Suchergebnisse

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.

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

Small mutual funds once flourished in nineteenth century Europe and North America. They still abound in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In recent years they have come back to European and North American cities with the immigrants from the global South. Some of the small mutual savings funds use the accumulated sums to provide financial assistance to members in distress and thus fulfil an insurance function. Others make loans regardless of their members' individual needs, in which case it is the savings or credit function that predominates. In this volume, five authors describe and analyse the results of their fieldwork among mutual fund members in Hyderabad, Yogyakarta, Ayelitsa (a township near Cape Town), among Surinamese in both Paramaribo (Suriname) and Amsterdam, as well as among Senegalese Peul who migrate from Thilonge to Dakar and on to Paris. The studies are based on field observations and personal interviews. The two editors, Abram de Swaan and Marcel van der Linden, provide a common comparative approach, and a shared historical and theoretical perspective. The essays explore the varieties and the logic of mutual funds, emphasizing the importance of peer pressures as a 'social constraint' to increase 'self constraint' on spending. Cooperation in a mutual fund, whether for insurance or saving purposes, can proffer the participants advantages which they cannot realize on their own.

Asian industrial competition, from Japan, China but also India, attracted greater public attention in Europe during the inter-war period than ever before. Indian industrial employment became the subject not only of extensive official enquiries, intensified legislation, a growing number of academic studies and of more popular writings, but also of debates within and between European trade unions

August Sartorius von Waltershausen (1852–1938) was an eminent German economist who visited the United States at the beginning of the 1880s and wrote a series of articles on the US labor movement, which were published in Germany. His training in the historical school of economics provided him with a different perspective from that of laissez-faire economists or socialists of his time. The articles are translated in this book, and presented with a biographical essay by Marcel van der Linden and Gregory Zieren and with an essay on his contribution to the writing of American labor history by David Montgomery. This book provides rich insights into the character of American workers' organizations as they recovered from the depression of the 1870s, before the establishment of strong national institutions