Twenty-One Years of LAWCHA

As I write, I'm wrapping up my work as president of LAWCHA and preparing to hand matters over to the inimitable William Jones. He will be assisted by our incoming vice president, Cindy Hahamovitch, our continuing treasurer, Liesl Orenic, and incoming secretary, Erik Gellman. This is a formidable team, and I'm excited to see LAWCHA continue its ambitious agenda: teaching, researching, writing, and organizing to ensure maximal public and scholarly understanding of working men and women's history and to support their ongoing struggles. LAWCHA is critical to keeping workers' voices an important part of the body politic, and for supporting the work we all do as teachers and writers.

It is strange to think, now, that LAWCHA did not exist until the late 1990s. As important as labor history was from the 1960s onward, no unified association brought together those teaching and researching in the field. We had the journal Labor History, to be sure, and there existed several crucial conferences, including the North American Labor History Conference (NALHC) held annually in Detroit. That conference, and Wayne State University's Department of History more generally, played a vital role by supporting the work and conversations that gave birth to LAWCHA.

I recall talking throughout the day and night at the NALHC 1997 conference with Jim Barrett, Leon Fink, Cecelia Bucki, Larry Glickman, Heather Thompson, Roger Horowitz, and many others about the need for an organization that could bring the disparate beacons of our field together. At the time, I was five months pregnant with my daughter Sophie, and I felt a bit wobbly as the conversations went into the late night. At the end of the conference, the group appointed myself and Elizabeth Faue—the longtime power behind NALHC—as cochairs of an organizing committee to establish LAWCHA (a year later Liz needed to step down and Shelton Stromquist ably joined me as cochair). The organizing group included interim officers, and it created a committee, chaired by Roger Horowitz, to draft our constitution. Over the next year a large team of us debated and worked through the articles and bylaws of that constitution. In October 1998 I held seven-month-old Sophie as we debated final details, and then, happily, we approved the constitution and LAWCHA was launched. A year later the organizing committee that had created LAWCHA was able to stand down, as the organization's first elected officers (Jacqueline Hall as president, with VP Joe Trotter, Secretary Vicki Ruiz, and Treasurer Thomas Klug) began their terms.

A letter went out to prospective members in June 1999 explaining the rationale for the organization:

We all felt the need for an organization that would make labor history more visible and create a presence in public debates that affect us as academic workers or as members of the broader labor community. We also wanted to strengthen ties between academics, public historians and trade union activists, and to make working-class history integral to public school curricula and to public history projects.

In the years since, LAWCHA has achieved more than its organizers originally imagined. Its finances and membership are strong and growing (with nearly six hundred members). It is a model organization, known not just for supporting the research, teaching, and writing of its members and for generating greater knowledge of labor and working-class history—it also connects to labor activism across the country and lends its support to ongoing struggles. In 2004 LAWCHA voted to launch its own biannual conferences, often in collaboration with other organizations; that same year LAWCHA collaborated with Leon Fink to create its own journal, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History. Those two developments have done much to stimulate new scholarship. LAWCHA has also worked to highlight the breadth of working-class history and demonstrate that it consists of far more than the history of unions and industrial wage labor. Working men and women's struggles in Asian American, Latino, and African American communities, immigrant or native born, young or old, female or male, LGBTQ+, disabled or abled: all have important stories to tell. LAWCHA members work to tell those stories...