1995 North American Labor History Conference

Abstract

More than 150 scholars attended the Seventeenth Annual North American Labor History Conference held, as usual, at Detroit's Wayne State Univer sity. Organized around the theme of Community and Culture in Working Class History, this year's gathering directed fresh critical attention to the core concepts which were so important to the emergence of the New Labor History in the 1970s. Twenty-eight panel sessions and three plenaries ap proached the constructs of and from variety of perspectives. While no consensus was reached about their meaning and continuing validity, the three-day conference bore testimony to the ways in which these organizing principles continue to animate the field of social history in general and working-class history in particular. Many of the panels showed how fragile working-class communities have been in the American past, and several papers highlighted how the story of labor in the twentieth century has been as much story of commu nity breakdown as community formation, as much history of division as of solidarity and unity. These dynamics received sustained attention in panel on steelworkers. Four very different papers showed how workers' solidarity often was undermined at its very foundation by the persistent divisions of skill, race, and gender. Through history of gender and labor in the company town of Sparrow's Point, Maryland, Karen Olsen offered nuanced explanation for racial and gender divisions among steelworkers, rooting them both in the culture of male workers?who shared rough shop-floor masculinity?and managers who reinforced divisions by race and gender through their segregated plan for the community and for company-sponsored domestic training programs. Offering an alternative explanation for the small number of women in the steel industry, Elizabeth Jones, drawing from oral histories conducted during World War Two, ar gued that female steelworkers were influenced by mainstream ideas about gender difference and viewed their industrial employment as a temporary opportunity. In deeply researched study of the Steel Workers Organiz