Surveying countries in all continents, a recent international report sponsored by The Club of Rome declared privatization to be “one of the defining features of our era.” Any major phenomenon of our time must have historical roots. The purpose of this volume is to address privatization as an issue of globalization, to give it a history apart from the totalizing notion of neoliberalism and the prescriptive models of economic theory. The consensus among social theorists and observers is that this global process of privatization is a result of neoliberalism, a practice and ideology whose central tenet is the primacy of markets. Certainly, the rhetoric and policies of neoliberalism have been spreading rapidly throughout the globe, but the blanket use of this concept has not enabled us to get inside the real social and political transformations that marked the last decades of the twentieth century. The writers in this volume introduce the particularities of social and labor histories and locate privatization in narratives of class politics and struggle. Bringing social and labor history into the analyses of privatization, at the same time, these essays put labor history, often monographically focused, into larger discussions of the state and capitalism. These essays make the class agenda of privatization explicit, viewing it not just as the “opening of markets,” but as clear assaults on the working classes and on the public claims that workers and citizens are able to make on the economy's resources and productivity.

This paper analyzes the roots of resistance to the privatization of public services in the context of the changes to class formation in Bolivia. Based upon two case studies of urban water privatization, it seeks to explain why the social coalitions that have emerged to protest the privatization of public water services in Bolivia have been led by territorially-based organizations composed of rural-urban and multiclass alliances rather than public-sector unions. It argues that protest against the privatization of water utilities in Bolivia must be understood within the context of neoliberal economic restructuring and the emergence of what has been termed the “new working class,” which is now primarily urban and engaged in informal forms of work.

By the 1960s, the urban crisis in the United States was well underway. Structural trans-formations in the postwar economy and accelerating deindustrialization contributed to high rates of unemployment in many cities in the nation's old industrial core. During the 1970s and 1980s, the urban crisis worsened. This article argues that the macroeconomic policies of Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan fueled urban decline. Responding to the waning hegemony of the United States in the global economy as well as to a domestic corporate crisis of profitability, the presidents pursued macroeconomic agendas that prioritized the revitalization of American economic dominance. Macroeconomic policy decisions in combination with white-backlash pressures constrained the range of urban policies the presidents could pursue and often compelled privatization. The federal-level decisionmaking had devastating consequences in Baltimore, Maryland, the city discussed in this article. The macroeconomic and urban policies had racialized and gendered outcomes that plunged the city into the most acute phase of the urban crisis.

The article discusses the opposition by the South African Municipal Workers' Union (SAMWU) to the privatization of Johannesburg's municipal services under Apartheid and in the new democratic dispensation. The unionization of South African black municipal workers has been shaped by a tradition of “social-movement unionism,” which greatly contributed to the decline and fall of the racist regime. The post-1994 democratic government has adopted policies of privatization of local services and utilities, which SAMWU opposed in Johannesburg by resurrecting a social movement unionism discourse. Conditions of political democracy have, however, proven detrimental to such a strategy, whose continued validity is here questioned.

At the beginning and the end of the twentieth century, the Russian imperial and post-Soviet governments pursued large-scale projects to transform land tenure in the countryside. Based on the belief that people would work harder and more productively on land they themselves owned, both reform programs divided collectively-managed land into individual parcels. Post-Soviet land privatization, consciously modeled on the Stolypin-era reforms conducted in early twentieth-century Russia, resulted in the dispossession of much of the rural population. This article examines privatization in a district of Voronezh oblast’ in Russia's southwest, considering contemporary processes through an historical lens. It shows how successful local efforts to adapt to markets and preserve large-scale agriculture nonetheless resulted in rural dispossession.

In April 2004, the Hospital Employees' Union (HEU) waged an illegal strike that mobilized sections of British Columbia's working class to the brink of a general sympathetic strike. Influenced by BC's class-polarized political culture and HEU's distinct history, the 2004 strike represents a key moment of working-class resistance to neoliberal privatization. HEU was targeted by the BC Liberal government because it represented a bastion of militant, independent unionism in a jurisdiction that appeared overripe (from the neoliberal standpoint) for a curtailment of worker rights and a retrenchment of public-sector employment. HEU also represented a direct barrier, in the language of its collective agreements and collective power of its membership, to the privatization of health services and dismantling of Medicare. The militant agency of HEU members, combined with anger generated by a constellation of social-service cutbacks, inspired rank-and-file workers and several unions to defy collective agreements and embrace sympathetic strike action. This revealed differentiation in the strategy and tactics of BC's labor leadership, and enduring sources of solidarity in labor's ranks.

The privatization of New York City's Central Park in 1998 was among the most high-profile municipal privatizations in the US during the 1990s. Since then, the park's privatization has been cited as an exemplary model of privatization. This essay develops a unique class approach to municipal privatization and uses it to reconceptualize Central Park's privatization. In doing so, it argues that the park's privatization involves an important contradiction—one that regards its ostensible status as one of the nation's most famous and treasured public goods against its production as a capitalist commodity. This class approach to the park's privatization yields four insights. First, it underscores the limitations of the hegemonic cost-efficiency calculus that has long informed the municipal privatization discourse. Second, it raises important questions regarding the troublesome relationship between democratic principles and capitalist production relations. Third, it offers an alternative to a wage-led approach to privatization. Finally, and paradoxically, it provides a framework for theorizing “progressive” privatizations.

When the British National Health Service was founded in 1948, professional employees and support staff, with the exception of family doctors, worked directly for the state. Since the 1980s, private employment in the National Health Service (NHS) has steadily grown. Beginning with the outsourcing of support services, the number of privately-employed workers in the National Health Service has gradually increased. This paper argues that marketization in the health sector has increased dramatically under the New Labour government. As policymakers have moved from ideological to pragmatic justifications for marketization, union opposition has similarly become more pragmatic and less ideological. With unions unable to stop these reforms, they have turned to the practical concerns of their members in partially-privatized workplaces under complex employment arrangements. This article shows that while ideologically opposing marketization, unions and employees have been forced into a more pragmatic position. Research at two privately-funded public hospitals shows that unions in the workplace have used their resources to protect their members, as thwarting the involvement of the private sector is nearly impossible.

The recent controversy over a foreign-owned company running a US port brought attention to the creeping privatization of work in ports worldwide. Since the 1980s, there has been a head-long rush to privatize ports. The pace can be best described as rapid and chaotic. For some economists privatization is seen as a method to increase efficiency. But the process has substantial critics. For many privatization is perceived as problematic. There is evidence that the process does not indeed lead to savings and greater efficiency. Instead, the process has been haphazard and far from uniform in its application. Even where there is an entrenched presence, savings from privatization have yet to be realized. Others have made the point that the process cannot be transferred to ports in the developing world. That is, the multiplicity of ports and transportation problems in the interior make privatization more like wishful thinking than a policy that can work.

The restructuring of capital and the transformation of the workforce in the late twentieth century has produced a newly-shaped working class; one that encompasses those in insecure work and unemployed workers. With this repositioning has come new political organizations of unemployed workers, of which Te Roopu Rawakore o Aotearoa, the national New Zealand organization for unemployed workers, is an example. This organization of unemployed was not only significant for its existence in the face of poverty, status disintegration, and a perceived sense of social worthlessness, but also for the tripartite ideology its members employed. Unemployed workers in New Zealand combined the identity politics of race and gender with a class-based critique of society to demand “the right to work and a living wage for all.”

In late August 1930, two white American workers from the Ford Motor Company in Detroit were tried for attacking a black American laborer at one of the Soviet Union's prized giants of socialist industry, the Stalingrad Traktorostroi. Soviet trade-union authorities and all-union editors used the near month-long campaign to bring the two assailants to “proletarian justice,” in order to cultivate the image that workers in the USSR valued American technical and industrial knowledge in the construction of the new socialist society, but vehemently rejected American racism. They reinforced this image in publications by juxtaposing visual depictions of Soviet citizens' acceptance of black Americans as equals against those which portrayed the lynching of black workers in the United States.