LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History

LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History is the official journal for the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA), and is housed at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University. A subscription to LABOR is available through membership in LAWCHA. 

The labor question—who will do the work and under what economic and political terms?—beckons today with renewed global urgency. As a site for both historical research and commentary, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History hopes to provide an intellectual scaffolding for understanding the roots of continuing social dilemmas. We invite submissions that explore the situation, subjectivity, or strategy of working men and women in any era. Although the tradition from which we emerge and to which we still pay critical homage has focused primarily on social movements and institutions based on “free” industrial labor, we mean to give equal attention to other labor systems and social contexts (e.g., slavery and other coercive labor forms, agricultural work, unpaid and domestic labor, the contingent or informal sector, the professions). While we begin with the US experience, we intend to extend our literacy not only across the American hemisphere but also, by way of transnational, international, and comparative themes, toward a truly global reach. To these ends, we look not only to academic historians but also to other scholars, journalists, labor educators, poets, and writer-activists for research articles, interpretive essays, notes and documents, and reviews.

Subscribe to LABOR, Read LABOR through Duke University, and join the discussion at LABORonline.

Information on submissions to Labor, including the journal’s style guide, can be located here.

Any questions related to the journal can be directed to Managing Editor Patrick Dixon.

About the Editor

Leon Fink is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is a specialist in American labor, immigration history, and the Gilded Age/Progressive Era and the editor of LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History.

The author or editor of a dozen books, Fink’s most recent work adopts a transnational and comparative view of the Gilded Age/Progressive Era as well as seeking out the roots of today’s “globalized” economic order.  In this regard, please see, e.g. co-edited, Labor Justice across the Americas (University of Illinois Press, 2018); The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Promise of a New World Order (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); co-edited, Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises (University of Illinois Press, 2014; winner of the “Book of Year” prize bestowed by the International Labor History Association),; Major Problems in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Third Edition (Cengage 2014); Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to 2000 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) a study of maritime labor regulation, 1800-2000; co-edited  Workers Across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).  In 2003, he traced the trans-national experience of recent Latino immigrants in The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Other works include: Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Harvard University Press, 1998); In Search of the Working Class: Essays in American Labor History and Political Culture (University of Illinois Press, 1994); Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: 1199SEIU and the Politics of Health Care Unionism, co-authored with Brian Greenberg (University of Illinois Press, 2nd ed. 2009) and Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (University of Illinois Press, 1983).