ABSTRACT This article examines how institutional documents produced within the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) system have defined the roles of the ACFTU from its establishment in 1925 to the present. Drawing on union constitutions, congress reports, union resolutions, and union newspapers, the article reconstructs how successive institutional texts defined the roles assigned to trade unions. During the revolutionary period from 1925 to 1948, union documents described trade unions as organizations responsible for mobilizing workers in support of revolutionary struggle. During the period of socialist construction from 1949 to 1977, union documents emphasized participation in national production and economic development. During the reform era from 1978 to 2012, official texts gave attention to mediation of labor disputes and the protection of workers’ legal rights. After 2013, union documents have highlighted political education and ideological guidance among workers in a rapidly changing labor market. By reconstructing these successive descriptions across a century of union documents, the article shows how the roles assigned to Chinese trade unions were repeatedly redefined in response to changing political and economic priorities.

ABSTRACT Current mainstream literature examines the evolution of worker management and management structures in SOEs solely at the macro level, treating state and managerial actors as a unified bloc that, across all historical periods, has dominated transformations in worker management structures. This article argues that transformations of SOE management structures are shaped by a complex and shifting tripartite relationship among state bureaucrats, enterprise managers, and ordinary workers. The analysis identifies distinct historical phases: an initial period of imbalanced state-manager cooperation; a period of tripartite integration during the Maoist era that fostered workplace participation; and a post-reform era in which a reinforced state-manager alliance prioritized efficiency, marginalizing workers’ democratic roles. Currently, a nascent three-pillar dynamic is emerging, characterized by increased state supervision, managerial accountability, and a modest restoration of workers’ consultative and management rights, though a fully balanced structure remains unrealized. By integrating macro-structural shifts with micro-level workplace politics, this framework offers a new perspective on the contingent and contested evolution of workers’ democracy within China’s political economy.

ABSTRACT This article examines the artistic practices of Chinese factory workers in the twentieth century, focusing on predominantly visual artworks that represented labor conditions, fostered class consciousness, and constructed worker identities. It argues that factory art functioned not only as a tool for political propaganda and class education but also as a space for workers to express subjectivity and negotiate identity. Drawing on primary sources, including factory archives, propaganda posters, murals, and workers’ photography, the study employs historical and visual culture analysis to trace the evolution of factory art from the 1950s to the 1990s. The findings show that through participatory artistic creation, workers shifted from ‘passive producers’ to ‘active cultural constructors,’ forming labor identities that encompassed both collective and individual dimensions. This process highlights art’s value as a ‘living archive’ of labor history. The article demonstrates that the transformation of factory art reflects changing political and economic contexts while revealing the logic of workers’ subjective practices, offering a cross-disciplinary framework for labor culture studies and deepening understanding of the social and cultural roles of the Chinese working class.

ABSTRACT This article argues that despite constituting a majority of the workforce, women workers in tea plantations of Assam have remained largely excluded from trade union leadership and formal political representation. Drawing on subaltern perspectives and feminist labor theory, it examines how plantation patriarchy, labor hierarchies and male-dominated union bureaucracies particularly within the Assam Chah Mazdoor Sangha (ACMS) have historically constrained women’s political voice. Based in-depth interviews, archival sources and participant observation conducted in two tea estates in Jorhat district, the study shows that trade unionism after independence did little to disrupt these gendered exclusions. At the same time, it reveals how women cultivate alternative forms of leadership through everyday practices and informal collective spaces such as Mothers’ Clubs and Self-Help Groups. These arenas, initially framed around welfare, have become sites where women negotiate authority, articulate grievances and develop political capabilities. The article contends that such informal forms of leadership constitute a subaltern political process that reshapes labor politics from below, even as formal union structures remain resistant to gender inclusion. By foregrounding women’s everyday political practices, the study contributes to labor history debates on agency, representation and the gendered transformation of leadership in postcolonial tea plantations .

ABSTRACT; During the Italian occupation of Albania (1939–1943), the Fascist regime launched a broad project of Italianization that involved both tourism and vocational education. Within this framework, the founding of the Shkolla Bujtinore në Shqipni in Tirana in 1942 exemplifies how vocational training were shaped by political and ideological aims. Officially meant to train local elites and workers, the school pursued a wider goal: producing disciplined individuals, laborers taught also the daily performance of the empire’s symbolic order. Drawing on unpublished archival sources and Michel Foucault’s theoretical insights (1975, 1979), this article examines an overlooked dimension of Italian colonial history: the role of service labor in sustaining colonial domination as a system of power and social control. Special focus is given to the Albanian model, inspired by the Hospitality School in Merano, a city in former South Tyrol subjected to a coercive Italianization campaign. The Tirana case highlights continuities between strategies applied in internal frontier regions and those imposed in colonial territories, showing how labor was framed not merely as economic but also as symbolic and ideological. Although active for little more than a year 81942-1943), the school represented a revealing laboratory of Fascist pedagogies of service.

ABSTRACT Understanding farm labor contractors to be central agents of exploitation in the California fields, the United Farm Workers demanded hiring hall provisions be included when it started winning contracts in the 1960s. Hiring halls were a crucial means for gaining control over the labor supply and thus a means for significantly decasualizing farm labor. Growers fought back, seeking to protect their traditional control over hiring. A multifaceted class struggle thus evolved, one in which the role of the state was also always important. This paper traces this struggle, showing how histories of the UFW, while noting the importance of the hiring hall to the fate of the union, underestimate both the significant challenges the union faced in running its halls and the intensity of the class struggle within which the halls operated. This article clarifies why and how the hiring hall became an important flashpoint in UFW’s two-decade-long effort to unionize farmworkers, why it was so strongly resisted by growers, the role the state played in mediating this conflict, and, finally, the ways in which the UFW ultimately failed in its quest to wrestle control over the labor supply from growers and their allied farm labor contractors.

ABSTRACT In the history of Chinese journalism, Chinese people who worked for foreign newspapers in China in the nineteenth century were the earliest newspaper workers in China, whose identities, work and organizational status rarely received attention. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, when the English daily The North-China Daily News, which had been operating in China for a century, announced its closure, the management wanted to lay off all the more than 120 Chinese workers at a low price. Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, the Chinese workers union conducted more than 10 rounds of difficult negotiations with the management, and finally won a dismissal compensation package for all Chinese workers based on length of service and labor merit, effectively safeguarding the rights and interests of workers and guaranteeing their lives after dismissal. In this process, the Shanghai Municipal Labor Bureau and the Shanghai Printing Workers Union, through specific guidance, made the socialist values such as ‘glory of workers’, ‘collectivism’ and ‘people-centered principle’ rooted in the hearts of the workers, prompting them to transform in their political identity and ideological consciousness from being exploited to the masters of new China under communism.

ABSTRACT In the process of urban-rural integrated development, community-based factories in some developing countries have created local employment opportunities for rural female workers. However, existing literature has predominantly focused on the impact of rural-to-urban migration on female workers, while insufficient attention has been given to the micro-level transformations and subjectivity development brought about by local employment. Using Yanbo Village in Guizhou Province, China, as a case study, this study employs qualitative methods and fieldwork investigations to examine how local employment reshapes the agency of rural female workers across economic, familial, and socio-cultural dimensions. The findings reveal that local employment enhances rural women’s economic autonomy and challenges patriarchal norms. The flexible work arrangements in community factories help mitigate the role conflicts rural women experience between career aspirations and domestic responsibilities. Moreover, workplace training and professional engagement further facilitate cultural cognition shifts and the awakening of self-awareness among rural female workers. This study contributes to feminist theories of subjectivity from an employment perspective and offers practical insights into gender-inclusive rural development.