Solidarity™: Student Activism,Affective Labor,and the Fair Trade Campaign in the United States

Abstract: Ethical labeling campaigns have become a central means for diffusing and negotiating conflicts between social movements and market actors. Fair Trade was a pioneering ethical label and, by many accounts, a success. For nearly a decade, United Students for Fair Trade (USFT) activists worked to build the reputation of the Fair Trade Certified (FTC) label, but in Fall 2011 they withdrew their support and urged ethical consumers to do the same. This paper is an urgent reflection on USFT's trajectory from guerrilla marketing to boycotting FTC products. While their actions may appear shortsighted and contradictory, their decision to withdraw support from the FTC label has roots in a long struggle for control of Fair Trade. We argue that their actions signal a new stage in consumer action, as activists lose faith in the legitimacy of ethical labels and instead target the agencies that own the ethical brandscape.     

EDITORS' FOREWORD

Canadian federal energy policy since the early 1970s has run counter to the interests of the producing provinces. Federal policy has always been predicated upon two points: sufficient domestic supply and acceptable domestic prices. Until the early 1970s, federal policy had been complementary to that of both the producer and consumer provinces. Natural gas shortages in 1970 and 1971, the OPEC embargo, and the quadrupling of prices radically changed federal policy. Exports were no longer promoted, and the federal government undertook to protect Canada from the inflationary pressures of rising world energy costs. These policies have run counter to those of the energy producing provinces, particularly to those of Alberta.

While it would appear that producer-provinces would have sufficient leverage to insist upon their interests, the federal government has made good use of its direct and indirect powers to set the agenda. This suggests that the Trudeau government has begun a recentralization of federal prerogative in an area historically the preserve of the provinces. Because the government has largely been successful, a difference between federal governments and supranational organizations is suggested. In supranational organizations the power to veto is vested in the governments of the states-members; in an integrated federal state, that power resides in the central government.     

Land and languor: ethical imaginations of work and forest in northeast Madagascar

Since the early twentieth century, the practice of slash‐and‐burn agriculture by Betsimisaraka subsistence farmers of eastern Madagascar, and their reluctance to engage in wage labor processes, have been interpreted by French and other Malagasy people as symptoms Betsimisaraka laziness. Colonial officials’ idea of remedying Betsimisaraka laziness justified the imposition of wage work and forest conservation. The paper argues that colonial settlers, by conflating their vision of lazy labor and a victimized landscape, did not apprehend the co‐existence of an alternative work ethic which entailed a different time‐space orientation and social relationship to land. While scholars have analyzed the “laziness” of colonial subjects as a form of subaltern resistance to colonial domination, resistance alone does not account for the fact that under certain conditions Betsimisaraka people have also willingly partaken in wage labor. This article reveals how the labor and land ethics of Betsimisaraka farmers have actively contributed to the social and natural environments of capitalism.     

中国民营经济发展若干问题研究

民营经济是一种以民为本的民本经济;生产劳动是满足人民群众日苴增长的物质和化需要的直接的经济活劝;保护私有财产权是大国兴起之路;构建和谐社会必须正确看待当前收分配差距;必须给民营经济发展创造良好的社会环境,所有这些都是中国民营经济发展中的重要理论和政策问题。为此,我们很有必要从理论上加深对民营经济的认识,在实践中进一步促进民营经济的发展．     

Suku and the Self-Valorization of Chinese Women Workers: Before,during, and after Enterprise Privatization

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used suku (speaking bitterness) in ideological education movements to teach subaltern women to give voice to their personal narratives of oppression in accordance with Maoist political doctrine. Suku is thus a historically specific practice and a culturally specific form of women’s narrative practice. By listening to and observing the post-Mao suku narrative performance of my grandmother, a retired State-Owned Enterprise (SOE) worker, I show that her suku is a gendered performance, a form of labor that blurs production and reproduction, and a form of embedded personhood; and that suku as a form of narrative persisted through the period of economic reforms, even though its intent and audience became transformed. My kin relationship with this particular suku performance allows an analysis of the impact of suku on cross-generational relationships—those between first-generation SOE workers and laid-off SOE workers in former SOE families. Furthermore, I argue that suku can be seen as a form of labor and self-valorization of Chinese women workers discarded in the new economy, and contrary to its original disciplinary purposes, as a form of resistance.     

“For the Means of Your Subsistence ... Look Under God to Your Own Industry and Frugality”: Life and Labor in Gerrit Smith's Peterboro

The rural hamlet of Peterboro, the home of Gerrit Smith, the nineteenth century's most famous social reformer, has been portrayed as an idyllic and peaceful community free of class conflict. The extensive documentary record suggests a less harmonious situation and indicates that the community was fraught with struggle, engendered as much by Smith's reform efforts as by general class relations. This article examines class-based struggle through several vignettes, including a look at the voting patterns of the Liberty party in Smithfield, the social conditions of African Americans who lived in Peterboro, and the story of the temperance hotel.     

Children's Strikes, Parents' Rights: Paterson and Five Points

While Karen Calvert's book, Children in the House, deals with middle-class play, there is very little work devoted to children's toys and games in a working-class context. This paper uses the toy assemblages from two working-class sites to begin a discussion of working-class play and the struggle nineteenth-century working-class parents waged to impart their own values to their children. Because marbles were the predominant toy recovered from both sites, the nature of the game is discussed, and its relationship to working-class values is considered.     

Plant-food preparation area on an Upper Paleolithic brush hut floor at Ohalo II,Israel

While a division of domestic space into separate sectors dedicated to different activities has been suggested for a number of Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherer sites, it has never been demonstrated based on plant remains from this period. Moreover, due to the usual scarcity of plant macrofossils in archaeological deposits, only animal food preparation activities associated with hearths have been reported in the literature on Near Eastern prehistory. Ohalo II (Israel) is the first Upper Paleolithic site where such a patterned use of interior space and plant processing are evidenced by the distribution of plant remains on a sealed floor of a brush hut. This paper describes and interprets the distribution of almost 60,000 identified seeds and other plant remains on that floor, proposing a reconstruction of three activity areas in the interior of the 12-m² hut: processing of food centered on a grinding stone; a flint knapping area; and an access area in between. Finally, it is suggested that these activity areas might represent male-female division of labor.     

民国北京政府时期劳动灾害赔偿制度探析

民国北京政府时期,劳动灾害频繁发生,政府开始通过劳工立法规范雇主在灾害赔偿方面的责任。灾害赔偿立法由各行业政府主管部门起草并出台。制度属于现代劳动灾害赔偿制度中的雇主责任制模式。它覆盖工业、矿业、交通业等现代工人。与此时的国际劳工组织相关标准进行比较,中国制度的赔偿项目齐全,伤病医疗费和伤病期间工资等赔偿标准较高,残废抚恤金和遗族抚恤金则不及。制度虽然实施效果不佳,但这是劳动灾害赔偿首次进入立法,对后来政府的立法有借鉴意义。     

对高校教育中创新教育的思考

本文以建构主义理论为指导,提出培养人的创新能力是高校素质教育的本质内涵．培养具有创新精神的专门人才是高校实施创新教育的核心。