The year 2025 marks the 120th anniversary of Lochner v. New York, a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down legislative limits on work hours in the baking industry. U.S. scholars generally agree this decision harmed workers and was a setback to the labor movement in the United States. The essay borrows from some of the historian E.P. Thompson’s writings on the relationship between historical inquiry and normative values in order to reflect on Lochner and the relative consensus among scholars opposing the decision. That reflection in turn serves as a point of entry for thinking about the role of normative values in doing labor history, what values we propound in the present by writing and teaching about the history of working-class people, and how those issues relate to different ways labor historians can understand what is arguably our field’s central category, class. The essay suggests that, with regard to the Lochner decision and in general, labor history is something of a different activity if the field’s orientation is toward the amelioration of time- and place-specific problems in working-class people’s lives, toward class as inherently a category of violence and injustice, or both.

This article establishes the role white women played in shaping the urban labor force and the economy in late colonial times in Lima, roughly from 1790 to 1822. It focuses on the impoverished elite women who, by the end of the colonial period, had to ask for alms to avoid working with their own hands. An important part of the Limeño elites could not respond to the twofold challenge: the negative consequences of the economic and administrative reforms of the Bourbons, and the relative flexibilization of the social order in Lima by the end of the eighteenth century. Instead of adapting to new conditions, the Spanish elites generated a social discourse that reaffirmed status and ethnicity as a means to distinguish themselves from the “vicious” plebeian sectors. More than one thousand applications to Church relief programs serve as the main foundation of this article; they are made up of at least one fifth of the white female population of the city in 1806. The article enters into dialogue with studies on socio-labor practices and the history of gender and ethnicity by engaging with concrete experiences of poor elite women in a city considered to be the opulent center of the Spanish colonial power.

The return of remains of Korean forced laborers who died in Japan between 1940 and 1945 has been a major controversy for over half a century for Koreans. These deaths reveal the tragic consequences of Japan’s World War II forced labor system. Japan forcefully mobilized nearly 800,000 Koreans who were taken to at least 1,589 worksites in Japan and 381 worksites in Hokkaido. Over 10 percent of all Koreans forcefully mobilized throughout the empire are estimated to have died or disappeared, but the precise number of Korean forced laborers’ deaths inside Japan remains unknown. Until 1989, remains recovered from graves throughout Japan by local people were immediately cremated by Japanese Buddhist priests, making cause of death and precise identities forensically impossible. This account relates the first and only comprehensive effort to exhume Korean forced labor graves without immediate cremation, coordinated by Korean and Japanese activists and academics based in Hokkaido. This effort helped revive a neglected aspect of Korean forced labor history while focusing on the concerns of bereaved Koreans seeking the remains of their lost family members. Nevertheless, the project had serious limitations due to working in a difficult political environment and neglect of forensic science protocols in mass grave excavations and identification. This complex situation prevented identification of victims’ names and cause of death that could have held the Japanese government and companies involved accountable.

From the end of the 1960s until the outbreak of the Civil War (1975), Lebanon experienced a phase of relatively sustained industrial expansion. Albeit the “boom” did not modify significantly Lebanon's tertiarized economic structure, it was anyway sufficient to create the structural conditions for the emergence of a new militant working-class able to become one of the most relevant contentious actors of its time. This new working class was made primarily of very young and recently urbanized unemployed of rural origin, brutally injected in a crude and hyper-exploitative productive cycle where formal labor unions were, for the most part, absent or scarcely effective. The input for their grassroots, transgressive organization into factory-based Workers’ Committees came from the Organization for Communist Action in Lebanon (OACL), i.e. the most important force of the so-called Lebanese New Left, within the framework of a broader process of militant penetration of the “revolutionary classes” produced by the contradictions of Lebanese capitalism. This created the precondition for the Committees to affirm themselves not only as the radical avant-garde of the Lebanese labor movement but also as an integral part of a broader process of contestation of the existing status quo by the subaltern groups emerged from - or activated by - the structural and cultural changes that the country was experiencing. By retrieving the forgotten history of the Workers’ Committees, the article wants to examine the forms and the trajectories whereby such a new working class became an integral part of this process. In particular, by adopting a Gramscian methodology, the article will first expose the structural changes in the Lebanese industrial sector in the examined period and their labor implications. Then, it will focus on the dynamics which superseded the Committees' birth and affirmation, reserving particular attention to the role played by the OACL. Finally, it will conclude by examining the impact of their agency on the political developments that the country was experiencing. The paper contends that the emergence and the affirmation of counter-hegemonical and transformative working-class activism on the eve of the Civil War, along with representing a direct by-product of structural stresses and constraints, was significantly debtor also of the new ideological and militant infrastructures that the emergence of an Arab New Left had contributed to popularize and deploy. The paper wants also to intervene in the historiographical debate on the Lebanese Civil War, stressing the importance of both subaltern actors and class phenomena in its outbreak, which have generally been widely disregarded by the dominant understandings of the conflict.

In January 1909, the students of the Azhar, the Islamic world’s most prestigious university, went on strike. Protesting recent curricular and administrative changes introduced by the Egyptian Khedive, they demanded increased material support and asserted the university’s right to govern itself. After several weeks of demonstrations that drew thousands of supporters into the streets of Cairo, the Khedive suspended the reforms that first caused the Azharis to walk out. Oddly, this remarkable mobilization has nearly vanished into obscurity. Drawing on reporting from the Egyptian press and intelligence memoranda from the Egyptian Ministry of Interior, this article argues that the apparent incongruity of Azharis on strike was no mistake. Their willful rejection of ascribed categories helps to explain both why this movement of unionized seminarians speaking a language of self-government proved so striking for contemporary supporters and critics alike and why this event has slipped through the cracks of a historiography still framed by those very categories. Long forgotten in histories of both nationalism and organized labor, the Azhar strike represented a pivotal moment in the emergence of mass politics in Egypt. In invoking “union,” the Azharis engaged in multiple, overlapping acts of comparison. Inspired by the modular repertoires of militant labor, they simultaneously hailed the constitutional revolution of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress as a model for political transformation. Rooted in a self-conscious critique of colonial comparativism, their struggle thereby furnished new materials with which to elaborate a telescopic series of anti-colonial solidarities that were themselves fundamentally comparative.

This paper studies the transformation of the worker-peasant to reluctant revolutionary industrial worker during the establishment of Iran's copper industry at the Sarcheshmeh copper mine from 1966 to 1979. It explores the procedural rules implemented by mine management, such as coercion and paternalism, and the nature of the employment relationship, including methods of control, bargaining, and dispute resolution. Consideration is given to engagement of different agents with welfare policy and industrial relations, including the nature of capital, the structure of ownership, the path of traditional labor relations, and international contributors on one side and workers’ agency and their structural power in the context of evolving domestic and international environments on the other. Also highlighted is the role played by the workers’ background and economic improvement and how these factors affected their political stance during the 1979 revolution.

Labor law scholars have been receptive to socio legal methods, going beyond doctrinal legal sources and looking to other disciplines including industrial relations, sociology, and history. This Article revisits the development of socio legal labor law scholarship in Germany and the UK in order to understand the different approaches within the context of two different legal and academic cultures, and considers how a comparison can provide new insights at a time when the discipline is in a state of flux. In particular, this Article focuses on how history can provide an entrée into different ways of comparing labor law and labor relations systems. It seeks to start a methodological debate on “how to do” labor law history within the context of the discipline’s socio legal origins. In a final section, it uses insights from history and comparative law in order to develop a new methodology—a “minor comparativism”—which unearths the processes and influences underpinning the historical development of labor law which have hitherto escaped the legal record. Such an approach enables scholars to reassess traditional narratives—a worthwhile endeavor at a time when the future role of labor law in regulating work is under scrutiny.

Most studies of the antibureaucratic revolution have focused on political elites and activists in Serbia, Montenegro, and the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo. Recent scholarship has focused on individual participants, often workers, and takes their agency seriously. Building upon such research, this article explores the antibureaucratic revolution as a particular manifestation of a larger sociocultural process, constitutive of long-term structural changes across the whole of Yugoslavia. An analysis of workplace documents and local newspapers in northwest Croatia demonstrates that antibureaucratic sentiment was not the prerogative of Serbian and Montenegrins but of Yugoslav citizens more generally. Yugoslavs were conditioned by the party-state to be critical of bureaucracy. Workers began to admonish the expansion of administrative positions, which they blamed for their falling living standards. Despite decentralizing and autarkic tendencies in political and economic life in late socialist Yugoslavia, working class discontents (and representations of it) remained remarkably similar across republican boundaries. In Rijeka and its environs, a shift does not occur until in mid-1988. Condemnations of nationalism become more urgent and a skepticism toward the mass protests occurring in Serbia is palpable from this point onward.