Labor history (discipline)

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Labor history (or labour history) is  a broad field of study concerned with the development of the labor movement and  the working class. The central concerns of labor historians include the development of labor unions, strikes, lockouts and  protest movements, industrial relations, and  the progress of working class and  socialist political parties, as well as the social and  cultural development of working people. Labor historians may also concern themselves with issues of gender, race, ethnicity and  other factors besides class.

Labor history developed in tandem with the growth of a self-conscious working-class political movement in many Western countries in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Whilst early labor historians were drawn to protest movements such as Luddism and  Chartism, the focus of labor history was often on institutions: chiefly the labor unions and  political parties. Exponents of this institutional approach included Sidney and  Beatrice Webb. The work of the Webbs, and  other pioneers of the discipline, was marked by optimism about the capacity of the labor movement to effect fundamental social change and  a tendency to see its development as a process of steady, inevitable and  unstoppable progress. As two contemporary labor historians have  noted, early work in the field was 'designed to service and  celebrate the Labour movement.' (M. Savage and  . A. Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1840-1940, p. 1).

In the 1950s and  1960s, labor history was redefined and  expanded in focus by a number of historians, amongst whom the most prominent and  influential figures were E. P. Thompson and  Eric Hobsbawm. Thompson and  Hobsbawm were both Marxists and  were critical of the existing labor movement. They were concerned to approach history from below and  to explore the agency and  activity of working people at the workplace, in protest movements and  in social and  cultural activities. Thompson's seminal study The Making of the English Working Class was particularly influential in setting a new agenda for labor historians and  locating the importance of the study of labor for social history in general. Also in the 1950s and  1960s, historians began to give serious attention to groups who had previously been largely neglected, such as women and  non-caucasian ethnic groups. Some historians situated their studies of gender and  race within a class analysis: for example, C. L. R. James, a Marxist who wrote about the struggles of blacks in the Haitian Revolution. Others questioned whether class was a more  important social category than gender or  race and  pointed to racism, patriarchy and  other examples of division and  oppression within the working class.

Labor history remains centered on two fundamental sets of interest: institutional histories of workers' organisations, and  the "history from below" approach of the Marxist historians.

Despite the influence of the Marxists, many labor historians rejected the revolutionary implications implicit in the work of Thompson, Hobsbawm et al. In the 1980s, the importance of class itself, as an  historical social relationship and  explanatory concept, began to be widely challenged. Some notable labor historians turned from Marxism to embrace a postmodernist approach, emphasising the importance of language and  questioning whether classes could be so considered if they did not use a 'language of class'. Other historians emphasised the weaknesses and  moderation of the historic labor movement, arguing that social development had been characterised more  by accommodation, acceptance of the social order and  cross-class collaboration than by conflict and  dramatic change.

[edit] See also

• New Left
• Communist Party Historians Group
• Subaltern Studies
• New labor history