Labour, Rights, Politics: research, comments, links

National Archives UK; War Cabinet Committee on Women in Work

(researched November-December 2009) Files in LAB5 (Ministry of Labour). Evidence before this committee was heard in the closing stages of World War One. Contains rich description on work processes and gender dynamics in the workplace, for example in the Potteries. Witnesses include Union and labour leaders, for example from National Federation of Women Workers,  National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, the Amalgamated Society of Male and Female Pottery Workers, and GDH Cole for the Labour Research Department. Beatrice Webb sat on the Committee.

Am now back in the UK which has Council/ Borough elections next week, and am about to travel to Paris, serendipitously in the countdown week to final round Presidential election ballot. Last week I was in Scotland at the European Social Science History Conference in Glasgow: Scotland certainly seemed to be gearing up to a Labour resurgence in the election: am now in London where the real contest is Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson. Johnson will doubtless win but it’s an intriguing match: was at a dinner party the other night where the debate was of Johnson cycling in his popular reforms on rails already set by Livingstone. Not all is an up though: the UKIP is running a hate campaign: Europhobic, xenophobic, ‘put up the barricades’ tv ads, in dialogue reminiscent of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in the years of Howard Government, but which would certainly be at least reined in these days in Australia.
But never mind democracy – in these same weeks the real popular focus is on Chelsea FC’s winning through to the finals of the European Champions League, to play Munich. Again though the real loser is Spanish football – with Spain’s plummeting economic status another football triumph was surely not an unreasonable wish.

Cynthia Cockburn's blog.

How great is the internet. It used to be quite difficult to locate Cynthia Cockburn's work online even through university websites pre the days of blog. And now she has her own website/ blog at http://www.cynthiacockburn.org/

Cockburn is both scholar and activist, politically involved in Women in Black against War and in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. These days her research and writing is, as you might know, very much on women and/in peace movements, feminists as anti-militarists, but I first came across it in another genre - gender / labour process - 15 years back during my PhD historical research on, inter alia, women in the printing industry. Cockburn's book re male domination in the UK printing industry - Brothers: Machinery of Dominance (1983) - was a thunderbolt on gender-labour relations in an industry that, pre the take-over by computer publishing, combined craft/ technical skills and manufacturing.

She has an extraordinary and creative facility for persuading people to talk, for listening, and then for writing the detail in a style both direct and vivid. Her cumulative feast of projects has taken in women's peace activities in various states in Europe and the Middle East; she describes her forthcoming book (next month, 2012) Antimilitarism: Political and Gender Dynamics of Movements as  'a study of antiwar, antimilitarist and peace movements in several countries and contexts'. The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (1998) investigated women’s projects of cooperation in Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzogovina and Israel/Palestine in the 90s. It's fascinating stuff, including re the differences between the national cohorts of women which derive from differing cultures, experiences, and immediacy of political urgencies. And - she has been published in Turkish, Georgian, Spanish, Bosnian, Greek, Russian, Korean and German. Now That is being accessible.

A Civil War.

On January 26 1939, in the third year of the Spanish Civil War, General Francisco Franco y Bahamonde finally took Barcelona. In March he took Madrid and in April he and his nationalist, royalist, ruling class forces controlled Spain. Franco established a repressive, elitist, anti-worker regime which would last until his death in 1975.

This photograph (2006) from my own collection is of the Telephone (Telegraph) Building on the perimeter of Plaza Cataluna in Barcelona, at the upper end of the Ramblas. In May 1937 it was held by anarchist/ republican forces in a battle eloquently described by George Orwell in 'Homage to Catalonia'. Next time you're mixing it with the entertainers on the Ramblas, and deciding on a cafe for coffee, take instead this image: 'The bullets from the tower were flying cross the street and a crowd of panic-stricken people was rushing down the Ramblas, away from the firing; up and down the street you could hear snap-snap-snap as the shop-keepers slammed the steel shutters over their windows.' (Orwell, 1938).

Lest we forget.

Free Sakineh - not done yet.

Horrible. I was foolishly surprised to pick up this info last night from an Amnesty tweet. A few months back when the Iran government backed off on stoning Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani for 'adultery while married' we could have been excused for thinking that a measure of safety for Sakineh had been achieved. You might recall that she was originally imprisoned for complicity in the murder of her husband: AWID, Association for Women's Rights in Development, observes that the prison term linked to that conviction has possibly expired. Signing Amnesty petitions seems the most rapid action in support of last minute attempts to stop a hanging. Amnesty UK has a link (on their Take Action page).
AWID also points out that the 'FreeSakineh' website has not been updated since 2010. This is truly shocking, given the great swell of anger apparent across the west when her case became public. I recall being in Rome a year ago, seeing huge photographs of her mounted at high points in key public spaces in the centre of the city. Just how much must be done to save one life?
So please, sign the petitions, talk, tweet, facebook, write, whatever is within or even beyond your scope.

http://www.awid.org/Get-Involved/Urgent-Actions3/Urgent-Action-Amnesty-International-Iran-New-Execution-Fears-for-Sakineh-Mohammadi

New Year and the military spectacular.

It's New Year's Eve (or it was, until 20 minutes back) and Oz has watched the UK summer Edinburgh Tattoo on ABC TV, Again. Such a strange mix of spectacle, military skite, irony (the British National Anthem in Edinburgh Castle?) colonialism, and soldiers dressed to the nines looking too old and way too far being just back from Helmand Province. What head-space are they in and do these games help, or simply hide that space? All is played out against brass bands, skill, and bravado. Male bravado, mostly. Yet oddly there must be some civic pride involved as well - would really like to hear the view of my Scottish friends. I'm not sure that I'm knocking the Tattoo but every year it provokes such mixed feelings here. With the presence of soldiers who are part of current wars this spectacle takes on different responsibilities. Of course the current war aspect isn't new - soldiers fresh from duty in Northern Ireland have been part of the Tattoo in the past. Was their role made explicit? There's a dissertation in this. Any takers? Any knowledge of existing studies? 

Nowhere safe.

Who'd want to be an Afghani asylum-seeker today? After all, consider the options - wait for months or years in detention in Indonesia, waiting against hope to be granted refugee status, eventually patience worn down, desperate for self or loved ones to escape, pay some crook $6000 for a space on a worn-out fishing boat heading for Australia. Drown, or see loved ones friends and travellers drown. What point then of escape to paradise Oz, refugee status.
Or to have got into Britain, with a UK government which lets asylum-seekers in, then throws them out, deports. Almost more cruel? The bureaucracy facilitating bonds of new community, then sending back to the places from which you fled.
Rubbish rationale in Australia to the Indonesian lockout - that this refusal to welcome, 'this processing' off-shore will ultimately defeat the people-smugglers. Meantime tragedies simply accumulate - boat after boat, suicide sfter suicide. People die, or drown.
Too many officials are tying themselves in ugly knots over these disasters. Their focus above all seems to be the boats, the people-smugglers, the point of sale. But it's surely not so hsrd - I suggest an easy solution for the Oz/ Indonesia crisis: simply send the Australian Navy to successively transport asylum-seekers here, on-shore, into communities. So that not only are people physically safe but lo, the people-smuggler business is destroyed. The trick is, to enable the policy-makers.

Riot revisit?

Am about to return to London, several weeks now from the August unrest/riots and anxious to see the dialogue from within as it has tracked with time.
Those were extraordinarily complex days, a confusion of social protest, anger over Mark Duggan's death, frenetic youth enthusiasm for wild times, organised crimes, arson making homeless of workers, outright murder on the streets of Birmingham.
All fed afterwards by ruling class determination to punish everyone involved and to assume that presence of youth meant parent neglect/guilt. And to evict families, so creating more homelessness. Will this have shifted? I somehow doubt it. Resources for analysis? Ah. Depleted by BBC cuts and bruised kneejerk reporting from Sky: looking forward as always to a return to Paul Lewis/ Guardian. And reinforced by openDemocracy.

The Gillard government, its Malaysian deal, and the UN Convention on Refugees

'If you take a bunch of innocent people and throw them into gaol indefinitely, they will eventually break...When they break, we punish them.'
Julian Burnside on the academic blog site < conference.edu.au > on 9 May 2011. Burnside again is articulating the anger so many of us feel. The Gillard Labor government is becoming quite as brutal to asylum-seekers as was Howard's Coalition and, as Burnside points out, is seemingly abandoning compassion in an electoral panic driven by the Right's escalating rants of intolerance. It's a political reality that ill-informed and self-serving rants by people in power will always gain some kind of audience: ethical politics must move beyond them.  Sadly however the PM's dialogue is increasingly cruel, alienating, and flouts human rights. The policies breach international law. Deals are being done with nations who have not ratified the UN Convention and Protocol on the Status of Refugees. Australian media has documented, and disseminated, the conditions of the detention centres to which Australia will send people who have fled here for help in crisis. In those centres, people who have been granted refugee status by the UNHCR may have that status removed by the simple expedient of stealing their official card. There is no doubt what is going on there. So to what are we consigning people, and with no right of return? What in the name of any gods does this Prime Minister think she is doing? Will this Australian Government need to be threatened with the Hague and the International Court of Justice before the 'Good Global Citizen' returns. Or will Julia Gillard now say, as John Howard so famously did 10 years ago when confronted by the UNHCR on mandatory detention of asylum-seekers "We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come"?

James Warner: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and intervention.

openDemocracy (@openDemocracy)
4/05/11 2:19 AM
All the frogs croak before a storm: Dostoevsky versus Tolstoy on Humanitarian Interventions… http://goo.gl/fb/INys2

by US author James Warner - another challenging article from the irreplaceable openDemocracy. Very interesting research. I'm not quite convinced on the parallels, but the narrative fits and the final paragraph is particularly food for thought.

Donald Quataert: Ottoman scholar.

Two years back I launched this blog as (NSW) North Coast Labour History. That's now a link to this page. An early post noted a new labour history website for the Ottoman and modern Middle East, founded and convened by John Chalcraft of the LSE and Donald Quataert at Binghampton. This imaginative initiative serviced Turkish/ Ottoman labour history, and aimed to reach historians and the labour movement beyond Ottoman/ Middle East regions .

Don Quataert died in February this year. He was 69. He was a scholar and a teacher with a tremendous output of important books and publications on labour, work and culture in the Middle East. These include Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1500-1950 (2002 ) ; Miners And the State in the Ottoman Empire: The Zonguldak Coalfield, 1822-1920' (2006);The Ottoman Empire 1700-1922 (2005). Their research base included documents not widely accessed by post-19th century labour scholars, including in Turkey, given the barrier to Ottoman documents created by Kemal Attaturk's shifting of an entire nation from reading and writing in Roman rather than Ottoman/ Arabic characters. Robert Fisk has observed that this shift created a barrier to accessing circa 1915 documents on the Armenian genocide.

Quataert's work is highly regarded in Turkey. Nonetheless, and despite a professional need to retain full access to local resources and support, he didn't shrink from speaking out on what he defined as until recently 'the elephant in the room' of Ottomanist studies, the Armenian genocide of 1915. In a 2006 review of Donald Bloxham’s The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians he urged scholars  to resist polemics on the deportations, ‘to engage’ with issues raised in Bloxham’s book relating to the forced march and mass murder and to ‘encourage the dialogue’  between the parties to this horrific past. While the review indicts the Great Powers for complicity, agreeing with Bloxham that if they ‘as a group, had acted differently, the horrors of 1915 might have been averted’ (as must also be said of the WW1 horrors of 1914-18), it also unequivocally indicts Ottoman officials, as distinct from Turkish nationalists, of the massacres/ genocide while associating the emergent Turkish republican state with a strategic cover-up.  The review was published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. In a February obituary Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News  recalled the Turkish ambassador to the US warning that the published views threatened Turkey’s funding for the (US based, independent ) Institute of Turkish Studies, which Quataert chaired: he resigned from the board rather than retract.

I never met Don Quataert but came across his work and the labour history website when researching for my first visit to Turkey - to Istanbul - in 2008. In Istanbul I met a sophisticated, exciting, hospitable city bridging Asian and Europe - literally, with the Bosphorus - which, as it has done for visitors over millenia, shifted my perspectives on the world. Istanbul also revealed a labour rich culture - a huge construction and manufacturing base, large shipyards, a working port, and a trade union movement in constant tension with the nation's push to become a voice and a stakeholder in Europe. So, back home in Australia I tried unsuccessfully to find labour history comrades also working on Turkish/ Middle East labour movement or with links to there. This apparent absence of like studies in Australia's labour history networks despite Australia's having a critical Turkish immigrant population reinforced my understanding of the significance of the Quataert/ Chalcraft initiative and admiration for Quataert's wider work. With this posting I want to register my thanks: vale Don Quataert.