The Midwest Labor and Working-Class History Graduate Colloquium met on May 26th, 2018 at the University of Iowa, where it was founded by graduate students of Professor Shelton Stromquist almost twenty years ago. Hosted by Ph.D. students Ashley H.
Read more →
If there is going to be a revival of the U.S. labor movement, it’s likely that women are going to lead it.
Read more →
Pride in something seems to be a good thing to have. But pride can lead to prejudice. And it can also lead to displacement and erasure. For many, President Trump’s promise on Inauguration Day, that “From this moment on, it’s going to be America First,” feels like an evocation of national pride.
Read more →
President Trump’s recent visit to Southern California to view prototypes for his much-touted border wall drew protests and new pledges by immigrants and their supporters to fight his anti-immigrant policies. But in February, the Supreme Court handed immigration rights advocates a legal setback in Jennings v.
Read more →
I came in through the back entrance. It offered a clue to one strength of The Sweat of their Face: Portraying American Workers, an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (through September 3 2018). Greeting me was Ramiro Gomez’s “Woman Cleaning Shower in Beverly Hills (after David Hockney’s Man Taking Shower in Beverly Hills, 1964)”.
Read more →
Although I’ve taught at the same university continuously since 2007, I’m still considered “temporary” faculty: a kind of intellectual migrant, shifting every year to a different office left open by whichever tenure-track faculty member is on leave that year.
Read more →
Ed Sadlowski passed away yesterday. His life is a testament to the grit of the leftwing Midwestern union militants. His roots in unionism go back to the Southern Illinois coalfields and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations of the 1930s.
Read more →
LaborOnline’s no-longer-quite-monthly series on new books in labor and working-class history continues. Christo Aivalis’s The Constant Liberal: Pierre Trudeau, Organized Labour, and the Canadian Social Democratic Left was published on May Day by UBC Press. Aivalis is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto in the history department.
Read more →
Scabby the Rat, a familiar figure on US picket lines, has taken his show on the road. In the past few years, he’s been spotted outside several Australian companies, sometimes accompanied by his pals, Fat Cat and Greedy Pig. Scabby’s journey shows that both anti-labor efforts and working-class feistiness are every bit as global as capitalism and labor.
Read more →
A literary festival isn’t the obvious place to discuss class, but a couple of weeks ago I found myself introducing a session at my local Faversham Literary Festival on a new book called Know Your Place. Edited by Nathan Connolly and subtitled ‘Essays on the Working Class, by the Working Class’, the book brings together twenty-two writers of working-class origin reflecting on aspects of their lives past and present.
Read more →