Labour History

Edlira Xhafa is the Executive Director of the Online Academy of the Global Labour University. She has a master's degree in Labour Policies and Globalisation from the Global Labour University (Germany) and holds a PhD in Labour Studies from the University of Milan, Italy. Since 2000, she has been engaged with national trade unions in her home country Albania, as well as in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Myanmar. She has also worked for, and collaborated with Education International, Public Services International, Building and Wood Workers' International, International Labour Organisation, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and others.

I was Director of Campaigns and Communications for the international trade union federation of food, farm and hotel and catering workers IUF from 1991 until retirement in 2020. During that period I was actively involved in building trade union organization in transnational companies and their supply chains.

Rick Halpern is a social historian whose work has focused on race and labour in a number of national and international contexts. He has written about meat and meatpacking, sugar and plantations, and regionalism. Currently he is at work on two major projects: a book on race and class in 20th century photography, and a study of the year 1919 in Chicago. He is the Bissell-Heyd Chair of American Studies at the University of Toronto.

Peter Cole is professor of history at Western Illinois University (USA) and a Research Associate in the Society, Work and Politics Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). He is the author of Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (2018), winner of the Philip Taft Labor History Book Prize, and Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia (2007). He edited Ben Fletcher: The Life & Times of a Black Wobbly (revised 2nd edition, 2021) and co-edited Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (2017). He co-edited and brought the novel, Presente: A Dockworker Story (2024), written by the deceased Herb Mill, to publication. He is the founder and co-director of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project.

Daniel Edmonds is a researcher and historian who works with the Global Labour Institute in Manchester, UK. He has authored the GLI's text on the history of the international labour movement, created lesson plans for young people on the history of youth-led protests, and written an article on the Indian-born labour leader Shapurji Saklatvala.

I am a historian of race and class in the United States and author of The March of Washington: Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights and The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South I am a Professor of History at the University of Minnesota

Growing up in a blue-collar union family in the 1950s Southern United States I learned about the depth of racial and class injustice and the power of collective organizing. The many jobs I held in my twenties before fleeing to graduate school at Stanford University left me acutely aware of workplace sexism and disrespect. I became fascinated by how work shapes our sense of self and especially curious about the distinctive feminisms, labor movements, and politics of working-class women. These questions animate all my writing and teaching. Thirty years and seven books later, I believe reimagining work and labor movements is more necessary – and possible -- than ever before. For more information about the books I have written and for copies of my essays, https://www.dorothysuecobble.com.

Professor Lucien van der Walt is an author and worker educator, and director of the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) at Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa. Long involved in working-class movements, and widely published, his books include Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1880-1940 (201 0/201 4, ed. with Steven Hirsch), Negro e Vermelho: Anarquismo, Sindicalismo Revolucionario e Pessoas de Corna Africa Meridional nas Decadas de 1880 a 1920 (2014), Politics at a Distance from the State: Radical and African Perspectives (2018/2022, ed. with Kirk Helliker) and Labour Struggles in Southern Africa, 1919-1939: New Perspectives on the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU) (2023, ed. with David Johnson & Noor Nieftagodien). Much of his work can be found at https://lucienvanderwalt.com/

Silke Neunsinger is research director at the Swedish Labour Movement Archives and Library. She is affiliated with the Department of Economic History at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research is concerned with global feminist labour history and methodology. She has been the chair of the European Labour History Network and a founding member of the Nordic Labour History Network and the Global Labour History Network. She is the editor of the Swedish labour history journal Arbetarhistoria and is an editorial and advisory board member of labour history journals in Europe, the Americas and Australia. She is a lifetime member of the Association of Indian Labour Historians.