Labor and Working-Class History Association

The Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) is a non-profit association of academics, educators, students, and labor movement and other activists that promotes research into and publication of materials on the history of the labor movement in North and South America. Its current president is James Gregory, professor of history at University of Washington.

LAWCHA works to create and sustain relationships with labor unions, workers' groups and community activist organizations, and to make labor history more accessible to union members and other workers. LAWCHA also works to promote the teaching of workers' history in public elementary and secondary schools, and seeks to foster the preservation of historic sites important to the labor movement.

LAWCHA was founded in 1998. At the time, various labor scholars felt that existing professional organizations, while effective and worthwhile in their own way, did not focus on labor history and lacked an emphasis on workers and local worker organizations. Conversations about forming a new organization occurred on various listservs, especially, H-Labor, part of H-Net.

At a caucus of interested historians at the 1997 North American Labor History Conference in Detroit, Michigan, participants decided to form a new association. An organizing committee, chaired by Elizabeth Faue and Julie Greene, and a constitution and by-laws committee, led by John Bukowczyk and Roger Horowitz, were formed. A constitution was drafted in late 1997 and early 1998, and the organizing committee debated the constitution in mid-1998.

The organizing committee presented the draft constitution to the founding members of LAWCHA at the 1998 North American Labor History Conference. The constitution was approved, and LAWCHA officially founded. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) was elected LAWCHA's first president and Joe W. Trotter, Jr. (Carnegie Mellon University) its first vice-president.