2012 Award Recipient
Cindy Hahamovitch
The Taft Labor History Prize Committee, made up of Ileen DeVault, Jeff Cowie, Susan Levine, Moon Ho-Jung and Laurie Green, is pleased to announce the winner of the 2012 prize for the best book in labor and working-class history. The winner of this year's prize is Cindy Hahamovitch, for No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor, published by Princeton University Press.
Based on extensive research in archival collections and oral history interviews across national and imperial borders, Cindy Hahamovitch offers an incisive and expansive history of Jamaican "guestworkers" in the United States since World War II. Revealing the intricate dynamics between local and global contexts and between individual aspirations and corporate demands, Hahamovitch's engrossing interpretation stands as a cautionary tale of how the state regulation of labor migration produced working conditions detrimental to all workers, especially to guestworkers subjected to a permanent state of deportability.