Abstract Labor history has for a long time struggled with so-called “informal” labor, which is situated outside of regularised labor relations, but is widespread in many regions of the globe. The essay reviews five recent books from different fields on transport and labor in Africa, which explore the question of informality, everyday labor, labor organisation, and the infrastructure and technology of mobility. It develops an approach to informal labor that emphasizes historicity and a dialectical model between the stability of the transport infrastructure and the precarity of the workers that uphold it.
The paper examines the case of branch cutters, the only female workers employed in Soviet logging brigades, focusing on the marginalization of women into physically demanding yet technologically stagnant roles. Branch cutters' primary duty was to turn felled pine trees into logs by manually chopping off boughs, branches, and knots. By the mid-1960s, this task remained the only non-mechanized job in Soviet logging. Female branch cutters worked with axes alongside male workers equipped with modern logging equipment-chainsaws, tractors, loaders, and haulers. Adding to previous studies that highlight wage disparities and occupational segregation, this paper analyzes how labor protection regulations aimed not merely at safeguarding but also at systematically excluding women from technologically complex labor, confined them to (relatively) low-paying, dangerous, and low-status jobs. The article traces in detail how Soviet labor policies of the 1930s-1980s explored the idea of women as physically weaker workers and deliberately constructed a discourse of gendered labor based on the categories of "ease" and "hardship." Labor protection bodies, trade unions, and enterprises constantly restricted women's access to mechanized, high-paying jobs based on this division, bolstering their exclusion from upward mobility. The study thus expands our understanding of gendered labor dynamics in Soviet industry, illustrating how technological stratification reinforced occupational and gender segregation. By centering women's experiences in an underexplored sector of Soviet industry, the research offers new insights into the complexities of labor inequality and gendered power structures in the Soviet Union.
Nadakkal Parameswaran Pillai, a worker at the Indian Coffee House (ICH) in Trichur, later recalled that the cooperative found its place in history through its "martyrdom" at the hands of Sanjay Gandhi during India's Emergency (1975-1977). Before the state demolished its Connaught Place location in 1976, that flagship caf & eacute; in New Delhi became the largest and most visible expression of workers' confidence. From selling coffee on the street, they collectively acquired prime urban property and created a central meeting place for ministers, bureaucrats, intellectuals, artists, and political activists. That ICH emerged as a site of resistance during the Emergency appears puzzling given its origins as a colonial Coffee Board enterprise. Yet its transformation into a workers' cooperative reshaped both its clientele and its political significance, turning it by the 1970s into a space of oppositional sociability. The cooperative form itself was unexpected. In the decades before 1957, when ICH formally became a workers' cooperative, Communist Party of India (CPI) leaders and union organizers had pursued nationalization as part of a broader vision of socialist development. After prolonged agitation, however, the CPI accepted the organization of newly unemployed Coffee Board workers into a cooperative rather than a state-owned enterprise-an outcome that disappointed many rank-and-file activists. Drawing on archival materials, memoirs, and oral histories from multiple continents, this article reconstructs the history of the ICH workers' movement from the 1930s through the Emergency, explaining why workers first occupied and appropriated a colonial institution and ultimately compromised with the Nehruvian state.
The suspension of Palestinian work permits after October 7, 2023, exposed the long-standing fragility of Palestinian labor in Israel and illuminated the political purposes this labor regime serves. This article situates Palestinian workers within a historical continuum of exclusion and conditional incorporation that has structured Zionist and Israeli labor policy since the Mandate period. Drawing on archival, historical, and contemporary sources, we show that Palestinian labor has functioned not as a neutral economic exchange but as a central instrument of colonial governance.We argue that Israeli labor policy toward Palestinians combines three interlocking logics-elimination, exploitation, and discipline-through which workers are rendered simultaneously indispensable to key sectors and permanently vulnerable to surveillance, disposability, and political sanction. The permit regime, tolerated informality, and externalized social reproduction constitute a technology of control that manages mobility while fragmenting collective agency.By analyzing Palestinian labor as a colonial apparatus, the article contributes to wider debates on the coloniality of labor and demonstrates how labor regimes can be mobilized to restructure dependent economies and pacify subordinated populations.
The English weavers who organized what would become a flourishing cooperative business in 1844 remain famous worldwide. In the second half of the nineteenth century, their story traveled through a newly international labor press, inspiring workers to build cooperatives in the template set forth by the so-called "Rochdale Pioneers." While scholars have detailed the Rochdale model's impact on the cooperative movement itself, historians have missed its significance as a vector for wider changes in working-class politics. Drawing on cooperative movement literature and organizational records, this essay traces the transnational circulation of the Rochdale story from Britain to the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. I explore how the Rochdale method's influence simultaneously standardized cooperative practices, and reflected a protracted shift in anti-capitalist struggles. Against the backdrop of land dispossession and anti-labor violence, the Rochdale experiment captured hopes for a cooperative economic strategy fit to survive in the modern era. Focusing on the rise of consumers' cooperation in the United States, I show how organizers mobilized a cooperative vision for a post-enclosure world-one consistent with the structure, if not the spirit, of private property and commodity markets. This article explores how the cooperative movement became a vital site for reimagining economic autonomy as industrial capitalism conscripted ever more people into wage labor.
The word ta 'awuniyya ("cooperative") in Palestine today can mean multiple things. It can mean a registered cooperative, or can loosely refer to any initiative based on collective labor and possession, geared toward a collective societal benefit-a communal garden, for example. This vernacular usage of the term, close to the concept of the commons, is borne out of Palestinian history and is an invitation to go beyond the formal definition of a cooperative when searching for a Palestinian "cooperative movement." Registered cooperatives in Palestine have historically played a role that ranged from subordination and placation by ruling authorities to reformist and survival mechanisms for a colonized population. Informal cooperatives, on the other hand, played roles that surpassed survival and attempted to upend the basis of colonial control. Apart from structure and labor relations, what unites both senses of the term "cooperative" is the political role they have played, as well as their tendency to focus on basic necessities such as food and housing. The history of the cooperative movement in Palestine tells a story of social production and reproduction as an arena of struggle, particularly against Zionist colonization. This essay will give an overview of this history, focusing mainly on the areas of Palestine occupied in 1967.
Although Franco's dictatorship in Spain was rooted in the repression of the labor movement and the working class, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed political and social changes that enabled the anti-Franco unions to achieve better conditions for workers. However, domestic workers were denied these improvements due to their exclusion from the formal labor system. This exclusion kept domestic workers in the informal sector and ensured their continued feminization and precarity. This article contributes to debates on the level of coercion in non-productive work by examining labor discipline in the Spanish domestic service during the 1960s and 1970s. It follows Marcel van der Linden's proposal to focus on three defining stages of labor discipline: entry, work and exit. Although the working conditions and identities of Spanish domestic workers in the 1960s and 1970s have been studied, coercion and resistance have rarely been put at the center of analysis. Doing so introduces Spanish domestic labor into the study of coerced work, showing how it was affected by global features such as migration, feminization, all-day work, and control over workers' bodies. This paper sees labor discipline as dialectically constructed, shaped by both adherence to and negation of established norms. Therefore, it is important to study both how domestic workers complied with rules set by employers and how everyday forms of resistance challenged labor discipline and thus contributed to its refinement. Some of these forms of resistance (petty theft, change of employment) caused confrontation, while others (marriage) fell within accepted moral and legal boundaries. The article is based on a wide range of sources, including surveys and reports by Catholic working-class organizations, letters sent by domestic workers to the Elena Francis radio advice program, and court records and newspaper reports about domestic workers' theft. These sources make it possible to analyze labor discipline from different perspectives, showing variation in mistresses' coercive measures, domestic workers' attitude towards coercion, and autonomous practices against household discipline. While this paper focuses specifically on the intersection between class and gender in late Franco Spain, it contributes to labor and coercion studies in other geographical and historical contexts.
This brief paper aims to consider the impact of Israel's settler-colonial measures on workers in the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) after October 2023. Although the ongoing war has been waged on the Gaza Strip, with devastating repercussions for lives and livelihoods in the Strip, Israeli colonial measures in the West Bank have had a grave impact on all segments of Palestinian society, including workers. These measures include: First; closure of the Israeli labor market in the face of tens of thousands of Palestinian workers. Second, broadening the system of movement restrictions within the West Bank which led to disruptions in local production and trade thus damaging private sector operations. Third; Israel's continued withholding of Palestinian custom duty revenues with adverse impacts on workers in general but particularly public sector workers. To assess the impact of these measures, the paper utilizes a number of indices to assess the situation of these workers; including labor supply, unemployment, wage levels, distribution across sectors, informality, and workers' rights. The paper finds a grave deterioration in the situation of workers in the labor market at all levels, with dire repercussions for workers and their families.
This article examines the large and modern sugar factories established in Egypt in the 1870s as multi-phased production sites that combined coerced peasant labor with the deployment of state of the art steam technology. These factories possessed the capacity to produce 7.5% of global sugar output from sugarcane at the time. Yet their scale, combined with their reliance on forced labor, have been neglected in Egypt’s labor historiography. The article argues that the forms of resistance enacted by coerced workers on these worksites co-shaped the emergence of peasant wage labor in subsequent decades. Drawing on the analytical perspectives of sugar history and Global Labor History (GLH), it demonstrates how wage labor took shape on industrial worksites in rural regions—challenging earlier labor histories that treat urban wage labor as the starting point of modern Egypt’s labor history. In doing so, it shows that rural labor strikes predated the conventional periodization of labor strikes and working-class formation in Egypt’s cities during the 1880s–90s. Finally, this global microhistory argues that the materiality and temporality of sugar production, when combined with the resources-demanding and labor-intensive technology of the factories, complicate Egypt’s late nineteenth-century position as a commodity frontier for Europe’s industrial capitalism.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the concepts of surplus labor, disguised unemployment, and underemployment emerged as key tools for thinking about economic development in the emerging "Third World." This article examines how these concepts were developed and debated in Egypt, a country that was at the forefront of postcolonial planning efforts internationally. To this end, the article examines the statistical construction of the "labor problem" and the way it shaped competing visions of economic development among national, colonial, and international actors. Using a variety of sources-including Egyptian government archives, documents from the British Foreign Office, and the International Labour Organization-the article contributes to the global history of development and quantification, and contributes to the scholarship on Nasserism in Egypt.
This essay examines the overlooked 1979 strike by Palestinian workers at the Jerusalem District Electricity Company (JEDC) as a pivotal moment of anti-colonial resistance. It argues that the strike, which fused demands for better wages with a political struggle against Israel's erosion of the company's concession and autonomy, demonstrates the inextricable link between class and national liberation. By mobilizing broad popular solidarity to defend a critical national infrastructure, the JEDC workers' union articulated a mode of resistance in which labor solidarity became a primary vehicle for asserting sovereignty and contesting the political economy of settler colonial occupation. Their actions foreground the central role of an organized urban working class in the broader Palestinian struggle for development and liberation.
This article examines how the International Labour Office (ILO) tried to disseminate one of its statistical tools, the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO), in sub-Saharan Africa, in the context of decolonization and development planning. It sheds light on the changing relations in the late 1950s and early 1960s between the ILO, late colonial and then national administrations, and a regional organization, the Combined Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of the Sahara (CCTA). Although characterized by rivalry, misunderstandings, and sometimes indifference, these relations were also marked by partially overlapping interests. Focusing on the successive ILO experts responsible for developing occupational classifications, this paper shows how their interactions with local actors reshaped the project which they had to carry out. For instance, it gave a greater place to the training of national civil servants or contributed to the realization of the 1962 Nigerian census. In particular, the article analyzes the connections made with other international programs (relating to demography and economic planning) on the ground, and the resulting interdependence among them. By doing so, the ILO expert responsible for the project on occupational classifications benefited from the resources of other technical assistance programs and tried to demonstrate to national authorities the importance of the project which could apply in various fields. While unexpected difficulties limited the scope of the initial project to Nigeria alone, the paper discusses how ILO officials inscribed occupational classifications in the general framework of development planning.
This article examines the construction of statistics on labor emigration to France and the attempt of the Algerian state to integrate this emigration into development planning after independence. It draws on extensive primary sources in France, Algeria, and Switzerland, including colonial records, the ministries and offices of independent Algeria, international organizations and academic studies. To trace colonial legacies, it first considers the colonial expertise of the 1950s before turning to the Algerian emigration planning projects in the 1960s. Extending the work of James Scott and Timothy Mitchell, it argues that Algerian planners both recognized the biases embedded in colonial representations of migration, and sought to develop a form of statistical modernity that was critical and reflexive. They engaged in careful assessments of available data while simultaneously valuing it as a tool for action. In particular, critiques and reflections within the Algerian Ministry of Labor on the 1969 emigration planning model point to the need for a nuanced understanding of statistical modernity. Rather than perpetuating a colonial gaze on society, the introduction of this model primarily sought to address the limited informational capacities of the independent state. Demographic statistics thus became the main instrument for regulating emigration, but they were valued out of pragmatism rather than ideology. Given the limitations of other socio-economic indicators, such as unemployment rate, population statistics were among the few reliable sources available to allocate exit permits fairly across the regions of origin of prospective emigrants.
Australian workers mobilised precociously to win the eight-hour day. Building workers in Melbourne secured the standard in 1856. They inspired and helped to lead a wider movement that shared in the victory over subsequent decades. By the early 1890s the "eight-hour day" was widely embraced as a social norm. Australian successes were contemplated in a range of international publications. Australian employees in several trades secured an eight-hour day from the middle 1850s. By the 1890s, Australian advances had attracted considerable international attention. But these precocious Australian successes have not yet been satisfactorily explained. The dominant explanations focus especially on a propitious environment in the middle 1850s, buoyed by the wealth of a gold rush and characterised by labour shortages. These accounts overestimate the persistence of favourable market conditions and underestimate the import of the political context and of creative and determined collective struggle. This article offers a new interpretation. It suggests that the Australian campaign for eight-hours is best understood as a social movement. It then applies five key concepts drawn from the field of social-movement studies to examine the campaign and to explain its successes: political opportunities; framing; strategy; repertoire; and mobilising structures. The article aims not only to explain the Australian eight-hours campaign, but also to demonstrate the value of concepts and approaches drawn from "social-movement studies" to the study of labour history. It is based on a substantial source base, including union records, scores of newspapers, parliamentary debates, contemporary pamphlets, and government reports.
What is happening in Gaza now is a total displacement of any form of normality. This displacement of the normal has been effected by a population-wide project of social reproduction. Every Gazan, including children, is solicited to reproduce life, to survive. At the same time, social reproduction in Palestine has always also entailed insurgent possibilities, where this form of labour has indeed sustained and reproduced Palestinian revolutionary action. From collective kitchens to local initiatives of care for children, to using drones as musical instruments to distract children from the deafening violence of its soundscape, social reproduction is iterated as both survival and insurgency. This short intervention tries to think through the question of how to make sense of social reproduction as capitalist oppression through the unwaged housework, and as colonial violence through the mass extermination of a population, without leaving behind its potential for insurgency?
This article examines the local production of statistics of workers recruited by the Portuguese colonial administration in Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau) during the last years when the Native Labor Code was in force. By enquiring the statistics produced by commissioners of post in the district of Cacheu in their monthly service journals, it consideres the purposes of the workforce statistics at a moment Portugal had just ratified the International Labor Organization's Convention on forced labor and compiling reliable statistical records became crucial. Examining statistical production and registration allows us to explore the expectations and tensions within the colonial state regarding the management of forced labor and the functioning of the colonial administration. Rather than a tool for controllling the African workforce, counting workers was a way of controlling and monitoring the performance of colonial administrators. Moreover, statistics could become part of a strategy of hiding and concealing less palatable aspects of daily colonial rule and labor recruitment practices. Indeed, the workforce recruited by the colonial state remained fairly invisible (and thus subject to abuse), be it due to inconsistent record-keeping or the lack of statistics on workforce recruitment altogether.
In April 1929, the French authorities in Algeria commissioned a "general survey of the native female workforce," as part of broader reforms in vocational education and handicrafts policy. Drawing on a wide range of administrative and missionary sources, this article traces the origin and implementation of the survey, showing how Algerian women's work was made visible, classifiable, and governable in the service of colonial economic and ideological goals. It argues that cultural and statistical representations of Algerian women defined the forms and conditions of their integration into state-sponsored handicrafts, specifically through the promotion of home-based labor. It also explores how the data were shaped by the practices, interpretations, and agendas of the men and women who requested, collected, formatted, and transmitted them. Situating the survey within longer standing practices of quantification, this article shows how Algeria functioned as a colonial laboratory for experimenting with new categories aimed at transforming women into human resources in the service of colonial mise en valeur. After outlining the political goals of the survey in the 1920s, this article examines the measurement criteria used, which reveal the difficulty of capturing forms of work that blur the boundaries between home-based labor and wage labor. It then reconstructs the chain of information production, highlighting the political and personal factors underlying it, as well as the intermediaries on whom administrators relied. Finally, it turns to one of these actors, the missionary congregation of the White Sisters, whose private archives offer valuable insight into everyday practices of quantification.
Using C & ocirc;te d'Ivoire as a case study, this article examines how the abolition of forced labor in the French colonies of Africa in 1946 put statistics at the heart of tensions between the colonial administration, European planters, and African planters. The first section suggests that figures were instrumentalized to serve competing group interests: on one side, those of European planters eager to show the iniquity of the measure to abolish forced labor, which undermined their economic activities due to the resulting labor shortages; on the other side, those of Ivorian planters, who produced figures to argue for the rights of workers and to convince the colonial administration of the need to move toward a system of freedom of labor. The article thus puts the focus on a blind spot in the academic literature, namely, the role of African agency in the production of figures and their capacity to resist colonial domination. It also examines how West African workers managed to circumvent the colonial recruiting system that had been set up by European planters in the form of the Syndicat interprofessionnel d'acheminement de la main-d'oe uvre (Interprofessional union for the transport of labor, or SIAMO). It is this in particular that leads me to question the data produced by SIAMO, which attempted to direct migrant workers toward European farms in the south from 1950 onward.
