On SLSA's latest Working History podcast, "Labor, Capital, and Politics in the Industrial South," Michael Goldfield discusses his book, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Oxford University Press), union organization in the South's leading industrial sectors, and how contests between labor and capital in the New Deal-era South continue to shape American politics today. Listen to Working History on the New Books Network, Spotify, iTunes, and SoundCloud, and subscribe on these platforms to stay up to date on future episodes.

Michael Goldfield is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and currently Research Fellow at the Fraser Center for Workplace Issues at Wayne State University. A former labor union and civil rights activist, Goldfield's work focuses on the study of labor, class, race, and American politics.

Webinar TONIGHT! Register here

Workers across the US South are on the move demanding workplace safety amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic. Southern workers also need a strategy and self-organization to secure any gains they make through collective action. As we reach nearly 17 million people becoming recently unemployed, our for-profit health care system tied to a job is increasingly being exposed. Health care should be a human right for all.

Studies show that the Black working class, because of the capitalist system's historical oppression and neglect, has suffered the highest number of deaths from COVID-19. 57 percent of the US Black population live in the South, a region where racial, economic, social and political inequality has been the highest for Black America.

How do we use this moment to advance the organization of workers at the workplace and to build solidarity formations such as local workers assemblies, especially in the Southern region with lowest union density? How can this crisis help us get closer to a universal, single-payer health care system? 

We seek to launch a South-wide campaign that unites workers on the following PRINCIPLES:

1) Right to a safe workplace - everyone has the right to a safe workplace and a right to refuse unsafe work.

2) Building workplace organization and uniting with your co-workers in collective action is best way to combat unsafe conditions, including building Local Workers Assemblies,and 

3) Healthcare is a human right - health care should not be tied to the employer, it should be provided to everyone, even those recent unemployed through a universal single-payer system like "Medicare for All", and all testing and treatment related to COVID-19 should be covered by single-payer public health insurance like Medicare. While also recognizing that we need to immediately fight our employers to provide affordable health insurance coverage until the day this is won. 

Some of these questions (and more) will be discussed on this webinar, organized by the Southern Workers Assembly on Tuesday, April 28 at 6:00pm.  Join us! 

Participating organizations including: 
North Carolina Public Service Workers Union, UE Local 150, Black Workers For Justice, National Nurses United, Raise Up/Fight for $15, Farm, Labor Organizing Committee, New Orleans Hospitality Workers Alliance, Durham Workers Assembly, Raleigh Workers Assembly, Target Workers Unite, Muslims for Social Justice, Cooperation Jackson, Southern Movement Assembly, Scalawag Magazine, and others.

Register here

On SLSA's latest Working History podcast, "Race, Class, and Communism in the Jim Crow South," Mary Stanton discusses her book, Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930-1950 (University of Georgia Press), New Deal-era political activism, and movements for racial, economic, and social justice in the Jim Crow South. Red, Black, White is the first narrative history of the American communist movement in the South since Robin D. G. Kelley's groundbreaking Hammer and Hoe, and the first to explore its key figures and actions beyond the 1930s. Listen to Working History on the New Books Network, Spotify, iTunes, and SoundCloud, and subscribe on these platforms to stay up to date on future episodes.

Mary Stanton is the author of From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo,  Journey toward Justice: Juliette Hampton Morgan and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Freedom Walk: Mississippi or Bust. She has taught at the University of Idaho, the College of St. Elizabeth in New Jersey, and Rutgers University.

Extended Deadline: April 30, 2020

Robert H. Zieger Prize for Southern Labor Studies

The Southern Labor Studies Association is currently accepting submissions for the Robert H. Zieger Prize for Southern Labor Studies. SLSA awards the Zieger Prize at the Southern Labor Studies Conference for the best unpublished essay in southern labor studies written by a graduate student or early career scholar, journalist, or activist. The Zieger Prize includes a $750 award.

The Robert H. Zieger Prize was established in 2013 with the cooperation of the Zieger family, the Southern Labor Studies Association, and former friends and colleagues of Bob and Gay Zieger. The prize is named in honor of the late Professor Robert H. Zieger—teacher, scholar, and tireless union activist. Dr. Zieger was a prolific, award-winning writer whose books include For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 and The CIO, 1935-1955, and three field-defining edited volumes on southern labor history. Professor Zieger served as an officer in the North Central Florida Central Labor Council and an organizer for the United Faculty of Florida at the University of Florida where he was a Distinguished Professor of History.  Along with his wife of fifty years, Gay Zieger, an English professor at Santa Fe College, Bob maintained a strong commitment to social justice his entire life. Many of his former students went on to become labor organizers and educators. SLSA hopes that the spirit of Zieger’s combination of rigorous scholarship and his dedicated commitment to improving the lives of working-class people will live on in this prize.

Eligibility

Graduate students and scholars, activists, and journalists who are no more than five years beyond the author’s highest degree are eligible to apply. Essays must be in English and should be primarily concerned with southern labor and working-class history broadly conceived. Applicants are not required to be members of SLSA at the time of the submission.

The winner of the Zieger Prize will be announced at the 2020 Southern Labor Studies Conference which will be held at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill September 11-13, 2020

To be considered for the Robert H. Zieger Prize, applicants must submit their essays electronically by April 30, 2020, to the prize committee chairperson:

Professor Paul Ortiz

Chair, Robert H. Zieger Prize Committee
Department of History
University of Florida
P.O. Box 117320
Gainesville, FL 32611-7320

Questions: Email, portiz@ufl.edu

Update on the SLSA Conference from Bryant Simon, SLSA President

Dear SLSA People:  

Hope everyone is safe and well.  As you can imagine, we have been having a number of conversations about the upcoming SLSA conference in Chapel Hill, set for September of this year.  The panel proposals and individual submissions for the conference are absolutely great and the program is shaping up beautifully.  We very much want to have this conference and this exchange of ideas, and we want to have it in real time, with interactions between people facing each other in person and not over Zoom.  

But right now, of course, it is hard to know what the fall, or even next week, will look like.  Hopefully colleges and universities will be up and running, or at least limping along, and it will be safe to gather and tell our stories (about our scholarship and about the pandemic.)  But again, there is no way to know right now.  

With all of this uncertainty hanging in the air, we just want to wait.  We don’t want to cancel yet.  If you need to pull out of the conference, let us know, but for now, we want to wait until May 1 or so to make a call.  

Please don’t hesitate to write or call if you have any questions, ideas, suggestions, or comments. 

All the best,

Bryant Simon

President, SLSA

brysimon@temple.edu 

On SLSA's latest Working History podcast, "Politics of the Pantry," Emily E. LB. Twarog discusses her book, Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford University Press), the activism of American housewives as consumers, and food's central role in consumer politics in the twentieth-century United States. Listen to Working History on the New Books Network, Spotify, iTunes, and SoundCloud, and subscribe on these platforms to keep up to date on future episodes.

Emily E. LB. Twarog is an Associate Professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations, and Affiliate Faculty in the Gender in Global Perspectives Program and European Union Center at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She holds a PhD in American History from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a MS in Labor Research from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is the also the Director of the Regina V. Polk Women's Labor Leadership Conference, a residential school for women workers that has been run by the University of Illinois' School of Labor and Employment Relations-Labor Education Program since 1988. 

Final call for papers for SLSA 2020! Find the CFP here

REGISTER NOW for The 2020 Labor Research and Action Network (LRAN) National Conference will be held March 12th at Morehouse College, co-hosted by the Morehouse College International Comparative Labor Studies Department.

On March 13th, the Jobs With Justice National Conference, located at the Atlanta Convention Center, will include an LRAN track of workshops. Scholars, labor practitioners, and activists from across the country will converge in Atlanta, GA to share new ideas and lessons learned, and connect around research and campaign work. As we gather in the space of an historically black college and university in the South, we hope this conference is an opportunity to develop a proactive strategy that amplifies voices that have historically not had a place or priority at the table. We hope to learn from the unique challenges faced by organizers and researchers in the South and in Right-to-Work states, including from active campaigns in the Atlanta area.

LRAN conference attendees are encouraged to join the Jobs With Justice National Conference, which will be held March 13th-14th at the Atlanta Convention Center. The 13th will include LRAN workshops. Registration for the JWJ conference requires an additional fee. Please indicate in the form if you are only able to attend the LRAN conference on the 12th.

Schedule
Breakfast 8-9am
Opening Plenary 9-10:45am
“Labor Studies in the 21st Century”
Moderator” Shannan Reaze, Executive Director, Jobs With Justice Atlanta
Speakers:
Jaira Burke, Campaign Manager, Amplify Georgia
Andrew Douglas, Associate Professor, Morehouse College
Cynthia Hewitt, Professor, Morehouse College
John Taylor, National Field Director of Property Services Division, SEIU

1st Workshop Block 11-12:30pm
Lunch 12:30-1:15pm
Keynote Address 1:30-2:45pm
Speaker:
Stacy Davis Gates, Vice President, Chicago Teachers Union
2nd Workshop Block 3-4:30pm

Workshop Topics include:

• Recommendations for 21st Century Labor Law
  
• Personal Surveillance Devices and Datafication in the Workplace
  
• Build an LGBTQ Economic Justice Movement
  
• Organizing in the South
•  How and Why We Must Build Women’s Labor Leadership
• Building Our Power to Win Through Participatory, Member-Led Research Roundtable
  
• Bargaining for the Common Good

To post to the LRAN listserv, login to www.lranetwork.org, click “Listserv” then click on an appropriate topic. If you are not a member, click “Join Now” to access the listserv.

The Southern Labor Studies Association is currently accepting submissions for the Robert H. Zieger Prize for Southern Labor Studies. SLSA awards the Zieger Prize at the Southern Labor Studies Conference for the best unpublished essay in southern labor studies written by a graduate student or early career scholar, journalist, or activist. The Zieger Prize includes a $750 award.

The Robert H. Zieger Prize was established in 2013 with the cooperation of the Zieger family, the Southern Labor Studies Association, and former friends and colleagues of Bob and Gay Zieger. The prize is named in honor of the late Professor Robert H. Zieger—teacher, scholar, and tireless union activist. Dr. Zieger was a prolific, award-winning writer whose books include For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 and The CIO, 1935-1955, and three field-defining edited volumes on southern labor history. Professor Zieger served as an officer in the North Central Florida Central Labor Council and an organizer for the United Faculty of Florida at the University of Florida where he was a Distinguished Professor of History.  Along with his wife of fifty years, Gay Zieger, an English professor at Santa Fe College, Bob maintained a strong commitment to social justice his entire life. Many of his former students went on to become labor organizers and educators. SLSA hopes that the spirit of Zieger’s combination of rigorous scholarship and his dedicated commitment to improving the lives of working-class people will live on in this prize.

Eligibility

Graduate students and scholars, activists, and journalists who are no more than five years beyond the author’s highest degree are eligible to apply. Essays must be in English and should be primarily concerned with southern labor and working-class history broadly conceived. Applicants are not required to be members of SLSA at the time of the submission.

The winner of the Zieger Prize will be announced at the 2020 Southern Labor Studies Conference which will be held at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill September 11-13, 2020

To be considered for the Robert H. Zieger Prize, applicants must submit their essays electronically by March 30, 2020, to the prize committee chairperson:

Professor Paul Ortiz

Chair, Robert H. Zieger Prize Committee
Department of History
University of Florida
P.O. Box 117320
Gainesville, FL 32611-7320

Questions: Email, portiz@ufl.edu

For a list of past winners, see: https://southernlaborstudies.org/page-18074

For information on the SLSA, see: https://southernlaborstudies.org/

SLSA Biannual Conference CfP: Expanding the Horizons of Southern Labor Studies

September 11-13, 2020 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Submissions due February 15, 2020

If you are looking to propose or join a session, please look for collaboration opportunities here:

Over the past few years, SLSA has sought to modernize, energize, and organize – and the results have been amazing! We have expanded the geographical, chronological, and thematic boundaries of southern labor studies by extending our geographic scope to include the broader Atlantic world, and pushing our time frame back to pre-European settlement. We’re reaching beyond our traditional emphasis on the workplace, politics, protest, and unions to explore working-class cultures—foodways, music, film, family, and home life. This conference will continue the push outward and onward. 

We warmly invite all academics, students, activists, labor organizers, union members, lawyers, and anyone with an interest in labor issues – past or present – to join us at our next meeting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to be held on September 11-13, 2020 (Friday afternoon through Sunday morning). The conference will focus on expanding the horizons of southern labor studies. We will also experiment with some creative new formats built around new work and new conceptions of southern labor and additional sessions specifically aimed to help us think about how to communicate with larger audiences and share our work with the public.