President’s Perspective: Looking Ahead from Washington, DC

The LAWCHA conference held in Washington, DC, in May 2015, “Fighting Inequality: Class, Race, and Power,” carried forward the momentum from our large gatherings in Chicago and New York. Held in partnership with the Working-Class Studies Association (WCSA) and in conjunction with film showings by DC Labor-Fest, the event blended scholarship, activism, arts, and culture.

Thanks to the extraordinary efforts and commitment of the conference program committee—in particular our host, LAWCHA board member and director of Georgetown’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor Joseph McCartin, and longtime WCSA leader Sherry Linkon, who did the lion’s share of conference planning—the program was a huge success.

Among the more than a hundred lively sessions were two rousing plenaries featuring activists: one titled “Reinventing the Labor Movement,” with representatives from Working America, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the North Carolina AFL-CIO, and Bargaining for the Common Good; and another titled “Testing Inequality,” with a leader of the Chicago Teachers Union, a parent activist, and a middle-school math teacher and author. Other panels ranged from teaching workshops, digital history project presentations, film discussions, and sessions for labor archivists to all manner of intriguing topical sessions on history and working-class culture and activism. One especially dynamic panel presented the case for “Why Progressive Faculty Should Boycott Teach for America.” The presenters, who included past TFA teachers and teacher-mentors, seemed to leave no one unconvinced. It would be great to keep that and other discussions from the conference going through LABOR and LaborOnline.

As longtime LAWCHA members know, we alternate between holding our own stand-alone conferences in odd years, as at Georgetown, and holding our meetings in conjunction with the Organization of American Historians (OAH) annual meeting in even years. We hope as many members as possible will join us April 7–10, 2016, in Providence, Rhode Island, at the OAH. We expect to have a big presence in Providence, with our board and membership meetings as well as a Friday evening panel featuring local labor activists and followed by a reception; a Saturday labor tour of Providence followed by a dinner at a local brewpub; and several additional cosponsored panels. (See the website for details and updates, and make sure to sign up for the luncheon membership meeting and the tour when you register for the OAH.)

We are just beginning to plan our June 2017 conference, to be held in Seattle, Washington. We are excited to be meeting in what is often called “the left coast” for its progressive prolabor public policies and anticipate that attendees will find Seattle’s recent history inspiring. Incoming president James Gregory has begun reserving spaces at the University of Washington, and we will begin constituting a program committee after the Providence meeting this spring.

In ongoing work, the board laid plans at its Georgetown meeting to continue pushing out the resources of our Teachers and Public Sector Workers Initiative to K–12 teachers and other union activists. Plans are in the works to reach out in particular to contacts in the AFT and the National Education Association and among labor educators and to try to have a LAWCHA presence at their conventions. If you have not seen the materials yet, please visit the “Teaching Resources” tab of the website and help us get them to teachers in your area so they may, as Jim Barrett nicely put it in the teaching session he organized, “look back to move forward.”

We continue to try to build our membership so that LAWCHA can do more. Board member Talitha LeFlouria heads our membership committee and is working with a group of state organizers to actively recruit on a state-by-state basis. You can help by contacting the national office for brochures to take to events or conferences or to share with colleagues and contacts. We know from the history of organizing that one-on-one recruiting works best, so please help us reach people in your personal networks.

We are also seeking to develop more of a presence at meetings that could...