June’s LAWCHA conference was my first. I had an excellent time, presented my work on a successful panel about blue-green alliances, and a chaired a really great panel on the 100th anniversary of the Paterson textile strike of 1913. But
Events this summer have further demonstrated a cruel irony of African American life in the glare of the nation’s first black presidency. Specifically, Barack Obama’s historic two administrations have been accompanied by brazen white supremacist reaction and widespread black alienation.
Clarence Lang, Forum Organizer: Since the late 1970s, neoliberalism has emerged as the main political-economic organizing principle in the United States and globally. Characterized by deregulation, privatization, and economic austerity, neoliberal policies have promoted the devaluation of labor and the
The 2013 LAWCHA national conference ended with a closing session held at Cooper Union Hall on Saturday, June 4th at 4:30. The closing plenary, entitled “Looking Forward: New Directions and Strategies for Labor,” featured activists, labor leaders, and academics who
The New York conference in June marked an important threshold for LAWCHA. The programmatic diversity and stimulus to membership the conference created invites some rethinking of LAWCHA’s identity as an organization and future directions.
School safety is on the chopping block in Philadelphia. On June 7th, the school district announced the layoff of 1,202 school safety staff. Today, a group of Philadelphia school parents and lunchroom staff responded in an incredibly inspiring way, launching
How have working people developed solidarity and power to confront employers and the state, to struggle with each over and within their communities, to enhance rights and extend the arc of justice? How do we as scholars, educators, and labor
Shortly after Howard Zinn’s death in January 2010, the Occupy movement took to the streets, many of its most vocal proponents brandishing his People’s History of the United States. They seized upon his work as both a legitimization of their
Editors Note: Duke University Press allows us free access to one selected journal article or forum published in each issue of Labor: Working Class History of the Americas. This issue had a roundtable forum on the popular show The Wire.
The battle against teachers and their unions seemed to crescendo last year during Chicago’s teacher strike. The mainstream media had a field day blaming those “lazy teachers” and their “big unions” for the problems facing Chicago’s public school system, the