Keep up to date with recent publications on labour!
Pat Armstrong and Suzanne Day. Wash, Wear and Care: Clothing and Laundry in Long-Term Residential Care (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017). $21.29.
An account of the ways in which modern The authors argue that how nursing homes look after the clothes and meals of their residents speaks volumes about the rise of neoliberalism in eldercare.
Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed. The Pandemic: Perspectives on Asia (New York: Columbia University Press and the Association for Asian Studies, 2020), $20.09.
Contributors look at the unfolding of Covid-19 in China, India, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and beyond, with special attention to its class dimensions.
Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a time of pandemic. London: Little, Brown, 2021. $30.12.
A palliative care doctor writes about how the British health service fared in a time of death and darkness.
Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias. The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. $31.70.
The authors argue that “data colonialism” has become central to twenty-first-century capitalism and constitutes a new structuring of social relations.
Covid Critical: A Doctor’s Story: Dispatches. Channel Four documentary, 1 March 2021.
Dr. Saleyha Ahsan films her own journey through the second wave of Covid-19.
Toby Green, The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality (London: Hurst and Company, 2021). $28.07.
A polemic against lockdowns, unusually from a pro-labour perspective, that usefully synthesizes many of their deleterious effects.
David Herzberg, White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020). $34.96.
Examines the opioid and other epidemics sweeping working-class North America, which grew worse under Covid-19.
Mario Possamai, A Time of Fear: How Canada Failed Our Health Care Workers and Mismanaged Covid-19 (Ottawa: Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, 2020). Download the report here.
Major statement exploring the underlying logic of hyper-exploited nursing labour in the pandemic.
Samaddar Ranabir, ed. Borders of an Epidemic: Covid-19 and Migrant Workers (Kolkata: Calcutta Research Group, 2020). Download a PDF here.
Major exploration of the experiences of migrant workers in India, with invaluable first-hand testimony as well as scholarly analyses.
Samaddar Ranabir, A Pandemic and the Politics of Life (Lucknow: Women Unlimited, 2021). ₹408.00 or $6.84.
A further reflection on India’s pandemic, with sage observations about its long-term lessons for all interested in social justice.
Barbara Katz Rothman, The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the Covid-19 Pandemic. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021). $22.69.
Life and work in Big Pharma.