Program

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2021 LAWCHA Conference Program
2021 LAWCHA Conference Program

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Thursday, May 20, 6 – 8 pm ET

Opening Night Plenary

College for All and a National Agenda for Labor in Higher Education
This summit brings together LAWCHA members, labor activists, Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education (SFNDHE), and union representatives serving a variety of higher ed workers to discuss the College for All bill and how to use it as a foundation for a bottom-up national movement, one that demands fair funding, fair tuition, and fair labor. SFNDHE successfully fought to include labor provisions that prioritize contingent faculty and tenure-track positions in the College for All bill–but there is still more to be done. LAWCHA members, as labor scholars, higher ed workers, and union organizers, have a vital role to play in this national agenda and the federal legislative battles ahead.

Endorsed by the LAWCHA Contingent Faculty Committee

  • Higher Education Union Representatives TBA
  • Jalil Mustaffa Bishop, Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Pennsylvania and SFNDHE member
  • Ian Gavigan, PhD candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick
  • Aimee Loiselle, SFNDHE Co-Facilitator and Postdoctoral Fellow at Smith College
  • Eleni Schirmer, PhD Candidate at University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Moderator: Lane Windham, Georgetown University
Friday, May 21, 12 – 1:15 pm ET
The Personal is Historical: Incorporating Family Legacies and Personal Experience into Labor History
  • Toni Gilpin, Independent Scholar
  • Sergio M. González, Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies, Marquette University
  • Jack Metzgar, Emeritus Professor of Humanities, Roosevelt University Chicago
  • David Ranney, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois Chicago
  • Beryl Satter, Professor of History, Rutgers University-Newark
  • Christine Walley, Professor of Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Working People and (Human) Capital: Class, Race, and Education in Twentieth Century America
  • Human Capital, Summer Riots, and Disciplining Black Resistance: 1965-68, Mahasan Chaney, Brown University
  • Historicizing Workplace Power and the Limits of Human Capital, Cristina Groeger, Lake Forest College
  • “Putting (Some) People First”: Reinventing Democrats and Workers in the Global Knowledge Economy, Jon Shelton, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
  • Chair/Commentator: Jeffrey Helgeson, Texas State University
The “Frontline” at Home: Domestic Workers as Essential Workers
  • Joan Flores-Villalobos, University of Southern California
  • Anasa Hicks, Florida State University
  • Anna Jakubek, Arise Chicago (Domestic Worker Organizer)
  • Emma Amador, University of Connecticut
  • Premilla Nadasen, Barnard College
  • Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, University of Southern California
From the Prison to the Pandemic: Histories of Criminalization, Migration, andEssential Work in the U.S. and Europe
  • Policing Precarity: The Criminalization of Spectacle Work at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, David Helps, University of Michigan
  • Where Domestic and Penal Labor Meet: The National Domestic Workers Union and Georgia’s Work Release Program, Eshe Sherley, University of Michigan
  • Working under the threat of Covid-19: West-African low-wage workers in New York City, Kalilou Barry, Paris-Est Créteil University
  • Discipline and Diversity: Forced Labor Inside New York City’s Nineteenth-Century Carceral State, Michael Haggerty, University of California Davis
  • Migrant Workers in Slovakia and the Covid-19 Crisis, Benjamin Sorensen, Cape FearCommunity College Chair/Commentator: John Enyeart, Bucknell University
High Tech as Management Ideology and Workplace Praxis
  • The Paradox of Automation: QWERTY and the Neuter Keyboard, Jason Resnikoff, Columbia University
  • “The Machine is Neutral”: Imperial Wars in Southeast Asia: American Tech Workers and Silicon Valley Internationalism, 1967-1980, Jeannette Estruth, Bard College
  • Grand Illusions: Clinton Intellectuals and the Idea of the “High Performance” Workplace, Nelson Lichtenstein, UC Santa Barbara
  • Chair/Commentator: Brishen Rogers, Temple University Law School
On the Margins of Labor and Capital: Shifting Social Identities in the Global South
  • Becoming pobladores: Identity and Place Making in Santiago, Chile, 1872-1950 Denisa Jashari, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
  • Korean Women Workers and Social Reproduction in the Japanese Countryside after World War I, Wendy Matsumura, University of California, San Diego
  • Revolutionary Encounters in the Countryside: Spanish Exiles, Mexican Peasants, and Rural Colonization Initiatives, Kevan Aguilar, University of California, San Diego
  • Chair/Commentator: Barbara Weinstein, New York University
Histories of Unions at the University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Cathleen Jensen, SEIU Local 73
  • Paul Pater, Illinois Nurses Association
  • Jeff Schuhrke, University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Janet Smith, UIC United Faculty
  • Chair: Robert D. Johnston, UIC United Faculty
Management, Vigilantism, and Repression from the Civil War to the 1930s
  • Murder on the Border 1865: The Last Battle of the Civil War as a Matter of Company Security, Mark Lause, University of Cincinnati
  • Why we must call the first Ku Klux Klan an Employers’ Association, Chad Pearson, Collin College
  • The Chamber of Commerce in Action: Employer Violence in Pacific Northwest History, Aaron Goings, St. Martin’s University
  • Chair/Commentator: Elaine Frantz, Kent State University
Union and Worker Responses to Police Brutality and State/Corporate Repression in the Early to Mid 20th Century
  • “Police Brutally Beat Girls Who Strike Against Garment Shop Starvation Wages”: The Sopkins Factory Strike, 1933, Janette Gayle, Hobart & William Smith Colleges
  • Footloose Under Lock and Key: Policing Pacific Northwestern Migrant Workers in the Early Twentieth Century, Elizabeth Pingree, Boston College
  • Bloody Sticks and Working Class Martyrs: Responses to Police/Corporate Brutality During the Great Depression by Labor Organizers, James Robinson, Rutgers University
  • To Slay the “Beast of Reaction”: The IWW, the East Coast Maritime Strike of 1936 and its Repression, Matt White, The Ohio State University
Friday, May 21, 1:45 – 3 pm ET
Working-class Coalitions and the Emerging Neoliberal Order, 1970-1990
  • “A New Bracero Program”: Mexican American Resistance to Neoliberal Immigration Reform, Eladio B. Bobadilla, University of Kentucky
  • “Homeless and Jobless”: Organizing for Justice, Dignity, & Reform in the Neoliberal City, Allyson P. Brantley, University of La Verne
  • Progressive Triangulation: Industrial Conversion, Municipal Politics, and Labor’s Electoral Strategy in Los
  • Angeles, Tobias Higbie and Gaspar Rivera Salgado, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Chair/Commentator: Grace Davie, Queens College, CUNY
Hot Off The Press!: A University of Illinois Press Showcase
  • Alison K. Syring, University of Illinois Press
  • Dana M. Caldemeyer, South Georgia State College
  • Tom Alter, Texas State University
  • Nick Juravich, University of Massachusetts Boston
  • Jenny Carson, Ryerson University
  • Dawson Barrett, Del Mar College
Academic Labor Union Density Growth (2013-2019) in Perspective
  • William A. Herbert, Hunter College, CUNY
  • Jacob Apkarian, York College, CUNY
  • Joseph van der Naald, PhD candidate, CUNY Graduate School
  • Claire Goldstene, LAWCHA Committee on Contingent Faculty Chair
  • Robert D. Johnston, University of Illinois at Chicago
Comparative Approaches to Labor History: Canada, Brazil, and the United States
  • The Emergence of a Slave Labor System in 16th Century Brazil and Colonial Virginia, Sofia Cutler, Yale University
  • Separations and Strange Bedfellows: Labor and the New Left in the United States and Canada, Barry Eidlin, McGill University
  • “The Canadian Jimmy Hoffa”: Hal Banks and a Comparative Perspective on the Issue of Union Corruption, David Witwer, Penn State Harrisburg
  • Chair/Commentator: Dorothy Sue Cobble, Rutgers University
Agrarian Crusades: Interracialism and Cultural Politics in the Late Nineteenth-Century South
  • “Are Not Our Interests the Same?”: Black Protest, the Lost Cause, and Coalition Building in Readjuster Virginia, Bryant K. Barnes, University of Georgia
  • John Brown’s Bodies: Civil War Memory and Interracial Class Politics in “the Other South,” Matthew E. Stanley, Albany State University
  • “Big Landholders” versus “Three Classes” of Farmers: The Rise and Fall of Populism inGwinnett County, Georgia, 1873-1896
  • Matthew Hild, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Chair/Commentator: Jane Dailey, University of Chicago
Visual Culture and Struggle in Latin and Latinx America
  • The Bisexual Erasure of Emiliano Zapata: Art, Censorship, and Revolutionary Struggle in Mexico, Robert Franco, Washington University in St. Louis
  • The Revolutionary Art of Rosendo Salazar: Anarchism, Muralism and State Ideology, Rosalía Romero, Pomona College
  • Visualizing Juana Colón: Archival Power and the Struggle for Remembrance in Puerto Rico, Jorell MeléndezBadillo, Dartmouth College
  • Chair: Kevan Antonio Aguilar, UC San Diego
  • Commentator: Alexander Aviña, Arizona State University
Gig Work in the Woods – The Long History of Contingent Logging Work in Maine’s Woods, 1850-2020
  • Pulling the Strings in Maine’s Forests, 1940–2000, Michael G. Hillard, University of Southern Maine
  • I will be a farmer until I take a job: Agrarian Independence and Contract Labor in Rural New England and New
  • York, 1850-1930, Jason Newton, University of North Carolina–Charlotte
  • The Struggle Continues – Maine Loggers’ Recent Gains, Troy Jackson, Maine State Senate
  • Chair/Commentator: Elizabeth Tandy-Shermer, Loyola University of Chicago
Saturday, May 22, 12 – 1:15 pm ET
Anti-Apartheid Organizing and the Long Civil Rights Movement in the United States: Corporate Research, Bank Campaigns, and the Push for Sanctions
  • From Shareholder Activism to Trade Union Corporate Campaigns: How the International Anti-Apartheid Movement Reshaped the American Left, Grace Davie, Queens College, CUNY
  • “Redline South Africa, Not Lawndale and Chicago’s Black West Side!”: The 1977-88 Anti-Apartheid Bank Campaign, Prexy Nesbitt, Chapman University
  • “Radicals in a Broader Sense”: Anti-Apartheid Politics and the Long Arm of the Civil Rights Movement, Leon Fink, University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Chair/Commentator: Alex Lichtenstein, Indiana University
Writing Puerto Rican Labor History: A Discussion of ‘Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire’
  • Emma Amador, University of Connecticut, Storrs
  • Ismael Garcia-Colón, College of Staten Island and CUNY Graduate Center
  • Eileen Findlay, American University
  • Carmen Whalen, Williams College
  • Jorell Melendez-Badillo, Dartmouth College
  • Delia Fernandez, Michigan State University
Metzgar’s Striking Steel: A Twenty Year Retrospective
  • Tracy Neumann, Wayne State University
  • Gabriel Winant, University of Chicago
  • Samir Sonti, CUNY
  • Jefferson Cowie, Vanderbilt University
  • Jack Metzgar, Roosevelt Universtiy (retired)
  • Christine Walley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Broadcasting the Working Class: A Podcast and Community Radio Workshop
  • Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network
  • Judy Ancel, KKFI, Kansas City Community Radio
  • Patrick Dixon, Georgetown University
  • Jerry Mead-Lucero, Labor Express Radio
  • Liz Medina, Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO
  • Alan Wierdak, University of Maryland
Canaries in the Coal Mine: Sex Workers at the Front Lines
  • Angela Jones, SUNY Farmingdale
  • Heather Berg, Washington University St. Louis
  • Lindsay Blewett, York University
  • femi babylon, writer and artist
  • Emily Coombes, University of Nevada Las Vegas
  • Velvet, Sex Workers Outreach Project
  • Chair/Commentator: Melinda Chateauvert, Front Porch Research Strategy
Walls, Bars, and Fences: Incarcerated Workers in Canada’s Past and Present
  • From Camps to the Streets: Direct Action During the Great Depression, Mikhail Bjorge, University of Toronto
  • Prisoner Unionization in Canada, Jordan House, Brock University
  • Working Over Canada’s First National Internment Operations, Kassandra Luciuk, University ofToronto
  • Chair/Commentator: Paul Gray, Brock University
Saturday, May 22, 1:45 – 3 pm ET
New Directions in Faith, Labor, and the Common Good
  • Dan Graff, University of Notre Dame
  • Karen Kent, Unite Here Local 1, Chicago
  • Sr. Emily TeKolste, SP, NETWORK Lobby for Catholic SocialJustice
  • Kevin Hawkins, US Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service
  • James Franczek, Jr., Franczek P.C.
  • Chair/Commentator: Heath Carter, Princeton Theological Seminary
Red, Green, and International
  • Cindy Domingo, Legacy of Equality Leadership and Organizing
  • Carrie Freshour, Geography, University of Washington, Seattle
  • Rosalinda Guillen, Community to Community
  • Alina R. Méndez, University of Washington, Seattle
  • Michael Schulze-Oechtering, Western Washington University
Teaching Labor’s Story: Writing Workshop
  • Nikki Mandell, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
  • Randi Storch, SUNY Cortland
  • Rosemary Feurer, Northern Illinois University
  • Emily Lieb, Seattle University
  • Lisa Phillips, Indiana State University
  • Nick Juravich, UMass Boston
  • Cecelia Bucki, Fairfield University
The Home as an Essential Workplace
  • Northern Households, Immigrant Domestic Workers, and the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, Eileen Boris, University of California at Santa Barbara
  • “A First-Rate Seamstress For Sale”: Gender, Slavery, and the Contested Meaning of Home, Alexandra Finley, University of Pittsburgh
  • Fashioning Community: Black “At Home” Dressmakers in Early Twentieth Century New York City, Janette Gayle, Hobart & William Smith Colleges
  • Political Homework: Latina Labors and Political Activisms, 1930-1960, Sarah McNamara,Texas A&M University
  • Bargaining for “Work and Family”: Labor Defines Work-Family Benefits and the Meaning of Home, Kirsten Swinth, Fordham University
  • Chair/Commentator: Katherine Turk, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Entangled Histories of Racial Capitalism in the United States and South Africa
  • Strings Attached: Coke Money and the Student Divestment Movement in Atlanta, Amanda Joyce Hall, Yale University
  • Not the country for cheap white labour: U.S. Mining Engineers and the Elaboration of Racial Capitalism in South Africa, 1889-1910, Doug Jones, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign
  • Beyond Desegregation: Waging a Battle Against Apartheid in the South African Workplace, Mattie Webb, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • The American-African Affairs Association and the Conservative Case for South Africa Kelsey L. Zavelo, Duke University
  • Chair/Commentator: Jessica Ann Levy, SUNY-Purchase
Essential in the City: Working People and Organized Labor in Times of Urban Crisis
  • Empire in Need: Scales of Struggle in 1970s Seattle, Andrew Hedden, University of Washington
  • Fighting for the Working Class City: Retired Workers, Organized Labor, and Redevelopment in San Francisco, Laura Renata Martin, South Puget Sound Community College
  • Public Sector Unions and in the Re-Articulation of Essential Work in the 1975 New York City Fiscal Crisis, Michael Beyea Reagan, University of Washington
  • Mutual Aid and the Hierarchy of Care: Organizing Care Work in Capital’s Crises, JM Wong, Office of Civil Rights
  • Chair/Commentator: Katie Wilson, Transit Riders Union in Seattle
Networks of Working-Class Organization in the American Midwest, 1900-1970
  • Millions of Honest Workingmen: Reconstructing Socialist Networks in Chicago, 1900-1917, Natalie Behrends, Harvard University
  • The Kansas City Solidarity Infrastructure: Articulating Class Interests with Progressive Allies in the 1910s, Jeff Stilley, University of Missouri
  • Red Detroit: Revolutionaries, Labor Organizers, and Communists in the Motor City During the 1970s, Kenneth Alyass, Harvard University
  • Chair/Commentator: Traci Parker, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Saturday, May 22, 8 – 10 pm ET

Plenary

Essential Workers in the Food Industry during the Pandemic

The early weeks of the pandemic seemed to teach a general lesson about “essential labor,” a lesson that seems to have been largely forgotten since. In the meantime, the struggle to raise the federal minimum wage continues, despite the recent setback. This panel considers the possibilities of organizing in fast food and other restaurants, as a particularly militant part of the US working class historically, and today.

  • Mohamed Attia, Executive Director, Street Vendor Project
  • Dorothy Sue Cobble, Distinguished Professor Emerita of History and Labor Studies, Rutgers University
  • Ryan Coffel, Colectivo Collective Union Organizer
  • Carlos Enriquez, Restaurant Organizing Project, Democratic Socialists of America
  • Ben Wilkins, Organizing Director, NC Raise Up
Monday, May 24, 4:30 – 5:30 pm ET

Writing and Teaching a Labor History of Contingent Faculty (Joint Session with UALE)

Monday, May 24, 8 – 10 pm ET

LAWCHA/UALE Cultural Event: A Night of Poetry and Music

Tuesday, May 25, 12 – 3 pm ET

LAWCHA Board Meeting

Tuesday, May 25, 8 – 10 pm ET

UALE/LAWCHA Plenary: 9 to 5

We will gather with the United Association of Labor Educators for a screening and roundtable discussion of Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar’s documentary film, 9to5: Story of A Movement.

Wednesday, May 26, 6 – 7:30 pm ET

LAWCHA Member Meeting

The LAWCHA Membership Meeting will begin with a short greeting from an organizer of the B’Amazon Union Council of RWDSU, which is supporting the organization of workers at Amazon warehouses in Bessemer and across the South. The meeting will also include the announcement of this year’s LAWCHA Distinguished Service to Labor History Award and other prizes, and a discussion of LAWCHA’s future led by Vice President Cindy Hahamovitch.

Thursday, May 27, 12 – 1:15 pm ET
Public Sector Workers on the Front Lines of Democratic Existence
  • Gender & Politics among Federal Indian Service Employees, 1800-1930, Cathleen D. Cahill, Penn State University
  • Night of the Living Dread: Public Sector Workers Can’t See Light of Day, Frederick Gooding, Jr., TexasChristian University
  • “They Won’t Work for a Cop of Any Kind”: The 1970 Sanitation Slowdown, Municipal Workers and Black Power Politics in Philadelphia, Francis Ryan, Rutgers University
  • The Meaning of Teachers’ Labor in American Education: Change, Challenge, and Resistance, Jon Shelton, University of Wisconsin – Green Bay
  • “We’re the Backbone of this City”: Women & Gender in Public Work, Katherine Turk, University of North Carolina
  • Sick Ins, Heal Ins, and Wildcat Strikes: Labor Organizing at Chicago’s Public Hospital in the 1960s and Its Legacy for the 1970s, Amy Zanoni, Southern Methodist University
  • Chair/Commentator: Eric S. Yellin, University of Richmond
Roundtable: On doing global labor history: challenges and benefits
  • Julie Greene, University of Maryland–College Park
  • Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, University of Southern California
  • Peter Cole, Western Illinois University
  • Moderator: Shelton Stromquist, University of Iowa
Gangsters, Deindustrialization and Labor History for the Fashion Industry:Perspectives on New York City’s Garment District
  • Teaching Fashion Students About the History of the NYC Garment District, Kyunghee Pyun, Fashion Institute of Technology
  • Teaching Fashion Students About the History of the NYC Garment District, Daniel Levinson Wilk, Fashion Institute of Technology
  • On the Auction Block: The Garment Industry and the Deindustrialization of New York City, Andrew Battle, Common Notions
  • Murder in the Garment District: The Historic Role of Labor Racketeering in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Catherine Rios, Penn State University
  • Chair: David Witwer, Penn State University
  • Commentator: Kim Phillips-Fein, New York University
Economically Essential, Medically Marginal: Latinx Migrant Worker Health on theFront Lines of Twentieth Century U.S. Industry
  • Resisting Death and Dismemberment: Mexican Strategies to Secure Compensation in the Lower Midwest, Bryan Winston, Dartmouth College
  • 20th Century Agricultural Labor, Migrant Death, and Remembering Lost Lives, Juan Ignacio Mora, University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana
  • Surviving Dairyland: Investigating How Undocumented Immigrants Navigated WorkplaceDanger in the Rural
  • Midwest, 1988-2004, Dustin Cohan, University of Wisconsin-MadisonChair: Marla A. Ramírez, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Commentator: Chantel Rodriguez, University of Maryland
Exploring Black Power, Political Resistance, and Social Movements
  • Forging Radical Inclusivity: Jon Paul Hammond’s Architecture of a World Unrealized, J.T. Roane, Arizona State University
  • Rethinking Black Intellectuals and the “Inner” City: Against the Plantation to Ghetto Narrative in the US Capital, Paula C. Austin, Boston University
  • “People Can’t Live in a Stadium:” Black Resistance to the Politics of Development in Atlanta, Danielle Wiggins, California Institute of Technology
  • Chair and Commentator: Marsha Barrett, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Democracy in Public Sector Unions
  • More Whitley Than Wagner: A Canadian Public Sector Union’s Experience with Sectoral Bargaining from 1967 to 2000, Jason Russell, SUNY Empire State College
  • Democracy & Authority at Work: Public Employees in 1970s Pennsylvania, James Young, Edinboro University
  • Striking and Bargaining for the Common Good: The Case of the 1970 New Haven Federation of Teachers, Alexander Kolokotronis, Yale University
  • Firestorm!: Chaffey College in Crisis, 1978-1980, Lukas Gunderson, Chaffey College
  • The Struggle Over The Story: Rethinking Schools, Union Democracy and the Milwaukee Teachers’ Union, 1975-1990, Eleni Schirmer, University of Wisconsin
Education and the Making of Working-Class Politics in Boston
  • We’re doing it our way: Working-Class African American and Latina Mother-Organizers in Boston’s
  • Movements for Educational Justice, Tatiana M.F. Cruz, Lesley University
  • Driving Against Injustice: Boston’s School Bus Drivers Union and the Struggle for a Democratic City, Jeffrey Helgeson, Texas State University
  • Class Politics and School Desegregation in Boston, 1974–1985, Greta de Jong, University of Nevada, Reno
  • From Busing to Black Lives Matter: The Evolution of the Boston Teachers Union, Nick Juravich, UMass Boston
  • Chair/Commentator: Zebulon Miletsky, Stony Brook University
Collective Bargaining from All Sides: Unionism, the Faculty Senate, ContingentFaculty, and Academic Administration
  • Naomi R. Williams, Rutgers University
  • David Hamilton Golland, Governors State University
  • Jon E. Bekken, Albright College
  • Nelson Ouellet, Université de Moncton
Labor and the First Amendment: Recovering the Past, Reclaiming the Future (Co-sponsored by UALE)
  • Sophia Z. Lee, University of Pennsylvania Law School
  • Laura Weinrib, Harvard Law School
  • Donna T. Haverty-Stacke, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of NewYork
  • Catherine Fisk, University of California, Berkeley Law
  • Jessica Rutter, American Federation of Teachers
  • Amanda Jaret, United Food and Commercial Workers
Tapping into Crises: Identity, Cultural Production, and Exploitation in America’sHistoric Brewing Industry
  • Joseph B. Walzer, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
  • Krista Grensavitch, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
  • John Harry, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
  • Jacob Remes, New York University
Thursday, May 27, 1:45 – 3 pm ET
Cold War Labor: Crossing Borders, Crossing Systems
  • Flexible Production with Socialist Characteristics in the Soviet Union: The Case of the Shchekino Chemical Combine, 1967-1971, James Nealy, Duke University
  • From ‘Free’ Trade Unionism to Free Trade Zones: Labor Internationalism at Cold War’s End, Jeff Schuhrke, University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Reproduction and Destruction: Caring Work in America’s Cold War Empire, Hannah Ontiveros, Duke University
  • Chair/Commentator: Leon Fink, Editor of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History
Setting the Stage for Restructuring: Government, Organized Labor, and Finance Capital’s Responses to the Prospect of American Industrial Decline
  • If We Build It, They Can Profit: How the Area Redevelopment Administration Federalized Corporate Welfare, Alyssa Russell, Duke University
  • A Nationalist Response to a Crisis of Power: The AFL-CIO and the Burke-Hartke Act, 1971-1974, Melanie Sheehan, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
  • Sort of a Renaissance Man: David Murdock’s Rusty Paternalism in Kannapolis, N.C., 1982-Present, Will Raby, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
  • Chair/Commentator: Erik Gellman, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Multispecies Workforces and the Limits of Solidarity
  • Reducing Chinese Laborers to Beasts of Burdens: Dehumanization and Resistance in San Francisco during the
  • Great Epizootic Influenza Outbreak of 1873, Thomas G. Andrews, University of Colorado Boulder
  • The Making of the Circus Celebrity and the Unmaking of the Circus World, Andrea L. Ringer, Tennessee State University
  • Who Was a Worker?: Industrial Captivity, Industrial Childhood, and the Politics of Manufacturing Illuminants, 1830-1865, Jeremy Zallen, Lafayette College
  • Chair: Joshua Specht, University of Notre Dame
  • Commentator: Susan Nance, University of Guelph
On the Front Lines Against Fascism I: The Making of US Antifascism
  • Class War and Peace: Communism, Anti-Imperialism, and Antifascism in the Interwar Period, Alexander M. Dunphy, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Character of a New Type: Richard Wright’s Native Son and Popular Front Aesthetics, John Bohn, Columbia University
  • Antifascism, Antisemitism, and the Young Communist League in Los Angeles, Caroline Luce, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Chair/Commentator: Christopher Vials, University of Connecticut-Storrs
If We Can’t Enforce Our Rights, Then No One Will: The Worker-driven Social Responsibility Model’s History and Impact on Supply Chains
  • Cathy Albisa, Chair of the WSRN Coordinating Committee
  • Marita Canedo, Migrant Justice
  • Gerardo Reyes Chavez, Coalition of Immokalee Workers
  • Jennifer Lynn Bair, University of Virginia
Racial Capitalism and Labor History
  • Keona K. Ervin, University of Missouri
  • Elizabeth Esch, University of Kansas
  • Bernadette Pérez, University of California, Berkeley
  • Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Georgetown University
  • Gabriel Winant, University of Chicago
Community Organizers and the Building of Worker Power
  • Naomi R. Williams, Rutgers University
  • Dennis Deslippe, Franklin & Marshall College
  • Louis Kimmel, New Labor
  • Jonathan Lange, Industrial Areas Foundation
  • Andrea Ortiz-Landin, Brighton Park Neighborhood Council
  • Mazahir Salih, Center for Worker Justice of Eastern Iowa
  • Deborah Scott, Georgia STAND-UP
Dignity and Labor: The Push for Fair Pay and Social Respect, 1919-1946
  • Before Essential Workers: Chicago’s Janitors, Sanitation, and the SEIU, Benjamin Peterson, Alma College
  • The Same as a Man: Gender, Labor, and Equality in the Fort Worth Armour & Co Plant, 1942-1946, Justin Jolly, Texas Christian University
  • The American Standard: How the Fight Over Minimum Wage for Mexican Women Helped Shape White Supremacy in the State, Leah LaGrone Ochoa, Texas Christian University
  • Chair/Commentator: Kenyon Zimmer, University of Texas Arlington
On the Imperial Frontline: Radical Activism across Borders
  • Agrarian Radicals on the Edge of Empire in Texas, 1846-1917, Tom Alter, Texas State University
  • Socialism and the Construction of a Global White Consciousness: Race and Colonialism in the Second International (1889-1914), Lorenzo Costaguta, University of Bristol
  • The Emergence of an Anarcho-Feminist Movement in the Mexican Borderlands: Caritina Piña, Hermanos Rojos, and Germinal, 1915-1930, Sonia Hernández, Texas A&M University
  • Chair/Commentator: Kyle Pruitt, University of Maryland
Thursday, May 27, 8-9:30 pm ET

Plenary

The New Labor Journalist and the First Draft of Working-Class History

Recent years has seen surging interest in workplace issues as more workers engage in strikes and express interest in unions. The pandemic has further heightened labor conflicts, as inequality of many sorts soars, people debate the nature of essential work, and the gig economy expands but also is challenged. What will historians of the future make of it all? It’s often been said that journalism is the first draft of history. Join some of today’s leading labor journalists–whose proliferation itself is a sign of greater importance of labor

  • Michelle Chen, Dissent/Nation
  • Steven Greenhouse, formerly New York Times
  • Kim Kelly, Teen Vogue
  • Juliana Reyes, Philadelphia Inquirer
  • Micah Uetricht, Jacobin
Friday, May 28, 12 – 1:15 pm ET
Labor, Disability, and Imperialism in the U.S. Empire
  • Labor, Race, and Disability on the Panama Canal, Caroline Lieffers, King’s University
  • The U.S. Imperial World of Labor and Disability, Jack Werner, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Ability and the Management of Empire, Karen Miller, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY
  • Chair Commentator: Colleen Woods, University of Maryland, College Park
On the Front Lines Against Fascism II: Antifascism Across Borders
  • The Spanish Civil War and Anti-Fascism in the USSR: From the Great Patriotic War to the Soviet Postwar, Glennys Young, University of Washington
  • The Surprisingly Transnational Origins of Antifascism: A New Proletarian Politics in Interwar Rome and New York City, Joseph Fronczak, Princeton University
  • Aid the Victims of German Fascism! Transatlantic Networks and the Rise of Anti-Nazism in the USA, 1933–1935, Kasper Braskén, Åbo Akademi University
  • Chair/ Commentator: Julie Greene, University of Maryland, College Park
Structuring Home-Based Labor: Professionalization, Organizing, and Resistance Among Child Care and Domestic Workers
  • To Dignify Housework: Professionalizing Household Labor in the Early-Twentieth Century United States, Cristina Groeger, Lake Forest College
  • Importing Care: the History of the Au Pair Program, 1986 to the present, Justine Modica, Stanford University
  • Organizing Low-Wage Women Workers: A Comparative Report from the Field – Then and Now, Rosa Navarro, SUNY Albany
  • Chair/Commentator: Grace Chang, University of California Santa Barbara
New Perspectives on U.S. Socialist History
  • Intellectual Radicals: How Ben Hanford and Carl Sandburg Shaped American Socialism, S,tephanie M. Riley, University of South Carolina
  • Fighting Fascists: Socialists and the Social History of Anti-Fascism in the Early 1930s, Ian Gavigan, Rutgers, New Brunswick
  • After the Party: Socialist Milwaukee in the New Deal and World War II, Aims McGuinness, University of California Santa Cruz
  • Chair/Commentator: Tobias Higbie, University of California Los Angeles
Policing White Supremacy: Police Unions, City Politics, and Police Brutality, a RoundTable Discussion
  • Aaron Bekemeyer, Harvard University
  • Michael J. Lansing, Augsburg University
  • Simon Balto, University of Iowa
Redesigning and Reimagining Superhero Narratives and Essential Workers
  • Michele Bury, California State University, Dominguez Hills
  • Vivian Price, California State University, Dominguez Hills
  • Ellie Zenhari, California State University, Dominguez Hills
  • Chair/Commentator: Vivian Price
Towards a Collaborative Path Forward: Envisioning the Future of Community Connections in the Responsive Curation, Promotion, and Description of Labor-Related Collections (Co-sponsored by UALE)
  • Documenting the Intersectionality of the Black Lives Matter and Labor Movements: Why We Can’t Wait, Ben Blake George Meany Labor Archive, UMD
  • Corrective Collecting and Proactive Documentation, Outreach, and Archival Description Strategies: A Collaborative Community-Centered Model, Conor M. Casey, Labor Archives of Washington, Seattle
  • Speaking of Work: The Evolution of the Iowa Labor History Oral Project and the Future of Labor Archives in the Midwest, John W. McKerley, University of Iowa Labor Center
  • Building Shared Power and Solidarity: Community Programming as a Strategy for Mutual Care, Support, and Growth, Shannon O’Neill, Tamiment-Wagner Collections, NYU
  • The Present is Prologue: Building Archival Collections in the Now, Catherine Powell, Labor Archives & Research Center, SFSU
  • Developing a Collaborative Relationship between the United Auto Workers and its Archives, Gavin Strassel, Walter P. Reuther Library, WSU
Friday, May 28, 1:45 – 3 pm ET
Finding Black Resistance in the Archives – Exploring Chicago’s Black Labor andWorking-Class History
  • Erik Gellman, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
  • Melissa Ford, Slippery Rock University
  • William Adams, University of Kansas
  • Beverly Cook, Chicago Public Library
  • Chair/Commentator: Marcia Walker-McWilliams, Black Metropolis Research Consortium
Farms, Factories, and Files: Centering Women in Modern U.S. Labor History
  • Performing the Family Farm: Gender and Labor on Stage at Farm Aid, Daniel Gilbert, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • Pickin’ and Shuckin’: African American Women’s Work in the Mississippi Gulf Coast Seafood Industry, Deanne Stephens, University of Southern Mississippi
  • Discouraging the Office Wolf: The Delayed Campaign Priorities of the Working Women’s Movement, Amanda Walter, Towson University
  • Chair/Commentator: Caroline Waldron, University of Dayton
Populism, Labor, and Social Movements
  • Thomas Alter, Texas State University
  • Omar H. Ali, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  • Rachel Meade, Boston University
  • Chair/Commentator: Robert D. Johnston, University of Illinois at Chicago
The Right to Labor: Making Multiracial Solidarity from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression
  • The Corporation’s Racial Body, Yuhe Faye Wang, Yale University
  • Slave Labor Must Die and Free Labor Shall Be its Executioner, Kyle Pruitt, University of Maryland
  • Human Rights versus Property Rights, 1880-1940, John Enyeart, Bucknell University
  • /Commentator: Rachel Ida Buff, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
More to the Stories: Communist Party Gains and Rightwing Violence in the 1930s
  • Keeping the Peons in Line: Rightwing Rioting in 1939 San Antonio, Gigi Peterson, State University of NY – Cortland
  • Keeping the Peons in Line: Rightwing Rioting in 1939 San Antonio, Martin Halpern, Henderson State University (Emeritus)
  • Dead Red Reaction: The Klan Responds to the CPUSA Organizing the South, Ben Schmack, University of Kansas
  • Popular Radicalism in the 1930s: The History of the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill, Chris Wright, Hunter College
  • Chair/Commentator: Randi Storch, State University of NY – Cortland
Red, Blue, Purple: Deindustrialization and Working-Class Political Realignment
  • Urgent Emergence: Post-NAFTA Working-Class Politics in Southern Indiana, Joseph Varga, Indiana University Bloomington
  • Appalachia in the Neoliberal Era, Lou Martin, Chatham University
  • A “Sweatshop Employer”: The Embodied Politics of Workplace and Community Campaigns Against
  • Deindustrialization in Western New York, Jason Kozlowski, West Virginia University
  • Chair/Commentator: Sherry Lee Linkon, Georgetown University
A Decade of Documenting Agricultural Workers’ Struggles: The Farmworker Association of Florida and the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida
  • Erin Conlin, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
  • Matt Simmons, University of Central Florida
  • Adolfho Romero, University of Florida
  • Chair: Paul Ortiz, University of Florida
  • Commentator:J. Antonio Tovar, Farm Workers Association of Florida
Chicago Health Care and Activism, Past and Present
  • The Struggle for Safe Schools and Communities, Stacy Davis Gates, Chicago Teachers Union
  • Care and Protest during Covid-19, Elizabeth Lalasz, National Nurses United
  • The History of the Trauma Center Campaign, Toussaint Losier, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
  • Fifty Years in the Struggle for Health Care as a Human Right, Linda Rae Murray, University of Illinois-Chicago
  • The Public Hospital and Chicago’s History of Health Care Activism, Amy Zanoni, Southern Methodist University
Friday, May 28, 8-10 pm ET

Plenary

Screening of Adrian Prawica’s new documentary film, Haymarket: The Bomb, the Anarchists, the Labor Struggle.