This article focuses on the multidisciplinary methodological approaches that undergird the Digitizing Experiences of Migrant Labor in Qatar research project. This project is building a publicly accessible digital archive of oral histories, the first of its kind in the Arabian Peninsula, allowing migrants to narrate their own experiences in their own voices and expanding our understanding of migration in the region. By leveraging digital tools, the project aims to democratise knowledge production and extend access beyond academic audiences to migrant communities themselves, prospective migrants, and their families. The authors of this article, who come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, discuss the methodological and ethical dimensions of creating and disseminating a digital oral history archive. What does it mean to centre the voices of migrants in a space where they have historically been marginalised? How do we balance the imperative of access with concerns about privacy, security, and potential risks of voice identification? What are the limits of anonymisation in an era where digital traces are increasingly difficult to erase? We argue that the act of listening to migrants in their own voices holds an ethical and political power that is lost in conventional text-based formats.

This first study undertaken of Australian ship stewardesses draws attention to specific aspects of working in the male-dominated maritime industry. It takes a feminist methodology that looks to women-authored sources to find evidence of experience not visible in traditional union and business archives. The article makes a case for “Letters to the Editor” as a source for accessing emotions in labour history. These letters allow women’s voices to be foregrounded and provide insights into women’s workplace experiences of sexual harassment, the public–private domain of their work, and gendered concepts like ambition and heroism. Letters reveal girls’ continuing aspirations for paid work.

It is now known that convicts engaged in widespread work-related dissent in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, and that dissent climaxed in 1833–34 undermining penal transportation as a system of labour exploitation. This article explores resistance patterns within a particular road party, Notman’s Gang in Northern Tasmania between 1831 and 1834. An important aim is to demonstrate how quantitative data can be used to place qualitative observations within a wider context. Using a range of digital techniques in conjunction with qualitative analysis, we demonstrate the gang operated as a de facto penal station marked by levels of punishment surpassing those meted out at the notorious settlement at Macquarie Harbour. We also chart the extraordinary level of collective resistance in this gang, identifying their origins, the key activists and the administrative impacts of that resistance. We show the inter-linkages between different modes of protest and the relations and networks that developed between groups and individuals, using these to provide new insights into patterns of convict dissent.

When Filipinas began entering Denmark in unprecedented numbers from the mid-2000s, this group of migrants gained substantial political, scholarly, and media attention. This seemingly sudden inflow of workers from another continent – who at this point primarily entered through the so-called au pair visa – was treated as an isolated, contemporary, and unintelligible phenomenon, clouded in moral panic. However, the au pair migration was but the latest type of entry in a long history of labour migration from the Philippines to Denmark that commenced in the 1960s, a period marked by the development of guest worker programs in western and northern Europe and the emergence of state-brokered labour export in the Philippines. Though recruitment of Philippine labour for the service sector in Europe has been substantial since the 1960s, and though Filipinas came to play a significant role in the Danish hotel and restaurant workers union, they had fallen through the cracks of both labour and migration history. Through oral history and the collection of source material neglected by archival institutions, it became possible to restore the connections between these two fields, to create a Philippine history of Denmark, by tracing the lives of Filipinas recruited for hotel work, and by documenting and narrating the previously overlooked role played by the Philippine state.

Scholarship on workers’ compensation commonly concludes that workers and unions campaign for publicly funded compensation instead of trial-based common law compensation, and that they form temporary alliances with labour governments in the process to achieve their aims. The creation of the Dust Diseases Tribunal provides a unique counterexample to this trend, with a union informally aligning with a conservative government to remove a previous labour government’s scheme and replace it with common law compensation for asbestos victims. By tracing the 1988 FEDFA workers compensation campaign in the context of the Australian Labor Party’s shift towards neoliberalism in this decade, this article complicates scholarship on workers’ compensation by discussing an informal alliance between workers and conservatives that significantly changed workers’ compensation in New South Wales.

This article serves as the first in-depth study of the nature, dynamics and growth of a set of consumer boycotts in early twentieth-century Australia. Labelled “beer strikes,” these targeted hotels over issues such as the price and quality of alcohol, food and accommodation, as well as the treatment of staff. The article examines how campaigners created and adapted a body of tactics and forms of organisation between 1901 and 1920, to the point where beer strikes became an established and recurring form of contestation. Identifying beer strikes as a primarily regional tactic, it also sheds new light on consumer activism outside of cities. It finds that beer strikes had continuities with other forms of working-class activism: making use of methods of organisation rooted in unions and in labour politics, and drawing on modern adaptions of ideas concerning “fair” prices and rightful compensation for work. It demonstrates that boycotts played a greater role in Australian working-class distributive and consumer struggles than has been previously acknowledged.

This article maps the transition from a corporatist to a neoliberal consensus in the hotel industry in New Zealand, focussing on the changing labour conditions for migrant workers. We show how the current vulnerabilities for migrant workers, such as poor pay and conditions, and low unionisation, came into being. While much “presentist” research takes migrant worker vulnerability in hospitality and tourism for granted, this article finds that migrant workers did not always experience such vulnerability but, rather, this was constructed over time. The impacts of employment legislation and ownership changes during the 1980s and 1990s were crucial. By taking a critical historical employment relations approach, we better contextualise the current moment of labour shortages, reliance on migrant labour and by “race to the bottom” employment conditions. This suggests that the drive for sustainable employment practices will remain “aspirational” until the power imbalance in New Zealand employment relations is addressed.