Labor History Conference Research Articles

Reaching into the Community to Interpret Labor History

Reaching into the Community to Interpret Labor History

Remembering Wayne Roberts, 1944–2021

Remembering Wayne Roberts, 1944–2021 David Sobel (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Wayne Roberts, aged 76, passed away on 20 January 2021 after a five-month battle with leukemia. An impressive and extensive community of family, friends, and admirers were part of a collective effort to support his treatment and care. It was a testament to the many people Roberts had touched and inspired through his activism, research, and writing on food security and urban issues. His contributions to the food, environmental, and green movements were rightly recognized in the media. [End Page 13] His work in Canadian labour history also merits remembering. He belonged to a group of Canadian labour historians, influenced by E. P. Thompson and others, who sought to expand the writing of history to include culture, social movements, and class struggle. Roberts completed a master's degree in history at the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, and he occasionally spoke of what an exciting and intellectually challenging environment that was. It was there that his interest and involvement in left-wing politics grew. He completed his PhD thesis at the University of Toronto in 1978, with Kenneth McNaught as the supervisor. Roberts' deeply researched and interpretively venturesome dissertation on Toronto's working class in the years 1896 to 1914 remains a vital reference for the labour history of the city. His historical writing and research helped develop an explicitly class-conscious Canadian labour history, informed, in part, by his participation in left-wing activism. For much of the 1970s to the mid-1980s, Roberts was a committed Trotskyist. He was part of a group aligned with Ross Dowson that parted ways with the League for Socialist Action (lsa) in 1974, forming the Socialist League, also known as the "Forward Group," after the newspaper of the same name. Roberts served as Forward's editor beginning in 1974 and continued to do so for about a decade. As his interest in more popular journalism grew in the early 1980s, Roberts, his then partner Ellie Kirzner, and his close friends Alice Klein and Michael Hollett established the alternative newspaper Now Magazine, where Roberts would become a featured columnist. Much of Roberts' early labour history scholarship detailed and interpreted the exploitation of women and men and their struggles under capitalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He had no illusions that these struggles had somehow come to an end. I first met Roberts while an undergraduate, in 1980 at a labour history conference at McGill University called "Class and Community: Perspectives on Canada's Labour Past," where he was speaking. The presenters were an eclectic mix of practitioners, indicative of a certain tumult that the discipline was then undergoing. Roberts' paper clearly reflected the perspective of the upstarts, and his brand of history upset the academic establishment. Though the questions I raised with him after his talk were clearly those of a novice to the discipline, he took them seriously and was generous with his response. This was typical of him, as I came to know decades later. Before completing his dissertation Roberts had already published two interesting works in women's labour history, uncommon for a male historian at the time. They first appeared in a collection of essays entitled Women at Work: Ontario, 1850–1930, published by the Women's Press in 1974. His chapter with Alice Klein explored the many challenges that confronted Toronto's women working for wages at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The essay demonstrated a sensitivity and understanding of the material conditions in many occupations dominated by women in the period. [End Page 14] The contradictions that women encountered as union members were astutely noted, when Roberts and Klein observed that a 1905 column on women's work in a labour newspaper was reduced to recipe suggestions a few months later. The anthology, edited by Janice Acton, Penny Goldsmith, and Bonnie Shepard, provided information about how to do labour history, with suggestions for sources and methods. This aligned with Roberts' belief that writing history should not be left to academics alone. He later contributed to many popular history projects...

Frontiers of Labor: Comparative Histories of the United States and Australia

This collection of sixteen comparative essays, plus an introduction and a conclusion, marks a significant step in the advancement of labor history on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. Resulting as it does from an incipient discussion at a 2013 labor history conference in New York City and a 2015 panel presentation at a conference in Sydney, Frontiers of Labor reveals the value of continuing collaboration. Presenting these essays under six topic headings, however, seems to mimic the setup of a conference panel rather than organization for publication. The first subheading, “The Great War: Repression and Political Countermobilization,” encompasses four essays. Other topical subdivisions contain two or three essays each, covering labor coercion, Irish ethnicity, collective action and regulation, labor institutions, and transnational politics. Chronologically scattered, most of the essays focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the earliest and latest are grouped together under “Varieties of Labor Coercion,” with one comparing convict indenture in colonial America and in early Australia and the other analyzing union-avoidance strategies in meat industries from the 1980s into the early twenty-first century. All essays—except one, which also includes New Zealand—conform to the binational comparative approach.

LAWCHA Approaches Its Twentieth Anniversary

Twenty years ago, LAWCHA started to come together. The field of labor history had been operating for decades without a professional organization in part because of the many state and regional labor history associations already active. But the times demanded something more. The AFL-CIO had made a left turn, and many scholars were looking for ways to bring activism and labor history together. A meeting was called for the October 1998 North American Labor History Conference in Detroit, which approved a constitution and bylaws that had been drafted by Roger Horowitz and Cecilia Bucki. An organizing committee set to work, and a year later LAWCHA held its first official conference and elected officers led by President Jacquelyn Hall and Vice President Joe Trotter.I have a couple of reasons for flagging this approaching anniversary. First, LAWCHA now has an official archive. The Reuther Library in Detroit is processing the first donation of records, covering our early years. I hope those who have saved correspondence and other relevant materials will contact Tom Klug about adding to the collection. Second, the twentieth anniversary is a good time to take stock and think about what has been accomplished and where we want to go next. Our website features a brief history of LAWCHA by Shel Stromquist and Bucki. I am borrowing from it.The past twenty years have been complicated both for labor movements and for academia, the two institutional complexes we represent; but LAWCHA has more than proved the wisdom behind its foundation. The founding mothers and fathers made key commitments that made the organization different in tone and reach from other historical societies. They defined the field broadly, understanding that labor and working-class history encompasses so much more than the history of unions. They adopted a strategy of collaborating with regional labor history organizations and supporting their conferences. And they made special efforts to support graduate students and young scholars, understanding that the future unfolds with them.Other decisions strengthened the organization. In 2004 this journal was founded by Leon Fink and others, and Labor quickly established a reputation for publishing top-quality articles and field-defining forums. In 2008 we began awarding the Herbert Gutman dissertation prize, and Cornell ILR School asked LAWCHA to cosponsor the Phillip Taft book award. After David Montgomery’s death in 2011, LAWCHA members raised the endowment funds for a second labor history book prize in his name that is cosponsored with the Organization of American Historians (OAH). Meanwhile, our website had become a scholarly and organizing resource featuring Rosemary Feuer’s Labor History Links bibliography and resources for teaching labor history in the schools. In 2012 Ryan Poe and Feuer began remaking our communication systems, adding the dynamic blog LaborOnline and a Facebook page and expanding listserv capacities.LAWCHA’s reach extends far beyond its membership, thanks to the culture of activism that has been our secret sauce since the beginning. Hundreds of labor historians make their voices heard both through scholarship and through public service. We are active in the OAH, the American Historical Association, the Urban History Association, Western and Southern History Associations, African American Intellectual History Society, and other professional organizations. We are active online, producing public labor history resources that are used by millions. We are active in our communities, writing op-eds and working on social justice initiatives. And we are active on our campuses, fighting to preserve workplace rights, academic freedom, and a model of liberal education that is a cornerstone of democratic societies.The dual scholar-activist model was sharply apparent this year when LAWCHA members collected a basketful of book and distinguished scholar prizes at OAH in addition to LAWCHA’s own awards. The list of prizes shows how their work has won the respect of scholars in multiple fields of history and rises to the very pinnacle of professional accomplishment. Congratulations to Eileen Boris, Linda Gordon, LaShawn Harris, Max Krochmal, Nelson Lichtenstein, Ryan Patrick Murphy, Heather Thompson, and Katherine Turk.LAWCHA has much to celebrate as the twentieth anniversary approaches and much to do. New initiatives by the Contingent Faculty Committee and the ad hoc committee working with independent scholars will be important. As will the Global Affairs Initiative and our evolving relationship with the International Association of Labour History Institutions. I write this in August, six months before you are reading it, so I have no idea what new challenges the Age of Trump will bring. But I do know that we will be busy doing what LAWCHA was designed to do: bringing past and present, scholarship and activism together, understanding that the struggles of working people in the past and around the world can be a guide and inspiration as we meet the challenges of the present.

Workers of the World: 15<sup>th</sup> Biennial Labour History Conference, 23–25 September 2017, Emmanuel College, University of Queensland

Workers of the World: 15<sup>th</sup> Biennial Labour History Conference, 23–25 September 2017, Emmanuel College, University of Queensland

From Racism to International Solidarity: The Journey of UAW Local 879, 1980–1995

This commentary is based on a paper presented as part of a panel on “Working Class Self‐Activity in Transnational Contexts” at the 2013 North American Labor History Conference. It is largely based on the author's personal experiences with United Automobile Workers' Union (UAW) Local 879, an industrial union at the Ford Truck Assembly plant in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In this commentary, Rachleff traces the transformation of consciousness among white union members from racism and nationalism to new militancy, internationalism, and anti‐racism. He identifies several key turning points in the rank‐and‐file's experiences: the arrival of several hundred workers of color from other Ford plants; the Hormel strike of the mid‐1980s; Ford management's push for labor‐management cooperation in the early 1990s; and the North American Free Trade Agreement. At each of these points, local leadership, education, and activism helped workers engage new ideas, perspectives, and self‐awareness.

Fighting against War: Peace Activism in the Twentieth Century: The 14<sup>th</sup> National Labour History Conference, 11–13 February 2015, University of Melbourne

Fighting against War: Peace Activism in the Twentieth Century: The 14<sup>th</sup> National Labour History Conference, 11–13 February 2015, University of Melbourne

Mundos do Trabalho/Worlds of Labor Conference

AbstractThis piece reports the Second International “Mundos do Trabalho” Conference that took place from November 27–30, 2012, in Rio de Janeiro. The meeting was the largest labor history conference ever held in Brazil and clearly demonstrates the vitality of this field in the country.

Good Times, Hard Times? Making Australian Labour History, Remaking Australian Society: The 13<sup>th</sup> National Labour History Conference, Trades Hall, Sydney, 11–13 July 2013

Could the organisers of this conference have selected a more imposing and significantly historical site for this conference? My arrival at Sydney Trades Hall brought me back to 1954 when going to Sussex Street Sydney was itself a trip back into history. The great building of 1871 is still there, now with a wonderful adaption in modern style, the Auditorium, which was our central location and gathering point, so pivotal at this type of conference. It provided an opportunity for many from afar to meet, relate, or just catch up. On this clear crisp morning, a cup of coffee was appreciated once all the registration was completed and a good number in attendance. There was considerable anticipation in the Auditorium as the conference finally got under way with a warm welcome and acknowledgement of country by ASSLH's National President, Nikki Balnave.

Labour History and its People: the 12<sup>th</sup> Biennial National Labour History Conference, Australian National University, 15-17 September 2011

Labour History and its People: the 12<sup>th</sup> Biennial National Labour History Conference, Australian National University, 15-17 September 2011

Trans-Tasman Labour History: Introduction

The eight articles in this thematic section of Labour History arose from the Trans-Tasman Labour History Conference held in Auckland in early 2007. The articles have been edited by Ray Markey and K...

Trans-Tasman Labour History: Comparative or Transnational?

Three glorious summer days and the hospitality of the Auckland University of Technology provided an ideal environment for the first ever trans-Tasman Labour History Conference. Held at the Auckland University of Technology from 30 January to 1 February, 2007 the conference was attended by historians from inside and outside of universities, postgraduate students, and local labour movement activists. They listened to, and debated, over 30 stimulating papers by Australian and New Zealand speakers. The conference opened with a Powhiri in which local Maori representatives welcomed conference participants to the University marae. The following morning the proceedings began with a stimulating paper by Ann Curthoys and John Docker who took up arguments from their recent book to examine whether Labour History is Fact or Fiction. The lively discussion that followed revealed a refreshing interest in the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. The conference organisers commissioned Australian and New Zealand historians to work on parallel papers which would result in joint papers on a variety of topics to be published in Labour History in 2008. This will follow the Australian-Canadian and Australian-British comparisons published in previous issues of Labour History. Bradon Ellem examined four crucial periods in the history of Australian unions while I discussed turning-points in New Zealand union history. A common theme was that, more than in other market economies, Australasian unions have been shaped by the state. J'^y^ileplp Ray Markey found much in common gv=H j^^iip between the Australian and New Zealand If v. Labo(u)r parties and asked whether they could 11 ' .) ; be regarded as an antipodean phenomenon. |L?. ' ' j-:?'' : Kerry Taylor considered whether the H(??-?:S Communist Party of Australia had played ^BBpgS the role of big brother to its fraternal party ||^^5|??i across the Tasman. Greg Patmore examined Ray Markey, Conference convenor the development of Rochdale consumer co Photographer: Belinda Nash, AUT Media Unit operatives m Australia and New Zealand. Michael Quinlan discussed the role of the state and the regulation of work in Australia while Gordon Anderson traced the equally significant role of the state in New Zealand industrial relations. Melanie Nolan presented a joint paper with Rae Frances and argued that New Zealand and Australia are natural subjects for a transnational study of gendered labour relations because of the similarity of their social institutions and political legislation. Erik Olssen gave a lively summary of recent research on class and labour in New Zealand.

The IWW at One Hundred: The Return of the Haunted Hall?

All the celebrations and commemorations attendant of the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies) leave this historian puzzled. Not only have multiple scholarly and popular conferences been scheduled to pay homage to the memory of the Wobblies and the tradition of labor radicalism that they exemplified, including the major annual meeting of labor historians at Wayne State University in Detroit (the North American Labor History Conference) but also a lavish collection of original IWW art, cartoons, poetry, and songs plus graphics by contemporary illustrators, cartoonists, poets, and lyricists, a sort of Art Spiegelman-like history of the Wobblies have been compiled and edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman.1

UK-Australian Labour History Conference

This international conference, the first of its kind to be organized in the UK, was held at the Manchester Metropolitan University and the International Centre for Labour Studies, the University of Manchester, on July 16–18, 2003. The conference organizers were Neville Kirk, MMU, on behalf of the Society for the Study of Labour History, Anne Morrow, on behalf of the International Centre for Labour Studies, and Greg Patmore, University of Sydney, for the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. The aim was to bring together invited speakers in order to advance our knowledge and understanding of the labor history of Britain and Australia. Feedback received by the organizers suggests that this aim was successfully realized. However, attendance on the part of British colleagues was somewhat disappointing, perhaps a reflection of the minority interest among British labor historians in comparative history.

UK-Australian Labour History Conference, Manchester, 16-18 July 2003

Held at the adjacent campuses of Manchester University and Manchester Metropolitan University in weather more like an Australian summer than is usual for Manchester (even in summer), this Conference brought together well known practitioners of 'labour history' in Australia and Britain, some 'early career researchers' and, most encouragingly, some graduate students. Ostensibly it might appear as if the Conference was a by-product of what is nowadays often referred to as 'the new British history', an interest in the trans-national history of the British world beyond the British Isles. The fact that the model here was actually the Australia-Canada Labour History Conference held in 1996 is indicative of the extent to which 'labour history', in Australia at least, has been at the forefront in terms of engaging with emerging forms of inquiry. The Conference was very successful (apparently more successful, at a comparable stage, than the Canada-Australia exchange) in opening up numerous comparative and trans-national issues, as well as identifying some important differences. One of the convenors, Greg Patmore, opened the proceedings with a thoughtful discussion of the pros and cons of comparative history, which was also useful in setting the agenda for subsequent sessions. Across three parallel 'strands' the papers ranged far and wide: from detailed discussions of the contents of various labour archives

Radical Times: Brisbane in the Sixties and Seventies

This conference organised by the fledgling Brisbane Labour History Association with the assistance of the Queensland Council of Unions was long overdue. If its organisers were inspired by the apparent success of the earlier Sydney Labour History Conference, which traversed similar themes and issues, the Brisbane show emphasised how different its historical context and political experiences were. The conference participants did not engage in amnesiac nostalgia for radical times past. Instead, they offered analyses and testimonies of how radical their social movements were within the confines of the big country town of Brisbane where racism, political repression, and social conservatism held sway. Only Dan O'Neill spoke briefly but incisively about the roots of Brisbane's sunny oppressiveness and its reaction to the first stirrings of political engagement by a moderate minority of university students to the American war in Vietnam, military conscription, institutional and casual racism, South African apartheid, sexism and women's liberation. The jack-boot tradition of Bjelke-Petersen's police force to any manifestation of a student political rally, march or demonstration deepened their political radicalism and swelled their numbers. Unlike Sydney or Melbourne during the same period, there were few Queensland trade union leaders and rank-and-file unionists who actively supported the student struggles. This point was emphasised by the 'southerner,' Alan Anderson who was a Plumber's Union delegate to the Brisbane Trades and Labour Council. 'Ando' stressed that most ALP union officials were either indifferent or openly hostile to the emerging civil liberties movement, led by the St Lucia students. The few Communist Party union leaders may have been personally sympathetic to the students, but never attempted to agitate for these causes as Jack Mundey and Norm Gallagher had done on Sydney and Melbourne BLF building sites. Nevertheless, Left trade union leaders, through Anderson's encouragement, allowed the student radicals to establish 'Foco' within the portals of Brisbane's Trade Hall. 'Foco' became, for a time, a weekly gathering for the alienated young. Rock music, underground posters, and the subversive ideas of the New Left found a willing 'Foco' audience. If some of Australia's best rock bands played their first gig at the Brisbane Trades Hall, many 'Focoists' became radical activists against war, racism and poverty. Only when 'Foco' was forced to vacate its union bastion because of exaggerated complaints about noise and refuse did the police raid and close down every other venue in Brisbane hired by the 'Foco' organisers.

Michael F. Jiménez (1948-2001)

Michael F. Jiménez (1948-2001)

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

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.

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

Wayne State University, in Detroit, Michigan, once again hosted the twenty- second North American Labor History Conference (NALHC). Held between October 19–21, 2000, the conference was an incursion into cutting-edge scholarly research, examining the history of working-class and labor movements in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Mexico, as well as Central and Latin America. NALHC explored the deep-rooted relations among work and race, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, and the economy. A unique and particularly interesting aspect of the conference was that many of the panels were composed of both activists and academics of the labor movement, which made the examination of past and present issues of working-class life highly informative.

Class and Politics in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives: The Twenty-First Annual North American Labor History Conference

The twenty-first annual North American Labor History Conference took place in Detroit, Michigan, at Wayne State University on October 21–23, 1999. Within the conference's overarching theme of “Class and Politics in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” panels addressed subjects as varied as labor in postwar Japan, masculinity and class formation, the impact of deindustrialization on class consciousness, migration and citizenship, and US labor law in the late eighteenth century.