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Between working men and women (which may include “free” wage earners, chattel slaves, indentured labourers, sharecroppers, domestic servants, and many others) and those employing them, there has always been a constant – mostly silent but sometimes overt – struggle concerning employers’ discretionary power and over the interpretation of formal and informal rules. There is a constantly shifting frontier of control , that is, an ongoing struggle for control in the workplace, with managers and supervisors trying to increase their power over their subordinates, and their subordinates, in reaction, trying to maintain and increase their relative autonomy. The detailed case studies in this volume span three centuries and cover different parts of the world. Still, they speak to each other in many ways, highlighting the fact that power at work, whether on the shopfloor or beyond, results from a wide range of complex interrelations. Between technological innovations and the ways in which they are actually implemented. Between the division of labour at the site of production or service provision and changing standards of social segmentation beyond the premises of the company, which can be reinforced – or weakened – by management strategies of utilizing labour power as well as workers’ reaction to these strategies. And finally, between politics in production, which shape the relations between capital and labour on the shopfloor, and state politics of production, which cannot be understood without reference to broader developments in economy and society.

Die in diesem Band gesammelten elf Beiträge beleuchten wichtige Aspekte des historischen und zeitgenössischen Werdegangs der Weltarbeiterklasse. Sie versuchen geografische, zeitliche und disziplinäre Grenzen zwischen Geschichtsschreibung, Anthropologie und anderen Sozialwissenschaften zu überwinden. Die Aufsätze wurden in vier Teile gruppiert: Erörtert werden methodologische und historiografische Fragen, die Entwicklung der weltweiten Textilindustrie seit 1650, die Zusammenhänge zwischen Arbeitsmigration einerseits und der Integration ländlicher/agrarwirtschaftlicher Regionen in die kapitalistische Weltwirtschaft andererseits sowie ideologische und religiöse Neuorientierungen, die mit den globalen (partiellen) Proletarisierungsprozessen einher gehen.

A wide-ranging survey of debates within Marxism about the Soviet Union in the twentieth century.

Das Konzept des räumlich-territorialen abgegrenzten Nationalstaats unterliegt einem tief greifenden Wandel. Grenzen werden zunehmend durchlässiger, Verflechtungen spielen eine immer wichtigere Rolle. Zentrale Bedeutung kommt in diesem Zusammenhang Netzwerken als Triebkräften des transnationalen Transfers von Ideen, Meinungsbildungsprozessen und Lebensstilen zu. Diese Netzwerke begründen zugleich Einfluss- und Machtstrukturen. Netzwerke sind in ganz unterschiedlichen Erscheinungsformen - von lockeren Kontakten bis zu formalisierten Kooperationsstrukturen - organisiert. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes beleuchten die grundlegende Bedeutung von Netzwerken und von transnationalen Interaktionsprozessen in der Geschichte und zeigen exemplarisch konkrete Ausdrucksformen. Neben der Arbeiterbewegung wird dabei Wissens-, Protest-, normativen und Netzwerken der globalen politischen Ökonomie besonderes Augenmerk gewidmet.

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) was set up in 1949 and now has 215 affiliated organizations in 145 countries and territories on all five continents, with a membership of 125 million. It is a confederation of national trade union centres, each of which links together trade unions of that particular country. The ICFTU cooperates closely with the International Labour Organization and has consultative status with the United Nation’s Economic and Social Council. The present book is the first history to be written of this important organization. A team of researchers describes the development of the ICFTU’s precursors (the International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centres, the International Federation of Trade Unions, and the early World Federation of Trade Unions), and reconstructs the complicated history of the ICFTU itself, from its origins during the Cold War, through anti-colonial struggles, European unification, international campaigns against Apartheid and many other issues. A final chapter discusses the organization’s prospects in the twenty-first century.

The essays in this book are written by recognised experts and provide a comparative overview of the development of labour law in different countries. The book aims to give a concise account of the history of labour law and goes on to provide a critical historiography for each country with supplementary essays on international dimensions. This collection will be of interest to historians, labour lawyers, industrial sociologists and labour economists.

Despite labour history's flourishing since the 1960s an essential aspect of workers' lives has been virtually overlooked: their constant struggle for protection from threats to their way of life, such as illness, unemployment, disability and old age. Mutual benefit societies have been a major means of social self-defence in this area. The present collection of essays covers new ground by exploring the development of mutual benefit societies in 26 countries across five continents. A number of comparative and international analyses has also been included.