Awards and Business meeting, Saturday: One of the real pleasures of LAWCHA is our awards. We now give out two book awards, the Taft (in conjunction with the Cornell ILR School) and the Montgomery (in conjunction with the OAH), the Gutman Dissertation Award, and the occasional distinguished service award.

Global labor migration session, Saturday: If the #lawcha2017 opening session was a barn-burner, so too was what was for me the end of the formal conference (I didn’t go to tonight’s plenary, and I leave early tomorrow morning): a round-table on labor and migration–really about globalization and enclosure–with some of LAWCHA’s stars: Annelise Orleck, Nafeesa Tanjeem, Eileen Boris, and Nelson Lichtenstein, chaired by Eric Arneson.  

Remembering Jim Green, Saturday Session: A year ago, LAWCHA lost a stalwart: Jim Green, LAWCHA’s third president. At a panel on Friday afternoon, we remembered him as a teacher, as a scholar, as a public historian, as a leader of the labor history profession, and as, for so many of us, a mentor and friend.

A panel on Friday called “Traveling the World: Workers’ Transnationalism” was a example of another valuable thing about LAWCHA panels: thoughtful comments and discussions. The papers were good and interesting too–I summarize them in the tweets embedded below–but I want to really highlight Dana Frank’s commentary, which pushed the speakers and indeed the audience in a new direction.

Religious history panel, Friday Morning: One of the things I most enjoy about LAWCHA conferences is how ecumenical they are. Labor and working-class history is a broad church. Friday morning I went to a panel entitled Religious Leaders, Grassroots Responses, and Political Change.