About the talk:

Three scholars of workers and welfare will present a program comparing the threats (and imagined threats) posed by, and the treatment received by, the socialist-era working class and migrant workers in China, the Former Soviet Union, Russia and Central and Eastern Europe during the post-communist/post-socialist period.  The theme is the politics surrounding the relation between these post-socialist states and their old and migrant workers. Comparisons will be drawn as to the current situation and longer-term fate of these laborers in the different countries. 

About the speakers:

The speakers will be Dorothy Solinger (retired, Political Science, UCI), whose book, Poverty and Pacification: The Chinese State Abandons the Old Working Class, was published early in 2022;  Steve Crowley, Professor of Politics at Oberlin College, whose Putin’s Labor Dilemma: Russian Politics between Stability and Stagnation, was published in 2021; and Linda Cook, retired from Political Science at Brown University, who has published a great deal on welfare and workers in Russia, the FSU, and Central and Eastern Europe, and has a book in the works on these themes.