CONFERENCE REPORT

Celebrating Labour/Le Travail’s Fiftieth Issue: a
Report on the ‘Writing Canadian Labour’ Conference

Donica Belisle

Between Friday 31 May and Sunday 2 June 2002, a conference entitled ‘Writing Canadian Labour: Critical Perspectives’ was held at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. Celebrating the fiftieth issue of Canada’s leading labour studies journal, Labour/Le Travail, the gathering brought together Canadian and international labour scholars, editors of prominent labour history journals, unionists, anti-globalisation and anti-poverty activists, aboriginal historians, public historians, and students engaged in labour and Left studies. Held at Trent’s small, downtown Traill College campus, the conference was a wonderful opportunity for stimulating social and intellectual exchange in a relaxed, informal setting. In the Fall 2002 issue of Labour/Le Travail, selected papers from the conference’s proceedings will be published.	1
The conference opened on an appreciative note with the panel, ‘Canadian Labour Studies: A View From Afar’. The first speaker, David Roediger (University of Illinois), detailed why Labour/Le Travail is his favourite labour studies journal, including its celebration of working people and its linking of working-class struggles, past and present, with broad possibilities for social transformation. The second speaker, Verity Burgmann (University of Melbourne), also praised Labour/Le Travail for its many achievements – especially its activist stance. In her talk, Burgmann contrasted the contextual developments of Labour/Le Travail with its Australian counterpart, Labour History. Arguing that many parallels have existed between the Canadian and Australian journals, Labour/Le Travail nevertheless has historically had a more innovative approach to labour scholarship.	2
In the second session, ‘Canadian Labour Studies: Retrospectives and Prospectives’, the tone changed to critical self-reflection. The panel’s first speaker, Suzanne Morton (McGill University), suggested that, over the past decade, Labour/ Le Travail has diminished its role as a forum for the publication of broad social histories of working-class people. In his paper, David Bright (University of Guelph) raised a number of questions relating to the journal’s changing perspectives on region. One of the conference’s strongest presentations was Jacques Ferland’s (University of Maine-Orono) account of working-class, French-Canadian emigrants from Québec to New England. Ferland’s sensitive reappraisal highlighted how North American labour historians have adopted a geopolitically-specific paradigm that excludes the experiences of Franco-American workers.	3
In panel three, ‘Publishing Labour History’, the conference moved into a discussion of the problems and solutions confronting labour history journals’ editors. Joshua Freeman, editor of International Labor and Working-Class History, asked: how does one keep a 30-year-old journal fresh and innovative? He described ILWCH’s various approaches to this dilemma, including the soliciting of articles for specific theme issues. Greg Patmore, editor of Labour History, described his journal’s initiatives, including publishing comparative history, soliciting ‘thematic’ articles, encouraging non-solicited material, using email discussion lists, and reaching out towards younger scholars. The editor of Labor History (US), Leon Fink, spoke more broadly on the contemporary state of working-class scholarship, offering numerous suggestions on how labour historians could enrich their field such as by writing about lost labouring lives and by reintegrating labour and business history. The fourth speaker, Alexandre Fortes of the Centro Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (Brazil), described his centre’s efforts to build a labour studies journal, noting that the difficulties of translating English works into Portuguese constitute an important barrier for such work. Finally, Emmet O’Connor, editor of Saothar (Ireland), spoke about the difficulties of publishing labour history in Ireland. Unlike England, Canada, the United States, and Australia, which have strong labour history traditions, Irish labour history is a small and recent field.	4
The fourth panel, ‘Native Peoples and Labour History: Bridging the Divide’, raised questions about the implications of connecting labour and aboriginal history. Ron Bourgeault (University of Regina) suggested that the North American fur trade was an early system of capitalist exploitation, while Alicja Muszynski (University of Waterloo) argued that experiences of First Nations women who laboured in British Columbian canneries during the early twentieth century cannot be described adequately through the Marxist concepts of surplus-, use-, and exchange-value. Also focusing on British Columbia, Andrew Parnaby (Dalhousie University) described Squamish dockworkers’ encounters with wage labour and unionisation at the turn of the twentieth century.	5
On Saturday evening, conference attendants gathered at an informal pub in downtown Peterborough to hear a musical keynote address by Bucky Halker (Illinois Humanities Council). A singer/songwriter and labour historian, Halker performed songs from his new album, Don’t Want Your Millions, including those written by nineteenth- and twentieth- century North American labour activists Phillips Thompson, Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, and Florence Reece.	6
Attendants reconvened on Sunday morning for two final panels. During the first, ‘Working-Class History as Public History’, Nolan Reilly (University of Winnipeg) described approaching working-class history in Winnipeg, Manitoba, site of the famous 1919 General Strike. In his paper, Craig Heron (York University) discussed the difficulties the Workers’ Art and Heritage Centre (Hamilton, Ontario) faces in sustaining the interest of contemporary labourers. Arguing that the centre needs to engage with workers on their own terms, he described such initiatives as going to workers’ organisational meetings and involving workers in the interpretive process. Also exploring the problems inherent in public history, Joanne Burgess (Université du Quèbec à Montréal) outlined her outreach work in Quebec, where she is active in museums of popular history dealing with industrial and technological development, and noted that historians must continue to democratise the historical process. Finally, oral historian Michael Frisch (University of Buffalo) debated the aesthetics and ethics of public history.	7
The last session, ‘Poverty, Civil Society, and the Labour Movement: a First World/ Third World Dialogue’ was the most thought-provoking. John Clarke, an activist in the Toronto-based Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), spoke of his organisation’s struggles to oppose governments whose policies adversely affect immigrant workers, the poor, and homeless people. He argued that the leadership of such resistance should be coming from the powerful trade union movement, but in the absence of such mobilisation, the vacuum has been filled by OCAP. Its experiences, according to Clarke, raise serious questions about the role of the trade union bureaucracy in modern society. Jaggi Singh, an anti-globalisation activist living in Canada, spoke about anti-capitalist/anti-globalisation mobilisations from Seattle to Quebec City, insisting on the viability of what he called ‘non-reformist’ strategies that do not collapse struggle into specific political containers. He, too, raised criticisms of labour officials, pointing to the Quebec City decision of mainstream trade union leaders to direct unionists away from the battles at the perimeter fence in Quebec, thus moving them away from confrontation. Alexandre Fortes of the Centro Sérgio Buarque de Holanda in Brazil, drawing on the experience of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, called for a nuanced appreciation of levels of struggle, in which reform bodies such as NGOs and parties of the political Left could, under certain conditions, work together to improve the lot of workers and the poor.	8
Although the conference’s guests held varying scholarly, political, and social perspectives, several fruitful points of departure emerged. Dedicated to the research, dissemination, and promotion of labour and Left research and activism, the attendants’ discussions centred around solidarity, critique, and commitment to positive social change. Debates did at times become contentious, especially when they related to either the political trajectories of past and present labour historiography or the differences and commonalities among labour, social, aboriginal, feminist, and anti-globalisationist scholars and activists. Such discussions were stimulating, but there were times when an outside observer might have asked whether a focus on building bridges across disparate social and intellectual commitments might have been more rewarding than picking apart the differences that exist among such commitments.	9
This is a minor quibble, however. Overall, ‘Writing Canadian Labour: Critical Perspectives’ was an important, highly-engaging conference that celebrated labour history’s pasts as well as raising crucial questions about its possible futures. The strongest aspect of this conference was the gathering together – in a comfortable and relaxed setting – of different generations of scholars and activists from five countries. Not only was the conference a forum for academic debate, it also constituted a significant space for the making of political and intellectual contacts. In this post-September 11 era of neoclassical political economy on a global scale, such networks are vital. If labour historians are going to continue to produce work that is significant and relevant, it is crucial for them to build bridges across the Old Left, the New Left, and anti-globalisationists, as well as to forge scholarly and activist networks that stretch across the world.	10

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