Volume 42 part 2 (August 1997)

Summaries

ASEF BAYAT, Workless Revolutionaries: The Unemployed Movement in Revolutionary Iran
This article chronicles the genesis, process, and forms of collective protests by the unemployed in Iran immediately following the revolution of 1979. It analyzes the dynamics of jobless mobilization in demanding employment and social protection by exploring its complex relationships with the Islamic government, the opposition forces, and the broader revolutionary process. In developing countries, an organized struggle of the unemployed for jobs and protection is extremely rare, notwithstanding high rates of open and concealed joblessness. Family, kinship, patron-client relationships, and especially the informal sector provide essential mechanisms for protection and survival; lack of organization generally prevents the emergence of sustained protest movements. I argue that the conjuncture-based articulation of resources and political opportunity underlying the movement set the Iranian case apart. The resources included the post-revolutionary massive and sudden loss of jobs along with the rise of a revolutionary ideology among the jobless.

DAVID DE VRIES, Productive Clerks: White-Collar Productivism and State-Building in Palestine's Jewish Community, 1920-1950
Jewish clerks during the Zionist state-building period were intensively engaged in the social construction of productivity, and in turning the latter into a mechanism of social restraint. The clerks' productivism and concern with social utility was manifested in the reproduction of accepted Zionist physiocratic and constructivist notions of productivity, as a strategy in the politics of status; in the modernist transformation of the understanding of productivity to suit their own occupational terminology; in the prescription of the necessary qualities of the productive clerk; and in realization of these discursive campaigns in the practice of labor relations. These manifestations challenge a simplistic approach to the dissemination of the language of productivity as either a one-sided nationalist socialization, or a straightforward managerial strategy of control. Based on primary archivial sources of the clerks and their Union this paper argues instead that they reflected the intertwining of national attitudes with from-below advancement of group interests.

KLAUS WEINHAUER, Labour Market, Work Mentality, and Syndicalism: Dock Labour in the United States and Hamburg, 1900-1950s
This international comparison firstly examines labour market organization, casual labour and work mentality in North American seaports and in Hamburg. By contrast to British ports, these ports finally dispensed with casual labour between the world economic crisis and the Second World War, and labour markets there were centralized. Secondly, the industrial militancy of mobile dockworkers without permanent jobs is examined through a consideration of syndicalist organizations (1919-21), and interpreted as an interplay of experiences with power in the network of labour market, workplace and docklands. The study refers repeatedly to the decisive dividing line between regularly and irregularly employed dockworkers. National differences in trade-union representation and dispute behaviour are analysed by reference to dockworkers' direct actions.

JEFFREY BORTZ, "Without Any More Law Than Their Own Caprice": Cotton Textile Workers and the Challenge to Factory Authority During the Mexican Revolution
Much current literature argues that the Mexican revolution was not a revolution at all but rather a series of rebellions that did not fundamentally alter the social order. Similarly, many scholars assert the changes in the Mexican work world during the Mexican revolution were the result of a paternalistic state rather than the product of the actions of workers. This article examines cotton textile workers' relationship to authority in the workplace during the most violent phase of Mexico's revolution, 1910-1921. The results suggest that revolution indeed gripped the country, one that energized the country's still emerging factory proletariat. There is compelling evidence that millhands throughout Mexico continuously and successfully challenged the authority of owners and supervisors, fundamentally altering the social relations of work. It is this "hidden" revolution in the factories that explains changes in labor law, labor organization, and worker power in the immediate post-revolutionary period. The effectiveness of the workers' challenge to authority is what explains: 1) the new regime's need to unionize; 2) the development of pro-labor labor law after the revolution; 3) the power of unions after 1920. In short, workers' challenge to authority during the revolution is what explains the labor outcome of the revolution afterwards.