conditions, income, and social identity. Drawing on archival and primary printed sources, this article examines the rise and fall of the rickshaw industry, focusing on how regulatory constraints, motorisation, health risks, and barriers to collective organisation shaped rickshaw pullers' livelihoods and social integration. The study further examines the roles and limitations of hometown associations, trade unions, and foreign-led relief/mutual aid organisations in alleviating poverty and providing social support, while also highlighting the importance of family networks. This reveals the tensions between traditional social networks and the logic of modern institutionalised organisations. This paper demonstrates that rickshaw pullers occupied a transitional space between urban and rural; their labor practices embodied strategies for coping with the pressures of industrialisation and urbanisation, whilst also reflecting the coexistence of integration and exclusion of the working poor within modern institutions. This challenges the simplistic assumption that 'modernisation supplants traditional skills and values.'
This paper investigates the literary imagination of revolutionary modernity in Dongbei between 1958 and 1978 by examining grassroots literary production across key provincial journals. It argues that a distinctive production-oriented modernity emerged during this period, one that redefined revolution as a quotidian practice of labour and recast socialist modernisation as a teleological, linear historical project. Drawing on writings by workers, peasants, and amateur authors, the study explores how Dongbei's development was framed through discourse linking productivity with ideology and revolutionary purpose. The article highlights how narratives of technological triumph, mechanisation, and frontier development were incorporated into the narrative of revolution, and reveals how literary texts mediated the transformation of local environments into ideological and economic assets of the socialist state. It concludes that this productionist ethos reflected Maoist developmental imperatives and laid the cultural foundations for post-Mao economic reforms, prefiguring China's subsequent industrial acceleration.
This article reinterprets the 1873 Petroleum Revolution in Alcoy (long labelled the most important labor revolt in nineteenth-century Spain) by placing it at the center of European labor history rather than at its margins. Drawing on primary sources, including international press accounts, reports to the International Workingmen's Association, and extensive judicial records, this study provides the first systematic reconstruction of the uprising and its consequences, grounded in new empirical evidence. The article challenges four entrenched historiographical assumptions: that the revolt was merely a by-product of cantonalist politics, that it emerged in a context unsuitable for revolution, explaining its failure, that its causes were purely economic, and that it was defined by unaccountable, indiscriminate worker violence. Instead, it demonstrates that Alcoy was a highly organized, industrially rooted mobilization led by a self-conscious working class following strategies from Federaci & oacute;n Regional Espa & ntilde;ola-Asociaci & oacute;n Internacional de los Trabajadores (FRE-AIT) (IWA), which transformed a labor dispute into a sustained experiment in worker autonomy. Crucially, it identifies the uprising as one of the earliest open confrontations between republicanism and anarchism, revealing a decisive rupture within popular politics.
Current mainstream literature examines the evolution of worker management and management structures in SOEs solely at the macro level, treating state and managerial actors as a unified bloc that, across all historical periods, has dominated transformations in worker management structures. This article argues that transformations of SOE management structures are shaped by a complex and shifting tripartite relationship among state bureaucrats, enterprise managers, and ordinary workers. The analysis identifies distinct historical phases: an initial period of imbalanced state-manager cooperation; a period of tripartite integration during the Maoist era that fostered workplace participation; and a post-reform era in which a reinforced state-manager alliance prioritized efficiency, marginalizing workers' democratic roles. Currently, a nascent three-pillar dynamic is emerging, characterized by increased state supervision, managerial accountability, and a modest restoration of workers' consultative and management rights, though a fully balanced structure remains unrealized. By integrating macro-structural shifts with micro-level workplace politics, this framework offers a new perspective on the contingent and contested evolution of workers' democracy within China's political economy.
This article argues that despite constituting a majority of the workforce, women workers in tea plantations of Assam have remained largely excluded from trade union leadership and formal political representation. Drawing on subaltern perspectives and feminist labor theory, it examines how plantation patriarchy, labor hierarchies and male-dominated union bureaucracies particularly within the Assam Chah Mazdoor Sangha (ACMS) have historically constrained women's political voice. Based in-depth interviews, archival sources and participant observation conducted in two tea estates in Jorhat district, the study shows that trade unionism after independence did little to disrupt these gendered exclusions. At the same time, it reveals how women cultivate alternative forms of leadership through everyday practices and informal collective spaces such as Mothers' Clubs and Self-Help Groups. These arenas, initially framed around welfare, have become sites where women negotiate authority, articulate grievances and develop political capabilities. The article contends that such informal forms of leadership constitute a subaltern political process that reshapes labor politics from below, even as formal union structures remain resistant to gender inclusion. By foregrounding women's everyday political practices, the study contributes to labor history debates on agency, representation and the gendered transformation of leadership in postcolonial tea plantations .
On 4 September 2025, hundreds of federal agents stormed a Hyundai electric vehicle battery plant in Georgia, arresting 475 workers - 300 of them Korean nationals - in the largest immigration raid at a single location in U.S. history. Described by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a 'big deal,' the raid attracted widespread attention, in the U.S. and beyond. Although most accounts linked it to the Trump administration's anti-immigration policies, this article explores the deeper labor issues it revealed. It interrogates both the longer history of the foreign-owned auto sector - which accounted for half of North American production - and Hyundai's longer labor record. Utilizing primary and secondary records, I argue that the raid was a 'big deal' not just because of Trump's immigration policies, but because of what it revealed about the huge foreign-owned auto sector, which had long attracted industry through union avoidance, chiefly to the South. Incentives, lower wages, and a union-free environment were central to Hyundai's decision to locate there, revealing a deeper history of corporate largesse and poor accountability. Hyundai also had a long history of labor problems, including strained relations with Korean unions, centralized management, and allegations of using child and prison labor at U.S. suppliers.
This article reconsiders the prevailing historical interpretation that women's and children's proto-industrial earnings in the United States were uniformly supplementary and economically insignificant to community improvement throughout the antebellum era. While traditional labor historiography emphasizes the devalued and seasonal nature of female outwork, referred to here as the marginality thesis, this study uses the straw bonnet industry in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, as a counter-case. By synthesizing government wage assessments, local manufacturing surveys, and community-level data, the article quantitatively models household income contributions, revealing a significant disruption of the male-breadwinner norm. Consequently, the article recovers an overlooked, prosperous phase of proto-industry existing before 1815 in New England. This period predates the mature, often depressed systems typically analyzed in existing scholarship. It argues that failing to distinguish between industries producing low-value commodities and semi-luxury goods, such as fashionable bonnets, has created a historiographical absence and asymmetry in the gendered wage analysis of household economies. By situating straw bonnet production at the intersection of fashion-driven demand and household governance, this study reshapes the historical understanding of rural capitalism, demonstrating that gendered economic power was more elastic and substantial than allowed by narratives of uniform marginality.
This article explores the labor trajectories and identity shifts of Hui Muslim workers in Chinese state-owned enterprises during 1949-1980s, focusing on halal canteens as a key analytical space. It argues that halal canteens were not merely welfare facilities but institutionalized practices of the CPC's ethnic policies, serving as political showcases to distinguish the socialist regime from Kuomintang's Han chauvinism while supporting Hui workers' reproductive labor. Amid shifting political agendas, Hui workers' ethnic identity evolved - emphasizing class solidarity in the 1960s and ethnic unity in the 1980s - reflecting interactions between state policies, unit systems, and workers' demands. This study fills gaps in existing research by integrating an ethnic perspective into socialist labor studies, revealing how ethnic politics permeated micro labor scenes and broadening understanding of ethnic-minority workers' experiences under state socialism.
