Dear Labor and Labor Movements Section members,

We need to nominate candidates for the leadership positions in the Labor Section.  The Nominating Committee will be putting together the final lineup, but we very much depend on getting your suggestions, including suggesting yourself!  
We welcome nominations and self-nominations for: 

* Chair

* Secretary-Treasurer

* Incoming Council Member

Please send nominations to me at tilly@ucla.edu by Friday December 7.

Thanks, 
Chris Tilly

Dear Labor Section members, I'm pleased to share with you the Call for Papers below.  I would like to particularly thankSteve McKay and Carolina Bank for co-organizing the miniconference along with David Fasenfest from SSSP, as well as the numerous other contributors and cosponsors (see below) who have helped to get this off the ground.

CFP: Mini-Conference: Labor and Global Solidarity – The US, China and Beyond  

The Labor & Labor Movements Section of the ASA and the Society for the Study of Social Problems are pleased to announce a Mini-conference entitled Labor and Global Solidarity – The US, China and Beyond  to be held concurrently with the ASA and SSSP meetings in New York City on Monday, August 12th, 2013.  The conference is co-sponsored by: the Asia and Asian American Section of ASA; the Labor Studies Section of SSSP; the Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at CUNY; the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education; the Manhattan College Labor Studies Program; Critical Sociology; the Labour Movements Research Committee (RC44) of the International Sociological Association; and the China Association of Work and Labor of the Chinese Sociological Association.

The one-day mini-conference will bring together scholars and practitioners to address the changing landscapes of work and labor organizing at multiple scales, from the local to the transnational.  Facing the global re-organization of production chains, the expansion of precarious work, hostile political climates, and the continued world-wide economic malaise, workers and their allies nonetheless continue to act, from escalating unrest across China, to new models of organizing in NYC, to greater cross-border solidarity, North-South and South-South.

To engage these developments and spark discussion, the conference will include panels on both local, global and transnational labor issues and organizing strategies.  We also seek a mix of activists and academics.  Finally, the mini-conference is an opportunity for international exchange as five labor scholars from China will be participating throughout the event and across the different panels.  Papers including the U.S. and China are especially welcome, but topics and evidence from all over the world are appropriate.

We invite submissions of abstracts (min. 300 words) or full papers on a broad range of topics related to local and global labor, but are particularly interested in submissions that address the following themes of the conference:

• Labor in China
  
• Insurgency and Institutions
  
• Organizing (im)migrants – here, there and in the diaspora
  
• South–South Solidarity
  
• Transnational Labor Organizing – How & When does it Work
  
• Informal work, informal worker organizing
  
• ●       Monitoring international supply chains from the shop floor(s)
  
• ●       Responses to global economic crisis
  

To submit an abstract or paper, please send it to the conference co-organizers:  Carolina Bank Munoz (carolinabm75@gmail.com), David Fasenfest (critical.sociology@gmail.com), and Steve McKay (smckay@ucsc.edu). Abstracts or papers are due February 15, 2013.  If submitting an abstract, full drafts of accepted papers are due June 30th, 2013.  Papers presented at the conference will also be considered for publication in a planned special issue of the journal Critical Sociology and/or in a separate edited book.  Conference participants will be responsible for covering their own travel and lodging expenses (though meals for participants on the program will be provided).  The conference will be free and open to the public.

Dear Section Members, 

We are putting the Fall 2012 issue of In Critical Solidarity together. If you have any information on awards, call for papers, conferences, fellowship opportunities, labor news, labor actions members should know about, or other announcements that should be included in the newsletter please send them our way! The editors are also very interested in short essays relevant to labor and labor movements and potential topics for future newsletter symposia.

Please send them to Michael A. McCarthy, mam726@gmail.com.   

Steve Lopez
Associate Professor and Interim Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Sociology
The Ohio State University
Chair, ASA Section on Labor and Labor Movements