posts and bio
Leon Fink
Leon Fink is a distinguished professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago and the editor of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas.
Remembering the legacies of two longtime advocates for the working-class.
On August 5, 2021 labor advocates across the country lost a champion with the death of AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. Eleven days later, another working-class advocate, activist-sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, succumbed to a long illness.
Read more →
Political commentators regularly identify both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as populists. Labor historian Leon Fink dives into the debate over their roots.
Read more →
States such as Ohio and Michigan have been hit with blight and economic downturn. Offering reparations to those hardest hit could be the key to winning in 2020.
Read more →
It was the radical African-American intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois, who famously called the mass disaffection and migration of southern slaves to Union battle lines in the Civil War a “general strike.”
Read more →
In recent months we have taken action to end the shipping of print copies of Labor by FedEx in any capacity.
Read more →
President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address, progressive? Maybe. But only if you are one of the liberals who have forgotten this nation’s working class. A key feature of the president’s message was the absence of a single word: unions.
Read more →
From November 27 to November 30, 2012, I had the pleasure of attending the Second International “Worlds of Labor” conference—effectively the Brazilian labor historians’ national gathering—sponsored by the host institution, the Getulio Vargas Foundation, in Rio De Janeiro.
Read more →
Alfred F. Young, a pioneer of the “new labor history,” noted social historian of the early American nation, and a founding editor of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, died on November 6, 2012 at age 87. Many know him from his passionate and original investigation of the lives of working people,
Read more →
I write with exciting news of the takeoff of LaborOnline, a new blog that will deepen and extend the content of LAWCHA’s flagship journal, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. As piloted by new Associate Editor Rosemary Feurer–and assisted by an all-star cast of designated blog contributors–LaborOnline will feature commentary on a host of issues, contemporary and historical, as well as “instant” dialogue and debate among readers and authors about the contents of the print journal.
Read more →