Association Spotlight

Labor and Working Class History Association

Cecelia Bucki

(LAWCHA), founded in 1999, is open to everyone interested in studying the history of working-class men and women, their lives, workplaces, communities, organizations, cultures, political activities, and societal contexts. It aims to promote an international, theoretically informed, comparative, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and diverse labor and working-class history.

LAWCHA encourages research, writing, and teaching about labor and working-class history and is open to a wide variety of approaches to the subject and a free exchange of ideas and opinions. The organization recruits demographically and regionally diverse membership and leadership. LAWCHA’s four past presidents, all leaders in labor history scholarship, indicates the wide range of subjects that labor and working-class history encompasses: Jacqueline Dowd Hall, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Joe W. Trotter, Jr., Carnegie-Mellon University; James R. Green, University of Massachusetts-Boston; Alice Kessler-Harris, Columbia University. LAWCHA’s current president, Michael K. Honey, University of Washington-Tacoma., is presently on a national book tour commemorating the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s support of that labor effort. LAWCHA has also established the tradition of honoring the pioneers of our field. David Montgomery, Farnum Professor of History Emeritus of Yale University, received the first LAWCHA Award for Distinguished Service to the Field of Labor and Working-Class History at its May 2007 conference at Duke University.

LAWCHA works in a variety of settings. It is committed to making the study of working-class history an integral part of the history and social studies curricula in the public schools and also to collaborating with trade union research and education directors in making labor history more accessible to union members. It also supports wherever possible the inclusion of working-class history in public history projects at the federal, state, and local levels. LAWCHA is developing mutually supportive relationships with existing regional, state, and local labor studies and labor history societies as well as with federations of labor, their affiliated trade unions, independent labor unions and organizations, and labor history associations in other countries. In its attempt to meld scholarship and activism, LAWCHA promotes a culture of civic engagement with labor issues. Thus it is presently promoting a writing campaign of “Telling Labor’s Stories” to newspapers and periodicals to familiarize the general public with labor issues, especially pending legislation such as the Employees’ Free Choice Act.

The association seeks to produce more visibility and outlets for labor history scholarship, to work toward creating a much stronger communications network and support base in public debates that affect us as academic workers or as members of the broader labor community, and to provide stronger support for the career development of junior members of the labor history subdiscipline.  Accordingly, LAWCHA supports a quarterly journal, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. It has also recently established the Herbert Gutman Prize for Outstanding Dissertation in Labor and Working-Class History, in cooperation with the University of Illinois Press. It now collaborates with Cornell University on the Philip Taft Book Prize. It continues its awarding of one annual graduate student essay prize, with additional travel awards to graduate students who are presenting papers at either the North American Labor History Conference (at Wayne State University) or at its own annual LAWCHA conferences. It continues to sponsor sessions at professional history conferences such as the AHA and OAH, as well as other smaller conferences.

LAWCHA has recently begun cosponsoring an annual conference with a regional or local labor history society. The first took place in May 2005 at the University of California-Santa Barbara, cosponsored with the Southwest Labor History Association. The second took place in May 2007 at Duke University, cosponsored with the Southern Labor Studies Association. Our third annual conference is taking place in Vancouver, British Columbia, cosponsored with the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association, on June 5-8, 2008. The theme of this upcoming conference is “Indigenous, Immigrant, Migrant Labour and Globalization.” Registration for this conference is ongoing. Those interested in more information on this conference, as well as other activities, are invited to visit the website <http://www.lawcha.org>.