Kim Scipes (2020) The AFL-CIO's foreign policy program

Scipes, Kim. 2020. “The AFL-CIO’s foreign policy program: Where historians now stand.” Class, Race and Corporate Power 8(2), Article 5. 

Abstract

The struggle to end the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy program, as part of the effort to build global labor solidarity, began in the late 1960s but has qualitatively escalated since 2010. This paper details these efforts, while showing the advances over the preceding ten years. Interestingly, while labor historians have provided some important contributions in the past, they have refused to engage with the work of Kim Scipes, a major writer in the field, ignoring his path-breaking work yet supporting some of his major claims. The question is asked whether historians in this sub-discipline are being taught to over-prioritize archival works from governmental and organizational collections while ignoring what is happening in the real world.

Recommended Citation

Scipes, Kim (2020) "The AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy Program: Where Historians Now Stand," Class, Race and Corporate Power: Vol. 8 : Iss. 2 , Article 5.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol8/iss2/5

 

Bridget Kenny (2019) The sprawl of malls

Kenny, Bridget. 2019. “The sprawl of malls: Financialisation, service work and inequality in Johannesburg’s urban geography.” Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa 101: 36-60.

Abstract:

This paper considers the discussion of the growth of service jobs in arguments around inequality in greater Johannesburg. It provides a conceptual reframing by imbricating service jobs with the expansion of malls and retail property development through Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), an instrument of financial capital investment. It posits a conjunctural analysis bringing together low wage service jobs with transformations in urban geography in relation to property investment and local government practice. Thus, the site of the 'mall' becomes both a place of unequal relations and a conceptual node to think through the articulation of social relations reproducing inequalities of race, gender and class.

Bridget Kenny (2020) Servicing intimate publics

Kenny, Bridget. 2020. “Servicing ‘intimate publics’: Johannesburg and Baltimore department stores in the 1960s.” Safundi, The Journal of South African and American Studies 21(2): 115-139.

ABSTRACT

Based on archival and interview research in the US and South Africa, this paper examines two moments of public debate around access to the space of department stores in Johannesburg and in Baltimore in the 1960s. In Baltimore, African American students organized a sit-in protest at lunch counters and restaurants of major department stores to contest not being served. In Johannesburg, the National Union of Distributive Workers (NUDW), campaigned against job reservation in service and clerical work in stores in Johannesburg to argue for black workers’ access to employment. The paper contends that as “intimate publics,” department stores offer a site to compare the affective articulations of race, class, and gender in both places, which track differing political imaginaries at a moment when consumption was expanding and workforces were changing.

KEYWORDS: Department store, Baltimore, Johannesburg, gender, race, service work

Bridget Kenny (2020) the South African labour movement

Kenny, Bridget. 2020. “The South African labour movement: A fragmented and shifting terrain.” Tempo Social, revista de sociologia da USP 32(1): 119-136.

Bridget Kenny^* 
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6255-4971

^*University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

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ABSTRACT

This paper reviews the state of the South African labour movement. It discusses trade unions within the context of national political dynamics, including the Tripartite Alliance and neoliberalism, as well as growing precarianization of work within South Africa. It examines splits within the major federation and explores debates around union renewal and new worker organizations. It argues that the political terrain is fragmented and shifting, but workers’ collective labour politics abides.

Key words: Labour movement; South Africa; COSATU; New forms of organization

Bridget Kenny (2020) To protect white men

Kenny, Bridget. 2020. “To protect white men: Job reservation in elevators in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s.” Social History 45(4): 500-521.

ABSTRACT

‘Job reservation’ bolstered apartheid state power in South Africa through affirming the status and class position of whites. Under Section 77 of the 1956 Industrial Conciliation Act, an industrial tribunal could be set up to investigate whether a particular occupation might be reserved by race. This article examines the debates surrounding the investigation into an unusual job category – that of the passenger lift attendant within the service sector – demonstrating that what was at stake were the intimacies of gender, sexuality and respectability that were also constitutive of class and race. The National Party was interested in protecting jobs for infirm and elderly white men, and the debate around job reservation in lift operation reveals the centrality of the concept of the white male breadwinner within state policy. However, employers and building owners insisted on the importance of service to the white public as an alternative logic, opening up the possibility of using not only white women’s labour but also automatic lift technology, undermining the very basis on which job reservation rested. Thus the article highlights the contradictory ideological work of job reservation – of protecting white men – in Johannesburg during the 1950s and 1960s.

KEYWORDS: lifts, elevators, job reservation, South Africa, Johannesburg, race, class, gender