60th ITH Conference: Workers and Worldmaking: Labor in the Era of Decolonization

Organised by:
The 60th ITH Conference is organized by the International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH) and kindly supported by the Chamber of Labour of Upper Austria, the Chamber of Labour of Vienna, the Institute for Historical Social Research, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Austrian Society for Political Education, and the City of Linz. The conference is part of the FWF-project (P34980) A Socialist Workplace in Postcolonial Africa: A Connected History of the Yugoslav Workforce in Zambia (see: https://www.yuworkzambia.net/).

Preparatory Group:
Immanuel Harisch (University of Vienna), Shivangi Jaiswal (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam), David Mayer (University of Vienna), Goran Musić (University of Vienna), Saima Nakuti Ashipala (University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa), Therese Garstenauer (ITH, Vienna), Laurin Blecha (ITH, Vienna).

Objectives:
The success of decolonization in the post-World War Two Global South depended greatly on the ability of national(ist) political leaders to rally local labor movements behind their cause. Similarly, solidarity with anticolonial movements, or the lack thereof, showed by the labor organizations and workers’ political parties in the Global North, played an important role in the “battle for the hearts and minds” inside the metropoles. Labor movements in the center and periphery were not isolated, with rich exchanges taking place via political events, international conferences, delegation visits, and material aid. Parallel to the struggle to assert their geopolitical importance, governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean sought to establish social contracts with their working classes and control trade unions domestically, while using connections with organized labor and political actors in more developed countries to attract development cooperation.

The global turn in the historiographies of decolonization and the Cold War helped move studies of labor in the Global South beyond their old focus on the formation of national working classes. Recent research on competing labor internationalisms, communist support for decolonization, transnational developmental entanglements, and South–South solidarities opened new vistas for thinking about the working classes of the emerging Third World as constitutive makers of global modernity. The concept of ‘worldmaking’ has proven particularly fruitful in encompassing the wealth of simultaneous and often competing practices of transnational collaboration in the peripheries during the Cold War. This conference aims to look at the role of workers and workers’ movements situated in the Cold War ‘South’, ‘North’, ‘East’, ‘West’, and ‘in-between’, in these practices of worldmaking triggered by decolonization between the 1950s and the 1990s..

Venue:
AK-Bildungshaus Jägermayrhof, Römerstraße 98, 4020 Linz, Austria

Linz is an industrial town some 180 km west of Vienna and one of the historical centres of the Austrian labour movement. The Austrian Civil War between Austro-fascist militias (“Heimwehren”) and the federal army on the one hand, and the paramilitary organization of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers Party, the “Republikanischer Schutzbund” on the other, in February 1934, started in Linz. The surroundings of the Jägermayrhof were among the centres of combat.

Contact:
Laurin Blecha
International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH)
c/o Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW)
Altes Rathaus, Wipplinger Str. 6/Stg., A-1010 Vienna, Austria
email: conference[at]ith.or.at

A selection of links that may be useful for you attending the conference:

Travel:

How to travel to Linz – General information

ÖBB – Direct train connections from Vienna International Airport (“Flughafen Wien”) or Vienna Main Station (“Wien Hauptbahnhof”) to Linz Main Station (“Linz Hauptbahnhof”)
Westbahn – Direct train connections from Vienna Main Station (“Wien Hauptbahnhof”) or Vienna West Station (“Wien Westbahnhof”) to Linz Main Station (“Linz Hauptbahnhof”)

Blue Danube Airport Linz – Bus, train or taxi to the city centre

Once you have arrived at “Linz Hauptbahnhof” (Linz Main Station) you can either travel to the venue by public transport or take a taxi (approx. EUR 15-20).

If you travel by public transport from “Linz Hauptbahnhof” (Linz Main Station), take tram no. 1 or 2 (direction to “Universität”) or tram no. 3 or 4 (direction to “Landgutstraße”) and travel 4 stops until “Taubenmarkt”. Change there to bus no. 26 (direction to “Stadion”), travel 5 stops and got off at “Jägermayr”. The bus station is right besides the venue.

The trams from “Linz Hauptbahnhof” (Linz Main Station) leave regularly. Bus no. 26 leaves “Taubenmarkt” every 30 min. The last bus leaves at 7:06 pm (Bus schedule).

Venue:

Jägermayrhof – Cultural and Educational Centre of the Upper Austrian Chamber of Labour

More:

City of Linz – Information by the Linz City Tourist Board
Vienna Tourism – Information by the Vienna Tourist Board