Except for historians of gender, mainstream labor history has neglected reproduction, the cluster of processes by which workers are born, recruited, raised, and educated. The central goal of this landmark collection is to restore the balance between production and reproduction in the study of class formation and collective action. Opening and concluding essays by Marcel van der Linden provide a focus for an outstanding collection of essays.

Van der Linden's introduction looks at why workers protest. He links participation in protest to household strategies and to household membership in workers' organizations. He identifies three types of workers' organizations: household-centered organizations such as mutual aid societies, enterprise-centered organizations such as trade unions, and state-centered organizations such as political parties. He argues that households participate in different societies according to the organizations' financial risk, liability to repression, and ability to confer benefits on members.

Taking up Van der Linden's distinctions, essays by Eileen Janes Yeo, Christina van Hodenberg, and Bruce Scates explore the conditions producing worker organization. In Britain between 1820 and 1850, Yeo demonstrates that households joined mutual aid societies, co-operatives, trade unions and Chartist organizations to defend themselves against new forms of factory organization. By demanding respectable funerals, joining societies to read the books of their choosing, and providing their own popular entertainment, workers and their families asserted their dignity and autonomy. More than later socialists, Chartists organized celebrations that came within the budget of impoverished worker households and, in so doing, extended the boundaries of class.

Unlike English workers, the protesting Silesian weavers studied by von Hodenberg did not join workers' organizations because they did not consider themselves workers. In 1844, Silesian village communities bound by ties of kinship and neighborhood mobilized protestors. The chief grievance of the relatively secure cotton weavers was the growing power of merchants-wholesalers who sought to treat them as wage laborers and threatened their proud claim to be independent producers. In contrast, the working-class women in late nineteenth-century Melbourne examined by Scates were really too poor to join any workers' organizations and their protests occupied the margins of working-class collective action.

Essays by Justin Byrne, Theresa Moriarity and Bonnie Stepenoff reveal how workers organizations used family and kinship ties to mobilize workers. Byrnes's investigation of bricklayers in turn-of-the nineteenth-century Madrid shows that kinship ties were an important element in the migratory chain; young bricklayers often first entered Madrid by boarding in the houses of brothers and cousins and were there recruited to the union. Once a union was formed these ties served to strengthen solidarity. In an accident-prone occupation, the union increased its appeal to families by providing insurance benefits for injured members. Appeals to defend a threatened masculinity were also important to trade-union propaganda. An aggressive trade unionism was stoked by assertions of bricklayers' masculinity and shorter hours were demanded so that they could fulfill their responsibilities as patriarchal family heads.

Family issues possessed enormous capacity to mobilize workers but also, as Moriarity shows, to demobilize them. During the great Dublin lockout of 1913, union organizers adopted a new tactic recently used by American and continental workers. Both to illustrate the workers' plight and to lessen the burden on the strikers, they sent workers' children to stay with unionists in the United Kingdom. After considerable initial success, religious scruples were invoked to defeat the scheme. Catholic prelates claimed that the children's religious beliefs might be threatened by British proselytizers. Workers' attempts to use familial symbols were ably counteracted by employer-sponsored appeals to family religious values. Stepenoff's essay on the silk workers of western Pennsylvania also illustrates the double-edged danger of familial demands. As the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) unionized silk workers in cities such as Patter-son, New Jersey, less skilled silk working factories employing young women were established in western Pennsylvania. Many of these young women were the daughters of miners belonging to the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Arguing that factories posed a grave danger to their daughters' physical and moral health, union organizers appealed to fathers to encourage their daughters' unionization. Although initially successful, such methods did not really build an independent trade union movement among women workers and unions collapsed when the UMWA and the more radical IWW quarreled.

Essays by Henk Wals, Rosanne Ruten and Mark Pittaway analyze how familial ties influenced the forms of workers' mobilization. Wals argues that insurance services offered by trade unions were an important incentive to the organization of construction workers in early twentieth-century Amsterdam. Working-class households sought respectability underpinned by regular income and union-sponsored insurance funds could insure a regular income through periods of sickness and unemployment. The most remarkable essay in this section is Ruten's 1992 re-analysis of the Philippine rebels in the pseudonymous Hacienda Milagros whose rise she studied in 1977–1978. Ruten shows both the strengths and the limits of efforts to study collective action within a familial perspective. In the 1970s Philippine Maoist revolutionaries organized in the New People's Army (NPA) employed familial appeals to the hacienda workers that they organized and were very sensitive to the familial needs of local organizers. The situation was very different though with regard to those activists that the NPA sought to develop as full-time cadres. These were systematically encouraged to break with their families and become professional revolutionaries. As long as the movement was expanding, many activists followed this new career path despite its dangers. Once the movement fell into decline, familial impulses reasserted themselves and many workers dropped out of politics to care for their children. Pittaway's essay on working-class protest in post-World War II Hungary shows how under the repressive conditions of Stalinist rule, workers abandoned organization as vehicles of reform and turned to private efforts within household or community to better their lot. Establishing their own little gardens, selling their services on the black market, or doing their own hunting, fishing and baking, were more effective means of contributing to household welfare than protesting.

The essays in this collection address an important and seriously neglected area of labor history from a variety of perspectives. This collection deserves the widest possible attention.