Volume 53 part 3 (December 2008)

Summaries

James R. Barrett. Was the Personal Political? Reading the Autobiography of American Communism
Taking the communist memoir as a sub-genre of working-class autobiography, the article analyzes, first, the characteristics of the communist autobiography, the conditions under which such works were produced, and their intended functions. Second, the article considers some personal dimensions of American communist history and how this more subjective side of the history relates to the more familiar political narrative of the movement. Recent feminist and other theory of autobiography are employed to analyze approximately forty communist autobiographies and other personal narrative material to analyze personal love and marriage, child rearing and family life, and self-identity within the party.

Dilip Subramanian. Occupational Mobility and Internal Labour Markets: Public Sector Workers' Struggles in Bangalore (circa 1960-1980)
Instead of seeking to conceptualise internal labour markets as either exclusively facilitating employers' drive for greater workplace efficiency or reinforcing the contractual rights of workers, it would be more productive to recast them as institutions inherently ambivalent in character, and hence equally capable of serving the interests of both sides. This also implies that formalised career structures are not always unilateral creations of employers intent on forging a compliant and diligent workforce, as radical labour academics tend to suggest. The agentic role of workers and unions in fighting to establish a codified framework of employment rules need be recognized as well, given the effectiveness of such rules in protecting labour from the arbitrary exercise of managerial power. Procedures governing seniority entitlements and promotion opportunities can again both operate as a unifying and a divisive force. Underscoring anew their ambivalence, they have the potential as much to mobilize workers as to fracture them along generational, skill and ascriptive lines.

Tobias Brinkmann. "Travelling with Ballin": The Impact of American Immigration Policies on Jewish Transmigration within Central Europe 1880-1914
The restrictive immigration policies enacted in 1921 and 1924 by the United States Congress had strong roots in the period before First World War. This is not a new thesis. But this article transcends the confines of American history and looks at the impact of increasingly restrictive American immigration policies in Central Europe since the early 1880s. It describes in detail how German state authorities and the private steamship lines constructed an increasingly hermetic transit corridor through Germany making sure that only persons who would not be rejected by the American immigration inspectors could enter. The well-organized and profitable transit migration system broke down in 1914. The repercussions of the closing American doors forced the Weimar Republic to take a less restrictive line towards foreign aliens than its Imperial predecessor, as large numbers of migrants were stranded in permanent transit.

Jasmien Van Daele. The International Labour Organization (ILO) in Past and Present Research
This article addresses from a multidisciplinary perspective key questions, trends and debates that determine how the history of the International Labour Organization (ILO) has been conceived over the past ninety years. ILO historiography has to be understood in relation to the historical development of the ILO as an institution; the international political, economic, and social context; and the developments within the scientific discipline, especially the fields of (a globalizing) labour history and international relations/organizations. A starting point for this survey essay is the central hypothesis that the scientific interest for the history of international organizations is very much related to the general importance attached to multilateral structures and the belief in the effectiveness of international cooperation. Based on this analysis of the past trends and the current state of the field, I conclude with comments on lacunae and possible paths for future research on ILO history.