A trade union or labor union, often simply referred to as a union, is an organization of workers whose purpose is to maintain or improve the conditions of their employment, such as attaining better wages and benefits, improving working conditions, improving safety standards, establishing complaint procedures, developing rules governing status of employees and protecting and increasing the bargaining power of workers.
In political philosophy, the means of production refers to the generally necessary assets and resources that enable a society to engage in production. While the exact resources encompassed in the term may vary, it is widely agreed to include the classical factors of production as well as the general infrastructure and capital goods necessary to reproduce stable levels of productivity. It can also be used as an abbreviation of the "means of production and distribution" which additionally includes the logistical distribution and delivery of products, generally through distributors; or as an abbreviation of the "means of production, distribution, and exchange" which further includes the exchange of distributed products, generally to consumers.
Labor history is a sub-discipline of social history which specializes on the history of the working classes and the labor movement. Labor historians may concern themselves with issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and other factors besides class but chiefly focus on urban or industrial societies which distinguishes it from rural history.
Marxist feminism is a philosophical variant of feminism that incorporates and extends Marxist theory. Marxist feminism analyzes the ways in which women are exploited through capitalism and the individual ownership of private property. According to Marxist feminists, women's liberation can only be achieved by dismantling the capitalist systems in which they contend much of women's labor is uncompensated. Marxist feminists extend traditional Marxist analysis by applying it to unpaid domestic labor and sex relations.
Transnationalism is a research field and social phenomenon grown out of the heightened interconnectivity between people and the receding economic and social significance of boundaries among nation states.
Labor unions represent United States workers in many industries recognized under US labor law since the 1935 enactment of the National Labor Relations Act. Their activity centers on collective bargaining over wages, benefits, and working conditions for their membership, and on representing their members in disputes with management over violations of contract provisions. Larger labor unions also typically engage in lobbying activities and electioneering at the state and federal level.
Autonomism, also known as Autonomist Marxism, is an anti-capitalist social movement and Marxist-based theoretical current that first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerism. Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became significant after influence from the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in the 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio as well as Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and Franco "Bifo" Berardi.
Abram Lincoln Harris, Jr. was an American economist, academic, anthropologist and a social critic of the condition of blacks in the United States. Considered by many as the first African American to achieve prominence in the field of economics, Harris was also known for his heavy influence on black radical and neo-conservative thought in the United States. As an economist, Harris is most famous for his 1931 collaboration with political scientist Sterling Spero to produce a study on African-American labor history titled The Black Worker and his 1936 work The Negro as Capitalist, in which he criticized black businessmen for not promoting interracial trade. He headed the economics department at Howard University from 1936 to 1945, and was a professor at the University of Chicago from 1945 until his death. As a social critic, Harris took an active radical stance on racial relations by examining historical black involvement in the workplace, and suggested that African Americans needed to take more action in race relations.
Joshua B. Freeman is an author and professor of history at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY) and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the former executive officer of the Graduate Center's history department.
Precarious work is a term that critics use to describe non-standard or temporary employment that may be poorly paid, insecure, unprotected, and unable to support a household. From this perspective, globalization, the shift from the manufacturing sector to the service sector, and the spread of information technology have created a new economy which demands flexibility in the workplace, resulting in the decline of the standard employment relationship, particularly for women. The characterization of temporary work as "precarious" is disputed by some scholars and entrepreneurs who see these changes as positive for individual workers. Precarious work is ultimately a result of a profit driven capitalist organization of work in which employment is largely understood as a cost that needs to be reduced. The social and political consequences vary greatly in terms of gender, age, race, and class and result in varying degrees of inequality and freedom.
Cynthia Estlund is the Catherine A. Rein Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.
The Review of African Political Economy is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering African political economy. It was founded with the help of Lionel Cliffe and is published quarterly by Taylor & Francis since 1974. As of January 2024 the journal will leave Taylor & Francis and become open access. It focuses in particular on the political economy of inequality, exploitation, and oppression, whether driven by global forces or local ones, and to materialist interpretations of change in Africa.
Tom Bramble is a socialist activist, author and retired academic based in Queensland, Australia. He taught Industrial Relations at the University of Queensland for many years and has authored numerous books and articles on the Australian labour movement. He is a member of Socialist Alternative.
The Australian Journal of Politics and History is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes articles about history, political studies, and international affairs, concentrating on Australia, New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region. It was established in 1955 and was published triannually until 1997. In 1998 it began publishing quarterly. Until recently it was edited by Geoff Ginn and Lisa Featherstone and is now edited by Sally Young. It is published by Wiley.
Immanuel Ness is an American academic, and Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York (CUNY), Brooklyn, School of Humanities and Social Sciences. His academic focus is on worker's organization, migration, mobilization and politics. He is also a labour activist.
The Journal of Agrarian Change is a peer-reviewed academic journal established in 2001 covering agrarian political economy. The journal publishes historical and contemporary studies of the social relations and dynamics of production, power relations in agrarian formations and ownership structures and their processes of change.
Tom Brass is an academic who has written widely on peasant studies. For many years he was at the University of Cambridge as an affiliated lecturer in their Faculty of Social and Political Sciences and at Queens' College, Cambridge as their Director of Studies of the Social and Political Sciences. For many years he was an, and then the, editor of the Journal of Peasant Studies. Murray reports Brass as being "dismissive of the cultural turn in peasant studies" and the rise of post-modern perspectives and his notion that this has been a conservative process and that it has lent support to neoliberalism.
Isabelle Ferreras is a Belgian sociologist and a political scientist. She is a professor of sociology at the University of Louvain where she is affiliated with the Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires Démocratie, Institutions, Subjectivité. She is also a senior research associate at the Labor and Work life Program at Harvard Law School. Furthermore, Ferreras is a tenured fellow of the Belgian National Science Foundation. Since the spring of 2017 she has been a member of the group called Classe Technologie et Société in the Royal Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts of Belgium where she in 2021 and 2022 holds the position as president of the academy as well as the chairman of her group.
Jefferson Cowie is an American historian, author and an academic. He is a James G. Stahlman Professor of History and the Director of Economics and History Major at Vanderbilt University; a former fellow of Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science at Stanford University; a fellow at the Society for Humanities at Cornell University, and at the Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies at UC San Diego.
Robert Miles, also known as Bob Miles, is a British sociologist. Miles has worked as a professor of sociology at University of Glasgow and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
