Labor and the New Millennium: Class, Vision, and Change. The Twenty-second North American Labor History Conference

Abstract

On October 19–21, 2000, scholars gathered for this annual labor history conference at Wayne State University in Detroit, this year focusing on the issues confronting working people in the so-called new economy. Globalization, growing corporate power, the need for diverse working populations to form effective alliances—all of these issues provided the context in which historians and other scholars presented and discussed a range of papers. Over the course of three days, sessions approached these issues from a number of different directions. While some panels explored the ways in which past labor struggles prefigured current dilemmas, others focused on the very recent. A third group of papers approached these issues by debating changes in methodology that would create a history of working people more responsive to the current dilemmas and more reflective of the past experiences of working people. These themes, however, did not impose any straitjacket on the proceedings. With over sixty-five formal papers and presentations, the conference provided a rich assortment of subjects, from papers offering a comparative perspective on slave labor to a profile of strikebreaking state militiamen in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Colorado.