Conferences Archive (2015-2016)

Closed workshop, attendance by invitation only

Organized by Jennifer Brier, UIC Gender and Women’s Studies, and History; Elena Gutierrez, UIC Latin American and Latino Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies

Sponsored by the UIC Institute for the Humanities, and Humanities Without Walls Initiative sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Organizers: Jeffrey Sklansky and Leon Fink, UIC Department of History

In his comparative work on different forms of labor, the historian Peter Kolchin spelled out “the labor question” that has long shaped both politics and scholarship: “Who should work for whom, under what terms should work be performed, and how should it be compelled or rewarded?” A conventional approach to this question has drawn a fundamental historical divide between “free” and “unfree” systems of labor, contrasting the many kinds of “extra-economic compulsion” under which slaves, serfs, peons, apprentices, indentured servants, and the wives and children of heads of households, among others, have labored since ancient times, on the one hand, with the “modern” emergence of market-driven forms of paid labor based on voluntary contracts between employees and employers, on the other.

The changing landscape of labor in recent decades, however, has challenged this narrative of emancipation and proletarianization. The relative liberty and security once claimed by large segments of the waged and salaried workforce in the industrialized world have gone up in smoke, while a growing global “precariat” of low-wage, part-time, tenuously and temporarily employed, and often migrant and undocumented workers has taken the place once occupied by the industrial “working class.” Meanwhile, much recent scholarship has suggested that the categories of “free” and “unfree” labor may conceal more than they reveal. Just as even the most brutal forms of forced labor such as chattel slavery leave room for negotiation and resistance, even the most emancipated and enfranchised employees have proven increasingly vulnerable, insecure, and disempowered since the 1970s. Scholars have responded by highlighting the fluidity and porousness of the wide variety of forms of labor that have flourished under capitalist dictates all along.

Yet if older views of the “labor question” have been undermined, the question itself remains as crucial as ever. We still need to understand how different structures of labor entail different kinds of compulsion and afford different means of individual and collective resistance for workers; we need critical reconsideration of how different forms of labor are related to each other in a particular place and period; and we need renewed efforts to analyze and explain the ways in which labor relations have changed over time. Truly moving beyond the binary of “free” and “unfree” labor means not simply erasing earlier distinctions, but defining more carefully the complex relations among often overlapping modes and instruments of exploitation such as debt, indenture, coverture, slavery, sharecropping, and the wage contract. It is the purpose of this forum to share recent, creative approaches to addressing the labor question across time and space.  We are interested in perspectives from labor and legal history and the history of capitalism as well as interdisciplinary angles from literary, linguistic, and anthropological analysis.

Confirmed speakers:

Sven Beckert, Harvard University

John Donoghue, Loyola University Chicago

Leon Fink, University of Illinois at Chicago

William Jones, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Mae Ngai, Columbia University

Seth Rockman, Brown University

Jeffrey Sklansky, University of Illinois at Chicago

Amy Dru Stanley, University of Chicago

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Loyola University Chicago

Schedule:

9:30-11:30 AM:  Session 1:  Horizons of Commodified Labor

Seth Rockman, Brown University

Amy Dru Stanley, University of Chicago

John Donoghue, Loyola University Chicago

12:30-2:30 PM:  Session 2: Politics of Class Struggle

Sven Beckert, Harvard University

Mae Ngai, Columbia University

Jeffrey Sklansky, University of Illinois at Chicago

3:00-5:00 PM:  Session 3: Freedom and Coercion in the Contemporary Work World

Leon Fink, University of Illinois at Chicago

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Loyola University Chicago

William Jones, University of Wisconsin, Madison

5:00-5:30 PM:  Wrap-up