This article explores the specifics of night work under Communist rule and within the state-socialist economy that the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) established after they seized power in 1948. Although the Czechoslovak communists sought to minimise night work, they achieved the opposite effect. One reason for this was the absence of economic reforms. At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, they were compelled to introduce uniform bonuses for night shifts, leading to their standardisation. However, those targeted by the incentives showed little interest in night shifts; consequently, night shift workers were often drawn from marginalised groups, such as prisoners and women facing financial difficulties. The article delves into their potential motivations for accepting night shifts. Furthermore, despite the Czechoslovak communists’ efforts to differentiate their night shift policy from that of the ‘capitalist’ approach (as embodied by interwar Czechoslovakia), numerous continuities were evident. This article investigates these aspects and seeks to uncover their potential causes.

From the late 16th century to early 18th, silver mining was the economic engine of empire in the Andes, playing a significant role in Spain’s European ambitions and the forging of global trade. Yet this productivity came at a terrible cost for Andean people forced to work in the mines, and colonial critics forcefully debated the morality and legality of the mining economy even as it became essential to the colonial project itself. More than any others, the mercury mines of Huancavelica, Peru became synonymous with this conflict between the human toll of colonial exploitation and immense mineral wealth of the Andes. As the only Andean source of the mercury required to refine silver and a mine infamous for its toxic conditions, Huancavelica became a crucial source of debate over the conditions in which the Spanish Empire could and should employ forced labor. Royal officials attempted to soothe pious critics, maintain mercury production, and preserve the Andean labor force while Spanish miners and Andean communities vied for their own interests. This article examines conflicts over nocturnal labor to shed light on these dynamics, challenging simplistic understandings of labor relations at the mines where Andeans actively advocated for themselves, miners challenged royal policy, and even seemingly favorable conditions failed to yield tangible reforms.

This paper examines the song Riziki1 (2005), composed and performed by Ja-Mnazi Afrika, which theorizes night work. Written and performed by the Kenyan musician Michael Otieno Ooko a.k.a Awillo Mike Ja’mnazi, the song appropriates the Swahili word “Riziki” which refers to a livelihood to complicate the idea and value of work, and particularly work by night. This way, the song’s Swahili lyrics muse upon and animate the work process to an East African audience. The song narrates night work dynamics, with a temporal sensibility, and proffers dignity to work-by-night subcultures. Borrowing from performance analysis and close listening analytical approaches, this paper argues that the song communicates the stress and pressures of night work while simultaneously emphasizing how imperative the continued work is to secure people’s livelihoods. Furthermore, the choice of language, for the most part, of the song in Kiswahili, an African language, and a language of trade in Eastern Africa is perhaps aware of the diversity of people and occupations included in night work. This way, the song complicates the cultural dynamic of night work to move beyond its association with the pleasure economy to locate work by night within capitalist work cultures.

Raymond Williams’ concept of “structure of feelings” with particular reference to the residual form, underpins experiences of deindustrialization in the embodiment of industry, gendering identities, and community values. This is a complex relationship between work, health, community and culture, where working life reached beyond the coalface. This article analyzes the significance of these interconnecting factors through the oral history accounts of former miners and residents within the Kent Coalfield. In drawing on Williams’ concept of “structure of feelings” with particular reference to “residual culture,” it reveals how ill-health was seen as “remarkable” and “traumatic,” yet equally “unremarkable” and “normal.” Having recognized the expectant inevitability of these issues, the discussion focuses on a particular understanding of community culture, social interactions and memories within the context of health and illness, which highlights the centrality embodiment in understanding deindustrialization as a process of change.

The year 2025 marks the 120th anniversary of Lochner v. New York, a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down legislative limits on work hours in the baking industry. U.S. scholars generally agree this decision harmed workers and was a setback to the labor movement in the United States. The essay borrows from some of the historian E.P. Thompson’s writings on the relationship between historical inquiry and normative values in order to reflect on Lochner and the relative consensus among scholars opposing the decision. That reflection in turn serves as a point of entry for thinking about the role of normative values in doing labor history, what values we propound in the present by writing and teaching about the history of working-class people, and how those issues relate to different ways labor historians can understand what is arguably our field’s central category, class. The essay suggests that, with regard to the Lochner decision and in general, labor history is something of a different activity if the field’s orientation is toward the amelioration of time- and place-specific problems in working-class people’s lives, toward class as inherently a category of violence and injustice, or both.

Across the twentieth century, hundreds of women worked as nurses, cooks, cleaners, and teachers on Mexico’s railroads. They have been overlooked in histories of the railroads and Mexican industrialization more broadly, their limited number perhaps suggesting that their work is not of analytical importance in understanding processes of economic development and class formation. On the contrary, these women’s work constituted many of the most coveted labor rights of the postrevolutionary railroad workforce, itself a symbolic vanguard of Mexico’s working class and one of the most important beneficiaries of the expansion of social and economic rights ushered in by the Mexican Revolution. The gendered division of labor characteristic of the railroads was neither accidental nor insignificant. Railroads used the feminization of the work of social reproduction to write off structural failures and predictable shortcomings in welfare provision as failures of femininity. Women became scapegoats for the consistent violation of workers’ rights through underfunding and understaffing. In tracing this process, the article models a historiographical and methodological intervention with broader relevance. It suggests that the social and labor rights that expanded around the world in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries must be studied not only from the vantage of legal or political history, but as themselves questions of social and labor history. Making these rights real depended on socially reproductive work that has often been marginal in accounts of industrialization and economic development. It is impossible to understand the political economy of social and economic rights without understanding women’s work.

This paper looks not at workers’ struggles, which had their ups and downs over the last two hundred years, but specifically at the revolutionary socialist movement, which aims to eliminate capitalism. While there have been contributions to the vision of a classless, stateless society by utopian socialists and anarchists, the paper concentrates on Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and their legacy. It identifies three bifurcation points in this particular revolutionary socialist tradition where a substantial part of the movement abandoned democracy, internationalism, or both, and argues that this has had a disastrous effect on the movement and needs to be reversed.

As labor in the capitalist system practically tripled to some three billion workers, solidary organizations of labor simultaneously dwindled in relative size and power. This is true globally but also for the historical core countries. While this is a paradox, it is not a contradiction. Capital is a (spatialized) social relationship. The globalization of capital since the 1970s has shifted the power relations with localized labor fundamentally in favor of capital, as Charles Tilly noted in this journal almost thirty years ago. Over time, power balances within capitalist states, and between capitalist states and transnationalizing capital, have reflected that basic class-relational shift. This article explains why the globalizing cycle of weakened labor may now be reversing.

In early modern times, workers, especially the unskilled, in many countries were already striking against low wages and long working hours before the advent of the trade union movement. These modern trade unions on the other hand were mainly a form of organization invented by skilled labor from around 1800. Trade unions became a part of the labor movement or the workers’ movement. For over a century the movement of the workers and the workers’ movement merged although this marriage was not always a very happy one. There have been periods of tensions between the two. Since the crisis of the 1970s both have been on the defensive, which can be seen from lowering union density rates and the plummeting of strike activity in most Western countries.

Many trade unions have been connected to the political part of the labor movement (more specifically social democracy) which in turn grew into the existing political and socioeconomic form of capitalism.1 Can a bureaucratic trade union movement that is so embedded in capitalist society be able to become the advocate of a future rise of working-class struggles? Is there a future for trade unionism or will another form of organization arise? And will the strike as a weapon of the working class really disappear as was predicted so many times? And was there a moment in time when both strikes and trade unions took the path that took them into the dangerous direction where they ended up in such life-threatening circumstances. Let’s go back in time to look for answers to these questions.

In this short contribution, we look at the trajectory of the largest international trade union organization, today ITUC, from the central questions in this exercise; why labor movements have achieved certain successes?, Why they sometimes failed?, And what major failures we have seen?

Labor historians, particularly in the United States, have given unique attention to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Emerging out of a series of tumultuous strikes on the West Coast during the early Depression years, the ILWU won trend-setting employment contracts, survived Second Red Scare-era persecution despite keeping avowedly leftwing leadership, and maintained its presence on the docks even after containerization dramatically reshaped the longshore industry. This review examines multiple recent works on the ILWU, noting new interventions—both in ILWU history and labor history, more broadly. All three reviewed works offer invaluable insight for how contemporary unions can adapt to technological changes in the workplace, foster internal democracy, and build labor power while fighting for social justice. The review concludes by offering potential avenues for further scholarly research, particularly on the nature of leftwing unionism and labor-generated alternatives to deindustrialization and workforce displacement.

This is an attempt to locate the idea of socialism and the socialist and working-class movements in history. This will here be done by relating the trajectory of socialism to capitalism, as a rival, and by highlighting the main social forces carrying the idea of socialism in the 20th century. These forces were two grand social dialectics, that of industrial capitalism and its generating working-class growth and strength; and, little studied, the dialectic of capitalist colonialism which needed and created a subordinated colonial intelligentsia, which came to organize and lead anti-colonial movements to independence, very often under a banner of socialism. Both dialectics have now largely expired. The victories of socialism were nowhere constructions of fully postcapitalist societies but vehicles of precapitalist development. Here achivements were considerable, as were socialist reforms within capitalist societies. However, catching up with its older and richer brother caitalism turned out an ever elusive goal of socialism, and the socialist horizon faded. A new postcapitalist vision is emerging with the climate crisis.

In 1920s Seattle, dance halls charging ten cents per dance became the focus of debate. Tracing the dance workers’ self-representations and labor organizing in a city increasingly hostile to interracial social spaces, this paper evaluates how gender, race, labor organizing, and politics intersected in unprecedented ways in Seattle’s nightlife. In a decade of tepid labor organizing and in a sexual labor sector where unions were extremely rare, female dancers in Seattle unionized. Moreover, they did so in what became under Mayor Betha Knight Landes (1926–1928) the first major American city to have a female mayor. The Women Dancing Entertainers’ Union’s (WDEU) tactics of emphasizing the respectability of their profession enjoyed initial successes, yet faltered when dance hall critics increasingly constructed the presence of interracial couples as a sign of immorality. The closure in 1929 of numerous ten-cent halls south of Yesler Way reflects how Anti-Asian prejudice entered into regulation of the city’s nightlife, adversely impacting dance hall workers, women in politics, and minoritized men. The WDEU’s insistence that they were upstanding workers and economic providers nonetheless provides a powerful corrective to contemporaries’ and, until recently, historians’ tendency to overlook sexual sector night labor.

Labor in the textile and garment industry is at the heart of a series of recent books on South Asia. Together these books document the different scales at which textile and garment work has been structured and restructured over the last century, and its implications for workers, their health as well as collective solidarity. Across the countries of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, the industry developed and declined in vastly different temporalities and rhythms. Yet, as these works reveal, workers have often been confronted with similar challenges brought on by the boom-and-bust cycles of industrial development. In each case, textile and garment workers have been forced to navigate transitions to premature deindustrialization, closure, or national/transnational industrial policy changes. The books center workers and their long “post”-industrial or industrial “afterlives,” as they cope with the dramatic changes in the global manufacturing of textile and garment.

In the 1910s, U.S. social reformers advocated for labor laws to protect women who worked in factories. The laws included bans on women working at night. In New York, a small contingent of night-working women who had lost their jobs objected. Arguing that the laws were paternalistic and harmful, they formed the Women’s Equal Opportunity League. The group opposed all single-sex laws and ultimately won repeal of New York’s night work ban for printers, elevator operators, and transit workers. Night work was the stage on which reformers’ ideas about the greater good conflicted with arguments for women’s autonomy. Whether and what kind of work women should do at night was a conflict about class, motherhood, and self-determination. This article profiles three leaders of the Women’s Equal Opportunity League—printer Ella M. Sherwin, transit guard Margaret Hinchey, and streetcar ticket agent Mary A. Murray. All three were devoted union members whose opposition to women-only laws made them dissidents within their unions. They remained shift workers their entire lives while lobbying state legislatures and Congress to demand formal legal equality for women. Histories of the early Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) have emphasized the support of upper- and middle-class women. These working-class women, who had long opposed protective legislation, later demanded the ERA—not in spite of the prospect that it would nullify single-sex labor laws, but because they hoped it would. Theirs was a minority position, and paying attention to it reveals the complexity of class conflict at the root of a feminist dispute which persisted long into the twentieth century.

Labor scholars have increasingly recognized the need to look beyond the workplace and explore where and how workers lived, socialized, shopped, or protested. The six books reviewed in this essay contribute to understanding how modern cities shaped the process of working-class formation as well as workers’ identity, experiences, and economic and material conditions. From different standpoints, these urban and labor histories of Paris, Mexico City, Miami, Port Said, Montevideo, and Santiago, Chile, demonstrate the impact of urban modernization, industrial capitalism, and migration on working families. By bringing together books from different regions and historiographical traditions, this essay also reflects on the possibilities and challenges of writing a global labor urban history.