Editor's Introduction

This issue develops a theme of knowledge workers’ labor amid the transformations of capitalism. Jiemin Tina Wei's article, “Amazon Mechanical Turk: The Human Sciences’ Labor Problem,” takes us into unexplored dimensions of the gig economy. Wei examines the growing conflict between workers who labor at digital piecework for Amazon Mechanical Turk, an outsourcing platform, and those who pay their low wages. Amazon named its platform after the eighteenth-century “Mechanical Turk,” seemingly a chess-playing robotic figure but in fact a hoax that hid a human inside (an image of it graces this issue's cover). Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likes to call the human laborers at the heart of his platform “artificial artificial intelligence,” noting that they are cheaper than the real AI. Working for extremely low wages in precarious conditions, the workers of Amazon Mechanical Turk have devised shortcuts and workarounds, leading their human managers to seek ways of further deskilling them. By examining the labor history of knowledge production, Wei shows how the twenty-first-century interactions between humans and artificial intelligence are replicating age-old struggles between exploitation, deskilling, and working-class agency and resistance.In the issue's second article Timothy Minchin offers an important analysis of Douglas Fraser's successful campaign to convince Japanese automakers to open factories in the United States. The “build it here” project moved into high gear in 1980, against the backdrop of widespread deindustrialization and unemployment in the auto industry. As Minchin shows, Fraser helped rebuild the auto industry, convincing leaders of Nissan, Honda, and Toyota to open factories in the United States. Unfortunately, these efforts did not benefit the UAW because the Japanese corporate leaders focused on building factories far away from regions of union strength, mostly in the Southeast, and conducted strenuous—and typically successful—fights to defeat unionization in their plants.In “Contemporary Affairs,” Shannan Clark brings a labor historian's perspective to bear on the recent Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strikes. Their militancy and phenomenal labor movement solidarity allowed the unions to negotiate new contracts despite the original hard line taken by giants like HBO and Amazon. Yet as Clark notes, the unions failed to fully resolve structural issues generated by streaming and AI that threaten the future of their professions. He places their struggles within the larger context of the crisis confronting all culture and knowledge workers these days, from journalists to filmmakers to university faculty and graduate students.In “Arts and Media” our new Associate Editor Kathleen Newman ambitiously issues a manifesto for a “labor theory of culture.” Noting that cultural historians have in recent decades focused on commodification and ideology, Newman calls for a shift toward emphasis on the labor and production of culture. She encourages us to ask questions about production rather than form or reception. We feel certain that the road map she lays out here will generate insights in future “Arts and Media” segments.Margot Canaday's Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America, our Bookmark selection for books published in 2023, ambitiously reinterprets LGBTQ, labor, and capitalism history. She argues that sexual minorities were not as hidden as we've tended to think and instead provided employers an opportunity to practice the precarity we now associate with neoliberalism. Even during the years of the Lavender Scare, queer workers offered advantages to employers: because they were more vulnerable, they were more easily exploited. The result was often not a hidden identity but a quieter one along the lines of “Don't Ask / Don't Tell.” In this way their experience in some respects prefigured the post-Fordist employment regime associated with the digital age and gig economy. In response, five major scholars of LGBTQ and gender history—Christopher Phelps, Julio Capó Jr., Lisa Levenstein, Christina Hanhardt, and Joshua Hollands—probe the scope, periodization, argument, and evidence of Canaday's book while agreeing that it is a milestone achievement. Phelps praises Canaday's emphasis on the precarity of queer workers but questions her argument about their visibility. Canaday's critics praise the gender parity of her book, a useful counter to LGBTQ historiography that often focuses only on gay men, but Capó adds that her focus on certain regions, economic sectors, and white workers leaves much room for research by future scholars. Hanhardt likewise draws attention to the most marginalized and precarious queer workers and asks for more thinking about the forms of state intervention—beyond antidiscrimination laws—that could better support them.The books assessed in our reviews segment cover the United States but also span from South Africa to Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, across Western Europe and onward to Australia and New Zealand. The many highlights include Lorenzo Costaguta taking stock of Shelton Stromquist's Claiming the City; Alex Lichtenstein on Danelle van Zyl-Hermann's Privileged Precariat, which focuses on white workers in South Africa; and Eileen Boris on Dinah Hannaford's Aid and the Help. But don't miss Jefferson Cowie's analysis of A Fabulous Failure, Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein's history of the Clinton presidency. Cowie calls the book a “delightful wonkfest” while arguing that it needed more attention to the world beyond Clinton's administration. Finally, Kevin Boyle's review of Stephen J. Silvia's book The UAW's Southern Gamble pairs beautifully with Timothy Minchin's article in this issue. According to Boyle, Silvia's book deftly explains how and why the entrance of foreign automakers into the United States during the 1980s irreparably damaged unionization in that industry.