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AbstractThe struggle by women workers has largely been overlooked in the historiography of trade unions in South Africa during apartheid. This article analyses the strategies of the National Union of Textile Workers (NUTW) to end wage discrimination against women as part of the struggle against poverty wages in the South African textile industry during the last years of apartheid, c.1980 to 1987. The first South African equal pay legislation came into force in 1981, covering the minimum wages of just a small number of the workforce; it was not until 1984 that legislation set minimum wages for all workers. Before the legal reform, new domestic and foreign political opportunities helped the NUTW to create new mobilization structures and offered possibilities to connect levels of scale and make local action visible at home and abroad. Global framing of wage equality combined with a translocal repertoire was used in the cases of multinational companies to make relevant connections between levels of scale (international, transnational, national, and local) to add to the visibility of the violations. After the reform of labour legislation in South Africa, the union made reference to domestic legislation, but translocal activism remained important in bringing foreign companies to the local negotiating table. Drawing on these cases, the NUTW developed a national strategy to make wage setting more transparent across the entire industry, adding to the visibility of all forms of wage discrimination.

It is often said that labor history is in decline. Yet other interpretations are possible. The flourishing of labor history from the 1960s to the 1980s could instead be regarded as exceptional and the situation during the last twenty years as the more typical state of affairs. A second interpretation, which I favor, is that labor history has, in fact, not declined. Rather, the content of labor history has shifted. There may be less scholarship on many of the traditional or original objects of research, but there is new research, in history and other disciplines, on topics that arguably fall under a new, expanded understanding of "labor history." This second explanation is supported by the continued vitality of scholarship on women's work and women's activism.

In 1939 a law was passed in Sweden which forbade employers to dismiss female employees because of marriage or pregnancy. In Germany a law had been introduced already in 1932, which gave employers the right to dismiss a woman when she married. It also gave women right to end their employment for the same reason. The political decisions behind these legal changes were in both cases the result of an extended debate on the right of employment of married women. This debate occurred in most industrialised European countries in the interwar period. The increasing participation of women on the labour market was by some groups interpreted as a cause of mass unemployment. Economic crisis contributed to a crisis of masculinity, which then led to attacks on the rights of married women to paid employment. In Sweden there was a state commission set up in 1936 with the task of investigating women's employment. This commission, kvinnoarbetskommittén, managed to demonstrate that dismissing women would not lead to a lowering of the unemployment figures for men, a task they accomplished through detailed studies of several labour market areas. The report of the commission guided the decision of parliament, a decision taken when the economic depression had already turned to a boom period. The composition of the commission as well as its work was a consequence of the strong influence of the Swedish women's movement. In Germany the rights of women to paid employment was limited already in 1923 as the result of the financial crisis of the state. During the depression the attacks on married women's right to employment became a political tool, which could be used both in foreign and domestic policy. Dismissing married women employed as civil servants was aimed to quash the demands of unemployed men. A prime target in the foreign policy was to convince the victors of World War I that reparations exceeded the ability of the German nation, a nation which had been badly stricken by economic crisis and unemployment. With this argument a solution of the unemployment issue was given second priority.

As economic citizenship was a pre-condition of full citizenship, the lack of economic autonomy was an important motivation during the early stages of the women''s movement. Independent of their class background, women had less access to not only financial resources but also social and cultural capital, i.e., member''s commitment. Resources are therefore of particular interest from a gender perspective, and this book sheds light on the importance of resources for women''s struggles for political rights. Highlighting the financial strategies of the first wave of Swedish middle-class and sociali

The Labour Movement Archives and Library in Stockholm (Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek, or ARAB) has been and still is one of the more important nodes of labor history in Sweden. It is well known among academics as well as activists who aim to write movement history. ARAB is financed not only by the Swedish state but also the labor movement to generate new ideas for public labor history. Although there are many units and higher education institutions in Sweden that played a vital role during the 1970s and 1980s, it was probably the research agendas developed by ARAB through seminars and publications that kept the field of labor history a vibrant area of scholarship. The main difference between ARAB and similar institutions is its steady attempt to create spaces where academics—such as historians and social scientists—and activists can meet in order to produce and promote new approaches to labor history. The results and even the success of this work have been built on two institutions at ARAB: the journal Arbetarhistoria, published since 1977, and the research council at ARAB, established in the early 1980s.

As economic citizenship was a pre-condition of full citizenship, the lack of economic autonomy was an important motivation during the early stages of the women's movement. Independent of their class background, women had less access to not only financial resources but also social and cultural capital, i.e., member's commitment. Resources are therefore of particular interest from a gender perspective, and this book sheds light on the importance of resources for women's struggles for political rights. Highlighting the financial strategies of the first wave of Swedish middle-class and socialist women's movements and comparing them with similar organizations in Germany, England, and Canada, the authors show the importance of class, gender, age, and the national context, offering a valuable contribution to the discussion of resource mobilization theories in the context of social movements

Home-Based Work and Home-Based Workers (1800-2021) is about the past and present of home-based work and homebased workers between 1800 and 2021 from a global perspective.; Readership: All interested in social and economic history, and especially in the past and present of home-based work and homebased workers.