This article explores the Chicago School Board’s 1915 union-busting effort against the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, a union of women teachers co-founded by two Catholics. This article argues that newspaper coverage reveals that the gender identities and religious affiliations of the CTF members made them doubly intolerable. Not only did their very presence in public schools threaten to introduce Catholicism into a space that Protestants viewed as their domain, but these women also had the temerity to expect just compensation for their work. The Catholicism of the CTF’s leaders attracted nativist prejudice, and the press’s fixation on religious difference reframed the Loeb Affair from a conflict over salaries, pensions, and union membership into an endeavor to wrest the schools from Catholic control. Whatever the initial motivation of the Loeb Rule, anti-Catholicism became a weapon to defeat the economic and equality claims of women who demanded to be treated as professionals rather than as proxy mothers. From this viewpoint, the Loeb Affair figures not only as a loss for organized labor and teacher organizing, but it also illustrates Progressive Era beliefs about competing ways of performing womanhood, the role of religion in public schools, and the fear of Catholic power.

Scholars of the politics of consumption in the United States have argued that the early twentieth century marked the emergence of a new kind of “economic” or “consumer citizenship” which linked Americans’ political identity with their ability to access and afford mass-produced goods.1 A fuller examination of the participation of immigrants in these economistic visions of citizenship remains to be established. The years surrounding World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Max Ehrenfreund has recently suggested, constituted a critical moment when consumption and citizenship became more tightly linked not only through the choice to consume but also to refrain from consumption.2 In this piece, I explore “financial citizenship,” a term I used to describe an alternative form of civic belonging linking affinities for markets and politics.3 Financial citizenship—namely, the public outcry for a more responsive economic system that could provide cash for everyday transactions, efficient access to credit, and a variety of financial instruments for other purposes—was a vision raised by a broad range of demographic groups, from northeastern ironworkers to midwestern farmers to Black wage workers in the urban New South.4

“Labor” as a specific domain of embodied experience and a source of imagery and figurative language in early China remains understudied. The study invites critical attention to this topic, focusing on four types of imagery of labor—plowing, weaving, fishing, and hunting—which constituted an interpenetrated rhetorical body sustaining varying socio-political and intellectual agendas. Either foregrounded with expressive rhetorical figures like metaphor and allegory or sedimented in commonplace language, the four types of labor imagery emerged and proliferated to present a constellation of moral, epistemic, and aesthetic values toward the characterization of specific practices of ruling, learning, speaking, and writing, as well as the intellectual agency thereof. This rhetorical phenomenon emerged in pre-imperial China and gained new prominence during Han times. Especially since the first century bce, the four tropes of labor were made particularly useful to characterize a growing body of intellectual labor, which was increasingly engaged and coupled with literary learning and production in a manner of self-oriented accumulation and manifestation. This change worked in concert with a forcefully emerging and proliferating literary culture, as well as its embedded scholarly aesthetics and ideology.

Recent commentaries on Iran have stressed attacks on workers and wages by a neoliberal regime bent on slashing costs in response to sanctions, stagnation, and inflation. At the same time, Iranian political elites and government experts uniformly advocate for higher minimum pay. Underneath this paradox lies a complex shift of class inequality away from salary scales determined by firms and government agencies toward a single minimum wage set every year by the Supreme Labor Council, the central body responsible for employment policy. The result is not labor discipline or wage repression but an unruly wage containment state. Integrating archival sources, interviews, and statistical data, the article examines how elite conflicts, societal interests, and economic forces have structured the politics of pay in Iran. Framed comparatively, Iran’s wage containment state is a product of the way in which politics, development, and international relations have shaped Iranian capitalism.

What explains the contested conditions for migrant worker citizenship under socialism? Migration scholarship often elides socialist contexts, tracing migrant deservingness to the neoliberal rise of labor-based conditionality for legal status across Western states in the late twentieth century. However, a broader historiography suggests that socialist states, despite their institutional differences, conditioned migrant inclusion on labor performance throughout the twentieth century. To explain how this form of civic conditionality operated under socialism, this paper draws on the case of migrant “limit” worker management in Moscow from the early 1960s to 1987. Using archival materials, I show that state-owned enterprises operated as migration intermediaries, establishing and enforcing a labor-based conditionality for local citizenship even as the state pursued additional civic aims. I find that civic campaigns initiated in the early 1960s provided an ideological framework and material base for enterprises to govern migrant workers at their dormitories. Managers and officials at the dormitory redirected resources intended for social activism and cultural tutelage toward ensuring baseline productivity and compliance. Enterprise managers and union officials additionally substituted the material conditions at the dormitory for the assessments of individual migrants’ moral and productive status. This paper extends the literature on migrant deservingness to a socialist context, showing how conditionality for civic inclusion develops beyond the neoliberal shifts in contemporary citizenship.

Management of broadleaf weeds in chile pepper may be improved by including a rotation with sorghum treated with selective, non-residual herbicides. However, herbicides applied to sorghum specifically for managing weeds in subsequent chile pepper crops have not been evaluated. This study evaluated two herbicide treatments applied to sorghum for their effects on broadleaf weed density and hand hoeing time in chile pepper crops the following year, and compared the treatments for their net economic benefits across sorghum and chile pepper growing seasons. Treatments included 1) a sorghum nontreated control; 2) one herbicide application, which was a premix combination of 2,4-D (0.35 kg ai ha−1), bromoxynil (0.35 kg ai ha−1), and fluroxypyr (0.14 kg ai ha−1) applied at the 4-leaf stage of sorghum; 3) two herbicide applications, which included the aforementioned premix combination followed by bromoxynil (0.28 kg ai ha−1) applied at the 6-leaf stage of sorghum; and 4) weed-free sorghum using hand hoeing. Results indicated that broadleaf weeds covered less than 10% of the ground where sorghum had been treated with herbicides. The two-application treatment resulted in 24% fewer broadleaf weeds in chile pepper than in sorghum that had been hoed by hand, and 63% fewer than the one-application treatment. Hand hoeing time for chile pepper was similar among the two-application treatment, one-application treatment, and weed-free sorghum. A partial budget analysis indicated that the one-application treatment provided greater net economic benefit than the two-application treatment (US$6,550 ha−1 vs. US$5,894 ha−1), due to lower input costs and greater overall gross revenue. These findings indicate that a two-application treatment maximizes reductions of broadleaf weeds in chile pepper caused by rotational sorghum; however, the one-application treatment may be a cost-effective approach to reducing broadleaf weeds in chile pepper.

This article is an environmental history of Anaconda Copper Company’s disposal of hundreds of thousands of tons of toxic waste from its Potrerillos and El Salvador mines into Chile’s Río Salado and Bahía de Chañaral. First, it uncovers a long history of disputes between copper companies and workers who panned the river for tailings. This early water war in Chile was shaped by competing understandings of water’s legal status. While workers claimed rights under the water law’s definition of water as a bien nacional de uso común, mining companies invoked the mining code and contended that the river’s water and waste were private property under civil law. Mining companies claimed rivers’ water by treating rivers in legal terms as mines and property of the state, bienes fiscales, that could be conceded as private property. They argued that human engineering of rivers in dams and canals, and through pollution, made rivers into a commodity and a form of property akin to subsoil minerals. Second, the article describes how, during the social reformist government of Eduardo Frei (1964–1970) and the revolutionary government of Salvador Allende (1970–1973), the state asserted control over Chile’s waterways while balancing centralized state management of water in the name of development with local users’ claims of long-standing riparian use rights. Third, the article traces the long history of the state and mining companies treating water as an economic commodity, often superseding local use rights, and argues that this history built the foundation for the later privatization of water during the Pinochet dictatorship. The article demonstrates that the privatization of water in Chile under Pinochet had its origins in the resolution of the tension between water and civil law in favor of extending property rights to water and building as a subsidy to transnational mining companies. This meant rolling back state management of rivers and often eroding local users’ water rights. Finally, the article concludes by examining the town of Chañaral’s successful 1987 lawsuit against the El Salvador mine to win an injunction against further pollution of the Salado as part of a moment of broader Latin American “environmental constitutionalism” during the 1980s. While this legal victory reflected a significant change in environmental law and an emergent environmentalist movement in Chile and across Latin America, it struck a blow to hundreds of workers who depended on extracting tailings from the river for their livelihood and who responded with unsuccessful protests.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the concepts of surplus labor, disguised unemployment, and underemployment emerged as key tools for thinking about economic development in the emerging “Third World.” This article examines how these concepts were developed and debated in Egypt, a country that was at the forefront of postcolonial planning efforts internationally. To this end, the article examines the statistical construction of the “labor problem” and the way it shaped competing visions of economic development among national, colonial, and international actors. Using a variety of sources—including Egyptian government archives, documents from the British Foreign Office, and the International Labour Organization—the article contributes to the global history of development and quantification, and contributes to the scholarship on Nasserism in Egypt.