Preliminary Programme

Until the late 19th century, the American and English labour movements bore striking similarities: both originated among skilled craftsmen, pursued an exclusivist strategy meant to constrain the supply of labour in their field, and held a voluntarist ideology which revered the independence of the wage worker from both employers and the state. By the turn of the 20th century, their strategies had fundamentally diverged: in England, a series of debates between the “old” and “new” unionists within the Trades Union Congress (TUC) led to the adoption of a mass-based industrial strategy, centred around the recruitment of workers across skill groups and the advancement of universal welfare programs like national health and pension schemes. The American labour movement experienced no such turn—instead, the AFL convention of 1894 committed American unions to exclusivist craft principles and opposition to universal policies for decades to come.

My paper will examine the diverging orientations of labour movements in the UK and US towards universal welfare provision. It will do so by studying the relationship between the countries’ respective labour movements and the dense network of friendly and fraternal societies which existed in each case. Almost entirely overlooked in the literature on welfare state development and class formation, friendly and fraternal societies provided health, housing, funeral, and death benefits for working people on a voluntary, cooperative basis for much of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the UK, friendly society membership numbered 6 million people in 1905, while trade union membership only reached 2.5m in 1907. In the US, membership in fraternal organizations is estimated to have reached 5.5 million by 1901, when comparable indicators placed trade union membership at roughly 1 million.

The paper will present findings from a survey of trade union and friendly societies documents from 1880-1911 These include but are not limited to: records from the Trades Union Congress Parliamentary Committee, annual reports from American Federation of Labor, monthly reports from the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, quarterly magazines from the Cigarmaker’s International Union, monthly magazine records from the Independent Order of Oddfellows, and annual reports from the American Fraternal Congress. The paper will draw on these documents to understand the notions of class employed by the two labour movements, their perceived opportunities and threats, their relationship to deep rooted traditions of mutual and voluntary association among workers, as well as their changing relationship to and perception of the state. Documents have been coded and analysed using Nvivo, and qualitative as well as graphic text analysis will accompany the historical discussions.

In our increasingly service oriented and diverse economies, traditional unions once more face pressures to adapt. By examining the conditions under which workers overcome divisions of occupation, gender, and race, and by shifting the focus away from the workplace and into the realm of civil society, my research broaches questions which remain crucial contemporary labour movements, and to the structure of welfare states in coming decades. (Show less)

The term “worker photography” denotes the international movement of left-wing photographers — both working-class amateurs and middle class professionals — who documented the life of the working class in the 1920s and the 1930s. The movement aimed at creating class consciousness through theoretically educating the workers’ gaze and facilitating the access to photographic materials. Worker-photographers presented their work in illustrated press and during exhibitions. Moreover, the term encompasses private photographic practices of workers that took place outside of the organized movement. They included taking, collecting and exchanging photographs.
Since the late 2000s, several international, multidisciplinary research projects, museum exhibitions, and publications have been devoted to the phenomenon of worker photography. The most important include:
- The seminar preceding the exhibition “Una luz dura, sin compasión” (“A hard and merciless light”) at Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid (2010 - 2011, curated by Jorge Ribalta). The exhibition’s catalogue contains the most complete survey of the international worker photography movement available.
- Wolfgang Hesse’s team’s research at the ISGV in Dresden. The project resulted in two key publications, “Die Eroberung der Beobachtenden Maschinen” (“The conquest of the observing machines”) in 2012 and “Das Auge des Arbeiters” (“The worker’s eye”) in 2014. The latter served as a catalogue to an exhibition presented in Zwickau, Dresden and Cologne.
- The exhibition “Photographie, arme de classe” (“Photography, Weapon in Class Struggle” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2018-2019, curated by Damarice Amao) and its catalogue.
- Volume 4 (2020) of the yearly "Transbordeur: Photographie" edited by Christian Joschke and Olivier Lugon.
This body of research is devoted to worker photography in the Weimar Republic, the USSR, Austria, Czechoslovakia, the US, Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, Hungary, and Switzerland. Nevertheless, it does not include contributions regarding the Second Polish Republic, where worker photography was shaped by the local material, legal, and political obstacles. In my paper, I will relate the above-mentioned scholarship to material evidence available for inter-war Poland, such as:
a) The history and theoretical background of “The First Exhibition of Worker Photography” (Lviv, 1936) supported by the communist, socialist and agrarian populist parties. The exhibition was criticized by the Polish photographic milieu influenced by contacts with German National Socialist photographers.
b) The oeuvre of Aleksander Minorski, a worker-photographer who created the concept of “militant photography” in Warsaw in the 1930s and was imprisoned for his photographic work.
c) The Digital Photography Collection – “Workers in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century” (https://fotografierobotnikow.uni.lodz.pl/) hosted by the University of Lodz. It contains over 9000 items - photographs and autobiographical writings of Polish workers from before 1946. The collection enables an analysis of private photographic practices, auto-identification and memory of Polish industrial workers.
d) Theoretical developments in the fields of visual arts and literary criticism published in Polish communist and socialist journals both in Poland and the USSR.
In my analysis, I use Alf Lüdtke’s and Thomas Lindenberger’s idea of “Eigen-Sinn” and Jacques Rancière’s idea of the “distribution of the sensible”. (Show less)

Transformation of the former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) system from a socialist to a capitalist one resulted in deindustrialization, atomized and divided workers on different ground (from class to ethnicity), dissolved large industrial complexes, and impoverished and dispossessed workers. Transformation, as part of the neoliberal globalization, was done through a combination of the so called "shock therapy" measures: liberalization, privatization and stabilization. Our focus is mainly on the privatization through which large industrial complexes and leading socially owned companies in SFRY were dismantled, broken into pieces and sold or bankrupted, often in dubious processes. Large number of workers, who were once considered as builders, owners and motors of the companies they worked at, were left without a job, income, imporverished, but most of all dispossessed of ownership and the opportunity to work at, once considered as 'their', companies. Compared to the earlier research on post-socialist transformation processes, that largely focused on economic aspects and changes of the system, this paper provides a different angle by focusing on the privatization and transformation of SFRY and its successor states from a workers' perspective. Through interviews with (former) workers of privatized, dissolved and/or closed factories and industrial complexes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, notably 'Rudi ?ajavec', 'Energoinvest' and 'Aluminij', research presented in this paper analyses workers' attitudes and sentiments toward work in socialist Yugoslavia and work today under the capitalism, as well as toward privatization and processes attached to it, including the role of workers and unions in those processes. We have conducted a total of 31 interviews with (former) workers of mentioned industrial complexes and factories in 2020. In our analysis of patterns and discourses within the interviewees statements, we have discovered several: privatization as theft, powerlessness of workers within the privatization processes (lack of agency due to losing a power position), politics of fear, as well as workers disunity. The research results also show that the strategies and tactics used by different political, ethno-national and economic elites to pacify the workers' uprising and union actions in the privatization processes, ultimately resulted in shattering the workers' organized actions, division of workers and union fragmentation disabling the class struggle. (Show less)