By Zehra Betül Atasoy. In early Republican Turkey, women workers – predominantly in tobacco, weaving, and the food industry – were gathered mainly in the city of Istanbul. Although the number of female workers in industrial production gradually increased, gender-based wage differences continued, with women earning less, and these workers were subjected to long hours and inadequate health and safety conditions.
By Oliver Tappe. When I first visited the Lao tin mining area by the river Nam Phathaen in 2019, I was struck by the image of local villagers digging small pits and tunnels next to the roaring excavators of a Chinese mining company operating in the area.
By Hala Auji and Nurçin İleri. Capitalism’s far-reaching social, industrial, and cultural implications on the socio-political aspects of production, labor, and class struggle are well-documented. Scholarship on labor has emphasized the social and economic aspects of the capitalist economy and the history of working classes in a global context.
By Mariana Stoler. In Establecimientos Metalúrgicos Santa Rosa, the third biggest steel factory in Argentina between 1960 and 1981, the experience of a dangerous production process was a key element in the building of workers’ subjectivity.
By Nico Pizzolato. In the post-war period, during the climax of Fordism, factories became the birthplace of a new political praxis that mixed Marxist social theory with the bustling energy and initiative of novel demographics of workers.
By Nurçin İleri. In January 1936, İzzettin Muhittin Apak, a journalist from Akşam Postası (Evening Post) decided to visit the Silahtarağa Electrical Power Plant, the main electric power supplier of Istanbul, a city with a population of 900,000. What most attracted Apak’s attention was the hospital-like cleanliness of the power plant, and that almost everything was being automated in this vast industrial place.
By Malak Labib. In January 2021, the Egyptian government decided on the liquidation of the Egyptian Iron and Steel Company, one of the country’s oldest public-sector enterprises. While officials pointed to the company’s accumulated losses and its deteriorating production capacity, the decision was met with wide opposition.
By Josefine Carla Hoffmann. Vocational education and training was an important part of Indo-German technical collaboration from the mid-1950s onwards. Companies and other institutions all over India collaborated with the West German state and its companies, rhetorically stressing the priority of skilling the workforce, amongst other things.
By Rick Halpern. The 1930s were a formative period for documentary photography in the United States. The twin phenomena of the Great Depression and the emergence of a militant workers’ movement gave photographers interested in the working class a surfeit of material to shoot.
By Görkem Akgöz. In the New Year’s special issue of the Vatan (Homeland) newspaper, a Santa Claus-like, Father Time figure (zaman, meaning time) rips off the year 1933 from the calendar to reveal the exciting prospects of the coming year.
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research is a platform for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are interested in transregional exchange and research on current issues. TRAFO is the blog of the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) and the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (Bonn).
ISSN: 2199-2134
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