Our series of interviews with authors of new books in labor and working-class history continues with Alexandra Finley, author of the new book An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade, which UNC Press published this month.
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Our series of interviews with authors of new books in labor and working-class history continues with Verónica Martínez-Matsuda. The University of Pennsylvania Press published her Migrant Citizenship: Race, Rights, and Reform in the U.S. Farm Labor Camp Program in June. Martínez-Matsuda, an associate professor in the Department of Labor Relations, Law, and History at the Cornell ILR School, answered questions from Jacob Remes.
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Our series of interviews of authors of news books in labor and working-class history continues. Philip F. Rubio’s latest book, Undelivered: From the Great Postal Strike of 1970 to the Manufactured Crisis of the U.S. Postal Service was published in May by UNC Press.
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June 11 is Davis Day, a holiday originating in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, that honors the martyrs of the labor movement. It marks the day in 1925 when striking coal miner William Davis was shot and killed by police working to break a militant strike by UMW District 26 against the British Empire Steel Company.
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One of the first principles of critical disaster studies is that disasters exist not as time-out-of-time, but as embedded in the times and places that produce them. Because disasters are part of history, not outside of it, they can bring into relief structures of society that were always there.
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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