Ken Germanson, President Emeritus, Wisconsin Labor History Society
If there was any thought that history is irrelevant in today’s world, that was dispelled at the 31st Annual Conference of the Wisconsin Labor History Society held April 21 in Milwaukee.
Read more →LAWCHA Member Paul Ortiz wrote a stunning article on the nearly uncelebrated Emancipation Day, May 20, in Florida. He writes, “Today, May 20, is Emancipation Day in Florida. In order to commemorate this magnificent event–which is all but forgotten in the Sunshine State–the Coalition of Immokalee Workers asked me to write a short essay on the significance of Emancipation Day in a state where slavery is still a fact of life for thousands of workers in our agricultural industry.
Read more →Based on extensive research in archival collections and oral history interviews across national and imperial borders, Cindy Hahamovitch offers an incisive and expansive history of Jamaican “guestworkers” in the United States since World War II. Revealing the intricate dynamics between local and global contexts and between individual aspirations and corporate demands, Hahamovitch’s engrossing interpretation stands as a cautionary tale of how state regulation of labor migration produced working conditions detrimental to all workers, especially to guestworkers subjected to a permanent state of deportability.
Read more →On the hundredth anniversary of the Bread and Roses textile strike, over 300 labor activists, researchers and community members gathered on April 28 in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The strike, which began on January 11, 1912, was one of the transformative labor victories of the twentieth century.
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