Editor's Note

New Directions for Labour/Le Travail

As Labour/Le Travail turns forty-one, it is safe to say that the journal has turned a new corner. We represent a new development in the history of Labour/Le Travail: a co-editorship. After a search process by the editorial board, they selected a social historian (Joan Sangster) and a political scientist (Charles Smith) to collaborate as co-editors, a reflection of the new partnership Labour/Le Travail has forged with Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies (cawls), established in 2013. We embark on this journey with great respect for the journal's traditions, but also an enthusiastic openness to new directions. In the last three years, the journal has been edited by Sean Cadigan, then Greg Kealey and Bryan Palmer. We thank them for their work. It is safe to say that the journal would not have the national and international reputation it does without Greg and Bryan's tireless efforts and dedicated commitment to expanding the study of working class history and labour politics over the past four decades. To honour those years of service, Greg and Bryan have honorary positions on the masthead and Greg continues to have an important connection to the journal as Treasurer of the Canadian Committee on Labour History (cclh). We also want to thank Paul Lau and opseu for their support for the journal through translation services. Paul is retiring but he will continue to help us with translation.

The partnership between cclh and cawls presents opportunities to push the examination of work and class relations in exciting directions. We believe our experience will assist in bridging these two fields, but also build on the strengths that the rich traditions of working-class history and political economy have played in contributing to a rigorous examination of the progressive social and political movements in Canada and abroad. In many ways, these may be the best and worst of times for working-class history and labour studies. The economic and social climate is not propitious for organized labour, let alone the majority of unorganized workers in Canada and across the globe who have encountered years of austerity, enhanced precarity, and an ideological climate that has eaten away at the concept of workers' rights and the limited welfare state. At the same time, there are energizing signs of workers mobilizing around new demands, such as living wage campaigns, new kinds of organizing outside of a demoralized trade union movement, more radical movements grounded in working-class resistance, feminism, and anti-racism, and a resurgence of some interest in class relations and capitalism, for many years topics placed on the backburner of scholarly priorities. What can a journal dedicated to Canadian labour studies offer at this moment?

Our answer is Frederick Jameson's motto: "always historicize." We believe that it is essential to historicize paid and unpaid labour in all its formulations, explore the lived experience of working-class life, dissect the shifting relations between labour and capital, and connect the study of work to other social structures of inequality and the emancipatory movements that challenge those inequalities. In order to do that, we can build on the immense strengths of Labour/Le Travail (l/lt) but we also want to encourage new experiments, not just in presentation and form, but in thinking and theorizing.

The strength of the journal has been its commitment to deeply-researched articles framed by interpretive scholarly debates, and that tradition will likely continue. However, l/lt has also opened up new methods of presentation that could use more attention, more submissions: transnational studies that fit within the "Beyond Our Shores" section, Review Essays that truly challenge writing in the field; and Controversies that are strong, spirited debates encompassing both historiography and contemporary labour issues. Labour history writing in Canada has gone through various waves, in terms of its vigour, theme, and approaches, but the tendency in academic life over the 1990s and beyond to downplay the importance of class and labour may have caused us to bunker down and shy away from debate. We would like to see debate re-invigorated, including submissions that challenge...