Glbl Hist Worker Self-Activity

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

There is renewed attention to workers and the labor movement in the United States. Much of this tends to focus on statistics, union leaders, and implications for politicians, and moreover assumes that "the worker" is a white man in a hardhat. But what is life on the job actually like? What are workers, in fact, thinking and doing? This is a “terra incognita,” an unknown or unexplored land, in the coverage. This course interrogates a global history of worker self-activity, from the nineteenth century to the present, to explode these assumptions and open up new perspectives on the past and present of this major part of human society: life at work. We study texts that consider, “from below,” plantation slavery, agricultural work, convict labor, indentured migrant labor, factory work, maritime work, domestic work, mine work, and white-collar work—with examples drawn from around the world. We will think critically about the insights that this mix of scholarly works, oral histories, and worker writings might offer us about class society, historical social change, and the prospects for struggle today.