Events
Upcoming Events
April 2, 2025: Persistence in the Face of Crisis, A 2025 Labor Spring Discussion
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025: 12:00-2:00 PM
Walter Reuther Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs
2nd Floor Conference Room (#200)
Join Labor@Wayne for its returning Fraser Center for Workplace Issues' Lecture Series, featuring Lane Windham, Georgetown University. Lane Windham is Associate Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and directs WILL Empower. Dr. Windham is an experienced organizer, educator, historian and activist. She holds a doctoral degree in U.S. history and her book about union organizing in the 1970s, Knocking on Labor’s Door, has been met with critical acclaim since coming out in 2017. Lane spent nearly twenty years working in the union movement, including as media outreach director and specialist for the national AFL-CIO from 1998 to 2009. She organized unions among clothing and textile workers throughout the South in the 1990s. Her current research focuses on how working people can best build power within today’s shifting economy. She has published widely on issues of class, race, gender, economic justice and the future of work.
Click HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
April 3, 2025: Third Annual Labor Spring Teach-In for Students and Workers
Thursday, April 3rd, 2025: 11:00AM-3:00PM
Wayne State Student Center, Hilberry EF (2nd Floor)
Labor Spring is bringing together students, faculty, workers, unionists, environmentalists, allies, and elected leaders to support workers’ rights and organizing in a broad range of events, anchored on college campuses and in our communities! Join us for the third annual Labor Spring to learn about workers' history, labor and civil rights, ongoing social justice campaigns, and how to make sure your voice is heard! Wayne State’s Labor Spring Teach-In for Students and Workers is organized by a local committee to unite workers and campuses to bolster workplace justice, racial equality, and the public good. Labor Spring swept the nation in 2023 and 2024, and it is returning again in 2025!
Session 1 (11:00AM-12:00PM): Know Your Rights
Session 2 (12:00PM-1:00PM): A People's History of Labor
Session 3 (1:00PM-2:00PM): Knowledge for Unionists on Campus
Session 4 (2:00PM-3:00PM): Ongoing Workers' Struggles
This event is free and open to the public; refreshments will be served.
Made possible through the coordination of the Labor Spring Planning Committee and through partnering with the Department of Labor Wages and Hours Division, Lakeshore Legal Aid, the Fraser Center for Workplace Issues, Labor@Wayne, the Walter Reuther Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, the Wayne Academic Union, and the Departments of History and Employment and Labor Relations (ELR)
Click HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
April 15, 2025: Sedition and the Hand of Fraternity: Industrial Workers, Radical Unions, and the Forgotten Red Scare
Tuesday, April 15, 2025: 4:00-6:00 PM
Walter Reuther Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs
2nd Floor Conference Room (#200)
Join Labor@Wayne for its Fraser Center for Workplace Issues' Lecture Series, featuring Ahmed White. Ahmed White is the James E. Jones Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin. He is a graduate of Southern University and Yale Law School where, after graduation, he was a researcher with the Program in Civil Liability. He was visiting professor at Northwestern University and, in 2000, joined the faculty at the University of Colorado Law School where he was later namedthe Nicholas Rosenbaum Professor. For most of his career, White's scholarship has focused on the history of law and labor relations from the early Twentieth Century through the New Deal period and on the viability of a functional system of labor rights in liberal society. He is one of the country's leading experts on the history of labor repression, which is a major subject of his two acclaimed books, Last Great Strike: Little Steel, the CIO, & the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America (2016) and Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers (2022).
Click HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
April 23, 2025: Refusal: Black Women Workers and the Practice of Freedom
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025: 4:00-6:00 PM
Walter Reuther Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs
2nd Floor Conference Room (#200)
Keona K. Ervin speaks at Labor@Wayne's Fraser Center for Workplace Issues Lecture Series. Keona Ervin is Associate Director and Program Coordinator of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. Ervin is is the author of the award-winning book, Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis (2017). She has published articles and reviews in International Labor and Working-Class History, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History, New Labor Forum, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Ervin is currently writing a history of Black women's labor struggles that will be published by Verso Books and a history of the intersections of Black radical feminist politics and labor-leftist coalitions and solidarity movements in the US since the 1970s.
Click HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
May 7, 2025: "Work is Why I'm Not Fishing More:" Justice at Work and the Labor Movement's Moral Imperative
Wednesday, May 7th, 2025: 4:00PM - 6:00PM
Walter Reuther Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs
2nd Floor Conference Room (#200)
The Dave Miller Memorial Lecture returns in 2025 on May 7th to feature Robert Bruno. Robert Bruno is Director of the Labor Education Program and a Professor of Labor and Employment, as well as the director of the Project for Middle Class Renewal in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is also the author of five books; Steelworker Alley: How Class Works In Youngstown (1999), Reforming the Chicago Teamsters: The Story of Local 705 (2003), Justified by Work: The Meaning of Faith in Chicago’s Working-Class Churches (2008), A Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Story of the Chicago Teachers Strike (2016), and What Work Is (2024). He is the co-editor of Labor Studies Journal and is an executive board member of the United Association for Labor Education and Chicago Chapter of the Labor Employment Relations Association.
Click HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
Previous Events
February 27, 2025: Organizing Domestic Care Workers, A Community Discussion Panel
Join Labor@Wayne for a community discussion on the challenges facing domestic care workers in the United States and the obstacles that come with organizing workers in the domestic care industry on Thursday, February 27th, at the Walter P Reuther Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs. The panel discussion will begin at 4:00PM in the second-floor conference room and will conclude at 6:00PM. Food and beverage will be provided. Our panelists include Jennifer Guglielmo, Mia Michael, and Heidi Gottfried.
Jennifer Guglielmo specializes in labor and working-class women's histories in the US. She is an associate professor of history at Smith College and the author of Living the Revolution: Italian Women's Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (2010). Most recently, she co-directed a public history project with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, to bring the history of domestic worker organizing into the core of their political education curriculum. Mia Michael's scholarship centers the lives of working-class women of color and migrants in the United States and explores their prolonged struggle for dignity and legal rights they waged while employed as nannies, housecleaners and caretakers during the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Heidi Gottfried received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and her research interests span areas, ranging from sociology of work, the care economy, sociology of gender, welfare state, feminist theory, labor movements, to comparative political economy.
Click HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
November 11, 2024: Joe Trotter, Building the Black City: The Transformation of American Life
Dr. Joe Trotter is the Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Social Justice as well as the past Chair of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He serves as the founding director of Carnegie Mellon’s Center for African-American Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE). Trotter’s Building the Black City: The Transformation of American Life shows how African Americans built and rebuilt thriving cities for themselves, even as their unpaid and underpaid labor enriched the nation's economic, political, and cultural elites. Trotter’s prolific scholarship, including works like Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh since World War II and Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America, provide an astounding range of history spread across the country, all the way from the pre-industrial era to today.
Click HERE for a link to an online recording of the event (YouTube) and HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
September 18, 2024: Ruth Milkman, A New Political Generation: Power Resource Theory and 21st Century Union Organizing
Dr. Ruth Milkman is a sociologist of labor and labor movements whose work has focused on work and organized labor in the United States’ past, present, and future. Her most recent works include Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat (2020) and On Gender, Labor and Inequality (2016). Dr. Milkman joins Labor@Wayne to give our next Irving Bluestone Lectureship on Workplace Issues on Wednesday, September 18th, from 4:00 to 6:00 PM at the Wayne State Student Center, in Room Hilberry D. This event is made possible thanks to support from the Fraser Center for Workplace Issues and the Center for Labor Studies, Labor@Wayne, the Walter P. Reuther Library, and the Department of Political Science.
Click HERE for a link to an online recording of the event (YouTube) and HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
May 22, 2024: Steve Babson, The Great Fear, Then and Now: Dave Miller Faced HUAC in His Time, As We Now Face the Threat to Democracy in Ours
Dr. Steve Babson is a retired labor educator and union activist. He received his doctorate in United States History in 1989 from Wayne State. He worked at Wayne State from 1983 to 2006, both as an instructor and program coordinator for education and research, in the field of labor studies out of the now defunct College of Urban Labor and Metropolitan Affairs (CULMA). Dr. Steve Babson also served for many years as an officer of Local 6075 of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP-AFT), representing faculty and academic staff at the University. He is the author of books like The Unfinished Struggle: Turning Points in American Labor, Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town, and most recently, Forgotten Populists: When Farmers Turned Left to Save Democracy.
Click HERE for a link to an online recording of the event (YouTube) and HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
May 6, 2024: Labor@Wayne First Annual Labor Education Workshop
Labor education, both in academic courses and in non-credit courses, is part of what we do as Labor Scholars and Teachers. Labor@Wayne and the Fraser Center reaffirmed these commitments on May 6th when they held the first one-day workshop on labor education to make these connections. It included sessions led by the WSU Office of Teaching and Learning (OTL) but also incorporated other labor educators from around the country, with whom we discussed the state, role, and impact of labor education at this time of labor change and labor mobilization. Individual panel sessions included "Canvas Basics: Creating and Designing Content," "Motivating Students to Succeed by Creating an Inclusive Syllabus," and "Seven Communication Strategies to Engage Students Online," among other noteworthy sessions.
Click HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
April 4, 2024: Margot Canaday, Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America
Dr. Margot Canaday, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, discussed her new book, Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America, on April 4th, 2024. Queer Career has been recently awarded both the Hagley Prize in Business History and the Labor and Working-Class History Association's (LAWCHA's) Philip Taft Labor History Award. Margot Canaday's first book, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, explores state opposition to homosexuality and queer identity across more than the past 100 years. Dr. Canaday's talk took place on April 4th from 11:00AM to 12:30PM. The event was sponsored by Labor@Wayne, the Fraser Center for Workplace Issues, the Walter Reuther Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, the Department of History, and the Center for Gender and Sexuality.
Click HERE for a link to an online recording of the event (YouTube) and HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
March 29, 2024: Notes Toward a Global Labor History of Detroit
Distinguished professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History, UCLA, Dr. Robin DG Kelley gave a much anticipated talk in the Bernath Auditorium, located in Wayne State's Undergraduate Library (UGL). Robin DG Kelley is a scholar of African American music, culture, and history who has published on topics ranging from labor history to jazz and surrealism. His books include Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams, Thelonious Monk, and Africa Speaks, America Answers. Dr. Kelley's talk, which addressed crucial historical and contemporary issues, took place on March 29th from 3:00PM to 5:00PM. The event was sponsored by Labor@Wayne, Wayne State's Department of African American Studies, Department of English, and the Center for Gender and Sexuality.
Click HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
March 21, 2024: Labor Spring: Higher Ed, Union Revival, and Labor History at a Crossroads
Dr. Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University, gave Labor@Wayne's returning Irving Bluestone Lectureship on Workplace Issues the day after Wayne State's Labor Spring Teach-In. As Director of Georgetown's Kalmanovitz Initiative on Labor and the Working Poor, Dr. McCartin has worked tirelessly to coordinate Labor Spring teach-ins across the United States and internationally. This work is in addition to his scholarship on US labor, social, and political history. Dr. McCartin's talk was held in the Community Room of Wayne State's Undergraduate Library (UGL) on March 21st from 4:00PM to 6:00PM. The event was sponsored by Labor@Wayne, Higher Ed Labor United (HELU), the Reuther Archives, Wayne State's Department of History, and the Fraser Center for Workplace Issues.
Click HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
March 20, 2024: WSU Second Annual Labor Spring Teach-In
Wayne State University hosted its second annual Labor Spring Teach-In starting on March 20th at the Student Center (Hilberry E/F), going from Noon to 4:00PM. The first day of Labor Spring was organized into separate topics-based panels for students, staff, faculty, and other community members to learn more about the labor movement and labor activism's role in safeguarding our democratic institutions. The panel topics ranged from "What is a Union?" and "What Rights are Workers' Rights" to "Unions and Environmental Justice" and "Unions and Human Rights." Panel participants joined the teach-in from a variety of organizations and departments like Jobs with Justice, the Department of Labor Wages and Hours Division, the Graduate Employees' Organizing Committee (GEOC), the Wayne Academic Union, Pride at Work Michigan, and more.
Click HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
February 23, 2024: Essential Workers: Public Employment and the Dignity of Labor
Dr. William P. Jones, University of Minnesota, gave the Fraser Center's second Fraser Center Lecture on the history of Essential Workers, their longstanding ties to practices of Public Employment, and questions about the workers' rights to dignity in the wake of pandemics and other disasters. Dr. Jones' Fraser Center Lecture was held on February 23rd in the Student Center (Hilberry D) from 11:00AM to 1:00PM. The event was sponsored by Labor@Wayne, The Fraser Center for Workplace Issues, the Reuther Archives, Wayne State University Department of African American Studies, and the WSU Crockett-Lumumba Scholars.
Click HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
February 22, 2024: Sterling Heights Library Lecture Series
Jamie McQuaid, from Wayne State University's Labor@Wayne, gave a guest lecture at the Sterling Heights Public Library on his recent dissertation, "This Union Cause: The Queer History of the United Auto Workers, 1935-2000." The event was held on February 22nd at 6:00PM.
January 22, 2024: UC on Strike: Preserving Negotiation and Strike Success in Higher Education
Panelists Caroline Luce (UCLA), Monica Geraffo (UAW-UCLA), Gavin Strassel (UAW Archives), and Heeba Hartit (GSR UC Labor Center) joined the Fraser Center for Workplace Issues to discuss the recent strike involving more than 48,000 graduate workers, post-docs, and academic researchers at the UC system in November 2022. This talk, which was held at the Reuther Archives on January 22, 2024 at 4:00PM, brought the return on the Fraser Center Lecture Series for 2024. The event was sponsored by the Fraser Center, Labor@Wayne, Higher Ed Labor United (HELU), and the Reuther Archives.
Click HERE for a digital copy of the event flyer (PNG)
December 15, 2023: WDI Alumni Association Open House
The open house was for the AFL-CIO's Workforce Development Institute and doubled as a reception for alums interested in Labor@Wayne's Employment and Labor Relations Programs. The event was on December 15, 2023, and went from 5:30PM to 8:30PM. It was held in the Walter Reuther Library Atrium. Workforce Development Institute with Henrietta Hadley and Colleen Sullivan.