Scholars working on histories of labor and migration in the twentieth century have examined diverse situations in which laborers and workers traveled across borders international and domestic in order to work and better their lives. Such travel was often enabled implicitly or explicitly by state practices. At the same time, violent regimes of border/boundary policing, politics of differentiation and segregation, and worker/laborer dissent were common occurrences. Studies that have explored the dynamic relationship between migration and labor tend to be focused within particular geographical areas, taking into account the geopolitical contexts specific to those regions but eliding conversations across regional, geographical differences. This panel brings together scholarship on labor and mobility in the twentieth century from the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia. It demonstrates the centrality of boundary-crossing as well as boundary-making in the process of labor expropriation conducted by the state and capital. It also shows how laborers/workers banded together and fought for their rights against exploitative regimes of work. Ultimately, our panel illustrates the resonances in working conditions, state-society relations, and community-building practices across the world and theorizes how histories of labor in the twentieth century may be connected in unexpected ways.

Erik Bernardino examines the rise of a contract labor system in the California borderlands in the first half of the twentieth century and how this system relied on constructing migrant mobility as both a criminal and desirable attribute. Situated in the decades preceding Namibia’s 1990 independence from apartheid South Africa, Stephanie Quinn’s paper explores how colonial officials and employers debated who should bear the cost of distributing wealth to Black workers, whose labor had been expropriated using a network of regional, urban, and intra-urban boundaries. Alena Alamgir highlights migrant workers’ agency in regard to the defense of their rights and interests by reconstructing and analyzing a 12-day strike organized by a group of (primarily) female Vietnamese workers in a Czechoslovak plant cultivation company in the spring of 1983. Focusing on a state-owned steel mill in southwestern China, Sarah Chang considers how China’s urban versus rural household registration system played an integral role in the management and expropriation of rural labor in China’s state factories from 1958 to 1999.