The Fifth Biennial Conference
of the
Center for Working Class Studies


Working-Class Studies: Memory, Community, and Activism



May 16-19, 2001
Youngstown, Ohio





Keynote Speakers: 
 
Jennifer Gordon is the founder and former executive director of the Workplace Project in New York, a nationally recognized grassroots workers center that organizes low-wage Latino immigrants to fight for just treatment on the job.  The Project uses a combination of organizing, community education, and legal and legislative advocacy strategies and is led by an all-immigrant-worker board of directors.  Gordon is writing a book examining the relationship between law and organizing in the context of low-wage work.  Her previous publications include Immigrants Fight the Power, (The Nation, January 3, 2000) and We Make the Road by Walking:  Immigrant Workers and the Struggle for Social Change, (Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review (1995).  A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard/Radcliff College and Harvard Law School, Gordon was chosen in 1995 as one of National Law Journal's 40 leading lawyers in the United States under the age of 40.  In 1998 she was named Outstanding Public Interest Advocate of the Year by the National Association for Public Interest Law and in 1999 was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship.
 
 Alessandro Portelli teaches American Literature at the University of Rome La Sapienza and is the author of a number of essays and books on oral cultures and oral history.  His work published in English includes The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories, Form and Meaning in Oral History, Albany, SUNY Press, (1991); The Text and the Voice, Speaking, Writing, and Democracy in American Literature, Columbia U.P., (1994); The Battle of Valle Giulia, Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, Wisconsin U.P., (1997).  His book, L'ordine e gia stato eseguito, Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la memoria, an oral history of a Nazi war crime in the context of the history of Rome, has received the Viareggio Book Prize and is due to appear in English shortly.

Russ Marshall's compelling black-and-white photographs of factory workers and industrial scenes dates back from the 19702 to the early 1990s.  His more recent studies of smoky factories and foundries, industrial stacks, and water towers are examples of an ongoing project.  They work well with the moody in-plant portraits of workers at their jobs, an angry Zug Island striker, the tight huddle of night-shifters approaching a wintry plant gate, an old woman tending a grave near a factory, and the frustrated faces of workers unemployed.  All are beautifully composed and exquisitely printed.  Marshall's body of work in this exhibit represents the best of labor documentary/photo-journalism.  His photographs have appeared in such publications as Amerika Illustrated (Soviet Union), Frau Im Spiegel (Germany), and The Economist (England), The New York Times, Mother Jones, The Detroit Sunday Journal, Outtakes, Hour, and several trade union publications.  Exhibits of his work have been in Detroit, Flint, Washington D.C., and Mexico.

Jimmy Santiago Baca has earned a variety of prizes (the Pushcart Prize, the Vogelstein Award, and the American Book Award, among others), fellowships, and endowed chairs.  He has published books, won poetry contests, and has written and produced films; however, behind all of Baca's accomplishments, his writing tells a different story.  It is the story of growing up in a divided and violent family in rural New Mexico, of years spent in an orphanage and on streets of Albuquerque's barrio, of being sent up to the Florence, Arizona, penitentiary for six years on a dubious drug charge, of beginning to discover his voice and his self in the pit of humiliation into which he was shoved in jail.
In prison he began to read poetry---first in English and then, as he taught himself the language, in Spanish.  He began to write and eventually sent three of his poems to Denise Levertov, the poetry editor of the magazine Mother Jones.  She helped him find a publisher for his first collection of poems, Immigrants in Our Own Land, which was published in 1979, the year of his release from prison.  Baca's earlier poems focus on his prison experience, his struggle to sustain a sense of his own value in the face of his jailers' efforts to reduce him to a non-entity.
Subsequently, he has written more broadly about the experiences of brown and black people in late twentieth-century America, about his father and others whose oppressive conditions of life kept them from raiding him, about his own recent life on Black Mesa, parenting two sons, and running a small farm.  His own new volumes include Martin and Mediations on the South Valley (1987), a moving version autobiography, and Black Mesa Poems (1989).  He has also written a play, Los tres hijos de Julia, produced in 1991, as well as scripts for films (Bound and Honor) and video productions in which he has acted.

























Abstracts 



Jonathan Alexander, University of Cincinnati, Learning to Be a Proper Fag, or, Mz. Manner's Guide to Queer Desire and the Class Closet
In contemporary American culture, gay identity is most often associated with middle to upper-middle class tastes, styles, attitudes, and purchasing power.  The image of the gay connoisseur or "'smart shopper' with a penchant for Calvin Klein and Volkswagen products"remains ubiquitous.  Even the gay press, with its glossy magazines and lifestyle guides, perpetuates representations equating gayness with the upwardly mobile.  Such images, however, driven by market forces seeking out the final frontiers of capitalist possibility, never prompt us to consider the lives of working-class queers of the many gays and lesbians who grow up in the lower economic strata and who mostly have only images of the gay 'smart shopper' as representative of queerness.
Certainly, images of the good shopping queer abound to further the assimilation of gays into consumerist culture.  At the same time, though, such assimilative thinking has produced a sub-cultural climate that can, on one hand, freely eroticize the working class (remember the Village People?) but, on the other hand, insist that one's working-class background remain closeted.  Moreover, the conflation of queerness with consumerism overlooks how working class gays might configure both their own identities and their desires.
To explore this, my presentation will unfold as a performance piece, combining theories of queerness and class, analyses of the personal and the political, the occasional bout of poetry, and personal narration to set in motion a set of contradictions about how one negotiates oneself as both queer and a member of the working class.  Specifically, I'm interested in examining how contemporary American bourgeois-identified queerness calls one out of the working class at the same time that one's working class background may indeed inform one's erotic fantasies and investments.  In other words, the working-class queer can often find him- or herself in a double bind of desire with erotic interests shaped by a working class background at the same time that he/she is asked to negotiate an urban queer culture that has set itself up as the gay community.  I wish to explore the meeting ground between the two--a nexus that troubles stable and normalizing notions of both gay identity and class identity. 


Kevin Ball, Youngstown State University, "I'm not Working Class, but I Know Someone Who Is": Composing Working-Class Communities
The university composition class represents a powerful site for the exploration of issues of class through reading and writing.  As part of an interactive session titled "Composition and Working-Class Studies: Memory, Community, and Activism (A Dialogue)," this speaker will discuss his experiences exploring working-class communities in his honors composition courses at Youngstown State University.  In addition to reading Janet Zandy's Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness, a collection of nonfiction writing about working-class identity, consciousness, and self-determination, students in this speaker's first-year composition course were encouraged to write their own nonfiction inquiries into working-class consciousness.  This speaker will describe the integral role of community inquiry in prompting cultural critique and reflection upon individual identity in relation to working-class issues. 


DeAnna E. Beachley, Community College of Southern Nevada, Hands: The Image of Workers in the Art of Ben Shahn
Hands: large, beefy, with gnarled knuckles, slightly out-of-proportion with the bodies portrayed, are distinct features that mark the work of the American Jewish artist, Ben Shahn.  Shahn effectively created an iconography with his hands.  Also, in examining the same images, faces are also telling features.  This paper will use Ben Shahn's hands and faces as a microcosm to understand the larger body of his work and its place in 20th century labor history.  His workers were never placed in demeaning or belittling settings.  He treated his workers with respect.  His images tried to humanize the worker whose individuality had been stripped away by mechanization.  Shahn hoped to restore humanism and revitalize dignity in society with his artistic efforts.
For much of his career, Ben Shahn crafted many images of workers.  Shahn's paintings, murals, photographs, and posters not only reveal his interest in the worker as an image, but also provide another way to examine the problems that workers in this country faced.  Starting with a series of paintings on the wrongly prosecuted Tom Mooney in 1933, Ben Shahn spent the next twenty years providing a glimpse into the world of the worker.  Shahn was also an activist.  He worked for the Congress of Industrial Organization - Political Action Committee, producing posters and pamphlets to get the workers out to vote in the election campaigns of 1944 and 1946.  In the 1930s, his formal relations with labor included participation in the Artists' Union as well as the American Artists' Congress.  Both groups advocated improved financial and social conditions for the artist.
Shahn's pictorial references to the proletariat reveal his class-consciousness.  Shahn's subjects were blue-collar workers who depended on physical labor to survive.  He believed in protecting American democracy by making demands on the system, changes that would fulfill the sentiments in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Thus, Shahn was able to draw a connection between his art and his political convictions without one subsuming the other.  His work also draws links between the New Deal and the increase of active labor to the loss of some union power with the conservative turn in the later 1940s, and the attempts of labor to deal with the political turn of events. 


Ben Blake, Western Reserve Historical Society, Little Steel, Big Struggle: The Little Steel Strike in Youngstown, 1937
Centered in Youngstown, the 1937 Little Steel strike marked a turning point in the Congress of Industrial Organization's drive to unionize workers in America's industry. At the time, the critical question was whether or not the CIO could sustain the momentum gained by the autoworkers in their victorious sit-down strikes. This presentation aims to tell the story of the strike in a lively way and will include video clips, photographs, cartoons and news headlines. In the course of this narrative, a number of key questions will be examined, including the following: In facing militantly anti-union employers, what strategies and tactics were successful or unsuccessful? What was the role of the Communist Party? Was the CIO able to overcome racial and ethnic divisions? What was the role of women in the strike? As a whole, did the community of Youngstown support or oppose the strikers? The goal of this talk is to present history in way that is both interesting and useful to rank and file workers and union activists, who face similar struggles at LTV and AK steel today. 


Susan E. Borrego, Claremont Graduate University, Expanding the Diversity Conversation: The Emergence of Working-Class Culture
Largely unexamined are the ways that class consciousness and class-based experiences continue to shape American universities, including teaching styles, research foci, organizational structure, and curriculum. Class is an aspect of difference that must be incorporated in the definitions of diversity and multiculturalism in higher education.  In what ways is working-class culture emerging as a consideration in institutional practices and programs, diversity initiatives, and curriculum in higher education? How have class issues emerged as an aspect for consideration, who has initiated this work, and how? This qualitative study draws on working-class academics, experts in the field, and site visits at three four-year colleges to examine the ways in which specific institutions have begun to address class culture as an aspect of diversity and multiculturalism.  This study demonstrates the ways that institutions are defining new curricular and programmatic initiatives regarding class culture. Themes are identified at each site and in a cross-site analysis, including the importance of individual efforts and institutional support and the limited inclusion of class in campus diversity initiatives.  Class has emerged uniquely at these three sites: Youngstown State from an industrial/first-generation student perspective, UMass/Boston through immigrant/first-generation student issues, and Goucher College highlights awareness of privilege. This study demonstrates that much of the current work addressing class culture is being undertaken by individual faculty motivated through scholarly or personal interests. Implications of the study include 1) the potential of class culture awareness to empower students to critique and analyze institutional and societal structures, 2) the potential of collaboration between faculty and student affairs practitioners, and 3) a need for additional research on class culture in higher education. 


Eric Breitbart, Independent Scholar/Filmmaker, and Raymon Elozua, Visual Artist, Lost Labor: Images of Vanished American Workers 1900-1980
LOST LABOR: Images of Vanished American Workers 1900-1980 is a selection from a book project consisting of 150 photographs selected from the author's collection of more than 1200 company histories, technical manuals, pamphlets, and brochures. The concept of LOST LABOR is twofold: 1) a visual history of industrial work in America in the 20th century and 2) a critique of business-oriented representations of labor. The term "lost labor" has multiple meanings: the loss of labor in the changeover from hand labor to machine, or from machine-assisted labor to computer automation, or due to advances in technology and materials or from corporate takeovers, downsizing and globalization. Since many of the images document companies, factories and jobs that no longer exist. The images themselves can also be considered "lost."
Photographs of workers were often included in these books to illustrate industrial processes or provide human reference points for machinery.   Since factories are usually accessible only to photographers approved or employed by the company, these images provide an intimate, behind-the-scenes portrait of the American workplace. These photographs have no pretense to objectivity, or of being "pro-labor."  It is this point of view that differentiates this project from other labor photographs, most of which only show workers on the picket line or at meetings outside the plant.  While some of these books may be found in various library collections, they have never been studied or appreciated as visual history. 


Ron Briley, Sandia Preparatory School, Hollywood and the Working-Class Woman: Norma Rae (1979), Silkwood (1983), and Erin Brockovich (2000)
This paper will examine how mainstream Hollywood cinema has treated working class women in three film texts that achieved commercial and critical success.  Director Martin Ritt (Norma Rae), Mike Nichols (Silkwood), and Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich) depicted courageous women who challenged corporate greed and corruption with a mixed degree of success.
Norma Rae (Sally Field) loses her job in a textile mill but becomes a union organizer, presenting a sense of class solidarity.  Karen Silkwood's (Meryl Streep) efforts to expose contamination at a plutonium processing plant leads to her death under mysterious circumstances, but her legacy is a successful law suit against Kerr-McGee.  On the other hand, Erin Brockovich's (Julia Roberts) battle against corporate poisoning of a water supply results in a legal victory which makes her wealthy, providing an Horatio Alger element to the film.
All three texts are based upon true stories, although in the case of Norma Rae the protagonist's name has been changed.  While grounded in reality, the films, nevertheless, present Hollywood stereotypes of the working class.  The films consider the intersection between gender and class, but tend to ignore the role played by race.  The assumed promiscuity of the leading characters also tends to distract from issues of class and perpetuates stereotypes.  And the focus upon individual heroic action tends to blur issues of class solidarity, and in the case of Erin Brockovich, the American dream of escaping from the working class appears to be alive and well. 


Jeanne Bryner, Forum Health, Trumbull Memorial Hospital, Blind Horse: An Appalachian Migration
This performance art piece will encompass a piece of history concerning the migration of Appalachians to the industrial north in the 40s and 50s.  As a writer and daughter of a coal-miner turned steelworker, I search for ways to connect the worlds of struggle, language and healing.  Hungry for a steady paycheck, thousands of Appalachian families migrated to northern industrial communities.  My family was one link in that long chain of hopeful travelers.  Using memory and research, I've documented their leap and landing in a book of poems, Blind Horse.  Our Ohio town was a one-industry community, and when the steel mill closed in 1976, the town never recovered.  Through poetry and music, song and movement, these voices share the old story of famine and feast and famine. 


James Cebula, University of Cincinnati, Creating an Interracial Community in Post-World War II Cincinnati: The Case of Kennedy Heights
The post-World War II reconstruction in the United States led to efforts to resolve the contradictions in American life presented by the issue of race relations.  Cincinnatians completed a new metropolitan master plan at the end of 1947.  The plan led to the deconstruction of the city's overwhelmingly African-American West End residential area and led to the relocation of West End residents to various parts of the city.  In Kennedy Heights, an overwhelmingly white middle and working class neighborhood, residents created an interracial community council.  They worked with the Mayor's Friendly Relations Committee, civil rights organizations, churches, and the media to prevent white flight to outlying suburbs and to create a culture that celebrated interracial cooperation. 


Rita Chadha, Community Historian for the Hackney Society, Building Blocs of the Past, Stepping Stones to the Future
This paper explores the dynamics between urban regeneration and the development of heritage services for local communities in the UK. The London Borough of Hackney is an inner city east London borough and contains some of the most deprived areas in Britain.
Drawing on national examples, and the Hackney Society's innovative Building Blocs programme, the talk offers a fresh look at the relationship between the built, natural environment and civic participation. The presentation explore the nature of  'social exclusion' in Britain and crucially the role of community and oral history as a powerful tool for collective organising. 


Renny Christopher, California State University, Stanislaus, Work is a War: The Battlefield of the Job: Machines, Bodies and Blood
"Work! Sure! For America beautiful will eat you and spit your bones into the earth's hole! Work!"  Pietro di Donato, Christ in Concrete  (3)
One of the challenges to working-class literature is the depiction of work-related accidents and injuries. As with all depictions of violence, the challenge to the writer is to depict horrific events and their physical consequences in such a way as to make an impact on a reader, and yet not to create a sensationalized or pornographic portrait through the writing.
Working-class writing contains incidents of death and mutilation through industrial accidents, agricultural processing plant accidents, and long-term exposure to debilitating conditions. This level of violence and gore does not appear in any other (realist) genre than the war novel and yet the toll of working-class labor and the challenge of representing that toll in literary terms has never been adequately addressed in criticism. During the Second World War, more Americans died on the job than in battle. Both the reality of death and mutilation on the job, and the attempts of working-class writers to portray these incidents, need to be foregrounded.
This paper will look at depictions of death, injury and disability incurred on the job in works of both poetry and prose, with special attention to the ways in which writers handle the depiction of violence and physical injury. Works to be considered will include Bell's Out of This Furnace, DiDonato's Christ in Concrete, Rivera's and the earth did not devour him, and poetry by B.H. Fairchild, Jeff Tagami, Will Watson, and Jean Bryner. 


Lisa A. Cooper, Texas Christian University, The Reunion of Gender and Radicalism: Working-Class Women and Authenticity in the Writings of Meridel Le Sueur
While the American socialist movement of the 1930s addressed many issues facing the working class, problems that working women had to endure were largely ignored. There were, however, many activists and writers who sought to bring attention to the plight of women and their specific problems. Meridel Le Sueur is one such writer who wanted to give voice to those women workers who were so often silenced.
Le Sueur used her writing as both a literary and social directive. She recognized the need for not only authentic working-class texts, but also the exigency for these writings to contain a message of social activism. Le Sueur herself worked for many years in low wage jobs and, while doing so, became acquainted with a community of working-class women. Thus, her works of fiction, such as The Girl and Salute to Spring, contain a validity that can be gained only through first-hand experience. Furthermore, in these works, Le Sueur seeks to address some of the issues that were specific to women workers and were largely ignored by the Communist Party. The marriage between communism and women's issues was often an uneasy one; many of those in the communist movement feared that concentration on strictly "women's" issues would result in a schism of goals and purposes between genders in the communist movement.
Le Sueur, however, recognized the specific hardships that working women had to endure and sought to give this community of women voice by acting as both witness and participant in her writings. Her writings also reflect political and social ideologies of the American socialist movement. Yet what is perhaps the dominant feature in Le Sueur's works is the authenticity that she achieves due to her first-hand experience, language, and reliance upon the words of actual working-class women. It is this verity and loyalty to those voices of working women who had long been silenced that provides merit to Le Sueur's The Girl and Salute to Spring. 


Margaret Costello, Ampere Electrical Contracting, A Murky Shadow between the Spirit and the Letter of the Law: The Intersection of Gender and Class
Nowhere is the discrepancy between the spirit and the letter of the law more obvious than in the building trades where, despite over twenty years of supposed integration, women still only account for roughly two percent of the work force. Presuming opportunities exist and women simply choose not to take advantage of them, we evade the real issue: implementation of organizational acceptance of women workers in the trades.
From graduate school years desperately searching for information about female tradesworkers and a master electrician by trade, my history straddles the boundaries between academia and the building trades. I see first hand the dichotomy between theory and practice, viewing on a daily basis the dynamic between the dominant group, 98% male, and token workers, 2% female. The failure of integration speaks through these numbers.
A lack of academic interest in penetrating the world of the trades to gather data perpetuates the status quo, reinforcing the isolation of token workers. Why have the building trade organizations, where spirit often severely diverges from letter of the law, been virtually ignored by academics? What is the role of class in this seeming lack of attention? Are class issues a deterrent to productive scrutiny of the status quo? 


John F. Crawford, University of New Mexico, Valencia Campus, Anthologizing Working-Class Culture
Working class culture has found its way into college anthologies designed for a variety of purposes as well as those devoted specifically to the working class. Its influence is likely to be felt especially in readers for first-year composition students, to a lesser extent in anthologies for literature surveys. Often this literature appeals to students whose parents or grandparents identify with a specific kind of labor, such as agricultural workers, coal miners, or factory workers; or those who recall specific hardships such as racism or the Great Depression. Sometimes it will awaken repressed memories of circumstances not identical to, but parallel with, the literature in question, such as border issues and immigration. I will examine several anthologies with which I am familiar to show the potential effect of stories, poems, and dramas of working-class experience on the students who read them. 


Jeff Crump, Housing Studies Program, University of Minnesota, Contested Landscapes of Labor: Rival Unionism in the Farm Implement
On February 10, 1949 a pitched battle between members of Local 104 of the Farm Equipment and Metal Workers Union (FE) and recruiters of the rival United Auto Workers (UAW) broke out at the gates of the International Harvester (IH) Works in East Moline, Illinois.  As UAW organizers challenged the legitimacy of FE members coming off shift with cries of "Reds", "Commies" and "Go back to Moscow!", 200 loyal FE workers organized themselves into a powerful phalanx and engaged the UAW organizers in a wild melee (Chicago Daily Tribune 1949).  As the battle between the rival union members escalated, the verbal jousts turned into brutal fistfights and by the end of the day one FE member and twelve UAW organizers were in local hospitals with a variety of injuries (Gilpin 1992: 241).
As the larger and nationally influential UAW sought to depose the FE by raiding its membership and by forcing representation elections in plants represented by the FE, rival unionism forced farm implement workers throughout the Midwest to choose between two radically different philosophies of trade unionism.  At the same time the FE and UAW fought over the right to represent workers in the farm implement industry, the FE and IH engaged in a brutal struggle over who would control the shop floor: the company or the union.  Workers were not only faced with a contest between two rival unions, they were also confronted by a global corporation determined to roll back the gains of organized labor.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the spatial and scalar strategies of the FE, UAW, the International Harvester Corporation, and the U.S. federal government, in the struggle over who would represent workers in the farm implement industry.  Although it was often disguised in the material and rhetorical battles between the participants, the critical nexus of the contest was whether workers would exert control over decisions at the scale of the shop floor.  According to the FE, union power resided at the level of the shop floor.  From the perspective of the UAW, IH and the federal government, control of the shop floor was the prerogative of management and any union challenging this power structure was overstepping its bounds.  At the root of the UAW's business unionism was a reliance on national scale clout and a restriction on local scale actions.
My overall intention is to show that geographic scale is a contested material and ideological construction and that political power rests not only on the material control over particular places, but on the legitimacy that accrues to those actors who are able to control the discursive construction of scale (Herod 1991, 1997; Mitchell, 1998; Smith 1992; Swyngedouw 1997, 2000). 


Melissa Dabakis, Kenyon College, Civic Statuary, the Work Ethic, and the Paradoxes of Labor Commemoration: George Gray Barnard's Sculptural Program for the Pennsylvania Statehouse
In 1911, George Gray Barnard completed a series of didactic and moralizing sculptures for the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg that presented labor as a sacred and noble endeavor, removed from the exigencies of actual worker's lives.  Both biblical and classical traditions under-girded this sculptural program and enhanced the moral authority of its message:  a celebration of the American work ethic.  This sculptural project formed  part of Harrisburg's City Beautiful Movement and intended to inspire civic loyalty among Pennsylvania residents while affirming labor as the core of moral life.  Its message was largely addressed to the "foreign" elements of the Pennsylvania workforce, specifically those "uncontrolled masses" who populated modern factories, steel mills, and coal mines, and led violent strikes against the state's leading industries.
Barnard's sculptural program, titled "The Apotheosis of Labor," with its environmental civic message and dedication to the principles of the work ethic (which by 1900 had become synonymous in middle-class parlance with the idea of social control), hoped to effect social relations by encouraging workers to conscientious labor from which they would benefit in spiritual and moral ways, rather than from rectifying the material conditions of their oppression.  This paper shall address the contradictions that riddled the notion of the work ethic and its attendant representations at the turn of the twentieth century.  Indeed, the circumstances of a pre-industrial order, which equated work and virtue, had rapidly faded.  Not surprisingly, industrial capitalism, with its practical alienation of contemporary labor, could no longer sustain the language of work pride, the self-esteem produced by independent labor, inherent in the work ethic ideology.  This paper shall also explore the diverse ways that elite and middle-class interests and labor leaders alike deployed this ideology at the turn of the last century. 


Anthony Dawahare, California State University, Northridge, 'Diversity' and the Legacy of Anticommunism in the Academic Workplace
This paper will address some of the ways in which the institutionalization of 'diversity' represents one of the political forms of the class struggle between labor and capital in and outside of academia.  Through an analysis of  'diversity' statements published by governmental agencies (such as the CIA), corporations (such as Exxon Mobil), and academic think tanks, I will argue that the institutionalization of 'diversity' functions to direct progressive political energies of many workers into modes of thought and action that usually do not challenge the class basis of the social problems (such as racism and sexism) "diversity" aims to repair.  On the contrary, "diversity" promotes racial and gender identities and differences and attempts to erase the class content of racism and sexism in modern America, as well as all traces of the conflicting class interests that characterize capitalism.  Moreover, it is tied to an attempt to rejuvenate an American nationalism in crisis by promoting an image of American democracy in universities, colleges, and other workplaces.  As a legacy of the Cold War, the institutionalization of 'diversity' functions as a co-optation and a check to the inroads of the class-based politics of the protests of the 1960s.  A critique of the history and limitations of diversity ideology can strengthen labor struggles both within and outside of academia. 


Anthony Dawahare, California State University, Northridge, Countersong to Nationalism: Pedro Mir and Caribbean Working-Class History
Pedro Mir, one of the most important working-class poets of the Dominican Republic, published his poetry in defense of Dominican workers exploited and oppressed under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1930-1961) and successive U.S. occupations.  I am particularly interested in discussing how his epic poems, especially "There is a Country in the World," "If Anybody Wants to Know Which is My Country," and "Countersong to Walt Whitman," subvert the conventional nationalist narratives that posit a "Dominican" essence definitive of the country's history.  On the contrary, Mir envisions a history composed of class struggle and working-class agency that bears more resemblance to working-class struggles worldwide (and particularly in the Americas) than to anything uniquely "Dominican."  He condemns the profit system that holds the island in subjection to primarily U.S. interests and looks forward to the day "[w]hen the thread of all the borders / weaves together all countries into a single rug."  In a poetic style similar to both Whitman and Ernesto Cardenal, Mir powerfully states his case against nationalism and for an internationalist poetry and politics. 


William DeGenaro, The University of Arizona, Historical Narrative and Class Consciousness: Writing the Junior College Movement
Perhaps no movement in American education remains more riddled with contradiction than the junior college movement, the birth and rapid spread of two-year colleges during the early twentieth century.  Junior colleges welcomed the working-class and provided affordable education at convenient locations (Cohen and Brawer, Dougherty, Ratcliff).  The new and democratic institutions largely failed to deliver, though, on their promise of transfer to four-year colleges and universities, instead creating a lower-prestige campus where guidance counselors and vocational programs micro-managed the ambitions of blue-collar students (Brint and Karabel, Clark, Karabel, Shor).  Despite these rich contradictions, critical scholars in rhetoric and composition have largely overlooked the junior college movement as a site for historical narrative.  Those interested in the gatekeeping functions of higher education, the ways colleges and universities transmit hegemonic values to students, and the problematic allegiance between education and corporate America have much to learn from the history of the two-year college.  I am firstly suggesting that historians of rhetoric and composition turn their attention to sites of contradiction, diversity, and class conflict, sites such as the junior college movement.  Secondly, I am proposing we create historical narratives that vigilantly and ruthlessly ascribe agency to the individuals and collectives who hold the cultural power to shape institutions and movements.  I want us to be not only archivists with an attitude, but also archivists with a consciousness.
The junior college movement, spearheaded by elite scholars of education, coincided with philosophical movements like scientization and education for social efficiency.  The term "elite" denotes the affiliation of these scholars with institutions of exclusion and prestige, and their attitude of superiority over the student-worker, who was becoming ethnically diverse and agitated by poor working conditions.  Junior college movement leaders saw students as undisciplined bodies who needed to be taught taste and subjectivity but also to assume their positions within industrial capitalism.  Movement leaders sought to construct individuals who saw themselves not as part of a collective but rather as solely responsible for any success or failure the future might hold.  Through disciplinary devices such as assessment, junior college students learned the meritocratic cultural myths of individualism and capitalism.  In this paper, I analyze archival materials such as curriculum guides and other published accounts written by the founders and boosters of early junior colleges in the attempt to redirect the gaze of historians of rhetoric and composition away from familiar, homogenous institutions such as Harvard and toward domains where class conflict played out among various agents. 


Marianne DiPalermo/McCauley, Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, The City University of New York, Memory of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire: After the Fact
In preparing this documentary about an event that took place approximately one hundred years ago,  two dominant thoughts influenced my research.  The first was to understand the fact that this documentary was being created long after the fact.  The second thought was that it was my responsibility  to reconstruct the time, the place, the people and the emotional setting of that time.  I remembered my upset  at  seeing the way the plaque, firmly anchored on the building on which the event took place, was worded.  It seemed to be empty of human substance.  To me, it was written as though those who had died were objects to be commemorated rather than human beings.  That thought was not acceptable to me.
As a story-teller, I chose to use the Agatha Christie detective approach.  This approach implied that I could be creative in uncovering details not previously  known.  According to a psychologist, Bolen (1979) the Agatha Christie approach is intuitive and asks, "What is the meaning of this event?   What are the circumstances in which it arose?  What are the possibilities inherent in it?" The questions differ from the usual "what, when, where, what happened" approach. These questions  place the event in the middle of  industry and migrating populations, in the city of New York.  Those who worked in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company were non-English speaking people, foreign to our way of life at that time, in that place.  This is the story as it revealed itself, and life was restored into sterile words. 


Terry Easton, Emory University, Day Laboring in Atlanta
In the last quarter of the twentieth century citizens of Atlanta have witnessed an economic boom.  Suburbanization is currently extending the borders of the Atlanta metropolitan region and some inner-city residents are experiencing revitalization in their neighborhoods.  Construction cranes dot the landscape reminding residents and tourists alike that the real and imagined changes in Atlanta are synonymous with the phrase "The New South" and the terms "globalization" and "development."  But Atlanta's economic boom has not reached everyone.  Creeping in the shadows of recently developed office towers, parking decks, and shopping malls lurks the underside of economic growth.  Despite the increase in the circulation of money in Atlanta's construction industry, day laborers continue to work for low wages in unsafe conditions.
I am currently in the early stages of conducting research for my dissertation on day laborers in Atlanta's construction industry.  In the dissertation, I intend to situate Atlanta's day labor force in an international context while examining the lives of African American, Latino, and white day laborers.  I intend to use evidence from oral history interviews and archival materials to reconstruct the history of Atlanta's day labor pools while examining the working lives of day laborers.  In this presentation, I will discuss the scope and goals of my project.  Because I am at the early stages of research and writing, I welcome and encourage your comments, feedback, and ideas. 

Anthony Esposito, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, The Culture of Steel and Memory: A rhetorical analysis of the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor
The past three decades have seen America's industrial towns transformed from towns of rich production into towns that now only produce high unemployment and crime rates.  As a consequence, these transformations, including the loss of jobs, have impacted once productive ethnic and cultural communities.  Towns such as Youngstown, Ohio; Gary, Indiana; and, Flint, Michigan have seen their once proud traditions of producing either steel or automobiles relocated to foreign countries.  No town has been more effected by the closing of steel mills than Youngstown, Ohio.  When mentioned in the news, it seems that Youngstown is known only for high crime, unemployment, numerous prisons, and controversial U.S. Congressman, James Traficant.  These variables only escalate the town's negative image to the rest of the nation.  Therefore, how does a town such as Youngstown construct the memory of steel in a place where all of the steel mills have been closed?  Youngstown has enacted a steel museum named The Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor to pay homage to the once proud commodity of this community.  Understanding the rhetoric of individuals who worked at the mill and the paramount nature of steel's impact upon the community are just two examples of how steel museums can act as true indicators of how memory is constructed to say that reality once happened in Youngstown.
By studying this rhetorical artifact, one can begin to grasp a deeper understanding of how Youngstown's past has greatly influenced its present and future.  In the first section of the speech/paper, I will employ vernacular memory to the study of museums, providing a thorough analysis of the pertinent literature that has been studied on the topic.  In the second section, I will give a history of the Youngstown community, and also discuss the current state of the city.  I will then narrow my focus to the museum site and show how the rhetorical artifact displays how steel was made.  Included in this analysis will be a detailed description of safety in the mill, and through taped interviews available at the museum, the voices of individual workers who once were employed in the steel making business in the Youngstown community.  In the third section, I will study the impact of steel upon this community by studying discursive artifacts.  These include the enactment of a locker room and ethnic community, paychecks, and available taped interviews to show how memory is constructed in these environments.  Finally, I will show through tapes and individual interviews, how the closing of the mills impacted this once productive community.  Studying this museum through the concept of vernacular memory can show the rhetorical potential of critiquing an important contributor to this cultural community. 


Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, West Virginia University, Labor Speaks to the Community: Union Radio Programs in the Post-War Era
After World War II, organized labor faced an increasingly hostile economic and political atmosphere.  Events during and immediately after the war had raised the business community's anxiety about the apparent growing influence of unions on American communities.  Worried about its ability to shape the postwar reconstruction, the business community mobilized to shape social and economic policy and to win the loyalty and political support of the American public.  To accomplish this, corporate leaders relied on the mass media and infiltrated every important institution of American life from the work site to the classroom to the church in an effort to reorient Americans from their newfound loyalties to labor and the government. Business leaders attempted to sell Americans on the virtues of individualism as opposed to collectivism, freedom as opposed to state control and the centrality of the free enterprise system to the American way of life.
Some labor leaders recognized the danger this ideological onslaught posed to organized labor and the working class.  Despite limited resources, elements of organized labor, particularly attempted to complete for worker loyalty and for the political support of the public.  Unions sought to support the notion that worker success and security as well as America's future depended on the collective power of organized labor and the continued ability of the state to regulate business.
The mass media was an important battleground between business and labor.  In most cases, however, unions did not have the means to offset biased newspapers nor could they compete with business groups in purchasing extensive newspaper advertising.  Consequently, for the labor movement, radio was an important key to contesting business domination of political discourse.
This paper focuses on how organized labor used radio broadcasting in an effort to reach the community with the union message and to build a pro-labor political climate between 1945 and 1960.  During this period, unions pursued two radio strategies: one focused on operating non-profit FM stations committed to providing "propaganda free news" and public interest programming; the other centered on purchasing programming on commercial AM stations.  By the fifties, labor's voice was widely heard on the airwaves.  The AFL and CIO both sponsored nationally broadcast network news and commentary programs that promoted labor's political and economic vision.  National unions, city central bodies, and local unions also broadcast labor programs.  The CIO in Michigan, for instance, covered the state with fifteen different local radio programs supported by state and local radio advisory councils.  I would like to conclude this presentation by playing for the audience some recordings of labor programs from the fifties. 


Steven Garabedian, University of Minnesota, A Conversation on Working-Class Studies and American Studies Today Presented by members of the Working-Class Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association
Over the years, the field of American Studies has been at times more and less open to the aims and advances of working-class studies.  Despite its stated interdisciplinarity and diversity, many feel that the study of working-class culture, history, and politics has languished in American Studies in recent decades.  Such critics from within and outside of American Studies are optimistic--yet, perhaps cautiously so--about the appearance of late of a reverse trend.  As we witness a revival of working-class studies in American Studies scholarship and teaching, old and new proponents of class analysis must take time out to reflect on the promise and problems attendant to forging such a new partnership.  What might the future hold, and what do practitioners of each field have to gain and lose from such a contemporary synthesis?
This roundtable panel is meant to stimulate discussion among and between panelists and audience members in the fields of working-class studies and American Studies. The panel features members who comprise the Steering Committee of the Working-Class Studies Caucus of the national American Studies Association.  Organized two years ago under the aegis of the Center for Working-Class Studies, the Caucus seeks to promote and develop the field of working-class studies in American Studies.  Over the past two years, Steering Committee members have seen firsthand the "return of class" in American Studies, and they have worked to stimulate such a revival through Caucus-sponsored panels, roundtables, meetings, and activities at the ASA annual meetings.  The panelists envision this as an open and informal conference session.  We hope for and will encourage suggestions, frank dialogue, difficult questions, and constructive criticism from all interested parties on a variety of topics involving teaching, learning, politics, and activism inside and outside of the formal confines of academia. 


Fred Gardaphe, SUNY-Stony Brook, A Class Act: Understanding the Italian/American Gangster
Beginning with the late Mario Puzo's 1969 novel, The Godfather, and continuing to the latest novels of Don DeLillo, the gangster in literature, theater, and film, has been more often than not been the product of Italian America's own sons.  The gangster produced by these artists provides a means of transgressing the social boundaries set up by traditional definitions of class.  Fredric Jameson sees the gangster as a key player in Mafia movies that project a solution to social contradictions incorruptibility, honesty, crime fighting, and finally law-and-order itself,which is evidently a very different proposition from the diagnosis of the American misery whose prescription would be social revolution (Signatures of the Visible 32).  While Mafia movies may keep us from thinking about revolution, they are focusing our attention in other directions.
It would be in the 1960s, when slogans like "Power to the People" surfaced to shake up a working-class complacency, that Italian Americans would gain their share of power in a society that only a generation earlier had exploited them as workers.  The gangster became the symbol of the transformation of the Italian American male from worker to power broker.  The gangster took power and became an accepted figure for that task.  Unlike Rachel Rubin's revolutionary take on the Jewish Gangster, in Jewish Gangsters in Modern Literature,  becoming the Italian American gangster is a reactionary act.
As the real gangsters of yesterday recede into the history books, their figures loom larger than ever as they are resurrected by the arts.  If we see the gangster as a trickster figure we can begin to explain the American fascination with gangsters.  The trickster figure serves as a model of improper behavior.  Societies need to have a figure, which can represent fringe behavior against which the center of society can formulate its values and identity.  The Mafia myth has thus served an important function in American society by helping to define what is and what is not American.  It is not American to speak a language other than English; it is not American to use violence to guarantee business deals; it is not American to have mistresses and a happy family.  The Mafia myth also demonstrates what happens to those who don't play ball with the system.   Until the Italian American artist got hold of the figure; the gangster did just that. Robinson's Rico Bandello was a one-dimensional deviate who died like a dog, alone and without any family.  It was the likes of Puzo, Coppola, and Scorsese, who humanized the figure of the gangster by using the him as a twisted metaphor for their own culture's struggle for power and place in a new world.
In this paper I explore the gangster as a collection of the traits that the dominant culture represses.  I use the figure of the gangster to gain some insights into the past, present, and future of American notions of class.  I see the gangster figure in film and literature as a trope for signifying the gain of cultural power that comes through class mobility. 


Ben Gordon, Siena College, When it's Not a "Hot" Shop: What the Industrial Areas Foundation Community Organizing Model has to Offer Union Organizing
Are workers' decisions about forming labor unions really only about management?  That is, is union organizing just a referendum on pay, benefits and worker perceptions of management fairness?  Is worker interest in organizing, then, completely a function of management mistakes or miscalculation?  If not, why do most union organizers campaign as if all these questions are properly answered in the affirmative?
How can labor unions organize the unorganized in an environment characterized by economic uncertainty, union decline, lax enforcement of weak labor laws, and aggressive anti-union tactics and supposedly progressive human resource management practices by employers?  How do workers form a union when most or many of their co-workers are substantially satisfied with their wages, benefits and other conditions of employment?
To begin answering these questions, this paper argues for applying some lessons taken from the Industrial Areas Foundation community organizing model to union organizing. The paper suggests that through rethinking traditional methods of industrial targeting, organizer training, housecalling and campaigning (i.e., issue identification, individual contact, and the typical short-term focus on grievances), unions can organize in this new environment.  For example, the paper argues that a focus on identifying, recruiting, and developing relationships with leaders should replace the current campaign housecall goals of generating and measuring union sympathy and inoculation.


Thorsten Gresser, Center for Interdisciplinary Research on the Ruhr Area (ZEFIR), Ruhr-University Bochum, Pittsburgh and the Ruhr Area: Common Patterns in Urban Conflict Situations during the Decline of Steel
During the 1980s the regions of Pittsburgh and the Ruhr Area experienced a severe loss of jobs in the steel industry. In both regions the steelworkers, in alliance with local activists and the general population of the affected communities, waged a militant and highly publicized struggle against the shutdowns. Other industries also go through drastic rationalizations, lay-offs and the dismissal of masses of workers but militancy and active struggle seems to be the exception. The leading question is therefore: Is there a typical, a common pattern of labor struggles against shutdowns in old-industrialized areas during the decline of steel in the 1980s in the United States and (West-)Germany? Thorsten Gresser identifies four types of protagonists, that are represented in both cases and all four were not just currents in a broader stream dominated by one strategy or form of protest, but were active at the same time during the struggle and in conflict with each other.
The fight against shutdowns is fundamentally different from other labor conflicts, especially in an old-industrialized region: Its economic, political and cultural aspects are heavily interwoven and generate a background that is receptive for the mobilization of the community in alliance with labor. It differs also from other labor conflicts because the consequences are greater: The fate of the region and the future of the people living there are at stake. This creates a deeper and more pronounced need among the workers to find the right method in the struggle for the common cause and to define the common cause.
This overall common pattern of the struggle over the right mode of thinking and acting, over strategy and tactics of the struggle, is only the first step to explain fights against shutdowns in old-industrialized areas. There are still other questions (concerning cultural aspects, identification and self-identification of the workers, the sequence of steps of the struggle itself) which have to be addressed in Mr. Gresser's Ph.D.-thesis, which will be finished in 2002.   


Laura Hapke, Pace University, Sweating Out a Canon: Issues in Sweatshop Studies 
The paper addresses the 1) relations and possible divisions between working-class studies and sweatshop studies; 2) the unresolved tensions in working-class studies, heightened by the examination of the sweatshop and its plentiful representations in U.S. literature; 3) the stance of the scholar: the difficulties between, say, activist scholarship and theorizing the sweatshop; and 4) the perennial question of authority over texts. Who decides whether a transcribed interview with an undocumented Latina in a Los Angeles sweatshop or factory is a text for the field of Sweatshop Studies? What about the tapestry of wary-worker and professional-organizer voices, say, at a strike rally in Chinatown? 
Conversely can the elitist, misogynist Melville's "Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids," an American sweatshop classic, be given preference for its more "universal" exposure of labor inhumanity? And is the website for Students Against Sweatshops any more or less valid than the mediated representations of sweated labor mentioned above? In sum, with the workers themselves imprisoned, their voices largely silenced, what constitute a sweatshop art and canon? 

Ciara Healy, independent scholar, Active Exploitation 
In my paper on activism, I argue that power struggles in one activist workplace "Peace Action Wisconsin" arose over fundamental ideological differences between what it meant to be an activist.  Relevant aspects of this ideological divide include gendered labor, memories of activism form the 60's and 70's and the goals of social-change activism.  At Peace Action the divide is both external and internal. Externally, the effectiveness of Peace Action as an agent for social change was almost never addressed by the organization. The activist community that was Peace Action concentrated mostly on feeling good about "getting the message out" and supporting each other in the face of apathy and resistance. Effectively evaluating and meeting goals was not a part of any program or activity of the organization. Internally, while Peace Action passionately lamented the lack of workers rights and realistic health benefits, it did not offer employees either consistent benefits or a living wage. Workers, especially in the office-manager position, were expected to subordinate their financial needs to those of the organization while sacrifice and volunteerism were praised as key virtues of that woman-held position. 
My argument centers on the connections between conceptions of activism and the reality of the activist workplace. I claim that while Peace Action's workplace was exploitative, it was so because of the community's ideological commitments, notions of gender and passive resistance in the face of change. I think that there are direct connections between the ideals held by the activist community of Peace Action and the exploitative and ineffectual nature of their workplace and work. I aim to explore the rich irony of organizations that commit themselves to radical social change while remaining deeply resistant to change on any other level. I conclude with an update on the workplace since their organizational overhaul and my continued involvement as a member of Peace Action's Steering Committee. 

Anne Herzog, West Chester University, "What the Tenement Girl Could See": The Poetry of Linda McCarriston 
Poet Linda McCarriston spent the first 26 years of her life in the city of Lynn, MA.  I grew up near Lynn, and the only thing I remember about Lynn was the following ditty I heard whenever Lynn was mentioned in casual conversation: Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin.  You never come out the way you went in.  As a child, I thought nothing of what it might mean to call Lynn one's home, but Linda McCarriston, of necessity, faced this burden.  Much of her work grapples with what she calls the "nameless stain" of growing up in Lynn.  Lynn's stain was its poverty, its tenements, its fundamentally working-class, immigrant identity.  There was not then, nor is there now, any local movement for reframing and valuing Lynn's identity.  My presentation will consider McCarriston's 1991 Terrence Des Pres Prize winning collection, Eva-Mary, and more recent poems from her selected collection, Little River (2000), within the context of her autobiographical reflections (From Weed).  I wish to examine McCarriston's poetic response to what she calls the "nameless stain"--her struggle to respond to both the beauty and the pain of what the tenement girl could see. 

Faith S. Holsaert, Martha P. Norman, and Hellen O'Neal McCray, Community Researchers, "Women in the Civil Rights Movement/ Women in a Working-Class Movement"
The southern civil rights movement of the 1960s was rooted in workers’ history and involved tens of thousands of workers. An interracial collective of six women in their 50s and 60s, former members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) have compiled memories of women who worked with SNCC. The proposed volume is entitled Hands on the Freedom Plow, reflecting both the leadership of women in the struggle and the historically agricultural work of many black people. The memories, by their nature explore gender, race, and class.  This project has taken the writing of history out of the hands of academics and placed it in the hands of participants. It is not an oral history but a project in which the participants wrote their own pieces, a narrative in many voices. The narratives speak of a political community that defies the passage of time; they offer a case study of creating social change and show women in critical roles at times of decision-making and action. 
The more than 50 contributors include women who were public school or college students at the time as well as women who were health care workers, domestic workers, teachers, or independent entrepreneurs. In addition to stories of 1960s activism and courage, many pieces portray life under U.S. apartheid and document black family and community oral histories of resistance to racism as long ago as slavery. Though they have been largely written out of the academic history of this movement, when invited to speak in their own voices, women proudly take the places they have earned beside their brothers in the struggle. 

William M. Hunter, Geographer, Heberling Associates, Seeing Traces: Representing Working-Class History in Publicly Funded Cultural Resource Assessment 
The failure of the historic preservation movement to understand and protect significant working class resources is well known. The under-representation of labor in the practice of historic preservation serves to create a geographic knowledge that denies the link between landscape production and landscape representation. The over emphases on style rather than form, time rather than space, and results rather than processes prevent most preservationists from recognizing the place of the working class in the production of the cultural landscape. Yet the practice of historic preservation within the context of federally mandated Cultural Resource Assessment offers an opportunity to insert a critically informed reading of the cultural landscape into the institutional discourse. Geographers may illuminate the traces of working-class history that have escaped not only the effacement of creative destruction, but the gaze of the architectural historian as well. The insertion of the critical approach allows us to reveal the links between the appearance of the landscape and the historical forces responsible for its production. We may then write a more honest, accurate, and democratic public histories that are subtlety reflected in and through the resulting public works. We offer examples of publicly funded Cultural Resource Assessments that allowed the practice of human geography to illuminate the place of the working class in Ohio. 


Daniel Kerr, Case Western Reserve University; Robert Jackson, Robert Molchan, and Clarence Dailey, The Low Wage Workers Union, Industrial Day Labor and the LWWU: Bringing the Homeless Back into the Working Class 
In October 2000, a group of twenty homeless workers gathered at the Salvation Army Emergency Shelter in Cleveland, Ohio and officially christened the Low Wage Workers Union (LWWU).  The organization, consisting primarily of industrial temp laborers, evolved out of a larger successful struggle to pass a living wage ordinance in the city of Cleveland.  Many homeless workers recognized the shortcomings of the ordinance, which failed to address the needs of a large number of laborers.  They rightfully realized that the only way in which these workers could win a living wage would be through their own collective organization. 
The proposed panel will include one historian of homelessness and contingent labor, Daniel Kerr, and three homeless members of the LWWU, Robert Molchan, Clarence Dailey and Robert Jackson, who will discuss the realities, based on their personal experiences, which workers face within the field of temporary industrial labor on an everyday basis.  Attention will be placed on the specific types of work that homeless laborers are engaged in and how that work relates to the larger process of industrial production.  An important topic of interest for the panel will be the temporary day labor agencies, including a discussion of their historical development and the ongoing abuses that they inflict upon the workers that are dependent on them for jobs.  In conclusion, members of the panel will emphasize the development of the LWWU and the specific ways that the union has sought to redress the economic injustices that its members are confronted with.  They will make the argument that the fate of the low-wage worker is inextricably intertwined with fate of the larger working-class. 


Stephanie Kuduk, Wesleyan University, "The Poet's Hope":  Allen Davenport, Visionary Poetics, and Working-Class Radicalism in Mid-19th Century Britain 
In 1846, the last year of his life, the working-class radical poet and activist Allen Davenport published a series of visionary, utopian poems in the pro-democracy periodical the Northern Star.  There, he claimed for poetry the political function of nurturing and conveying to the people the radical utopian vision of the future---"the new world," as it was often called.  This new world was, as the title of one of these poems put it, "The Poet's Hope," the special realm of the poetic imagination.  In this poem, Davenport peers through the "dark vista of futurity" to glimpse the "shadowy twilight of a brighter day" in which "nations shall join heart and hand to drive the proud usurpers from the land."  The idea that poetry was uniquely able to convey utopian vision was widespread among British radical poets and critics in the 19th century and represents one of the central ways they imagined poetry participating in politics.  Allen Davenport was one of these poets.  In this talk, I ask why visions of the utopian future were "the poet's hope."  What understanding of the political effects of poetry propelled authors like Davenport -- who wrote all sorts of poetry as well as prose -- to write explicitly visionary poems?  How did he explain the political efficacy of visionary poetry? 
Focusing on Davenport's 1827 collection of lyrics, The Muse's Wreath, and his later poems published in the Chartist newspaper The Northern Star, I reconstruct three interconnected theories of how poetry could act as an agent of social change.  These theories demonstrate the inextricably political and aesthetic intentions that motivated visionary poetics in this period.  First of all, like many radicals Davenport believed that visionary poetry offered an imaginative experience of the future, an experience that actually constituted writ small the larger social transformation toward which radicals were working.  Second, he explained poetry of all sorts as both the record and the agent of working-class education.  It is in visionary poetry in particular, however, that he articulated the utopian impulses driving education, which he saw as a practice by which the people would slowly achieve social transformation, a "march of intellect."  Third, he believed that visionary poetry functioned as a bulwark against despair.  For though radicals insisted that the "new world" was realizable in their lifetimes, they often wrote utopian poetry when the new world seemed unattainable rather than imminent, illusory rather than visionary. 
In the years between 1827 and 1846, between The Muse's Wreath and "The Poet's Hope," the greatest mass movement for democratic reform in British history, Chartism, rose and fell, a historical sea-change that one would expect to see reflected in the poetic practices and aesthetic theories of radical writers.  Instead, what stands out is the persistence and stability of visionary poetry.  This persistence arises from extremely complicated historical factors that this paper can only sketch; I focus instead on its effects.  Ultimately, visionary poetry created and sustained a shared vision of the future that radicals could rally around despite ideological and tactical differences, despite political defeat, and even despite a receding horizon of change.  At the most fundamental level, visionary poems established a democratic future vision, the necessary corollary to a critical practice in the present.  The "new world" of radical poetry constructed the collective dream without which social change movements dissolve into rage or resignation., arguing that it enabled plebeian radicals to unite across philosophical and strategic divides, to move with seeming effortlessness from one radical camp to another.  The paper thus attempts to reconstruct in historical and literary detail one instance in which poetry shaped the course of radical politics. 


Christie Launius, University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee, Class, Gender, and Radical Politics in The Great Midland 
The title of Alexander Saxton's 1948 novel, The Great Midland, refers to the railroad company around which the lives of its protagonists revolve.  This novel, set in pre-WWII Chicago, chronicles the lives of three working-class families, but most closely follows singular members of each (Pledger McAdams, Dave Spaas, and his wife, Stephanie Koviak), all of whom are active members of the Communist Party. 
My presentation will focus on the character of Stephanie Koviak, who has risen from her working-class background to attend the University of Chicago, where she is a graduate student of biological science.  In doing so, I'm following the path begun by Constance Coiner in her introductory essay to the 1997 edition of the novel (an essay which she was working on but had not completed at the time of her tragic death).  After reading Saxton's novel for the first time, Coiner wondered "what had contributed to the consciousness of a male writer to enable him to fashion a female character in what would now be termed 'cross-gendered' writing as conflicted, depression-prone, ambitious and independent as Stephanie Koviak?" (xii). 
My presentation will take into account the undeniable remarkable-ness of Saxton's accomplishment while also considering the limitations of locating the novel's conflicts and neuroses in the psyche of its main female character.  Ironically, while Saxton portrays and validates Stephanie's existential concerns about pursuing social mobility through education and paying the emotional price of involvement in the Communist Party, he offers her no framework through which to understand how her material and psychological circumstances as a wife, as a daughter of working-class parents, as a student, as a job-seeker, and as a Communist Party member, are affected by her gender. 


Harmon Lisnow, Institute for Career Development, What Steelworkers Taught Us About Writing Literature of and by the Working Class 
"I guess everybody likes to think they've got a story to tell," steelworker Paul Woodring told the Baltimore Sun in March, shortly after he became a published author for the first time. Unfortunately, few blue-collar workers ever get the chance to tell their stories to anyone, save a few close friends and relatives. But as Woodring and a few fellow steelworkers recently proved, some stories deserve to be told to a wide audience.  Woodring is one of 15 steelworkers living near Baltimore and Gary, Ind., who contributed stories and poems to "The Heat: Steelworker Lives & Legends." The 156-page anthology describes the rigors of life in and around America's steel mills.  Some of the themes are familiar: plant closing, discontinued product lines, layoffs, occupational hazards and economic realities. But the stories delve deeper than the job conditions to reveal the quiet dignity of a caring, tight-knit culture America rarely sees - or worse yet - doesn't care to understand. 
Jimmy Santiago Baca notes in his introduction to the book: "Certainly, what secrets the steelworkers kept in their hearts were part of the American experience, and yet, after reading thousands of books over the past 25 years, I had never read anything written by a steelworker."  The Institute for Career Development set out to change that. We invited Jimmy Baca to teach a series of intensive writing workshops to steelworkers with the idea of publishing their stories and poems in a book. We had a couple of reasons for doing so. A book, we surmised, would be an effective hammer to shatter the prevailing stereotype of the American steelworker as all brawn and no brain. What better way to show that steelworkers are hard-working, sensitive people with sharp intellects than to have them demonstrate those qualities by virtue of their own words? 
We also wanted to use the book as an entree to the mainstream media to discuss other issues, like federal support for lifelong learning initiatives, the important role of continuous adult education in the workplace, the effectiveness of joint labor-management training programs such as ours, and the foresight of the USWA and other unions in negotiating educational benefits for their members. 
Just as important as pursuing these goals were the things we learned along the way. For example, we learned how writing workshops can capture the culture and history of an industrial workplace. In many respects, getting workers to write about their own experiences can be as fruitful as turning an oral historian loose on the shop floor. The writing submissions will vary in tone and detail and the contributors will focus on different events and characters. The result is a diverse body of work unfettered by an outsider's subjective interpretations of what is and isn't important to the workers' sense of history. 
Many of the writers found this to be the most important aspect of the workshops. Contributor Joe E. Gutierrez said that, more than anything else, he hopes children of steelworkers read the book to better understand their parents' jobs. Gutierrez, who has been invited on various occasions to talk about the union to young students, says he was struck by the number of children who have no idea what their parents do. "They just say, 'they work in the mills,'" Gutierrez said. We also learned that choosing the right facilitator is crucial to the success of the writing workshop. Based on our experience, working adults don't want a "teacher" to lecture them about story construction and grammar. Instead, they want an engaging and dynamic leader to inspire them to share their stories; to encourage them to overcome their fears about writing; and to tell them their experiences are worthy of artistic treatment. Jimmy Baca did this intuitively, but the effect was not lost on the writers. 
So now we have this book. What are we going to do with it? Our goal is to make it available in bookstores and libraries across the country, especially in steel communities. We also hope to convince some labor studies departments to add it to their reading lists or use it as a text. We're using it ourselves to teach writing classes and language skills to steelworkers in our Career Development Program. We'd also like to raise consciousness about the tough road that lies ahead for America's steelworkers, as the rising tide of layoffs and bankruptcies pushes the domestic steel industry to the brink of collapse.  As contributor Gary Markley puts it: "I may not have a job tomorrow, but at least my grandkids will know what my life was all about. If this book does one thing, I hope it makes Americans think about where washing machines and cars and bridges come from, and that there's a human cost to making steel." 


Jeff Manuel, Northwestern University, "This Place of Desolation Calls": Music and Youth in Postindustrial Youngstown 
The de-industrialization of Youngstown, Ohio in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s brought sweeping changes to the life and culture of young people in the Mahoning Valley. Heavy manufacturing's exit from the community forced all Youngstown residents, in one way or another, to reinvent and re-conceptualize their role in the world. Since youth were often the community members who had to face the long-run consequences of de-industrialization most directly, their experience provides important insights into the human costs of de-industrialization in America's industrial cities.  This research uses several genres of popular music from the late 1970s to the late 1980s as a lens to examine the ways various Youngstown youth reacted and responded to de-industrialization. The research highlights a distinct process of reaction against de-industrialization, adoption of the postindustrial future, and fight against stagnation and marginalization that characterized youths' responses to Youngstown in the late 1970s and 1980s.  Each of these processes was informed in part by various forms of local music, from the Dead Boys to DEVO to the Infidels. 


Delia Maria, Tilak University, In Feudal Bondage--A Case Study of Quarry Miners in Pune, India 
This paper is a curtain-raiser to the semi-feudal and semi-capitalist quarry mining industry on the outskirts of Pune city. The anarchic, capitalist development of mega-cities has increased the demand for gravel for public infrastructure like roads and other construction. Pune has grown two and a half times in the last two decades, which has resulted in the mushrooming of quarries. This paper traces the history of this quarry mining, the use of old-fashioned technology and the occupational hazards associated with the unsafe and backward mode of production. 
Landless workers, unemployed stone-cutters displaced by disasters and rural unemployment have migrated to the city and have got employed as casual on daily wage rates in quarry mining. This paper exposes the feudal relationships between owners and labourers, the parasitic middlement and transporters, the misuse of female and child labour, and the low remuneration system. There is also a nexus between the quarry owners, government inspectors, the local government officials and elected representatives. All this disallows the implementation of labour legislation fought and won by the mainstream labour movement. The other fall-out of this industry is the hazardous effect on the environment and the city's health thereby. 
This paper further goes on to investigate quarry mining as part of "feudal industrialism" in a developing country. It studies the relationship between capitalist underdevelopment and the unorganisation of small scale industry labour. While labour in other industries have struggled and enjoyed 75 years of organisation, labour in quarry mining still remains unorganised and unprotected. The nature of the industry precludes trade union organisation. The transitory nature of production denies housing and other civic amenities to the migratory labour. The local government bodies and representatives largely neglected the areas in which production takes place and workers colonies attached to them. 
This presentation makes a case for modernisation of the industry and the need to update labour legislation to allow the benefits of unionisation to its workers. An appeal is made to NGOs and left trade unions to get involved in this sector; NGOs and trade unions in the city have largely avoided working in such areas due to the hardships involved. The government needs to wake up to this feudal and exploitative production in its professed new role of globilising and modernising the economy. 
Finally, this paper places such backward industries as quarry mining within the entire realm of Indian capitalism and joins the struggles of labour in small scale production with the struggles against monopoly capitalism of the Indian bourgeoisie and multinationals. 


John Marsh, University of Illinois, Whose Public Sphere?  What Graduate Employee Unions Have Taught Us about Higher Education 
The successful (and failed, and in either case agonizing) efforts to organize graduate student unions is an all-too familiar narrative.  Rather than concentrate on the specific history of on-going attempts to win collective bargaining rights for graduate employees at the University of Illinois, then, I would like to ask what the responses to the prospect of graduate student unions by the state and the university reveal about the perception of academic labor, the job system, and the contested purpose of higher education.  Much is made even by those on the academic left critical of the growing corporatization of higher education of the university as a Habermasian public sphere, as a space outside of government and capital in which to discuss and critique the social, economic, and political realm.  Such rhetoric, though, rather disturbingly resembles that of the University of Illinois, which resists graduate student unions on the grounds that such unions would replace the academic model of labor relations with an inappropriate industrial one, thus disrupting "academic congeniality." Both arguments, academic congeniality and the university as public sphere, abstract the university from its participation in the reproduction of social relations, including class.  My purpose, then, following the work of Nancy Frasier, is to ask what conditions would need to be met before higher education could actually fulfill the criteria of a public sphere.  And failing those conditions, we would be better served to abandon (or at the very least to use more self-consciously) the language of public sphere as, at once, an impossibility and, given that impossibility, complicit in the de-politicization and de-classing of that very real political and classed institution, the university. 


Floatinfred Mass, writer/artist, Working-Class Poetry 
 After being introduced, I'll be reading a selection of original Working Class Poetry from my up and coming book of poetry tentatively entitled "Pentium Poetry."  Here are two short examples of my work: 
--- Time Cards --- 
Four punches in a day, morning, noon, noon and night To mark the days time to make sure that it is right 
Pounding sound of the time clock like the beat of your heart Punch the time card the day ends, punch the time card the day starts 
--- Smoke Stack --- 
Early morning sunrise turns the sky to red Alarm clocks ring factory workers rise from their beds 
Factory smoke stacks stare up at the faint morning light The wind stretches the smoke like a ribbon in flight 
Smoke stacks reaching high, high up into the heavens Smoke stacks standing tall like they're going to last forever 
Factory jobs move away, smokestacks seem to kick the habit Factory workers stays in bed wondering what the hell had happened 


Gloria McMillan, University of Arizona, Jane Addams on Blind Spots during the Pullman Strike of 1894:  "A Modern Lear" 
This presentation examines the rhetoric employed by Jane Addams, founder of Hull-House, in a November 2, 1912 Survey Magazine essay criticizing the behavior of George Pullman, some years after the 1894 Pullman Strike.  Addams casts the workers (and herself as the workers' friend) in the role of Cordelia to George Pullman's King Lear in this little-studied, yet historic, essay.  For comparison, I am examining samples of rhetoric from Eugene V. Debs.   I am also displaying graphic slide representations of these historic figures and the conditions that led to the Pullman strike to give a broader sense of this historic era in labor relations.  Addams' and  Debs' speeches and articles form a rich field for comparisons and contrasts between their styles of engagement on labor issues.  Addams was both a Quaker and an early feminist, so her writing displays elements of engagement that look forward to feminist theory and can form a benchmark of how effective feminist rhetorical techniques were/are in the area of labor concerns. In addition to simply analyzing Addams' style of writing and its contemporary effect upon readers, I am exploring ways to ground this reading of Addams' text in rhetorical theory, using the models provided by Ernest Bormann ("fantasy theme" criticism), Michel Foucault’s discourse theory, and Antonio Gramsci's model of hegemonic and counter discourses,  By touching on the possible systems at work upon both sides during the Pullman Strike, I hope to add a meta-commentary to the texts and rhetorical positions advanced by the various sides and by Jane Addams. 


Jack Metzgar, Roosevelt University, Working and Middle as Class Cultures 
Setting out a basic outline of the differences between working-class and middle-class culture, this presentation will argue that they should be seen as competing cultures, each with its own characteristic strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages.  Things are not usually seen this way because the dominant middle-class culture tends to take itself as a social norm to which everyone does or should aspire, thereby defining working-class culture as the absence of or distance from some middle-class characteristic.  Utilizing the crossover literature (autobiographical accounts of middle-class professionals, usually academics, from working-class backgrounds) as social evidence, Metzgar argues that each culture makes equally valid claims on us as individuals and as a society.  Recognizing how these cultures both conflict with and complement each other can have profound consequences for how we understand ourselves and our society. 


Jay Miller, Wayne State University, "Days of Roaring Hell": Trautmann, Riot, and McKees Rocks 
My presentation on William E. Trautmann and his 1922 novel, Riot, represents the discovery and evaluation of a forgotten socialistic labor novel and its unique and neglected author, a founder of the IWW.  However, I maintain that before Trautmann and Riot can be properly discussed and situated in the field of labor studies, as they deserve to be, they must first be introduced to a broader audience.  Consequently my presentation is less an argument about and more a contextualization of a lost labor leader and a literary relic of the early 20th-century labor wars.  It is based on the following works: my dissertation on Trautmann's recently discovered 1938 autobiography, "Fifty Years War"; my introduction to a forthcoming, new annotated edition of Riot; and a work in progress titled, "'Everything not yet destroyed was slowly succumbing': Conservation and Erosion in William E. Trautmann's Riot."  The presentation is divided into three parts: a biographical sketch of Trautmann, the historical contextualization of Riot in the 1909 McKees Rocks Strike, and the literary contextualization of Riot between Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Jack London's The Iron Heel. 
Born in New Zealand in 1869, Trautmann was raised in Europe.  After completing a brewing apprenticeship in Poland, he worked as a masterbrewer in Germany before being expelled for labor activities.  In 1890 Trautmann moved to the US, joined the Brewers Union, and in 1900 became editor of its newspaper, Brauer Zeitung.  In 1905 he joined with other industrial unionists to found the Industrial Workers of the World.  Between 1905 and 1912 he mostly worked in the field as an organizer.  In 1912 he broke with the IWW leadership over strike tactics and the alleged misuse of funds collected for the "Bread and Roses" Strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts.  At this point he all but disappears from labor histories. 
Riot is based on Trautmann's experiences as an IWW activist during the McKees Rocks Strike.  Between July and September of 1909, 5,000 workers comprising nearly 20 nationalities struck over wages and conditions at the Pressed Steel Car Company.  The strike was marked by a number of violent classes between police forces and strikers and culminated in a gunfight that left 12 dead.  In Riot Trautmann combines strike experiences with the concepts of workers' councils and industrial democracy popular in the reactionary climate of the 1920s. 
Riot is a Progressive Era "problem novel."  Thematically it falls between Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) and Jack London's The Iron Heel (1908).  "Problem novel" is a category covering fictions that introduce a central problem and work out a solution through characters and events.  The problem each addresses is the nature of the transition between a capitalistic and a socialistic society.  In Looking Backward the transition is speedy and non-violent; in Riot, sporadic and occasionally violent; in The Iron Heel, slow and extremely violent.  As authors, Bellamy and London are trapped by their utopian and apocalyptic models and fail to provide a realistic or desirable evolutionary path, but Trautmann charts a middle path between their extremes of an unrealistic peace and an unimaginable war. 


Ricardo Levins Morales, Northland Poster Collective, Art, Organizing, and Memory 
The telling of history is more than an exercise in documentation. It has always been an important element in shaping history.  Historical narrative provides important information about both specific tactics and strategies and broader possibilities for action.  Consequently, the struggle to control the memory of events is an important element of social conflict. 
The Northland Poster Collective participates in this aspect of social (particularly workplace) struggles on three levels. Working with organizers and rank and filers we help them to identify and redefine the workplace narrative.  To effectively organize, it makes a difference whether workers see themselves as part of a big, happy family; as engaged in a David vs. Goliath struggle; as rugged individuals who must each make their own way; as a community of interest in an exploitative environment, etc.  Art, humor, and creative tactics can create a receptive atmosphere organizing and leadership development. 
Telling untold (or miss-told) stories that can suggest avenues for action.  Even when figures or events from social struggles are integrated into mainstream teaching they are presented in ways that emphasize individual heroics and chance.  Our classroom posters focus on the collective action, planning, and community connection that offer a more reliable roadmap for creating change.  By our choices of what stories to depict we help to challenge widely held notions about who is an actor in history. 
Posterfolio sets help to bring more depth of knowledge (and curiosity) about events that people may know of only superficially.  Posters that challenge deeply held assumptions.  Less immediate in their impact, these may illustrate word definitions or the histories of everyday items, foods, etc.  Seemingly innocuous, these posters contain layers of social history and suggest connections to other peoples that are absent from mainstream and commercial culture. Making use of history as a lever for real change requires strategies for its dissemination.  Our approach has been to use our relationships with schoolteachers, unions, and community organizations to distribute the work that we produce.  These networks are also the source for information on the needs of the people at the front.  Organizing seeds have a hard time growing in hostile soil.  Tending to the cultural soil of the workplace, community, and broader society is a long-term and essential element in any strategy for change. 


Jenn Nichols, Michigan State University, Keeping Up with the Joadses: Working-Class Culture, Anti-Globalization, and Romantic Anthropology 
This paper focuses on the issue of "passing" from one class to another and the pop-culturization of the symbols of working-class lived experiences as articles of cultural cache among the bourgeoisie.  Drawing on a variety of popular textual representations of labor, migrancy, and mobility, I examine the ways in which middle-class America, particularly its youth, is colonizing the signifying elements of working-class life to render them meaningless as points of identification and solidarity.  From the popularity of blue-collar clothing such as Carharrt to a magazine article pitching migrant farm labor as an "off-beat travel experience" for recent college graduates, the very sites -- labor, uniform clothing, forced (im)mobility -- that traditionally represent class oppression to working-class subjects are being recast(e) as sites of freedom from oppression, namely, the stifling un-hipness of being middle-class. 
The recent rounds of activism against the IMF, WTO, and the World Bank have helped to foster another cycle of class awareness in this country as middle-class college students from across the nation join with union members and other blue-collar workers in protest against the destructive forces of global capital.  How sensitive this awareness is to the realities of living in one class or another (or in the liminal spaces between) is the subject of my exploration.  Do popular culture trends that draw on working-class experiences yield new understandings of America's class system?  Or are we simply witnessing the imperialistic recoding of class symbols for the enjoyment of the consumer market?  This paper will look at the history of class colonization that cyclically produces the nation's pop culture trends.  It seems that the class awareness that makes appreciating working-class culture possible simultaneously allows its significance to be forgotten all too easily by those whose blue collars are only this year's fashion trend. 


Bob Niemi, St. Michael's College, Imaging Working-Class Lives in Hollywood Film 
This paper (which is part of a larger project) constitutes a brief and selective historical survey of cinematic representations of the American working class from 1940 to the present. My thesis is this that Hollywood has tended to produce an ambiguous and conflicted representation of working-class people and working class lives: a mixture of reverence, pity, and condescension. Such a representation is in keeping with the paradoxical nature of "American Dream" ideology, which, on the one hand, refuses to admit the reality of class stratification but, on the other hand, must at least implicitly acknowledge class in order to affirm the virtues that allow for upward mobility. Furthermore, when Hollywood isn't caricaturing working people as dimwitted bumpkins it routinely uses a subliminal class discourse to flatter its working class audience by contrasting perceived proletarian traits (e.g., honesty, willingness to work hard, group and family solidarity, etc.) with the decadence of the wealthier classes while also taking pains to emphasize the drudgery of working-class life. Films to be examined include The Grapes of Wrath (1940); Mildred Pierce (1945) Marty (1955); Joe (1970); Five Easy Pieces (1970); The Last Picture Show (1971); Woman Under the Influence (1974); Car Wash (1975); Rocky (1976); The Deer Hunter (1977); Alien (1979); School Ties (1982); Places in the Heart (1984); Tin Men (1987); River's Edge (1987); Stand and Deliver (1988); Stanley & Iris (1990); City of Hope (1991); Night on Earth (1991); Boyz N the Hood; (1992); Do the Right Thing (1992); King of the Hill (1993); A Bronx Tale (1993); Nobody's Fool (1994); A Simple Plan (1997); Affliction (1997). 


Sharon O'Dair, University of Alabama, Is the College Classroom a Space for Working-Class Activism? 
For many, the answer to the question posed in my title is quite obvious:  of course the college classroom is a space for working-class activism.  But I'd like to contest, or at least problematize, the obvious by focusing on what seems to me a contradiction in many of the essays to be found in part one of Sherry Linkon's fine collection, Teaching Working Class.  This contradiction appears in the contributors' responses to the question, "toward what end are we easing or students' transition to higher education by engaging in counter-hegemonic pedagogy?"  As Ann E. Green asks, "Do we want our working-class students to become bourgeois?  Do we want our "bourgeois" students to drop out of school and experience a less privileged life?" (16).  It seems that many of the contributors DO and yet DO NOT want their students to become bourgeois--they want to ease their transition and they want them to succeed in the middle-class (or, as I like to say, the upper middle-class) institutions of higher education, but at the same time, they seem not to want them to accept the norms of those institutions--standard English, taste, manners.  Indeed, many of the contributors want to change the academy, and turn it into a working-class institution. 
About the above, I'd like to make three points. First, the contributors seem to be talking not about new definitions of what it means to be bourgeois but about a delaying strategy, the result of their students' not having been taught in high school or earlier that standard English, for example, is an essential tool for most forms of upward mobility in this society. 
Second, as a result of or possibly as an alternative to, this delaying strategy--and of thinking, I guess, that nothing can be done to change it, that nothing can be done to strengthen the high schools, for instance, and to give them back their job--many of the contributors want to change the academy, to make it a working-class institution.  For me, this is a scary proposition; for some of you it may not be, but for me it is. 
Third, I cannot but wonder what working-class students think about turning institutions of higher education into working-class institutions. As many essays in Teaching Working Class make clear, the vast majority of working-class students are in college because they want a better life and upward mobility.  They perceive higher education as a way to achieve such goals, and that perception is rooted in their understanding that higher education will help them to perform better in the weird bourgeois or professional worlds that await them.  Delaying further their transition to those worlds, until, perhaps they are already in them, would seem irresponsible and antithetical to their ambitions.  Finally, I cannot but wonder what are the implications of turning institutions of higher education into working-class institutions for those students who, as Ann Aronson points out in her important contribution to Teaching Working Class, have discovered or will soon discover that a college degree is no guarantee of upward mobility?  For students who will not experience upward mobility, what is the point of attending a specifically working-class institution of higher education? 


Mary O'Quinn, The University of Virginia College at Wise, The Appalachian Coal Miner and the Coal Camp: An Oral History of Clinch, Virginia 
Few middle class workers experience the danger and deprivation associated with coal mining.  Each morning, as a coal miner leaves his home, both he and his family are uncertain about his safe return.  Many miners are killed or crippled in the mines.  Others contract Black Lung Disease.  This research uses qualitative methods to describe ways in which coal miners interpret their experiences when immersed in an industry based on the exploitation of the worker, the environment, and the culture.   That is, the research attempts to address the miners' construction of reality in the coal camps of Appalachia.  To accomplish this, three theoretical perspectives are used: Colonization Theory (Lewis, 1972), Social Capital Theory (Couto, 1999), and Merton's theory of Anomie (1968).  Across several data collection methods, unstructured interviews, secondary analysis of historical data, and observations, each theoretical perspective is applied.  Findings are presented in terms of how the coal miner describes his reality.  Photographs, mountain music, and artifacts help to make this reality more understandable. 
This research is supervised by Dr. Mary O'Quinn and conducted by both Dr. O'Quinn and her students.  Students include: Hope Perkins, Phillip Reece, Brandy Moore, Miranda Robinson, Lydia Dorton, Kelly Whited, Chasity Clark, Kristy Skeens, and Ryan Mullins.  All students are from the coal fields of Appalachia. 

Cherise Pollard, West Chester University, Intimacies of Labor: The Politics of Representing Familial History in Natasha Trethewey's Domestic Work 
The complicated themes of domesticity and labor resonate throughout Natasha Trethewey's poetic investigation of her familial history in her first collection of poems, Domestic Work.  This paper will explore the ways in which Trethewey's poems surface the interior lives of black southern working-class men and women from farm to factory.  By analysing the politics of representing the history of southern agrarian labor framed within the memory of black cultural and communal practices, I will argue that Trethewey's poetics invites its readers to celebrate the rhythms and textures of black working-class life. 


Ruth Porritt, West Chester University, Disappointment, Debilitation and Questions of Work in the Poetry of Dorianne Laux 
Dorianne Laux has worked as a gas station manager, sanatorium cook, maid, and donut holer.  My presentation focuses on two Laux poems (“The Job” and “What I Wouldn’t Do”) and examines their treatment of disappointment—the failure to satisfy an expectation or hope.  The study of thwarted desire is significant not only for understanding women’s lives but also for understanding the lives of working-class people.  I argue that by diverting deep feelings of disappointment and forestalling an attitude of bitterness, working-class women might be preventing the debilitation of agency that allows them to bring home their indispensable paychecks.  Lynne McFall’s argument that, for women, deep disappointment and its resultant bitterness should be transformed from a “vice” into an ethical “virtue” is well-taken, for bitterness can stand as evidence for the claim that a woman justifiably expected better conditions for her life and she will not rescind those expectations (Feminist Ethics, Claudia Card, ed.).  However, is McFall’s argument, in part, class-blind?  Does McFall overlook the possibility that bitterness, as a cultivated attitude, may well be a luxury or an indulgence many working-class women cannot afford?  Taken together, Laux’s two poems offer a challenge to any argument that would reclaim the “good” of disappointment and bitterness in women’s lives without offering a careful consideration of the context of working-class experience and identities.  


David L. Preston, College of William and Mary, A Poor Woman's Fight: Women Munitions Workers During the American Civil War 
The histories of laborers and working-class communities during the American Civil War remain a largely unexplored area of study.  This paper explores women munitions workers' experiences at state and federal arsenals, where workers were frequently injured or maimed in explosions, fires, or other accidents.  On September 17, 1862, 78 munitions workers (mostly women) were killed, and dozens more wounded, in an explosion at the Allegheny Arsenal located near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  Using the Allegheny Arsenal explosion as a "microhistory," the paper demonstrates how the Civil War was a life-defining experience for working-class families on the Northern home front.  The war was a "poor woman's fight" in which Northern working-class women shouldered many of the war's burdens and became impoverished through the hardships that they endured.  The paper also highlights relations between working-class communities, the army, and the federal government.  The survivors of the Allegheny Arsenal explosion, for example, unsuccessfully petitioned the federal government from 1863 to 1898 for relief or pensions.  Through their petitions and the building of a monument, workers challenged prevailing gendered assumptions about the value of women's labor and wartime sacrifices.  


Heather J.S. Pugh, Sussex University, “Escaping Constraints?” Contemporary Working-Class Women’s Writing in Britain 
This paper attempts to reaffirm the value of contemporary writings by and of working-class women in Britain and explore the constraints of being working class, female, and a writer alongside the possibilities for escaping such constraints. Despite attempted political silencing of class divisions in Britain and lack of literary representations of female working-class identities in commercially published works, I would argue that exploration into this area is both important and complex and should be recognised as such by literary studies. I begin by looking at the formation of working-class identities and the need to redefine them, through exploring the effects of capitalism (the fragmentation and disintegration of working-class communities throughout Britain in the 1980s), class mobility, race, sexuality, and access to feminism. Through looking at the pressures and silences experienced by working-class women, I attempt to explore how these are manifested in their writings. 
I move on to consider the conditions of literary production by looking at the relationship between publisher, reader, and writer, and the factors that prevent working-class women from claiming literary authority. Exploring the divisions between writing as representation of an individual and a community experience, I turn to the work produced by the ‘Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers’ looking at how and with what success they are able to bypass many of the problems faced by commercially published writers and claim authority upon their own terms. 
In the final part of the paper I turn to four case studies of commercially published works in Britain, Pat Barker’s Union Street (1982), Livi Michael’s Under a Thin Moon (1992), Andrea Levy’s Never Far From Nowhere (1996) and Andrea Ashworth’s Once in a House on Fire (1999). I use the four texts to explore entrapment and ‘escape’ both in and through writing. Beginning with the latter texts I explore their focus upon individual educational ‘escapes’, which often have the affect of leaving one ‘between’ classes. Through Barker’s and Michael’s works, I explore their focus upon a growing sense of isolation, alienation, claustrophobia, and entrapment. Suggesting that ‘escape’ is a complex and multifaceted term in this context, I finally explore other ways of obliterating or transcending constraints, (such as violence, alcohol, detachment, fantasy and the process of writing itself). I end by suggesting that writing may alleviate some of the oppressions facing working-class women, challenging dominant discourses and largely male middle-class perceptions of working-class identity and femininity. Despite existing in the margins, working-class women may be able to undo the silences and create a space for themselves, their voices, language, and writing.  


Teal Rothschild, Roger Williams University, Alliances Across Gender In The Garment Trade: An Analysis of the 1885 New York City Cloakmakers Strike 
The presentation seeks to introduce the 1885 New York City Cloakmakers Strike as the first time in New York City garment industry history that men and women workers organized together successfully. The strike serves as a landmark in the garment trade for its cross-gender alliances. The presentation seeks to recount the reasons for striking, the actual bargaining, and the role that gender played in ultimately uniting this group of diverse workers together. Attention will be given to the social and physical spaces that the working men and working women negotiated in, as they were separated by both gender and skill assignment as they challenged their employers for fair treatment. Although the workers were also aligning with one another across ethnicity and skill, gender proved to be the most salient boundary to overcome. This will be analyzed through attention to the perceived and actual differences of the workers from their own point of view, as well as the public at large. Despite these differences, the workers aligned with one another for the common goal of gaining more autonomy through worker control in the cloakmaking industry.  


Eric Schocket, Hampshire College, Marxism and Working-Class Studies Roundtable 
Participants: Barbara Foley, Rutgers University, Newark Laura Hapke, Pace University Jack Metzgar, Roosevelt University Bill Mullen, University of Texas, San Antonio Michael Zweig, SUNY, Stoney Brook 
The theme of this year’s Working-Class Studies conference prompts a crucial question:  How do communities come together in order to organize and activate for working-class causes?  How does memory—or less subjectively, history—inform our attempts to create social and economic justice in the present and the future? 
Those who work within the Marxist tradition have developed a set of theories and strategies around precisely these questions.  And it seems an opportune time, given both conference’s theme and a renewed sense of social unrest across the country, to revisit these theories and strategies. 
Specifically, this roundtable will address the following questions:  What is the utility of Marxism within the realm of working-class studies?  How does it comprehend class? prompt social action? engage alternate theories of change and progressivism?  What can Marxism give the still-young working-class studies movement?  What can the working-class studies movement give Marxism?  What connections can a Marxist theory help construct between academic study and praxis?  


Sylvie Green Shapero, California State University/Northridge, Fetish: A Performance Piece 
When I was a little girl entering junior high, suffering, as most adolescents do, from a lack of self confidence and a strong desire to be like everyone else, I could not, for the twelve-year-old life of me, understand why I could not have a pair of Guess jeans like my classmates wore. 
“But Mom,” I’d exclaim, “I don’t like Lee’s!  They don’t fit right!” 
Of course they fit fine, it was the label on the back pocket that wasn’t right. 
Now, as a waitress putting myself through graduate school, I deny myself of expensive clothes all the time—no explanations necessary. 
I have written a performance piece entitled Fetish about my experiences as a waitress/writer.  My interest in working-class studies began when I encountered Marxist literary theory in my critical theories class, and, for once, felt like I found a form of critical writing that did not resist me; even though I agree with Virginia Woolf’s theory that women experience a “splitting off of consciousness,” not many of us are fortunate enough to have two hundred pounds and “a room of one’s own.”  And, if we do, we work far too often waiting tables in a restaurant where the owner knows nothing of his laborers except for our sales to spend the amount of time we’d like sitting in our own room writing. 
Fortunately, my father, who has worked as a truck driver for the past 15 years, served in the military before taking his long-distance job, and the Base Exchange sold Guess jeans for less than the department stores did, and without the sales tax.  


Larry Smith, BGSU Firelands College & Bottom Dog Press, Writing and Publishing as Forms of Activism: A Roundtable 
This workshop will follow a roundtable format. After brief introductions of who we are and what we do, we will open to dialogue about common issues and solutions to the activist act of writing  and publishing. We hope to have a representative group that will include David Shevin, Janet Zandy, and John Crawford, and others.  


Alan Harris Stein, Northwest Oral History Association, Rocking the Boat: Studs Terkel’s 20th Century 
This work-in-progress takes a close look at the social progress achieved during the last century and how it was achieved, as seen through the eyes of 89-year-old oral historian Studs Terkel and nearly a dozen of his contemporaries. 
For their efforts, these boat rockers have often paid a high price, yet, in the autumn of their lives, nearly all look back with deep satisfaction at what their struggles achieved.  Terkel worries that young Americans have no memory of, and are seldom taught about, the efforts it took to make their homeland more fair and inclusive.  "We suffer from a national Alzheimer's Disease," he says sadly.  "There is no memory of yesterday. Yesterday is erased."  This program, told by Terkel, in his voice, and through his eyes, seeks to offer a corrective to that condition.  Besides Terkel himself (the program's host and narrator), we meet other remarkable boat rockers, (voices not normally heard on television) including: 
85-year-old Stetson Kennedy, a civil rights activist who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan just after World War II; 
Jessie De La Cruz, 82, who helped organize the United Farm Workers Union with Cesar Chavez; 
Hazel Wolf, a labor and environmental activist who died recently at the age of 101; 
Gordon Hirabayashi, 82, who stood up against the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans; 
Timuel Black, 84, an African-American World War II veteran who became a prominent civil rights leader; 
actress Uta Hagen, 82, a victim of the McCarthy era blacklist; 
feminist leader Betty Friedan, 79; 
88-year-old Victor Reuther, co-founder of the United Auto Workers and a leader of the famous 1936 Flint sit-down strike; and 
90-year-old Norman Corwin, a crusader for intellectual freedom.
They tell of run-ins with the Ku Klux Klan, struggles to win economic justice and the right to organize, and what it was like to be an industrial worker during the 30s or a migrant farmworker in the 50s, a black soldier or Japanese-American during World War II, or a fighter for the environment in the age of Rachel Carson. 
While told from Terkel's progressive point of view, the program will in no way be a laudatory hymn to the Left.  Mistakes (including progressive support for the WW II internment of Japanese-Americans), excesses, honest examination of the costs of boat-rocking all receive their due.  A core group of American historians will assure program accuracy. In the end, Terkel assesses how far we've come, what threats lie ahead and what still needs to be done to truly realize the American democratic dream, especially for those who can still say, as did Langston Hughes, "America never was America to me." 
Terkel’s own experiences as a social activist, actor, and writer, have led him to the conclusion that all the social gains that most Americans take for granted have come because ordinary people made waves to make change.  He views the 20th century as a period in which American democratic principles were expanded, through social pressure from below, to include ever-wider circles of people who were formerly excluded: industrial workers, poor farmers, ethnic and racial minorities, women, gays and lesbians.  


Rebecca Stern, CUNY Graduate Center, The Role of Work Experience in Understanding Marx 
Standpoint theory makes the claim that members of oppressed groups have privileged knowledge about the system that oppresses them. I investigated this theory with the hopes of showing the value of personal experience in the social science classroom. 
I individually interviewed students from a college class on politics and power. The students told me about their personal class background and working experience and then interpreted two passages from the Communist Manifesto. I found that personal work experience, as opposed particularly to hypothetical examples, led to a more accurate—that is, traditionally accepted—understanding of certain Marxist concepts. For example, a student working in construction immediately understood the concept of exploitation through the owner taking the surplus value from the worker. In this presentation, I will describe my coding methods and my results, focusing on examples of how students used personal experience to interpret Marx.  

Lena L. Sweeten, Gray & Pape, Inc., Class and Cultural Landscapes: A Case Study of Bowling Green, Kentucky 
This paper examines the contributions of workers for the L&N Railroad and the building stone industry to the cultural landscape of Bowling Green, Kentucky.  It further proposes a means for recognizing and preserving this legacy of the city’s working class.  In Bowling Green, ten of the properties that are listed on the National Register of Historic Places have a direct link to the L&N Railroad or the building stone industry, but this important aspect of their historical significance has received little emphasis.  These include a working class neighborhood, a church, and a selection of public buildings.  This paper places these properties within a broader historic context than was heretofore developed and proposes a more inclusive interpretation of their significance.  By doing so, the enduring legacy of the contributions of Bowling Green’s late nineteenth and early twentieth century working class community can be preserved, recognized, and appreciated. 
From the 1870s through the 1930s, Bowling Green was a hub in a freight and passenger network that extended across the continental U.S.  The effect of the railroad’s arrival remains apparent in the city’s cultural landscape.  For example, many of the railroad construction workers were Irish immigrants who chose to settle in Bowling Green after construction of the railroad had been completed.  One of their most enduring landmarks is St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, which is located in the heart of the neighborhood founded by these workers.  Access to the railroad made possible the success of many local industries, not the least of which was the building stone industry.  Quarry owners built rail spurs connected to the L&N line, thus allowing the raw limestone to be shipped nationwide.  In addition, several local companies were established that specialized in cutting and finishing limestone architectural elements, including columns, capitals, friezes, cornices, and hood moldings. These pieces are important features of many of Bowling Green’s architecturally outstanding buildings, including the county courthouse, federal building, train depot, high school, and theater.  They are a lasting testament to the skill and craftsmanship employed by local artisans at the turn of the century.  

Carole Anne Taylor, Bates College, The Undocumented and the Undocumentable: Oral Testimony from Hispanic Overtime 
This extended observation—which will never take documented form—tries to understand matters of trust and solidarity among Hispanic workers in Maine and between these workers and the community where some have become residents rather than migrant workers.  Too much interviewed by academics without long-term commitment to either individuals or the Maine Rural Workers Coalition, an organization growing out of a failed attempt to unionize, member-workers decided that I should facilitate an oral history project that would tell their stories in their own words and for the profit of the organization, should there be any.  Interested in collecting documented aspects of a personal but also a public history, the project promises much, yet leads to this exploration of what can and cannot be said and what workers do and do not want represented.  It also suggests interpersonal aspects of workers’ lives that resist representation yet “represent” resistance nonetheless.  

David Van Arsdale, Syracuse University, The Millennium's Re-emerging Casual Laborer and Skid Row 
The hobo and tramp, and his living quarters - skid row - had all but disappeared until the rise of temporary labors new relationship with poor male laborers.  There are new twists to this "millennium relationship," one of the larger phenomena being that of the interdependent relationship between poor and working-class black male laborers and the temporary help supply industry.  Another new factor is that the labor is much more stationary and impacts local communities more.  Its not the migratory laborer, or hobo of the past, the new casual laborers are from communities where male homelessness, joblessness, and parole are major players in providing reserved labor pools of cheap labor.  

Jane Van Galen, University of Washington/Bothell, Class Constraints on Activist Research on Schooling 
In this paper, I explore three themes regarding the limits and possibilities of recent calls for more activist forms of research on the education of the poor and working class. 
First, I consider why we seem relatively untroubled that theoretical and empirical work on the education and life experiences of working class children is done almost entirely by middle-class scholars, even as we have come to be very cautious about speaking on behalf of "Others" in research on ethnicity and in feminist research. I explore how we might solicit more first-person accounts of classism, just as we now have access to first-person accounts of sexism and racism. 
Next, I consider whether framing our understanding of the work of public schools teachers within analyses of their contradictory class locations might enable us to move beyond the "blame and shame" tone of much critical scholarship on teachers and schools. Activist scholarship will require reconsideration of researchers'  intellectual and political relationships with educators who work in schools, relationships that currently are mired in unarticulated disparities in status and power between academics and teachers. 
Finally, I consider the possibilities or "studying up" so that academic activism might influence schooling beyond the spheres of curriculum and pedagogy.  Critical scholarship on education acknowledges that deep structural inequalities shape the work of schools, yet activist researchers have yet to develop research agendas for understanding the broader systems of policy-making and funding beyond the immediate contexts of local schools. In sum, the paper argues that activist research on behalf of the working class would require us to question the privileges that sustain our work while impeding our ability to know and affect social worlds beyond the academy.  

Gail G. Verdi, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Dangerous Language: Four Working-Class Women Academics Speak on Notions of Linguistic Competence and Performance 
Belanoff (1993) wrote that patterns of language use - in terms of both competence and performance - reflect the gender (race) and class status of the language user and are crucially important in determining the language user's success in the academy.  Therefore, working-class women, as they enter the academy, often find that as they attempt to navigate around language and ways of knowing that are relationship-based, they also come in conflict with linguistic tensions based on working-class  (sub)cultures.  In other words, our understanding of what we know about language (competence) and what we know and do when we use language (performance) are mediated by our associations with various communities (Mayher, 1990). While past studies have focused on intersections such as class and language; women and language; and language variation and education, there are few linguistic studies based on how gender, class, race and ethnicity determine success in the academy. 
This paper explores the forms of linguistic tension four working-class women academics experienced as they entered mainstream university cultures.  It also uncovers the forms of dexterity the individual women acquired in order to navigate the pitfalls they encountered.  My research evolved out of conversations with two graduate students and one full-time faculty member.  The researcher was also a participant and has included her own evolution.  During unstructured interviews significant themes emerged as the women narrated lived experiences.   Participants grew up in the New York Metropolitan area, ranging in age from forty to fifty-two, and came from different ethnic and racial backgrounds.  

Leslie T.C. Wang, University of Toledo, Defining Working Class: Perspectives Among Asian Americans 
What defines working class?  Which groups make up the working class?  There had been many attempts to include a comprehensive definition based on the various responses and lived experiences among groups during a period of sensitivity and political correctness in the 1990’s.  Yet working class is still not a concept which is universally defined, and for that matter social class.  The diversity in definitions and explanations for social class are still very much based on Euro-centric and/or western models, and a failure to comprehend other models. 
This paper presentation looks at how the concept of working class is defined and constructed by Asian Americans.  In this study, the data is collected through individual and focus group interviews.  Since the objective is to learn about the social construction of working class, qualitative research will allow for the richness and descriptiveness through individual voices.  The data will support the following:  First, Asian American groups define social class differently, and so do members of the same ethnic group based on different lifestyles and life chances.  Second, family and familial ties play more of a role in Asian American lives and experiences.  Third, the notion of the working class is perceived in a different light, possibly more favorably.  Fourth, socio-economic status as a means to understand social class lacks both relevance and practicality, because the variables are actually relatively distinct. 
The aim of this presentation is not necessarily to provide a comparison and contrast dichotomy in our knowledge, interest, and appreciation of the working-class concept between Asian Americans and the dominant culture, but to clarify misunderstandings and misrepresentations and to further our research.  

Paul Watt, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College/England, Public Housing and the Changing Nature of Working-Class Politics in Britain 
This paper addresses the role of public housing provision in the development of working-class politics in Britain, particularly within London. The development of the Labour Party in the early part of the 20th century did not occur in a geographically even fashion across the British social landscape, but was instead affected by locally specific configurations of class relations. A number of researchers have pointed to the important role played by the provision of public housing for rent by local government in assisting the growth of the Labour Party in particular areas of Britain, not least in London as a result of the efforts of the London County Council and the metropolitan borough councils. It is argued by the author that this process took place via the heightening of working-class identity among public sector tenants in an ‘us and them’ dialectic. During the post-war period, public housing tenants have continued to provide a key foundation of support for the Labour Party in urban areas. However, it is argued that the basis of this support in London, connected as it has been with a shared working-class identity, is potentially under threat both from demographic changes within public housing as well as from ideological and policy shifts within what is now termed ‘New’ Labour. Evidence from the inner London Borough of Camden is drawn upon to illustrate these themes. The paper concludes by discussing the potential electoral significance that such social and political changes might have for the Labour Party in the forthcoming general election.  

Helena Worthen, University of Illinois/Chicago Labor Education Program, The Language of Privilege: How it Captures and Holds Power 
Some pronouncements – for example, Margaret Thatcher’s famous “There is no such thing as society”-- are so remarkable in the way they capture and hold power that they appear at first to be unanswerable. 
The material for this session comes from a two-year project of tracking the implementation of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (WIA) and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (welfare reform). These two major pieces of legislation have knocked our social welfare system off its foundations and handed its control over to employers and other representatives of the ruling class, whose representations of the processes they are overseeing have much in common with Thatcher’s offhand remark. 
I will bring to this session a range of examples, some taken down verbatim from public meetings, others from written materials, and engage session participants in an analysis of them.  We will ask: How does this kind of speech work? What kind of authority (moral, legal, patriotic, religious, expert, etc.) does it claim? Are all discourses of privilege the same? To what is this kind of speech answerable?  What opposes it, and how?  

Janet Zandy, Rochester Institute of Technology, Anthologizing Working-Class Literature 
All of the participants in this roundtable have been involved as editors in the process of defining, selecting, and arranging working-class literature in published collections.  This roundtable offers discussions of the choices , difficulties, rewards, and complexities of the process of anthologizing working-class writings.  Also,  panelists will comment on including working-class writing in the curriculum as a catalyst to raising critical questions about cultural formation, wealth inequalities, and labor struggles. 
John Crawford, University of New Mexico, publisher and editor of West End Press will address two concerns raised by anthologizing working-class writing:  the contents of such an anthology and the audience it will engage. 
Larry Smith, Firelands College, publisher and editor of Bottom Dog Press will discuss the problem of audience as well.   How do we reach and develop an audience for working-class writing?  Also, how does the camaraderie of contributors to contemporary working-class writing collections help to generate a receptive audience?  His most recent edited collection is Our Working Lives:  Short Stories of People and Work. 
Paul Lauter, Trinity College, co-editor of Literature, Class, and Culture will discuss the tensions that exists between a focus on “class” as such, and a focus on “working class,” especially in teaching predominately non working-class students.  He will explore the material conditions of producing and using anthologies of working-class literature, as well as institutional and publishing contexts and conditions. 
Nicholas Coles, University of Pittsburgh, and Janet Zandy, Rochester Institute of Technology, will discuss the complexities of definition, selection, and sequencing American working-class literature for an anthology to be published by Oxford University Press.  

Janet Zandy, Rochester Institute of Technology, Ghosted Workers: Who Speaks for Deindustrialized Workers and How? 
The jobs of millions of workers have ended because of deindustrialization, mergers, automation and corporate cost cutting.  These jobs were not “lost” or misplaced; they were cut and severed.  Within this context of closings, this paper examines textual and visual representations of this purported “ghosted” space.  This space emerges from within two separate, existing structures:  one is the structure of corporations, of buyouts and mergers, of outsourcing and automation, the other is the structure of experience and feeling, to use Raymond Williams’s terms, the everyday experiences of workers rising to go to work, of facing the job, of sustaining relationships, of the anticipation of payday, of all the rhythms of work in a complex, textured way.  This presentation asks what happens when the structure of work is abruptly taken away, when the plant closes, the mill is razed, and all that’s left are the ghosts of the women and men who worked there and their machines and tools.  How do these workers carry on?  Who hears their voices and bears witness to their lived experiences?  In other words, the space that is created when the plant closes is not emptied space.  Left behind are living, breathing human beings, not ghosts or specters.  “The worker is out of the picture now” says former furniture maker Robert Riley (Closing 138).  This presentation examines several books that attempt to put workers back into the picture, visually and textually, although, unfortunately, not back on the job. 
Noting the textual and photographic history of documenting the absence of work, this presentation examines the representations of workers facing no work in Michael Frisch and Milton Rogovin’s Portraits in Steel (1993, Buffalo, NY), in Cathy Davidson and Bill Bamberger’s Closing:  The Death of an American Factory (1998, Mebane, North Carolina), in Chatterley, Rouverol, and Cole’s I Was Content and Not Content:  The Story of Linda Lord and the Closing of Penobscot Poultry (2000, Belfast, Maine) in relation to the poetry and images in worker-writer Sue Doro’s Blue Collar Goodbyes (1992, Milwaukee, WI.).  With particular attention to workers’ subjectivities and voices, I question how these important books resist, mediate, mute, or meliorate the ghosting of workers.  While the workers so represented cannot easily attend academic conferences, and while it is true that their jobs will not return, their identities as workers, of the particular skills they still own, have not ended.  This talk is intended to ask critical questions about how texts represent workers who face no work.  How much space do the authors create for workers to represent themselves, indeed, to resist their own ghosting?  

Tom Zaniello, Northern Kentucky University, Agit Prop and Labor Doc: Organizing and Mobilizing through Film 
I would like to offer a history and analysis of the relationship between a very specific form of labor documentary--the agitational-propaganda film known as "agit-prop"--and its relationship to specific political moments up to and including the present era.  Many labor documentaries endeavor to influence viewers about their subject matter, but agit-prop films are specifically designed to organize workers or mobilize community support and boycotts or expose an injustice.  Agit-prop films differ from various kinds of labor documentaries such as 1) traditional labor history films, 2) non-traditional or post-modern films, and 3) TV documentaries in that they do not attempt to 1) take the "long view" of history or 2) deliberately challenge the form of the documentary itself or 3) offer a balanced journalistic report. I will show clips from rarely seen examples of agit-prop films, explain their differences from labor documentaries, assess some of their successes and failures, and argue for a continuity of the tradition.  The latter is of special importance, since these films have an even shorter shelf life than standard documentaries and are rarely shown after their initial run.  The following films will most likely be used in my presentation: 
"Native Land," 1942: unusual agit-prop/mock-doc on civil liberties violations. "Harvest of Shame," 1960: TV documentary with agit-prop punch. "Wrath of Grapes," 1986: grape boycott film suppressed by the courts. "Deadly Corn," 1994: strike of Staley sugarworkers.jinxed Decator, Illinois, "Chaos," 1994: flight attendants unveil a radical strike strategy "One Day Longer," 2000: Las Vegas hotel and restaurant workers celebrate end of the longest strike in U.S. history.   

Ann Ziebarth, University of Minnesota, Housing and the Company Town 
Company towns have a long history in Minnesota. From the north woods lumber camps at the turn of the century to the development of Silver Bay in the 1950’s employers have been directly involved in providing housing for their workers. Today, facing difficulty attracting lower-wage workers employers are again turning to housing as a means of recruiting and maintaining a sufficient labor force. Unlike early days when the companies built, owned, and managed the housing, the company town of today is less obvious. Employers now use “arms length” donations to non-profit organizations, the establishment of private foundations, and participation in partnerships with local governments as a means of influencing the development of affordable working class housing. This presentation provides an overview of housing in company towns. A typology of employer assisted housing along a continuum from company built communities to mortgage down-payment assistance programs is presented. Examples from Minnesota communities are used to illustrate the typology.  By looking at the history of company towns as well as examining the new employer-assisted housing efforts the impacts of employers’ involvement on housing for workers, their families, and working class communities are highlighted. Finally, the alternative of union assistance in housing provision is discussed using historic examples of direct housing provision and contemporary efforts at negotiating housing benefits in union contracts.  


Michael Zweig, SUNY Stony Brook, The Relevance of Marx in Class Studies 
Class is a central feature of social relations.  One can no more understand society without Marx than one can understand the mind without Freud, the physical world without Einstein, the natural world without Darwin.  As with these other great thinkers, not everything Marx said was correct, nor was Marx's own work comprehensive.  But Marx's contributions to analytic method and his basic insights into the accumulation of capital and the connections among economics, politics, culture, and history must be the starting point for social investigation.  Following in that tradition requires above all keeping the world, rather than theory, as our point of reference.  Marx's contributions to class studies will be manifest in our ability to develop the Marxist framework to understand and guide the lived experience of class.