North American Labor History Conference

Abstract

The eighteenth annual North American Labor History Conference took place in Detroit, Michigan, on October 17-19, 1996. Detroit, with its rich legacy of labor organizing, has been greatly affected by national and global economic transformations. It symbolizes the challenges facing both labor organizations and historians. Two major themes of the conference aimed at addressing these challenges. One was the problem of historical memory? how it is produced and used. The second, related to issues of memory, was the need to expand definitions of worker and work experience. Labor history is now examining communities, not just sites of waged production, as locations in which class identities are forged. Recovery and incorpora tion of individual voices is essential to understanding relationships between community, identity, and experience. Several participants explored the recovery of memory. Some discussed the methodological challenges of working with different sources, from oral histories to fiction, from graphic arts to African nicknames for colonial-era labor bosses. Their studies also raised questions about the links between memory and the effectiveness of organizing efforts. What issues, symbols, and language have resonance for particular groups of workers? Presenta tions emphasized diversity. Laurie Green (University of Chicago) de scribed African-Americans in Memphis who sought to escape the planta tion mentality of their rural past and infused their labor struggles with concern for broader social rights. Tony Buba and Raymond Henderson, coproducers of a documentary about black steelworkers, also found that their subjects placed labor experiences in a much larger social context. As they put it, each interview was larger than the mill. Like the paper of Derek Valliant (University of Chicago), their Struggles in Steel demon strated that black and white workers often had very different memories. Tom Sugrue (University of Pennsylvania) found similar disparities in his