With Labor in State-Socialist Europe Marsha Siefert presents a history of work that focuses on state-socialist labor experiences, which have so far been marginalized in historical research. In this volume, the supposedly “backward” countries “east of west” constitute a “more inclusive European history of labor relations” that may catalyze a new global history of work (4, 10). Building on the work of Stephen Kotkin (1996), E. P. Thompson (1963), and Mark Pittaway (2005), the case studies in this volume highlight workers’ individual agency.
An open definition of labor and “other forms of work [that] have been shown to coexist with wage labor in different regional and temporal contexts,” as Siefert puts it in her introduction, prove an extraordinarily productive starting point for this volume (3). What makes it an original and very contemporary read from the beginning is the explicit attention to the lived experiences of workers, who become tangible...
