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Struggling
for Recognition
The individual in labour history
Conference
and special issue of Labour History
Mark Hearn and Harry Knowles, project co-ordinators,
Work and Organisational Studies
University of Sydney
Project
aims
Struggling for Recognition considers the role of the individual
in labour history, with a focus on working class lives, labour movement
activists and intellectuals.
 The
individual’s relationship with the labour movement and society
will be examined in a number of contexts: in the struggles by labour
movement activists for recognition of working class claims to political
and economic justice; the role of labour movement intellectuals
in stimulating or defining those struggles; through individuals
claiming leadership roles within the labour movement and in politics;
analysing working class individuals in networks of class, labour
movement or elite interaction; individuals struggling to construct
a meaningful social and personal identity; through individual experience
of working life.
The purpose of the project is not only to highlight individual contributions
to labour movement struggles. The project privileges the individual
in the historical process as the necessary referent of the experience
of social reality, and the source of class mobilisation. There is
no construction of politics without a dialogue between the private
and the public sphere, a transfer of personal values and experience
into public roles and discourse – civic life, work, community,
culture.
Struggling for Recognition seeks to uncover the sources of the labour
movement’s progressive politics in the unfulfilled needs of
the individuals who created and sustained its struggles, and hence
filled the movement with its intricate meanings.
Conference
Report
“Struggling
for Recognition: the Individual in Labour History”,
Women’s College, University of Sydney 21 November 2003.
Over fifty labour historians gathered at the Women’s College
at the University of Sydney on 21 November 2003 to consider the
role of the individual in labour history, under the theme “struggling
for recognition”. Thirteen papers focused on a diverse range
of working class lives, labour movement activists and intellectuals.
It is hoped that many of the papers will be submitted for publication
in the theme section of the November 2004 edition of Labour History.
The papers featured a good gender balance in speakers and subjects.
In the first session, Joy Damousi, Kate Deverall and Mark Hearn
considered some of the labour women activists of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Joy Damousi considered female factory
inspectors as labour activists; Kate Deverall scrutinized the relationship
between Anni Golding, Kate Dwyer and the Labor Party, and Mark Hearn
offered a narrative interpretation of Rose Summerfield’s “gospel
of discontent.”
British
academic John Shepherd provided a keynote address on “Lives
on the Left: recent developments in Labour Biography in the United
Kingdom”. John focused his address on the writing of his recent
biography of British Labour Party leader George Lanbury (published
by Oxford University Press). Lansbury’s radical labourism remained
a stark contrast with Thatcherism when John commenced his research
began, and Tony Blair’s New Labour agenda.
Harry Knowles, Terry Irving and Rob Sharpe considered lives that
were pushed to the margins of the labour movement, either by circumstance
or choice, during the early twentieth century, such as the iconoclastic
AWU leader – and dissenter – Arthur Rae, disillusioned
communist adherents Esmonde Higgins and J. Normington Rawlings,
and IWW activist W.G. Jeffrey.
In session three Gaynor Macdonald offered some important insights
into the attitudes to working life expressed by the Widajuri people
of central New South Wales, who sough to shape work ‘according
to their own values’; Judith Godden took conference delegates
back to the early colonial period with her illuminating paper on
the hospital matron Bathsheba Ghost. John Shields presented a progress
report from Andrew Moore and himself on the Biographical Register
of the Australian Labour Movement. Their paper observed the lack
of ‘self-reflection’ and theory in much labour biography;
labour biographers often fail to interrogate their methodological
aims or clarify how their work has advanced scholarly understanding
of the forces that have been exchanged between the individual and
society.
In the concluding session Peter Love reflected on the life of Labor
politician Frank Anstey, and the tensions between the private person
and the public persona; Paul Strangio reconsidered the early career
of Standish Keon, on the Labor MPs who quit the party during the
1950s split; and Suzanne Jamieson provided a profile of the conference’s
only living subject – the former Labor Senator Arthur Gietzelt.
Each session concluded with a lively discussion on the papers and
revealed a strong level of enthusiasm for labour biography in its
many forms and lives.
Information
for conference presenters considering submitting to the thematic
edition of Labour History
For those presenters who wish to submit papers to the November 2004
edition of the journal Labour History, please note the following
timetable and contact details for editors of the thematic section
of the edition. All papers are subject to review by anonymous referees.
If you do not wish to submit a refereed article, you may wish to
publish a research paper on Working Lives, the online research project
run by Work and Organisational Studies. Information about Working
Lives is also contained in your folder.
Timetable:
Submission of papers for peer review: 31 March 2004
Publication: November 2004
Conference co-ordinators and thematic edition editors:
Mark Hearn m.hearn@econ.usyd.edu.au
Harry Knowles h.knowles@econ.usyd.edu.au
Work and Organisational Studies
New Economics and Business Building H69
University of Sydney NSW 2006
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