Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Editor’s Introduction

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-8643415

1558-1454

Leon Fink,

Writing from inside the Covid-19 lockdown, I figured our readers as much as the editor would relish the summertime reverie afforded by Peter Blair’s witty “Caddy Master.” Would that we all could take a mulligan on this entire season of distress.Back-to-business and in keeping with the themes of contemporary relevance, we are delighted to showcase Liz Faue and Josiah Rector’s probing and prescient take on women health care workers during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. As the authors document, a spike of needlestick injuries, accentuated by a breakdown of OSHA and CDC regulatory vigilance, set the stage for concerted pushback by SEIU activists alongside women’s, gay rights, and public health organizations. Their efforts were crowned by the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act of 2000, which established new, federal standards on blood-borne pathogens. The danger to health care providers identified in HIV care, the authors conclude, is all the more apparent during the novel coronavirus pandemic. In both cases, a shortage of equipment and swollen patient-to-nurse workloads risk the lives and health of both workers and the general public.Based on his own observations and many conversations with both academics and trade union officials, historian Michael Honey presents the fruits of a 2019 sojourn at the University of Bergen, Norway. The Nordic way — or “social-democratic state capitalism” — he suggests, has much to teach us about the possibilities of a hybrid system of market-based entrepreneurialism combined with high taxes, strong unions, and elaborate, government-sponsored services. Rooted in the nineteenth-century social compromises extracted by Norwegian farmers and peasants from landowners and kings, the country’s characteristic system of class conciliation was secured by the Basic Agreement of 1935 (following a decade of violent labor conflicts) that guaranteed the right to organize, recognized shop steward power, and established mechanisms of dispute settlement. After World War II, parliamentary majorities secured by the ruling Labour Party and backed by the powerful central labor federation known as the LO constructed one of Europe’s strongest welfare states. Discovered in 1969, production of North Sea oil under state control offered a further social welfare windfall unknown in most societies (albeit also prompting criticism of its “gray” rather than “green” growth strategy). Recent decades, Honey learned, have seen some fraying of the Nordic model, challenged both by global neo-liberalism and xenophobia aimed at migrants. Yet, even as the governing coalition has shifted rightward, the Labour Party represents the strongest electoral base in the country and continues to defend a social project with which Martin Luther King Jr. also identified when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1964.The journal is proud to take the measure of several new spirits in the field with a combination of intellectual and autobiographical reflections by Emma Amador, Max Fraser, Naomi R Williams, and Stacey L. Smith. As Eileen Boris notes in her introduction to the forum, “these interventions belong to a larger project that continues to examine the relationship between class, race, gender, citizenship, and other factors. We have learned that there is no simple fit between the concept of intersectionality and historical experience; rather, there are multiple relations that allow for probing how class identify develops with and against race and gender.”This volume’s Bookmark features an exchange between Steve Striffler, author of Solidarity: Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights, and critics Bryan McCann, Eric Arnesen, and Nancy Raquel Mirabal. The readers are all appreciative, albeit in varying degree, of Striffler’s grasp of the long arc of a progressive counterpunch to official US intervention in the region that stretches from the Hai-tian revolution to the creation of NAFTA. McCann offers a full-throated assent to an account he calls “sometimes inspiring, sometimes sobering, always enlightening.” Mirabal worries that in focusing on solidarity campaigns “with Latin America and Latin Americans” inevitably is likely “to minimize, and at times, exclude the activism of communities of color, women, and immigrants in the United States who were very active and in many instances, critical to the success of these very same movements.” Arnesen poses a more root-and-branch skepticism toward the integrity of a solidarity project that he feels succumbed all too often to its own ideological blinders. Striffler more than recovers his balance, at once defending his work and engaging in extended self-explanation and auto-critique. To Arnesen he both throws an olive branch and the rejoinder that as a dedicated left internationalist, “we may just be so far apart that what he offers as critique I embrace as praise.”In the latest installment of Point/Counterpoint, historian Leah Vosko interrogates Eileen Boris about her new book on the ILO and the global political construction of the woman worker. Vosko highlights several distinctive features of the work, while also noting a couple of areas that deserve further scholarly attention. Among the former she salutes Boris’s skillful recognition of the way that ILO labor standards debates superseded too-easy dichotomies that regularly separate twentieth-century feminists into “difference” versus “legal equality” categories. Likewise, Boris’s focus on the ILO’s Programme on Rural Women highlights for Vosko “the importance of nonmonetized work and reproductive labor to processes of accumulation.” Interestingly, in response to a few prods from her interviewer, Boris seems to go farther than she had in the book to allow for the limits of the ILO’s tripartite arrangement in identifying deep structural inequities in the world economy. Readers may also find provocative Boris’s suggestion at the end of the interview that a basic income strategy (“health care for all, universal programs, free college, adequate resources for the elderly and young, etc.”) may prove more efficacious for domestic workers than classic living-wage campaigns.As if to directly respond to Naomi Williams’s concern (see below) that “working-class” historiography too often conjures up an all-white image, the Reviews section is populated by works on the race question as well as black and brown subjects. In particular we call our readers’ attention to the following new titles: The Communist International, Anti-Imperialism and Racial Equality in British Dominions; Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire; Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal; Why The Vote Wasn’t Enough For Selma; Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C.; Puerto Rican Labor History, 1898–1934: Revolutionary Ideals and Reformist Politics; Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad; as well as the long-awaited volume by Joe William Trotter Jr., Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America.I also take note that this is the last issue to receive the caring ministrations of Reviews’ Assistant David “Mac” Marquis. As a PhD candidate at the College of Wil-liam and Mary, Mac joined the Labor team in 2015 and has kept us on our toes ever since. Now completing his dissertation, he is currently moderating the LAWCHA Pandemic Book Talk series, hosted by Cindy Hahamovitch. Mac, deepest thanks, and we expect to see your name again in these pages!