LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas

The official journal for the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA)

Winner of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals' Best New Journal award for 2005

Individual subscribers and institutions with electronic access can view issues of Labor online.

As a site for both historical research and commentary, Labor hopes to provide a scaffolding for understanding the roots of our current dilemmas. Although the tradition from which the journal derives its energy has focused primarily on social movements and institutions based on industrial labor, Labor intends to give equal attention to other labor systems and social contexts (agricultural work, slavery, unpaid and domestic labor, informal sector, the professions, etc.). Its focus begins with the U.S. experience but also extends to developments across the “American” hemisphere and to other transnational comparisons that shed light on the American experience.

While the scholarly article and book review serve as the foundation of LABOR, the journal contains a number of sections designed to broaden its reach and purpose. The “Contemporary Affairs” section offers labor historians concerned with the search for “a usable past” a platform to address contemporary problems of workers and their unions. “Up for Debate” allows for a focused argument by several scholars on an important theme. “The Common Verse” displays a diversity of poems that give voice to American workers. And a recent new section “Whither Labor History?” analyzes the current state of labor history.

The journal is endorsed by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries.

Want to subscribe to LABOR? Join LAWCHA to get your copies!

Recent Issues

Winter, 2010

  • Charles Williams, "Reconsidering CIO Political Culture: Briggs Local 212 and the Sources of Militancy in the Early UAW"
  • Brandon Kirk Williams, "Labor's Cold War Missionaries: The IFPCW's Transnational Mission for the Third World's Petroleum and Chemical Workers, 1954–1975"
Table of Contents

Fall, 2010

  • William P. Jones, "The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class"
  • Lou Martin, "Factory Workers in the Hills of West Virginia: The Values and Politics of Rural Industrial Workers in Hancock County, 1930–1965"
Table of Contents

Summer, 2010

  • Kim Phillips-Fein, "Business Conservatism on the Shop Floor: Anti-union Campaigns in the 1950s"
  • Jennifer Brooks, "Unexpected Foes: World War II Veterans and Labor in the Postwar South"
Table of Contents


Special Issues

Winter, 2009: Workers, the Nation-State, and Beyond: The Newberry Conference

  • Michael J. Murphy, "Developing Communitites: The UAW and Community Unions in Los Angeles, 1965 - 1974"
  • Catherine Komisaruk, "Indigenous Labor as Family Labor: Tributes, Migration, and Hispanicization in Colonial Guatemala"
  • Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, "Many Zitas": The Young Catholic Worker and Household Workers in Cold War Chile"
  • Ted McCoy, "The Unproductive Prisoner: Labor and Medicine in Canadian Penitentiaries, 1867-1900"
Table of Contents

Spring, 2009: Labor and Religion

  • Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf, "Sanctifying the Southern Organizing Campaign: Protestant Activists in the CIO's Operation Dixie"
  • Annie Polland, "Working for the Sabbath: Sabbath in the Jewish Immigrant Neighborhoods of New York"
  • Laura Murphy, "An "Indestructible Right": John Ryan and the Catholic Origins of the U.S. Living Wage Movement, 1906–1938"
  • Joseph A. McCartin, "Interview: Building the Interfaith Worker Justice Movement: Kim Bobo's Story"
Table of Contents

Spring, 2006

  • Leon Fink, "Editor's Introduction"
  • Dan Letwin, "The LAWCHA Watch"
  • J. Pablo Silva, "The Origins of White-Collar Privilege in Chile: Arturo Alessandri, Law 6020, and the Pursuit of a Corporatist Consensus, 1933-1938"
  • Alex Lichtenstein and Eric Arnesen, "Labor and the Problem of Social Unity during World War II: Katherine Archibald's Wartime Shipyard in Retrospect"
Table of Contents



Indexed/abstracted in the following: Alternative Press Index, America: History and Life, Current Abstracts, Historical Abstracts, SocINDEX, Sociological Abstracts.

Frequency: Quarterly