This year’s electoral season presents both opportunities and challenges for LAWCHA’s stated intention to “promote public and scholarly awareness of labor and working-class history through research, writing, and organizing.”  Anti-unionists have launched a propaganda campaign against unions and the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which requires employers to recognize and bargain when a majority of workers have signed union cards.

Possibilities for a more labor-friendly administration in the United States and sharpening debates over immigration, the right to organize, health care, family and education policies all raise the need for informed analysis of working people’s history of engagement with these and other related issues.  Toward that end, we encourage LAWCHA members to step-up their efforts to “tell labor’s story” and to reach beyond scholarly audiences and campuses through opinion columns in local and national newspapers, web sites and blogs, film and television. We propose to focus our efforts on Labor Day (September 1, 2008), as the start of an ongoing campaign to engage a broader public. 

Central to labor history is the struggle for the right to organize, stretching from the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of association and the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on involuntary servitude and continuing through the Universal Declaration of Human Right’s assertion that “Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his/her interests.”  While writing for the public about working people’s role in history we can demonstrate that the right to organize remains critical to related debates over foreign and domestic policies including war, trade, immigration, and social and economic citizenship rights.

Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. we stand once again at a historical crossroads.  We appeal to LAWCHA members to use your knowledge and skills to move the country in a better direction, to respond to statements that denigrate working people and to educate the public about labor’s history of creating a more democratic, egalitarian, and peaceful society.  Who better than labor historians to tell labor’s story?  The time for civic engagement is now!

Please visit the LAWCHA website http://www.lawcha.org/index.php for additional information concerning impending legislation on the right to organize and immigrant rights. Please send copies of published opinion pieces and action alerts and reports on civic engagement by LAWCHA members to us at LAWCHA@duke.edu

In solidarity,

Edward Beechert, Karen Brodken, David Brody, Cecelia Bucki, Bob Bussel, Will Jones, Dan Katz, Lisa Kannenberg, Alice Kessler-Harris, Mike Honey, Nelson Lichtenstein, Ruth Milkman, Colleen O’Neill, Kim Phillips, Joan Sangster, Devra Weber. June 7, 2008, Vancouver, British Columbia

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See the LAWCHA website section on Restoring and Defending the Right to Organize, Resources and Supporting Materials - http://www.lawcha.org/tls.php

“Recognizing our common bond”: AFL-CIO policy on immigration, by James C. Parks
http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/thisistheaflcio/publications/magazine/commonbonds.cfm

See David Bacon’s web site:  http://dbacon.igc.org/Imgrants/21ImmigAFLCIO.htm

See ACLU, AFL-CIO, and National Immigration Law Center Challenge and Lawsuit to Homeland Security Rules Causing Discrimination to U.S. Citizens and Workers
http://www.aclu.org/immigrants/workplace/31494prs20070829.html

See the National Immigration Law Center - http://www.nilc.org/

On the importance of labor law, see Joseph A. McCartin, “’A Wagner Act for Public Employees’: Labor’s Deferred Dream and the Rise of Conservatism, 1970-1976,” in Journal of American History, June 2008 (95:1): 123-148.