Labour history

Die voortslepende arbeidsgeskille tussen die Kamer van Mynwese en die wit mynwerkerunies aan die Rand het in Maart 1922 tot 'n staking gelei. Nadat onderhandelinge misluk het, het militante stakers polisiestasies aan die Rand aangeval. Die regering het daarop krygswet afgekondig en die Unieverdedigingsmag gemobiliseer om wet en orde te herstel. Die Unieverdedigingsmag, bygestaan deur die Suid-Afrikaanse Polisie, het verskeie militere operasies teen die stakerkommando's geloods. Alhoewel dit meestal infanterie-operasies was, het artillerie en lugkrag ook 'n beslissende rol gespeel om die onrus vinnig en met die minimum lewensverlies te onderdruk. The role of the Union Defence Forces in the suppression of the industrial unrest on the Rand in 1922 Wage and labour disputes between the Chamber of Mines and white unionised workers on the Rand led to an industrial strike in March 1922. Negotiations failed and militant strikers attacked several police stations on the Rand. The Government proclaimed martial law and mobilised the Union Defence Forces to restore law and order. The Union Defence Forces, assisted by the South African Police, launched a series of military operations against the strike commandos. Although these were mainly infantry operations, artillery and air power also played a vital role in suppressing the unrest quickly and with minimal losses on both sides.

... Fruitful collaborations with colleagues at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and with Frank Guridy and Gina Pérez convinced me that ... A diverse group of intellectual col-laborators at Michigan also shaped this project: Maria Elena Cepeda, Matt Gladue, Tom Guglielmo ...

The article analyses the health hazards faced by Swiss female watch workers in the 1950s and 1960s on the basis of three cases: Tablet addiction, handling radium and the use of benzene to clean tools. It asks why both the responsible occupational health and safety authorities and the trade unions ignored these poisoning dangers for so long.
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Der Artikel analysiert die Gesundheitsgefahren, mit denen die Schweizer Uhrenarbeiterinnen in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren konfrontiert waren, anhand von drei Fällen: Tablettensucht, Umgang mit Radium und den Gebrauch von Benzol zur Reinigung der Werkzeuge. Er fragt, weshalb sowohl die zuständigen Arbeitsschutzbehörden als auch die Gewerkschaften diese Vergiftungsgefahren derart lange ignorierten.

... to the Complete Suffrage movement? Above all, it is to be regretted that Hall does not sustain the claim that Ashton was the most 'Chartist of all the factory towns' by comparing this 'micro-history' with those of other localities. La Trobe University ALEX TYRRELL ...

Pre-industrial apprenticeship is often considered more stable than its nineteenth- and twentieth-century counterparts, apparently because of the more durable relationships between masters and apprentices. Nevertheless, recent studies have suggested that many of those who started apprenticeships did not finish them. New evidence about more than 7,000 contracts across several cities in three countries finds that, for a number of reasons, a substantial minority of youths entering apprenticeship contracts failed to complete them. By allowing premature exits, cities and guilds sustained labor markets by lowering the risks of entering long training contracts. Training flexibility was a pragmatic response to labor-market tensions.

One of the standard objections against guilds in the premodern world has been their exclusiveness. Guilds have been portrayed as providing unfair advantages to the children of established masters and locals, over immigrants and other outsiders. Privileged access to certain professions and industries is seen as a source of inequality and a disincentive for technological progress. In this paper we examine this assumption by studying the composition of guild masters and apprentices from a large sample of European towns and cities from 1600 to 1800, focusing on the share who were children of masters or locals. This data offers an indirect measurement of the strength of guild barriers, and by implication their monopolies. We find very wide variation between guilds in practice, but most guild masters and apprentices were immigrants or unrelated locals: openness was much more common than closure, especially in larger centres. Our understanding of guild ‘monopolies’ and exclusivity is in ne...

The paper focuses on the crisis of Italian electronic business in the Seventies and on the influence of multinational corporations in the country after World War II. Multinational corporations, through the acquisition of brands and factories, became key players in the Italian economic life. Moreover, their influence involved also strategic industrial branches and innovation programmes and had an ambiguous effect on the labour market. In the Seventies, several enterprises faced massive restructuring and division outsourcing, while trade unions tried to organize new kinds of struggles, promoting public investments on Research and Development and technology dissemination programmes, following the example of Germany, France and other Western countries. Through the analysis of some case studies, the paper shows the impact of multinational direct investments in the Italian electronic business and the limits of trade unions proposals on the field of innovation and economic planning.

... 264 E. Anthony Swift ... For some workers, including Kanatchikov, these yearnings led to participation in Marxist study groups and contacts with radical stu ... Worker-in-tellectuals also expressed their identity by taking evening courses, reading the “thick” journals, visiting museums ...

After the end of the Second World War Britain found itself economically more dependent on its empire than ever before. In the face of the nationalist challenge, modernizing the colonies developed from an economic necessity of the metropolis into the new imperial self-justification of continued rule. Mobilizing labour was an integral part of the new social and economic policies, and “even small working classes could threaten the narrow channels of colonial commerce.” Fred Cooper comments in an article on the problematic character of strikes in colonial Africa in the 1940s and 1950s, which he describes as ‘mass urban events’ due to the fluidity of the category ‘worker’ at a time when most labour was still casual and people drifted in and out of jobs. 1

Radio in its early years sought to transform the daily lives of the working population in Australia. It set out to reorganise and remould the character of their lives and to reconstitute how they thought about themselves. In this sense radio contributed to a more general move to change the nature of the workforce in the 1920s and 30s in Australia. It performed an 'educative' and 'formative' role, in Gramsci's terms, as part of 'a collective pressure [which] obtains objective results in the form of an evolution of customs, ways of thinking and acting, morality, etc.'.1 The increasing importance of large scale manufacturing industries was effecting major changes in the economic structure of Australian society and demanding a new type of workforce, a workforce more adapt able to the assembly Tine and the new organisation of labour processes, Struggles occurred in the workplace over attempts to transform the nature of the work experience, the most notable being the fight against moves to introduce efficiency methods into the New South Wales railway workshops. But the synchronisation of labour required by industry was being organised by other means as well. The changes in the everyday lives of the working population being wrought by radio formed part of an onslaught to form new habits, new daily rhythms and new experiences of the relationship between 'work' and 'life'.2 An examination of the manner in which radio set out, formally and informally, to 'educate' listeners?in the traditional sense?reveals some of the processes involved in that remodelling.

There is a tendency in writing on the Australian peace movement to assume that widespread participation of youth in that movement began with the Vietnam War.1 It is true that the Anti-Vietnam War, Anti-Conscription Movement marked the peace movement's first mobilisation of middle-class youth on a mass scale in Australia.2 Nevertheless, working-class and radical young people had been vitally involved in the anti-war movement in earlier periods, including the anti-conscription campaigns of World War I and the mobilisations against war and fascism of the 1930s.3 This type of involvement extended into the post-war years, and continued to comprise a significant organisational nucleus around which young peace activists could cohere. One manifestation of this was the important coalescence of the youth, peace and labour movements which occurred in 1952, around the Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship (YCPF). It was, indeed, at this stage that the broad cultural foundations were laid, and crucial links and social networks developed, upon which the later mass movement was built when the historical circumstances made this possible in the period of the Vietnam War. This article examines the struggle by radical youth and peace movements, with the support of the labour movement, to organise what became a massive, broadly-based, counter-hegemonic gathering in the midst of the Cold War and in the face of concerted conservative attacks. The success of this initiative stands

On 4 June 1911, the sugar workers of the Lower Burdekin district declared themselves to be 'on strike', thereby precipitating the first major, prolonged and acrimonious industrial dispute that the Queensland sugar industry had experienced. By the end of the month, the conflict, involving both field and mill labourers, had extended into all the significant cane producing areas of the state?Mossman, Cairns, Innisfail, Ingham, Ayr, Mackay, Sarina, Bunda berg and Childers?with the singular exception of the Maryborough area, where employer and employee maintained a formal if strained and mutually resentful relationship. As various related unions such as the Waterside Workers', Seamen, Carters' and Engine Drivers' entered the dispute in sympathy with the principle of an eight hour day and 30/per week which the sugar workers, as members of the Amalgamated Workers' Association (awa) were seeking, and varied attempts at negotiation and reconciliation failed, it seemed that there was 4a grave danger' that the strike would 'result in general upheaval'.1 This confrontation was exacerbated by several factors. The continued use of alien indentured servants undermined the unionists' demands for basic improvements in pay and conditions. White organised wage labourers in sisted upon a total dissociation from all forms of legal servitude which had characterised labour relations in the Queensland sugar industry since its inception half a century before. The 1911 strike challenged the nature and structure of this master-servant relationship; conflict was inevitable when white employees would no longer assume the persona of 'servant' while the employers were still comfortable in the role of 'master'. Furthermore, unionists by 1911 resented any inference or treatment which might place them on the same social or economic level as alien indents who remained bound to their masters by repressive legal restrictions. The unionists main tained violently expressed racial antagonisms to these Italian, Chinese and Japanese indents. Their racial ideology thus prevented them?one segment of the working class?from forming an effective alliance with this other