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Approaches to the history of class relations in Germany as elsewhere have changed dramatically over the past two decades or so. Historical class analysis, which once pointed to the clear significance of class as a social marker, a cultural and political identity, in short, as a force of history, has became dulled in the wake of the collapse of socialism, the decline of organized labor, and the intellectual challenges associated with postmodernism, feminism, and race theory. As one student remarked in a recent seminar on the history and historiography of class relations in Europe, class has become the unexamined third pillar of the race, class, gender triad. Historians do not deny the significance of class relations; it has just that figuring out how to theorize and document the history of class is much more complicated than it used to be.

This article examines the social history of socialist work movements in Czechoslovakia during the first two decades of the Communist regime in the country. These movements were attempts to increase industrial productivity and to transform preexisting working-class culture. Not only did they founder on the chaotic operation of the bureaucratic planned economy and the endemic shortages it brought in train, they also foundered on the realities of labor relations in Czechoslovak enterprises. These were marked by the continuity of tensions inherited from the immediate postwar years that persisted into the Communist era, and the strength of egalitarian values among Czechoslovakia's working class.

A few years ago I began researching the evolution of the physical design and planning of the three greenbelt towns that were initiated in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Administration. While I was quite familiar with the context and social milieu of one of those towns because it was close to my home, I had never before visited Greenbelt. On my first trip there, I arranged to meet a University of Maryland professor at a local café. Since she and her students had been conducting material culture studies of Greenbelt, I thought meeting her first would be a good way to introduce me to the town. While we talked over dinner, I learned she was also a Greenbelt resident. After dinner, she told me she was on a Greenbelt committee that was making a presentation to the City Council that evening, and she had arranged for the committee to join us in the café so they could plan their presentation. Shortly, three people arrived and joined us at the table, brainstorming ideas for the upcoming council presentation. After being in town less than two hours, I was in a Greenbelt committee meeting.

The essays in this special issue by Jack R. Friedman, Sándor Horváth, Peter Heumos, and Eszter Zsófia Tóth, reflect a growing interest in the social history of industrial labor and industrial communities in postwar Central and Eastern Europe. While they approach their subjects in different ways and employing distinct methodologies, the essays suggest how the history of the working class and its relationship to postwar socialist state formation across the region might be rethought. They illustrate how the protracted construction and consolidation of socialist states in the region was negotiated on an everyday level by working-class citizens, and that this was a dynamic process in which state projects interacted with a variety of working-class cultures, that were in turn segmented by notions of gender, skill, generation, and occupation. The essays all demonstrate, in their different ways, how working-class Eastern Europeans were not simply acted upon by the operation of dictatorial state power, but played a role in state formation across the region. This role was characterized by an ambiguous relationship between workers and those in power who sought legitimacy by claiming that their states represented the interests of the "working class." Yet the policies those in power pursued often confronted working-class communities directly in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania, as these essays suggest. This produced a complex relationship characterized by consent, accommodation and conflict that varied from locality to locality, state to state, and from period to period.

In this autobiographical account of labor relations on the Montreal waterfront, Alexander C. Pathy gives an insider account of the volatile relationship between shippers and longshoremen. Pathy worked as a lawyer and then official of the influential Maritime Employers Association (MEA). The MEA was in the forefront in changing employment relations to better fit the introduction of technological changes brought on by containerization. As in most ports around the world, the introduction of containerization was riven with challenge and controversy. The Port of Montreal, and the lesser ports of Quebec City and Trois-Rivieres, shared this common experience. According to Pathy up to 1960 the respective ports had seen little strife. Indeed, it would seem that the relations between the two sides had been relatively amicable. This would change once ship owners and stevedores embarked on a rationalization scheme to make the loading and unloading of cargo that much more efficient and speedier. Beginning in 1960, negotiations became increasingly heated and hostile. Not least was the problem of language. In what could be best described as mutual ignorance the employers negotiated in English, while the union representatives, reflecting the membership, spoke in French. It was no wonder that misunderstandings could occur because of poor translation. But according to Pathy more than language, the principal point of conflict was perception. Each side brought to the table mutual suspicion and hostility. The problem Pathy contends was, "Each party did not see its glass half full but half empty."(40) Therefore, negotiations over gang size, technological improvements, hiring methods, and union jurisdiction all became major issues of contention. Adding to the complexity of the situation was the role of Canadian government. Canadian industrial relations law gave the government a vital stake in the negotiations. Just as important, as both official and wildcat strikes broke out, the government scrambled to stabilize the situation as ships were diverted to US ports. The loss of trade and thereby revenue was seen as a critical impairment to the maritime economy.

This paper examines the official discourses that shaped the parameters of everyday life and the reactions of socialist citizens to them in Hungary's first socialist city, Sztálinváros, during the 1950s. Concentrating especially on the regulation of working-class leisure, it argues that the authorities sought to frame social conflict in terms of a struggle between the civilized and the backward, the rural and the urban. In so doing it provides an insight into the nature of early state socialism as a project of cultural transformation.

Back to the shop floor! This book is a welcome addition to the literature of American labor in the mid-twentieth century. Through meticulous analysis of steel workers at the workplace in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, James D. Rose explains the emergence and eventual victory of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), a part of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), in all its complexity. In doing so, he reveals the inadequacy of Lizabeth Cohen's culture of unity as well as Staughton Lynd's militant alternative unionism to explain the labor history of the 1930s. In addition, he reintroduces the idea that the federal government's role in industrial relations was crucial to the success of the CIO.

This article explores how working-class women who belonged to the prize-winning Liberation Brigade of the Budapest Hosiery Factory in the 1970s represented their identities at different stages of their lives in oral-history interviews conducted with the author between 1998 and 2003. It argues that these identities had a deeply ambiguous relationship to those that the official discourse of the socialist era ascribed to them. Issues of consent, accommodation, and opposition are raised, which not only shaped identities under socialism, but continue to shape working-class memory of the period.

Joshua H. Howard's fascinating book examines the experiences of Chinese arsenal workers in Chongqing, China's wartime capital in three wars: the Anti-Japanese War, the Civil War, and class war from 1937 to 1953. Several clear and compelling arguments presented in Professor Howard's study have brought new approaches to the field of Chinese labor and new ways of seeing twentieth century China.

With the relatively recent renovation of the American welfare system, the current dispute over faith-based organizations administering federal aid, and the wanton usage of the term family values in political discourse, few can deny that debate over the family, welfare, and the state remains heated. To add greater depth and nuance to this debate, Sherri Broder has delved into the complex relationships between the subjects and objects of social reform in late-nineteenth century Philadelphia. She explores how wealthy reformers, evangelical rescue workers, the labor movement, and laboring people "all drew on the discourse of the family"—which revolved around contested definitions of what constituted a tramp, unfit mother, or neglected child—"to define themselves variously as gendered members of different social classes, as respected family and community members, as political actors, and as people with claims on the state, the police, and public and private social services"(6). Utilizing local and national labor periodicals, the published works of charity organizations and individual reformers, and the institutional records of the Pennsylvania Society to Protect Children from Cruelty (SPCC) and the pseudonymous "Haven for Unwed Mothers and Infants," Broder moves topically throughout five chapters dissecting different components of Philadelphia's discourse on the family.

This paper examines the special challenges faced by working-class people in writing convincing autobiographical self-presentations for membership to the Romanian Workers' Party during the early 1950s. Special attention is paid to the nature of the verification process [verificare] required for existing and new members of the Party. I argue that the experience of one's self as always-already proletarian made the process of writing one's autobiography particularly difficult given the Party's desire for a narrative that stressed conversion to a proletarian identity.

This article explores the historical relationship between scientific research and labor management by investigating the state supervision of color perception in British workers (1870s-1920s). Whereas eighteenth-century scientific writers had described color blindness as an individual idiosyncrasy, color blindness was interpreted in the late nineteenth century as a social contaminant. As multiple sites of labor and industry were saturated with color—for example, through the deployment of flashing red and green lights on ships and railways—the color vision of workers became an increasingly significant medical and legal concern. Starting in the 1890s, the Board of Trade developed new efforts to legislate the admittedly subjective realm of color perception. But British workers also publicly opposed the Board's efforts to regulate their perception and objected to the "modernist" palette that was commonly used in color vision tests. I trace the emergence of color blindness as a class-specific pathology and consider both the denigration and the valorization of workers' perceptions in modern British industrial society.