Journal of Social History

Buxton, Hilary

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shac055pmid: N/A

In 1915, Sukha Kalloo was buried in the local churchyard in Brockenhurst, England, near the Lady Hardinge Hospital. A hospital sweeper from Bareilly who died during his war service, Kalloo was an “untouchable” whose stigmatized status led to his burial amongst several New Zealand gravesites—alongside an epitaph celebrating his “sacrifice” for “King & Empire.” Pieced together from official correspondence, fictional narrative, and a very real headstone, Kalloo is one of many laborers whose global experiences Radhika Singha reconstructs in The Coolie’s Great War. Arriving amid a wave of new histories of the empire at war, Singha reminds us that the global dimensions of the conflict were not limited to soldiers, but rather, were supported and augmented by a diverse, integral workforce of non-combatants, from sweepers and mule drivers to water carriers and stretcher bearers. In “rescu[ing] the coolie and ‘the menial’… from historical obscurity,” Singha aligns military history and labor history to challenge Eurocentric narratives of World War One (3). It is hard work to reconstruct the experiences of this nebulous group. Their letters appear less often than those of soldiers in the fragmentary archive of the censor office; their battalion war diaries are more sparsely detailed. Singha has brought this evidence to bear where it exists, fleshing out the laborer’s existence with a wide range of British and Indian periodicals, policy reports, personal memoirs, and records from jails and hospitals alike. This refreshing focus goes a long way towards redirecting longstanding imbalances in the literature on the war and its Indian participants. Some of these corrections are geographic, helpfully challenging the orthodoxies of First World War Studies in South Asia and abroad. Centering the experiences of the Indian laborer, Singha shifts from the well-studied Western Front to comparatively understudied sites like the Mesopotamian campaign. Examining laborers’ origins, the narrative moves beyond the soldier-centric Punjab to consider participants drawn from southern Madras to Bengal in the East, borderlands in the Northwest and the Himalayan Northeast. Similarly, Singha makes clear the longer continuities of military labor beyond the traditional periodization of 1914-1918: infrastructure previously used to administer the fractious border territories in India was mobilized with new purposes during the war, while many laborers working amid the global conflagration were later transported to fight the Third Anglo-Afghan War after Armistice. Like recent work by Santanu Das and Kate Imy, The Coolie’s Great War never loses sight of the home front. Singha builds out not only laborers’ encounters abroad, but their motivations and social drives at home. Historians of the British Indian Army have demonstrated the rhetorical rigidity and practical flexibility of martial race theory—the belief that particular ethnic, caste, and cultural groups were uniquely endowed with military prowess. Where state rhetoric and recruiting patterns emphasized their selectivity and innate qualities, in practice, the definition of who was fit to be a soldier expanded when necessary—particularly during the manpower shortages of the war. Singha extends this scholarship to reveal similar patterns in the determination of which race, class, and caste was fit for which work. As the demand for labor grew more intense, military recruiters grew more open to a range of workers deemed otherwise unsuitable. Verification of caste was less strict among the follower ranks, though language and region took precedent to ensure cohesion and support networks within units (125). Where the relationship between identity and labor assignment grew more fungible, so too did the line between combatant and non-combatant. Policy demanded that combatants and “followers” be both separate and unequal, to reassert racial and caste hierarchy and to render the war machine more efficient. However, Singha skillfully reveals how laborers sought—in spoken rhetoric, bureaucratic contracts, and everyday actions—to align themselves with soldiery. In attempting to elevate the perception of their work, they tried to shrug off its association with the menial toil of the titular “Coolie” and assert themselves as integral parts of the military machine, whose work deserved the same elevated pay and respect as armed combatants. Some successfully sought further concessions for their service and sacrifice in the form of better salaries, uniforms, and benefits. Further, Singha illustrates the ways in which the colonial administration bent its hierarchical prescriptions when necessary. For example, the term “Coolie Corps” was discontinued for workers serving abroad, while the 1919 Esher Committee Report on military reorganization suggested abolishing the terms “follower” and “sweeper,” uniting both positions under the framework of “soldier.” While terminologies progressed, material inequities remained, both on the part of the state and social relations on the ground. Pay, pensions, and wartime provisions remained distinct from and less generous than those afforded to combatants. And laborers were just as intent on separating themselves from those they considered beneath them—as in the case of the mule-drivers’ (drabis’) anxiety about being aligned with latrine cleaners (mehtars)—as they were with elevating the perception of their own status. Singha reminds us that war is work for soldier and laborer alike, despite the unevenness of solidarities across categories of labor. While Singha’s lens remains focused on the Indian laborer, she sketches out a far more global network of toil than initially suggested. In her extraordinarily detailed account of non-combatants’ lives, she parallels their experience with references to white laborers in the British Labour Battalions, colonial soldiers assigned to work duty like the British West Indian Regiment, and, most significantly, the deeply understudied workforces of the South African Native Labour Corps (the SANLC) and the Coloured Labour Corps (CLC). Of equal importance, she begins to illuminate the work of women in both supporting and replacing male labor as their husbands, fathers, and brothers went to war, highlighting cases from railway companies and construction gangs where female workers were already considered integral. In doing so, she begins to draft a road map for future enquiry into the politics of, and parallels between, an empire of workers. Scholars of British India, the First World War, and global labor alike will find it an indispensable, nuanced rewriting of war history. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Mawdsley, Stephen E

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shac058pmid: N/A

Sydney A. Halpern draws on her extensive experience researching American medical ethics to tell the troubling account of deliberate hepatitis infection experiments undertaken by American researchers on conscientious objectors, disabled children, and prisoners from 1942 to 1972. During this period, most Americans respected medical science and valued researchers’ contributions to protecting human health through the development of effective interventions, such as penicillin and vaccines. Building on a collective faith in medicine and in the context of global conflict, some American researchers turned their attention to fight the poorly understood viral disease, hepatitis, by way of human studies. Trials were swiftly approved by America’s top medical research scientists—the biomedical elite—while any concerns about potential health risks were expressed in private and largely downplayed. Although these studies were unethical, exposed subjects to health risks, returned dubious results, and led to instances of disability or death, they continued for thirty years. Halpern convincingly argues that researchers were able to conduct these dangerous studies because they evaded criticism, exploited vulnerable populations, and built consensus through media alliances and a shared cultural belief in the value of science. Since the 2000s, social historians have increasingly uncovered instances of dangerous medical research and its impact on individuals and communities, including Susan Reverby’s Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy (2009) and Susan L. Smith’s Toxic Exposures: Mustard Gas and the Health Consequences of World War II in the United States (2017). Such works have explored how marginalized and institutionalized populations became targets for ambitious researchers, who were eager to create knowledge through potentially harmful studies. Dangerous Medicine advances this genre by offering an important case study into the rationale, methods, and consequences of deliberate hepatitis infection experiments before the establishment of Institutional Review Boards in the 1970s. Dangerous Medicine consists of nine chapters organized in chronological order. The first three chapters explore the period between 1942 and 1946 when America’s biomedical elite imagined and approved the hepatitis studies. Among the first test sites was the Lynchburg State Colony, Virginia, where intellectually disabled children were institutionalized. Although the children could not provide informed consent and were afforded little protection because of prevailing stigmas held towards the disabled, they were enrolled by their institutions. Meanwhile, hepatitis studies were also undertaken on contentious objectors in New Haven, Connecticut and in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Although some of the contentious objectors agreed to participate in the studies to demonstrate their patriotism and to challenge negative stereotypes, researchers did not divulge the extent of potential health risks. Many of the subjects suffered serious illnesses and some endured lasting health complications. The next set of chapters move beyond the Second World War to examine the immediate post-war period and early Cold War from 1946 to 1954. Halpern reveals how American researchers drew on earlier momentum and the threat of Soviet brinkmanship to justify further hepatitis experiments. As the biomedical elite met these proposals with limited concern, the studies continued unabated. Since contentious objectors were no longer available as human subjects after the war, researchers enrolled inmates from select prisons. Ideas of redemption and giving back to society were used to aid recruitment. Although these experiments were not secret, researchers successfully kept wider knowledge of them limited through the cooperation of the media and institutional officials. The final chapters of the book chronicle the period between 1956 and 1972, when researchers encountered challenges and growing public opposition. Halpern shows that even when researchers were presented with evidence of causing harm, they believed they were on the cusp of a breakthrough and were keen to continue their work. To facilitate additional studies, disabled residents of Willowbrook State School, New York, and prisoners at Joliet Penitentiary, Illinois, were enrolled in hepatitis studies. However, at a time of anti-war protests and civil rights activism, cultural expectations surrounding accountability in medical research had changed. Researchers faced a media and a public who were more vigilant and less tolerant of human exploitation; the resulting public backlash in 1972 forced researchers to end their studies. Dangerous Medicine is a balanced, well-researched, and persuasive book that sheds light on the complex character of historical medical ethics. While it primarily focuses on the people behind the research and the harm they caused, it most notably reveals American researchers’ willful ignorance of medical ethics as embodied in the post-war Nuremberg Code (1947), and the later Declaration of Helsinki (1964). While many European researchers reflected on the key principles of these documents, many American researchers showed more concern with seeking legal protections for themselves than in providing informed consent and safety for their subjects. Halpern also traces the agency of human subjects by drawing on an impressive collection of primary sources; indeed the cartoons and institutional gazette covers produced by conscientious objectors enrolled in these experiments helps to reveal their experiences and why they became active partners in science. This book will be of interest to a wide audience. Social historians will find Halpern’s effort to include and balance the historical voices of researchers with human subjects particularly successful and revealing. Historians of medicine will find the hepatitis case study an important addition to the existing literature on human experiments. In turn, history graduate students will find this book a useful model for how to trace a case study over time with both rigor and sensitivity. Bioethicists and medical researchers will find this story unsettling, but useful for group discussion and for reflecting on the wider issue of whether ends ever justify means when it comes to human experimentation. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Lieb, Emily

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shac053pmid: N/A

In the summer of 1974, Baltimore became “Charm City, U.S.A.” That July, the Baltimore Promotional Council launched a $40,000 campaign aimed at luring tourists to town, placing ads featuring a collage of photos—rowhouses with white marble steps, the old sloop U.S.S. Constellation, iconic burlesque dancer Blaze Starr, and (of course) crabs—in the New York Times and other big-city papers. “While the wrecking balls of other cities have been busy leveling tradition in the name of progress,” the ad read, “Baltimore has been meticulously rerouting progress around its history.” It was an interesting choice of words, given the busyness of Baltimore’s own wrecking balls—but almost no one ever read them, since the ad only ran a handful of times before boosters pulled it. They would try again, they told the Sun newspaper, when Charm City was a little more charming. “We will probably wait until the city is cleaned up,” one said. Baltimore was in the middle of a summertime strike that had started with transportation workers, then school janitors, prison guards, zoo workers, highway-construction workers, and about half of the city’s police officers. All this, coming on the heels of a monthlong teacher strike that winter, proved to many that the city was falling apart. And the strike’s resolution, in which some sanitation workers and police officers won wage increases while others, mostly strikers, were laid off, seemed to punctuate the decline of worker power in the public sector. Jane Berger’s A New Working Class: The Legacies of Public-Sector Employment in the Civil Rights Movement, hinges on this moment. During the 1960s, Berger argues, “a different future for Baltimore”—different, that is, from the one it got—“had seemed possible” (3). The War on Poverty and the federal funding it brought to cities like Baltimore gave local civil-rights activists the opportunity to boost Black communities’ political and economic power by creating relatively well-paid, relatively secure jobs for Black workers, usually women, in the public sector. (Many of these new government jobs provided human services that replaced the invisible, unpaid caretaking labor that Black women had routinely performed, such as caring for children and the elderly, stretching food budgets, improving housing conditions, and providing healthcare.) Berger argues against scholars who claim that the 1960s and 70s were, as historian Jefferson Cowie writes, “the last days of the working class”: on the contrary, she says, “those in the new working class, which included Baltimore’s public-sector workers, were just getting started” (4). After President Truman’s 1948 executive order banning discrimination, though not segregation, in federal jobs, Black people in Baltimore had been a key part of the workforce in the Social Security Administration and at the Post Office. By contrast, by Berger’s count (which excludes teachers, an important omission), there were hardly any Black workers in Baltimore’s municipal government in 1960. A decade later, though, about 40 percent of the now-greatly-expanded city workforce was Black and 30 percent of all municipal employees were Black women. Meanwhile, state and federal workers comprised 15 percent of all Black workers in Baltimore. In all, Berger writes, “over a quarter of all employed African Americans in Baltimore worked in the public sector” (53). Meanwhile, Berger explains, “as the size of the public sector swelled during the 1960s throughout the nation, growing numbers of government workers turned to unionization as a means of improving the terms and conditions of their employment” (76–77). Even so, she argues, the slow ascent of neoliberal urbanism in subsequent decades shifted power away from Black workers and back toward white officials (such as when, for instance, President Nixon replaced the War on Poverty’s categorical grants to antipoverty agencies with block grants to city and state governments). It also shifted funding and power toward the carceral state and its agents: now, Berger writes, police officers and not social workers were the “first responders to urban poverty” (118). This is how Berger explains the failure of her alternative future. As Baltimore’s leaders doubled and tripled down on austerity and downtown “revitalization,” they undermined public services and the workers who provided them; and Reaganomics, which eliminated most federal aid to cities altogether, furnished a near-fatal blow. Between 1980 and 1990, Berger reports, Baltimore’s municipal workforce shrank by nearly 40 percent, undermining Black economic security as well as political power. “The contraction of the social safety net was a tactic of social control that provided area employers with low labor costs,” Berger explains, and Black “concentration in low-wage employment in combination with higher than average unemployment rates led to an African American median income in Baltimore that was 54 percent of that of whites, a figure that was worse than the differential had been during the mid-1950s in Jim Crow Baltimore” (238). Berger’s story is limited in its scope. It is plainly true that Baltimore’s municipal workforce, like Baltimore itself, got much larger and much Blacker in the 1960s. It is also plainly true that that workforce, like Baltimore’s electorate, lost much of the power it had just as soon as more powerful people could get away with taking it. (Some of that workforce, anyway: police officers are municipal workers, too.) But the Great Society began to deliver categorical grants for antipoverty service delivery—the federal money Berger argues “gave agencies staffed by growing numbers of African Americans … significant influence over setting the municipal agenda” (59)—in 1965. By 1968, when many public-sector workers in the city won union recognition, they were already losing ground. Racist backlash was delegitimizing Black protest and Black labor. At the same time, federal commitment to what Berger calls “bottom-up solutions” (100) to urban problems was waning to virtually nothing. Without that commitment, there was no alternative path. In other words: if you blink, you’ll miss the moment of possibility A New Working Class describes. Still—and especially now, as organized labor makes a resurgence and Black cities fight for their lives—we should learn from it. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Black, Lawrence

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shac062pmid: N/A

What makes Amy Edward’s study of the ways that finance soaked into everyday life and cultural norms in the 1980s so charming is its attention to social history. Alongside financial history, the reader is treated to a history of artifacts like the Filofax, the suits of the Yuppy, board games (The Stock Exchange Game, Ratrace), newspaper financial advice columns and their radio and TV equivalents (such as BBC’s The Money Programme). Edwards likewise draws attention to how a mass investment culture was imbued in other forms—TV dramas, sitcoms and various shows (such as The Antiques Roadshow, although curiously, not ITV’s Minder) as well as plays like Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money. But such sources are more than just charm, for Edwards is also detailing how the monetization that captured Britain and Britons was not simply a process that trickled down from the initiatives of financial elites and political ideologues. This was ground-level, popular capitalism, a culture of neoliberalism, as much as some abstract idea(s) of political economy. Edwards is thus part of the current historiographical re-thinking—see, for example, Davies, Jackson and Sutcliffe-Braithwaite’s The Neoliberal Age? (UCL Press, 2021)—of the neat and tidy narrative that nestles neoliberalism, Thatcherism and the 1980s together. And it folds developments in investing into a broader, longer narrative of consumerism—what Edwards dubs “financial consumerism.” Are We Rich yet? reads like a British version of the new histories of capitalism (Bethany Moreton, Louis Hyman and more) that emerged in the U.S. in the last decade or two. If Edwards is practicing something of a material (re)turn in cultural history, her preferred name for the field is “economic humanities.” “What at first appears to have been a predominantly political and economic transformation,” Edwards says, “was in fact founded upon a requisite social and cultural one” (241). And the evidence upon which she bases this is hefty. Like many proponents at the time, Edwards is determined to look beyond the headline-grabbing floatation of public utilities (telecoms, gas) to more quotidian engagement between individuals, institutions and ideologies with financial services and markets. So, the Wider Share Ownership Council, formed in 1958 to promote employee share ownership and local investment clubs and women’s clubs, feature large. As a counterpoint to nationalized ownership or co-operative control, the ideal here was an older vision of Tory democracy—older that is than the 1980s—of property-, share- and pension-owning citizens as stakeholders, who had bought into society (literally). The Financial Services and Building Societies Acts of 1986 are also central to her story, seen here as equally transformative as the “Big Bang” that liberalized and deregulated the City of London and turned the London Stock Exchange into a private company, modernized trading technology, and abolished fixed commission rates. The 1986 Acts broke down the demarcations between banks and building societies, the life assurance, pensions and credit markets. A free(r) and competitive market was the result, allowing Edwards to productively analyze the marketing strategies of these institutional players—primarily the clearing banks—to attract and cultivate the British public. Freer and competitive for the bigger institutions that was. Edwards shows how the licensed dealers of over-the-counter “penny shares” and financial bookmakers were marginalized. The individual investor—here Edwards’ analogies with consumerism as a history where active citizens are captured by rather than themselves harnessing commercial forces are potent—was more occasional shopper than committed, active shareholder. And this was a frustration for true believers in shareholding as a participatory democratic form and for the financial powerhouses too who wanted to expand involvement, much as they capitalized on shortfalls in knowledge or circumspection about processes. Persuasive as Edwards is in shifting historians away from a Gordon Gekko interpretation of the 1980s as the triumph of greed and individualism, there is no shying away from how the proportion of shares in individual hands in the UK fell to a fifth in 1989, compared to over a third in 1975 and over half in 1963 (although if you factor in the indirect involvement via pension funds, the percentages were higher). The big winners in the 1980s were institutions, particularly insurance and pension funds and international investors. Equity markets flourished; equity, less so. The spread of mass investment culture “did not precipitate a downward distribution of wealth” rather “individuals experienced a steady process of disempowerment at the hands of financial infrastructures.” Edwards is clear about how “the late twentieth century did not … witness the transformation of the British public into a national of Thatcherite capitalists” (19, 21). And that is the essence of Edwards’ point, that despite this, the presence of the institutions, practices and languages of financialization—yuppies, brokers, risk became common parlance in the ways trade union lingo had been in the 1970s. Like it or not, participate or not, you could not buck the market. It meant “for those looking for it, goods, information and entertainment associated with the world of investment were everywhere” and “for those who were not, they could still be hard to avoid” (6). This discursive presence and vicarious experience did not translate into mass financial literacy (or indeed, numeracy). For all the books strengths, I have a few quibbles. There’s little sense of either political unease or resistance to the inequalities and built-in risk of markets or of popular cultural inertia, be it fatalism or risk-aversion, limiting the material shift Edwards assiduously plots. Reference to the work of Sean O’ Connell and colleagues on various official and unofficial forms of popular credit trading is an absence. That work has suggested a degree of market knowledge and consumer nous, if also of a degree of bilking and exploiting knowledge-poor consumers, that might have translated in ways that made the practices and investments Edwards discusses less of a transformation. This underscores Edwards’ highlighting of a protracted, entangled process, not a ‘big bang.’ Finally, the Trotters, the family business in the BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses—whose aspirational, entrepreneurial leader, Del Boy, appears on the book’s front cover in pinstriped button-down shirt, braces and holding a Filofax—are described as “East London wheeler dealers’, but they were definitively from Peckham in South-East London. On what there is no need for speculation is that Are We Rich Yet? is a distinctive intervention and worth the investment for both cultural and financial historians. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/pages/standard-publication-reuse-rights) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Adair, Jennifer A

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shac063pmid: N/A

Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis generated a flourishing of new social movements to combat the effects of deep poverty and social emergency. Neighborhood assemblies and unemployed workers marched daily and blocked roads for the return of life savings and the restoration of jobs. Their message for the nation’s leaders—“qué se vayan todos!” (out with them all!)—called for a total reimagining of politics. As businesses shutdown, workers also occupied their places of employment. By 2018, workers had occupied nearly 400 closed businesses and turned them into cooperatives. As Katherine Sobering describes in her riveting account of this period, the Bauen Hotel was by far the shining star of Argentina’s worker-recuperated businesses and an “icon of the movement” (30). The Bauen Hotel was built in 1978 for the World Cup and financed by repression, a product of loans backed by Argentina’s most brutal military regime, which ruled the country from 1976-1983. The glamorous 5-star hotel in the middle of downtown Buenos Aires boasted a popular nightclub and a glass elevator that looked down on the capital city from 20 stories high. By the late 1990s, during the brewing collapse of neoliberal policies in Argentina, the hotel faced bankruptcy and began to lay off its workers. In the wake of the 2001 crisis, the hotel closed, and its owners fired the hotel’s remaining employees. Former Bauen workers regrouped and discovered their retirement savings had been stolen by the hotel’s unscrupulous private owners. After connecting with other activists, Bauen employees decided to occupy the hotel. In March 2003 they founded the Bauen Cooperative and in 2005 they reopened the hotel. Over the next 15 years, under the control of its worker-owners, the Bauen Hotel turned a profit, its banquet halls and guest rooms the frequent hosts of heads of state, social activists, and quinceañeras. How did the Bauen Cooperative do it? There is a substantial body of literature and films about the Bauen workers’ dramatic takeover of the hotel. Sobering, a sociologist by training, adds new contours to these works by offering a long-term look at the everyday operations of the Bauen Cooperative and the making of workplace democracy. Sobering argues that the process of creating the Bauen Cooperative constituted an “equality project” (8). While scholars have embraced inequality as a field of study, Sobering contends that we know much less about what makes for equal working conditions. Using the Bauen as a case study, the book’s goal is to highlight the organizational features that can produce and sustain equality. Sobering identifies four characteristics that produced equitable working conditions in the Bauen Hotel: democratic decision making; workplace participation; job rotation; and pay equity. Based on ethnographic observation, archival research, and studies of cooperativism, the book is organized into six chapters that guide readers through the main features of the Bauen Cooperative’s work culture and the challenges that worker-owners faced to keep the hotel open. The first chapter tells the story of the Bauen Hotel’s recuperation and the creation of the cooperative. Sobering maintains that members of the Bauen collective “reimprinted” new characteristics into their workplace and used the history of the hotel as a motivation to transform it (20). Chapter 2 takes a close look at democratic decision making in the day-to-day operations of the hotel. Democracy in the hotel took the form of voting in the Workers Assembly (the highest decision-making body of the collective), but it also included more informal dynamics like rumors and water-cooler politics, which helped safeguard democracy at work. Save a core group of founders, most members of the Bauen Cooperative had no experience working in the hospitality industry and no knowledge of what it meant to belong to a worker cooperative. The third chapter delves into the process of becoming a member of Bauen Cooperative and the qualities that made for an ideal worker-owner, a combination of self-motivation, commitment to the collective, and the development of a political consciousness related to the work. As workers learned the ropes of running the hotel, they rotated through different jobs, a process detailed in Chapter 4. Trained by fellow cooperative members, workers gained new skills through practice in almost all sectors of the hotel. Job rotation was a key part of creating an equal workspace by levelling the distinctions between skilled versus unskilled labor. Chapter 5 delves into the politics of equal pay. All members of the cooperative earned the same base salary, which never amounted to more than the minimum wage. To compensate for low wages, Bauen workers developed a system of “survival finance” which allowed them access to credit and time off (121). Under the control of the Bauen Cooperative, the hotel became a profitable business. Yet the workers never earned the legal right to run the hotel. The final chapter details the Cooperative’s attempts to gain control of the hotel and its interactions with the state. Ultimately, Sobering concludes, the Bauen stayed open not only because of the herculean efforts of Bauen workers, but also because of the state’s unwillingness to “resolve the situation” (149). As Sobering reconstructs the Bauen Cooperative, the book does not shy away from its many contradictions. Some of the most engaging parts of the study examine the ways that the Cooperative reproduced the features of more traditional workplaces, including the challenge of maintaining families in low-wage service work, surveillance, gender discrimination, and nepotism within the cooperative. The Bauen was never detached from the forces of the world in which it existed. At times, however, the world beyond the hotel remains slightly out of reach. The Bauen Cooperative functioned during 15 years of fractious politics in Argentina, from the left-leaning governments of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner to the rise of the conservative government of Mauricio Macri. What political beliefs did workers bring to their labor in the cooperative? And how did the Bauen Cooperative reflect the long history of Argentine labor movements, especially its deeply Peronist roots? Ultimately, it was external forces that led to the hotel’s closure. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered the hotel for good. The book’s conclusions bring the history of the hotel full circle as Bauen workers faced a new crisis at the start of the global pandemic. Sobering’s beautifully written and engaging ethnography will appeal to a variety of readers, including labor historians, scholars of social movements, and anyone interested in the history of efforts to forge more just and democratic workplaces. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/pages/standard-publication-reuse-rights) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]