Last week the Coronavirus forced Disney to announce that its American parks are now closed indefinitely, resulting in the longest interruptions of any kind since they opened in 1955 (Disneyland) and 1965 (Walt Disney World). Disney has been on my mind because I made my first ever visit to Walt Disney World in Orlando on January 25th of this year, just as the first COVID 19 cases were being identified in the US.
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COVID-19, the coronavirus that is spreading across the world, is wreaking havoc on working people and their families. Weeks after it burst onto the world scene, the end of this deadly threat is still not in sight. Although it is clear that its death toll will not begin to approximate that of the lethal 1918-19 worldwide Spanish Influenza epidemic, early indications are that COVID-19 could end up inflicting even more economic and political damage than that earlier pandemic.
Read more →A real pleasure of academic exchange is to engage with readers who “get” one’s book. In their distinct ways, Chaumtoli Huq, Sarah Lyons, Katherine Turk, and Naomi Williams underscore the interpretative thrust behind the narrative arc of Making the Woman Worker, which uses the International Labour Organization (ILO) as its archive.
Read more →As a union researcher who uses participatory research methods, I was particularly interested in the chapter that discussed Maria Mies’s study of lace makers in India. Mies recruited women who were familiar with the region and the dialect to be part of her research team.
Read more →Eileen Boris’ meticulously researched and detailed book, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019, reveals some enduring challenges for women globally to actualize their full labor rights. There are three themes in the book that resonate for me as someone who works on transnational issues impacting women workers in Bangladesh and South Asia as well as low wage immigrant workers in the United States particularly in the South Asian diaspora.
Read more →Eileen Boris details the history of how the International Labor Organization (ILO) moved from positioning the male industrial worker in imperial centers to acknowledging the feminization of labor and promoting gender mainstreaming in Making the Woman Worker. She illustrates the ways that “othering” women workers led to treating women as objects instead of agents involved in their own economic justice efforts.
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As we celebrate International Women’s Day, we are pleased to host a roundtable discussion on Eileen Boris’ new book, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019. Boris’ book, centered on the International Labor Organization, the global United Nations agency that sets labor standards, offers a window to understanding gendered labor systems and the struggles to redefine them through the ILO.
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The dual enrollment programs offered to cash-strapped students and parents imposes a specific labor burden on sometimes low-paid faculty. We need a solution that doesn’t whipsaw the faculty in high schools and colleges.
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The rewriting of radical history has occupied two generations of US historians, in one way or another, and among some especially fine efforts in race-linked struggles, Red, Black and White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950 by Mary Stanton is a gem.
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Our series of interviews with authors of new books in labor and working-class history continues. This month, Johns Hopkins University Press publishes Marla Miller’s new book, Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts. Miller, the director of the Public History Program and a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, answered questions from Jacob Remes.
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