Our program committee has put together an incredible set of panels that we hope will be the centerpiece of a vibrant 2018 program in Philadelphia. Please submit your own work and/or spread the word far and wide about these panels and the call for submissions:
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Section on Labor and Labor Movements (http://www.asanet.org/annual-meeting-2018/2018-call-submissions-information )
 
Panel 1: Citizenship and Labor
This panel invites papers that investigate citizenship and labor in domestic and/or international contexts. Labor has played a mixed role in relationship to citizenship. For example, the AFL-CIO did not embrace new immigrants until 1995, and some unions continue to be exclusionary. However, the Labor Movement has played a historically important role in bringing immigrants into its ranks as witnessed in the garment and textile industries. This panel is especially interested in how labor organizations (unions, worker centers, and other worker organizations) engage in practices that expand or enhance understandings of citizenship, Citizenship is broadly defined to include topics related to belonging and nation-state, the exercising of human and civil rights, civic engagement, or political mobilization.
Organizers: Belinda Lum, Sacramento City College (bclum1974@gmail.com), Carolina Bank Muñoz, Brooklyn College  (carolinabm75@gmail.com)
 
Panel 2: Labor, Labor Movements and the Right
From the neoliberal onslaught against labor in the 1980s and 1990s to the ascendant right wing populisms of the 2000s, there is an urgent need for sociological investigations into the roles of labor and labor movements amidst this rightward lurch of politics. In the Global North, protectionist and xenophobic currents are seen in the right’s engagement with workers. In the Global South, the right’s prominence in several countries parallels development of new economic capacities and growing integration into the global political economy. In all cases, right-wing governments have administered (or at least promised) redistribution to some sections of the working poor through social assistance and welfare programs, while others face social dislocation as they dismantle earlier social compacts. As a result, growing income inequality, polarization and violence along racial, ethnic and religious lines have accompanied the rise of the right, exacerbating divisions among workers.
 
This session invites papers that address the varied interactions between the Right, labor and labor movements across different country contexts. Papers may address questions such as: What tactics are deployed by the right to garner support, obstruct or repress labor and labor movements? How does this compare with past periods of right wing growth? How are workers and labor movements resisting these efforts, but also how might they be participating in or facilitating certain types of right-wing politics? What new unities, divisions, and capacities are arising in workers’ movements in the face of these challenges?
Organizers: Smriti Upadhyay, John Hopkins University (smriti.n.upadhyay@gmail.com), Rina Agarwala, John Hopkins University (agarwala@jhu.edu)
 
Panel 3: Race and Labor and the 50th Anniversary of the Memphis Strike
In February 1968, 1,300 black Memphis sanitation workers struck for safer jobs, better pay, and union recognition, carrying signs that said “I am a man”. Rev. Martin Luther King visited Memphis repeatedly to support the strike, and on one of those visits, on April 4, 1968, he was assassinated. Despite vicious union-busting by the city government, the workers went on to win the strike.
 
Fifty years later, race and racism remain divisive issues among US workers, especially in the US South, where racial divisions have undermined recent organizing drives. Though migration has reconfigured the racial-ethnic mix of the country, the color line described by Dubois remains strong, as the Black Lives Matter movement and the election of Donald Trump have spotlighted. As we meet on the 50th anniversary of the Memphis strike, this session will be an opportunity to reflect on race and labor in the United States, and how and why their relationship has changed—and not changed—over the last 50 years. The session invites both historical and contemporary papers. We welcome a wide range of race-related papers including those that address organized labor (unions and other labor organization forms), cross movement collaborations, working-class communities and neighborhoods, and the impact of and challenges to racial hierarchies in the workplace (including processes of discrimination and struggles around affirmative action). We also welcome research that explore intersections of race with gender, ethnicity, class, and other social categories in the world of work.
Organizers: Chris Tilly, University of California Los Angeles (tilly@ucla.edu)
 
Panel 4: Section on Labor and Labor Movements Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
Sarah Swider (University of Copenhagen)
sswider@gmail.com
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Workplace Democracy Revisited: Labour and Practices of Participation, Workers ’ Control and Self - Management in Global Perspective
Linz/Upper Austria, 6 - 8 September 2018

The attempts to extend democracy from the political sphere to labour relations and the broader economy ( Self - Government in Industry , as G.D.H. Cole wrote in 1917) keep resurfacing in various forms and under different names throughout the existence of both modern industry and agriculture. Producer cooperatives have been an alternative form of enterprise organization in capitalist economies at least since the 19th century. Very differ- ent schools of thought supporting workers ’ “ associationism ” – socialist, anarchist, Christian – have seen work- er - run enterprises as the basis of a more egalitarian society. Communist revolutionaries envisioned workers ’ councils as the building block of post - capitalist political and social structures ever since soviets came to promi- nence in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions in Russia, but also a range of revolutionary stirrings in the aftermath of World War I (Germany and Austria 1918 - 19, Hungary 1919, Italy 1920, etc.). After the failed attempts of rev- o l u t i o n a r y c h a n g e i n E u r o p e , t h e G e r m a n , A u s t r i a n a n d C z e c h o s l o v a k i a n s t a t e s i n t r o d u c e d n e w l e g i s l a t i o n s enabling workers ’ participation and representation on the enterprise level to various degrees.
During the Cold War countries, such as Israel, Algeria, Peru and, most prominently, Yugoslavia, at- tempted to carve out a third way model of development by implementing workers ’ self - management structures in their economies. Many postcolonial state building projects in Africa and beyond fused the idea of workplace democracy with local communal traditions. Workers ’ self - management also served as an inspiration to dissi- dents in Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland), while closely related terms such as autogestion and even operais- mo became leitmotifs within the 1968 movement in Southern Europe as a vision of a more democratic social- ism. Numerous welfare state models in the European countries, ascribed to the political “ West ”, developed partly far - reaching legal bases for workers ’ participation, often relying on the concepts introduced by the legis- lative reforms immediately after World War I.
In the 1980s, the self - management ideals of liberation in the most developed capitalist societies and in factories worldwide often metamorphosed into management tools within the framework of neoliberal politics. While many activists in (state - )socialist Eastern Europe envisioned workplace democracy as an opportunity to introduce economic democracy from below, notions of workplace autonomy were also used by the pro - market reformists inside the communist parties to decrease guaranteed workers ’ rights. During the 1990s, when it seemed that the ideas of workers ’ engagement in economic decision - making lost validity, a movement of fac- tory occupations emerged in Argentina and other countries in Latin America, provoking a new wave of interest and debates about the perspectives of workplace democracy in the 21st century.  

State of the Art and Research Gaps
As this short historical outline shows, initiatives for democratization of labour relations were carried by vast- ly disparate social actors under diverse types of labour regimes and political rule in many different parts of the globe. Not surprisingly, a substantial research literature on these phenomena has developed. Yet, studies of workers ’ activation tend to have a narrow focus when it comes to the socio - economic complexity and the geographical scope of workplace democracy. Firstly, the topic has traditionally attracted left - leaning social scientists and heterodox economists inclined to look at the political organizing of the working class and eco- nomic performance of the enterprises respectively, thus overlooking labour relations and the inner workings of workplace democracy. Secondly, the studies were habitually framed in the context of individual nation states with the most illustrious historical projects claiming workers ’ emancipation attracting the greatest at- tention. The attempts to produce overviews on the history of workers ’ participation, control and self - management practices in different countries usually amounted to collections of individual case studies with moderate comparison, disregarding mutual influence, transnational exchange and transfers.
Conference Goals
In order to contribute to closing some of these gaps, the 2018 ITH Conference poses the following two strate- gic goals (with some potential topics listed below):
1.) To unpack and categorise the often interchanging terms and conceptualizations of workplace de- mocracy such as self - management, control, participation, co - determination and autogestion (in different languages) by tracing their evolution globally and relating them to particular geographic locations, cul- tural contexts and historical conjunctures:

• Classifying various examples of workplace organization without conventional management. We want to approach the debates about terms and concepts not only from a theoretical point of view, but as a theme of historical enquiry through concrete case studies. The categorisations should account for the aspirations of the involved actors (autonomous coalitions, trade unions, employers/management, and the state), aim- ing to realize their interests within the existing order, going beyond the given boundaries or various in - between solutions.
• The circulation of ideas about economic democracy across the borders of nation states. Did individual enterprises, labour movements or states that adopted workplace democratization as an official part of their policies make conscious efforts to promote their models internationally and what impact did they make?
• Experiences of workplace democracy in the periphery. What were the peculiar challenges that advocates of workplace democracy in the Global South, yet also in economically underdeveloped societies and re- gions of the Global North, and in the state socialist countries had to face? Factors to be kept in mind in- clude the peculiar features of the working class, the lack of technical expertise for the daily running of the production process and the widespread informal economy.
• The inclusion and categorization of experiments to democratize and control the organization of agricultur- al work, service sector as well as the less known instances of workers ’ involvement in the industry, re- gardless of whether they portrayed themselves as revolutionary or not, such as the instances of coopera- tivsm linked to traditional communal forms of economic organization in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
• The prominence of workplace democracy as a topic inside the transnational institutions and initiatives, such as the United Nations, ILO, socialist internationalisms, Non - Aligned Movement, etc.

2.) To examine workplace democracy beyond the political history of workers ’ movements or business history of alternative management models by investigating the actual practices of workers ’ involve- ment, decision - making and work conditions in concrete cases:

• The altered ways in which workers conceived of themselves, their enterprise and communities after the introduction of some form of workplace democracy. Was there an increased identification with the work collective, improved work efforts, appearance of voluntary labour, broadening of concerns for social or political issues, or different forms of inequalities within the enterprise?
• The main challenges associated with the collective participation in workplaces: mock involvement, con- tested decision - making processes, inefficiency, lack of accountability, parochialism, bureaucratization, clientelism, emergence of unofficial leaderships, etc.  
• The new concepts and definitions of economic performance and individual work efforts: What were some of the ways in which workers ’ ran enterprises, defined ownership rights, measured and distributed net in- come, wages, social service funds, etc.?
• The relations between individual self - managed collectives and the broader economy and society: What were the models and difficulties of expanding democratic economic decision - making beyond individual enterprises, and connecting economic democracy to political institutions and everyday tasks in the sur- rounding communities? What effect does the market have on workplace democracy?

SUBMISSION
Proposed papers should include:

• abstract (max. 300 words)
• biographical note (max. 200 words)
• full address und e - mail address

The abstract of the suggested paper should contain a separate paragraph explaining how and (if applicable) to which element(s) or question(s) of the Call for Papers the submitted paper refers.
The short CV should give information on the applicant ’ s contributions to the field of labour history, broadly defined, and specify (if applicable) relevant publications. For the purpose of information, applicants are invited to attach a copy of one of these publications to their application.
Proposals to be sent to Lukas Neissl : lukas.neissl@doew.at


TIME SCHEDULE

• Submission of proposals: by 28 January 2018
• Notification of acceptance: 9 March 2018
• Full papers or presentation versions: by 5 August 2018

PREPARATORY GROUP
Dario Azzellini , ILR School, Cornell University, Ithaca
Frank Georgi , Centre d ’ Histoire Sociale du XXème Siècle/Université Paris 1 Panthéon - Sorbonne
Goran Musić , Central European University, Budapest
Lukas Neissl , ITH, Vienna
Brigitte Pellar , Vienna
Anne Sudrow , Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam
Advisers:
Marcel van der Linden , International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
Susan Zimmermann , ITH, Vienna  

THE ITH AND ITS MEMBERS
The ITH is one of the worldwide most important forums of the history of labour and social movements. The ITH favours research pursuing inclusive and global perspectives and open - ended comparative thinking. Fol- lowing its tradition of cooperating with organisations of the labour movement, the ITH likewise puts emphasis on the conveyance of research outside the academic research community itself. Currently ca. 100 member in- stitutions and a growing number of individual members from five continents are associated with the ITH.

• Information on ITH publications in the past 50 years: http://www.ith.or.at/publ_e/publ_online_e.htm
• Subscription to the ITH e - newsletter published twice a year: http://www.ith.or.at/rundb_e/r_index_e.htm
• Download of the ITH membership application form: http://www.ith.or.at/mitgl_e/mitglieder_e.htm