Dennis Novy, Christopher Meissner, David Jacks
We are used to distinguishing between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ globalisation, separated not only by two world wars but also by changes in technology and institutions, and hence by their basic economic logic. The first globalisation is typically described in terms of ‘classical’ trade models of comparative advantage, where countries trade to take advantage of their differences. By contrast, the second globalisation is largely described in terms of ‘new’ trade models based on monopolistic competition and firm heterogeneity. Here, similar countries trade because they are all populated by firms exploiting economies of scale and differences in productivity.
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The Real History of May Day
Photo: AFP via Getty Images (Getty Images)
For most Americans, closing their laptop or clocking out at the end of an eight-hour shift at a restaurant or construction site is the norm, give or take a half-hour or so for lunch. And as tiring as a day of work can be, it’s easy to forget that over a century ago, people died to afford us the right to an eight-hour workday.
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Much of this country’s radical labor tradition has been erased by our political leaders’ allegiance to big business and a reverence for markets and capitalism. But the modicum of rights still afforded to workers in 2021 stem from the 19th century unionists, anarchists, and socialists who first defied the capitalists who created the abhorrent working conditions of the Industrial Revolution.
A historian friend once taught me the German word Zeitgenossen, explaining that it referred to one’s contemporaries, or members of one’s generation, but also more particularly connoted something like a “time-comrade.” Gabe Winant has become a great time-comrade to me, a thinker whose insights into questions of history and generationality, kinship and aging, have deeply enriched my own thinking on these subjects. His first book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America
, traces the transformation of Pittsburgh, the archetypal industrial steel town, into a city powered by the labor of hospital workers. It offers both a finely drawn portrait of working-class life in industrial and postindustrial Pittsburgh and a vision for how care work which has long divided workers along lines of race, gender, and generation could become the basis for a new kind of solidarity. In doing so, it also offers a profound look at how not just the workday