Why Does Labour Matter? The Past, Present, and Future of Labour and Labour Studies

Why Does Labour Matter? The Past, Present, and Future of Labour and Labour Studies 

Université du Québec à Montréal, 14-15 November 2025

In 1976 the Canadian Committee on Labour History (CCLH) launched its journal Labour/Le Travail, hoping to “foster imaginative approaches to both teaching and research in labour studies through an open exchange of viewpoints.” With the fiftieth anniversary of this event approaching, scholars, activists, unionists, and workers are invited to convene in the spirit of this tradition to exchange views and to consider new and renewed imaginative approaches to the study of labour and the working class.

Labour/Le Travail was founded in the mid-1970s amidst an apparent crisis in capitalism that can, in hindsight, be seen as a key moment of transition. In a period of stalled economic growth characterized by high inflation, unemployment, and a pattern of deindustrialization pushing production towards low-wage, less unionized jurisdictions, the nascent intellectual project of neoliberalism proposed solutions that would free capital from the regulation of the state and from the concessions won by the labour movement in the decades following World War II. Yet this was not the only vision of the future animating this historical conjuncture. This was also an era in which a wide array of social and political movements, organized labour among them, mobilized against inequality and oppression in their many forms and for a more just, sustainable, democratic, and humane world. Though there were tensions and contestations within and between these movements, they did create numerous local, regional, national and transnational networks of solidarity. It was in this milieu that Labour/Le Travail began its intellectual and political project, opening its pages to a diversity of analyses of the history of working-class life, culture, politics, and struggle with the conviction that such studies were of pressing relevance to the present and the future.

Fifty years later, the journal carries on its work in a context that is in some ways very different, but in others strikingly familiar.  Union membership and power has unquestionably declined, and yet a new generation of activists has emerged, in labour and other social movements, continuing the fight for social justice in a changed set of circumstances. These activists confront a capitalist order that, while faced once again with inflationary challenges, is transformed in important ways – a transformation that was already underway in the mid-1970s. Financial capital has superseded industrial capital as the principal agent of accumulation in Canada and other Western countries. With its distance from the site of production, finance capital is better positioned to evade workers’ collective resistance and, more broadly, from the legislative restraints of the state. This is particularly the case in the private sector, where the strategies of finance capital have been most directly imposed, but workers in the public sector, too, have struggled against a neoliberal logic that, using the public debt and the globalized competition to attract capital as imperatives, demands austerity.

If the social and intellectual relevance of labour and the labour movement was not in doubt in the context of the mid-1970s, today this relevance is no longer self-evident. It would be worthwhile, then, for researchers and activists to gather to revisit, reconsider, and, potentially, affirm the significance of labour history/studies. Why, fundamentally, does labour still matter? 

In recognition of the journal’s upcoming 50th birthday, the conference committee seeks proposals from researchers, activists, and public history practitioners for panels and papers that explore the past, present, and future of labour and labour studies. Questions and topics might include:

Why does labour history and labour studies – including in the domain of public history –  matter in our contemporary moment? What have been the contributions and the shortcomings of the past half-century of work in labour history/studies? How do we write about labour during a time of crisis and opportunity for labour and the left? How can issues of the past and present be reassessed in response to current challenges?

• What lessons does the study of past workers afford workers in the present as they confront an array of economic, social, political, environmental and other challenges? Conversely, how can current working-class struggles inform our understanding of the working-class past?

• How does context matter in our studies of labour and the working class across time and space? We especially invite panels that consider a theme in labour history/studies compared across national, regional, temporal, racial, linguistic, gendered, colonial or other contexts. How have labour, the left, and social movements worked together – or worked at cross purposes? What lessons about coalition-building (or its failure) can we take from the past?

• What can labour scholars learn from public history practitioners? How can scholars, teachers, and public history practitioners effectively collaborate? How can university researchers support the work of community groups and agencies involved in memory work?

• How can labour history/studies help us understand the evolution of political movements on the left and right alike? How can we deepen our understanding of the appeal of right-wing and far-right politics to working-class constituents?    

Submit a proposal:

Proposals for presentations, panels, or round tables can be submitted in English or French before 14 March 2025. Proposals, including a title, up to 250 word summary of the presentation, and up to 150 words biography of the presenters, should be submitted using this link:

https://forms.gle/tBaf5uz6fzMoDAYQ9

Travel subsidies:

Some funding will be available to subsidize travel expenses for students, precariously employed, or anyone else facing financial barriers to participating in the event.

Questions? info@cclh.ca

Organizing Committee:

Edward Dunsworth, Kassandra Luciuk, Benoit Marsan, Kirk Niergarth, Martin Petitclerc, Camille Robert, Joan Sangster