There has been a growing recognition amongst scholars that labour historians need to look beyond national borders in order to place the history of the working classes into a much broader context than has hitherto been the case. Whilst studies focused on individual countries are essential, it is only by comparing and contrasting the experiences across time and space that a true understanding of the subject can be attempted. Professor Marcel van der Linden, has contributed much to the debate on cross-border processes and comparisons. This volume makes available in English a collection of twelve of his most important essays on the theme of transnational labour history. Previously published in a range of journals and volumes, with two original contributions, Transnational Labour History brings them together in a single convenient collection, together with a new introduction. This work will undoubtedly provide an invaluable resource for all students of European labour history.

The first major volume to place U.S.-centered labor history in a transnational focus, Workers Across the Americas collects the newest scholarship of Canadianist, Caribbeanist, and Latin American specialists as well as U.S. historians. These essays highlight both the supra- and sub-national aspect of selected topics without neglecting nation-states themselves as historical forces. Indeed, the transnational focus opens new avenues for understanding changes in the concepts, policies, and practice of states, their interactions with each other and their populations, and the ways in which the popular classes resist, react, and advance their interests. What does this transnational turn encompass? And what are its likely perils as well as promise as a framework for research and analysis? To address these questions John French, Julie Greene, Neville Kirk, Aviva Chomsky, Dirk Hoerder, and Vic Satzewich lead off the volume with critical commentaries on the project of transnational labor history. Their responses offer a tour of explanations, tensions, and cautions in the evolution of a new arena of research and writing. Thereafter, Workers Across the Americas groups fifteen research essays around themes of labor and empire, indigenous peoples and labor systems, international feminism and reproductive labor, labor recruitment and immigration control, transnational labor politics, and labor internationalism. Topics range from military labor in the British Empire to coffee workers on the Guatemalan/Mexican border to the role of the International Labor Organization in attempting to set common labor standards. Leading scholars introduce each section and recommend further reading.

This book is the first comprehensive account of the International Labour Organization’s 100-year history. At its heart is the concept of global social policy, which encompasses not only social policy in its national and international dimensions, but also development policy, world trade, international migration and human rights. The book focuses on the ILO’s roles as a key player in debates on poverty, social justice, wealth distribution and social mobility subjects and as a global forum for addressing these issues. The study puts in perspective the manifold ways in which the ILO has helped structure these debates and has made – through its standard-setting, technical cooperation and myriad other activities – practical contributions to the world of work and to global social policy.

Recounts through the examination of a selected number of situations, the problems that the ILO faced, and faces.

This is the first major study of trade unions in the launch of the Cold War in the 1940s. Using unpublished archival material from Europe and the United States, MacShane challenges existing interpretations of international labor's role in the Cold War. He argues that European traditions and olitical differences were more important than American interventions in determining labor's attitudes to international problems after the Second World War.

The studies offered in this volume contribute to a Global Labor History freed from Eurocentrism and methodological nationalism. Using literature from diverse regions, epochs and disciplines, the book provides arguments and conceptual tools for a different interpretation of history – a labor history which integrates the history of slavery and indentured labor, and which pays serious attention to diverging yet interconnected developments in different parts of the world. The following questions are central: ▪ What is the nature of the world working class, on which Global Labor History focuses? How can we define and demarcate that class, and which factors determine its composition? ▪ Which forms of collective action did this working class develop in the course of time, and what is the logic in that development? ▪ What can we learn from adjacent disciplines? Which insights from anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists are useful in the development of Global Labor History?

The first comprehensive and authoritative history of work and labour in Africa; a key text for all working on African Studies and Labour History worldwide.