North American Labor History Conference Research Articles

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A Marx Family Reunion: Cultural Studies and Labor History on Common Ground

IN 1996, A GROUP OF SCHOLARS IN LITERATURE, AMERICAN STUDIES, and labor studies, myself among them, led a roundtable discussion at the North American Labor History Conference (NALHC) in Detroit on the development of a new working-class studies. We argued for a broad vision of working-class culture, one that would encompass images of the working class, art and literature by and about workingclass people, attention to groups of workers who had been left out of labor organizing, a greater emphasis on intersections of class, race,

Labor, Past and Present: Twentieth Annual North American Labor History Conference

Labor, Past and Present: Twentieth Annual North American Labor History Conference

1995 North American Labor History Conference

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

North American Labor History Conference

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

17th North American Labor History Conference, 1995 - Detroit

The Seventeenth Annual North American Labor History Conference was held at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, from 19-21 October, 1995. Over 250 delegates attended the Conference, with papers based on the theme of 'Community and culture in working class history'. The conference organisers had selected papers carefully and there was a remarkable consistency across over 60 odd papers. The sessions were varied in scope and subject matter. Some focused on particular periods of US history (the progressive era, post war period, etc), while others looked at groups of workers like steel workers, textile workers, or those who laboured in the printing industry. Others took a thematic approach, looking at 'consumer culture', 'deindustrialization' or Tabor and the state'. Many were framed within an analysis of gender or ethnicity, two areas which appear to be real strengths in US labor history, although there was little if any material on Native American cultures. There was also a modest attempt to include a comparative aspect with some panels including a consideration of Canadian, Mexican, English, and European history. One particularly valuable session was a reflective analysis of 'Community as construct in working class history'. The terms 'working class community' and 'working class culture' still represent dominant categories of analysis in US labor history, following Herbert Guttman's influential contribution in the mid-1970s. While the concept of 'community' had its advantages, it was often used as a descriptive rather than a well-formulated analytic category, and many participants were uneasy about this. One notable absence in the Conference debates about community was a discussion of the way capitalism, through the process of investment and disinvestment, affects particular 'communities'. There was a session on this topic but it appeared to be compartmentalised off from other principal concerns; the result perhaps of a focus on the detailed shape of community life, rather than the broader forces which create, structure and sometimes destroy working-class communities. Continuing a now well-established tradition, a group of Australian labour historians attended the Conference and presented a panel on class and community in three industrial towns in Australia. Greg Patmore spoke on Lithgow, Bradon Ellem and John Shields covered Broken Hill in the 1920s, while Erik Eklund looked at Port Kembla in the early decades of this century. Presenting to an audience well versed in the discipline of labour history but not specifically in Australian material (with some notable exceptions) is a valuable experience, and the papers provoked some interesting discussion. The panel also had the benefit of a Canadian chair with a good knowledge of

'International and Comparative Labor History', Report on the 16th Annual North American Labor History Conference

'International and Comparative Labor History', Report on the 16th Annual North American Labor History Conference

North American Labor History Conference

North American Labor History Conference

Eighth Biennial Southern Labor Studies Conference: Race and Culture

have begun to understand the importance of gender and race in writing the history of and in organizing working people, the conference also made clear that this is an ongoing project. Ahistorical notions of class, for exam ple, frequently obscure the contingencies and complexities of working class peoples. The next North American Labor History Conference, organized un der the theme International and Comparative Labor History, should help to broaden the agenda of labor historians even further. And, as previ ous conferences have demonstrated, Elizabeth Faue's superb planning and the convenient surroundings of the Wayne State conference center promise to make this a productive gathering. The sixteenth annual conference will be held October 13-15, 1994.

North American Labor History Conference

North American Labor History Conference

North American Labor History Conference: Men, Women, and Labor: Perspectives on Gender and Labor History

feisty, and emblematic of a regional culture, but additionally the material and social circumstances of these workers' lives fostered a multiple consciousness. Both artisanal and proletarianized, both distinct among women workers and rendered symbolic of a certain form of Spanish womanhood, both gendered as women workers and representative in some contexts of Spanish workers more generally, cigarette workers were deeply conscious of the own symbolic resources at their command. Their political and labor activities drew upon varied rhetorics of religion and nationality, independence and communal identity, giving them both a flexible vocabulary of consciousness and an ambiguous status within the overall development of Spanish working-class and female politics. Geoff Eley's commentary on Clark's and Radcliff's papers underlined the importance of such projects to the recasting of the largest historical interpreta tions?especially in labor history? in light of the history of gender, and called for continued studies that, like these, are anti-reductionist and sensitive to the particularities of place, rhetoric, and representation, but that remain engaged with the largest questions of local and national class formation.

North American Labor History Conference: Ethnicity and Class

North American Labor History Conference: Ethnicity and Class

Eleventh Annual North American Labor History Conference

political, not a social, event. For Furet, "the legacy of the terror poisoned all subsequent revolutionary history." For Schama, the terror was the revolution. It was the source of its energy, and all attempts to write about the revolution as though the terror was incidental to it have failed to understand what the revolution was about. More significant, he proposed that the terror was the first example of modern totalitarianism. Neither Furet nor Schama, then, believe that the legacy of the revolution is modern democracy and republicanism, as reiterated in countless republican histories and celebrated during the revolution's 1889 centennial. Nor do they believe that its legacy lies in the revolution's promise of an egalitarian society, heralded in the long-accepted but now rejected Marxist accounts produced by Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul, and Claude Mazauric. As a consequence, labor history played almost no role in these discussions. As Donald Sutherland argued, the old orthodoxy based on class struggle seems to have declined with the collapse of communism. This may be a positive develop ment if it forces us as historians of the working class to reexamine what we mean by democracy and to pay attention to its limitations in most of modern history. It would be a positive development if we heeded Patrice Higonnet's advice and began to consider the work of feminist scholars of the French Revolution, including that published by Joan Landes, Dorinda Outram, and Lynn Hunt. As Higonnet explained, these historians have examined the process by which misogynist redefinitions of masculine and feminine identity denied women access to the "natural" rights extended to men. Unfortunately, Hunt and Higonnet were the only voices for women present in the many sessions on the revolution. And only the Australians, Peter McPhee and Alison Patrick, seemed to think it was necessary to reiterate the idea that the French Revolution had an important impact on the lives of common people.

North American Labor History Conference

North American Labor History Conference

The American Historical Association, Part 1

of Michigan), and Links on the Chain: Songs of the Labor and Civil Rights Movement demonstrated how drama and music can be effective history and teaching devices as well as entertainment. Collette A. Hyman (University of Minnesota) observed the ways in which dramatic presentations of two quite different unions reflected their labor philosophies. The efforts of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) were professional and conventional while the productions of the Wholesale and Warehouse Workers were rank-and-file attempts to challenge existing institutions. Nora Faires (University of Michigan, Flint) described how a class project on the 1937 sit-down strike brought students and participants together to make a vivid experience out ofthat fifty-year-old event. In the evening, Michael Honey (Wesleyan University) and David Sawyer accomplished the same thing in an occasion al sing-along concert. Contrary to past experience, the last day brought higher attendance than had the previous two. Daniel Leab presided over a popular session on Unions and the Rejection of Radicalism in which Gary L. Bailey (Indiana University), Robert G. Picard (Louisiana State University), and Ronald Edsforth (Skidmore College) concen trated on the 1940s and 1950s in studies of the late career of Powers Hapgood (Bailey); the New York Newspaper Guild (Picard); and the UAW (Edsforth). They agreed that organized labor participated fully in the growing anticommunism of the time, fanned as it was by United States-Soviet rivalry. They stressed the role of unions as barometers and purveyors of public opinion. Finally, at a luncheon gathering directed by Sidney Fine (University of Michi gan), Daniel Nelson (University of Akron) made a case for the limited extent to which scientific management practices affected working conditions during the movement's twilight years, 1915-25. By almost any measure, the three-day meeting was a success: more people came than ever before; a record number of sessions was held; and the spirited debates at those sessions often continued beyond the confines of the meeting rooms. Excluding the national professional conventions, the North American Labor History Conference is now the most important annual conference among American labor historians.