Editor's Introduction

As new editors taking the helm of Labor, we see vividly the debt labor historians owe to Leon Fink, who founded this journal and edited it for twenty years. Under his leadership the journal has provided a site for lively debate, top-notch scholarship, reflections on current affairs and labor arts, and poetry—all of it framed around an understanding of the breadth and diversity of working-class people's historical experience. His and his editors' shrewd labors have left us rich material that are shaping our first few issues, even as we work to explore new and uncharted territories.While building on the foundation established by Fink, we are simultaneously working to develop new approaches to collaboration and cross-fertilization. I'm grateful to Vanessa May for continuing her terrific work as reviews editor, and to managing editor Patrick Dixon for keeping the journal humming smoothly as a new group learns the protocols. But I also welcome two senior associate editors, Shennette Garrett-Scott and Jessica Wilkerson, who join me as full partners in this adventure, shaping the journal's vision and helping solicit and edit all materials. New associate editors, including William Jones for Up for Debate, Gabriel Winant at the helm of Contemporary Affairs, and Kathleen M. Newman for Arts and Media, are eager to hear ideas from readers for new directions and conversations they'd like to see. We are proud to be the official journal of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA), whose hundreds of members are engaged in a wide array of labor research, writing, teaching, and activism across the United States and around the world. At LAWCHA's biannual conference we introduced the new editors and declared our plans to deploy an organizing model as we build broad networks to enrich the journal's offerings.This issue reflects those commitments. We begin with offerings from enslaved potter and poet David Drake, who engraved his poems onto pots sculpted for enslavers in the early nineteenth century. In Contemporary Affairs, Michael Billeaux- Martinez creatively explores how structural constraints shape pitfalls and possibilities in logistics workers' organizing whether at UPS, on the railroads, or at Amazon warehouses. Their pivotal position in the supply chain creates the opportunity for grand disruptions to the economy if their demands are not met; nonetheless, as he shows, they face significant barriers to realizing that promise.The 1871 Paris Commune figured mightily not only in the nightmares of elites but also in the dreams and aspirations of activists. In "Remembering the Commune," Aloysius Landrigan argues that the Commune served as a palimpsest to workers in the United Kingdom and the United States. Its meaning changed over time as activists sought new values and ideals to strengthen their movement. His essay continues a scholarly tradition that examines the memory and memorialization of important events in labor history, one that counts Eric Hobsbawm and Jim Green among the most illuminating of practitioners.Two other articles jump far forward to very recent history and explore the challenges of care work globally and in the United States. Justine Modica takes on the "Worthy Wages" organization that fought for higher wages for daycare workers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Centered in Seattle, but with more than thirty branches across the United States and Canada, the daycare workers in Worthy Wages fought to overcome understaffing and low wages. Activism by daycare workers is a fascinating case study—the number of centers exploded in the late twentieth century, but the larger landscape of privatization and deregulation made it a harshly exploitative workplace. As Modica shows, the particularities of the daycare world—and particularly the fluidity of relationships that transgressed traditional employee/employer divides—provided an advantage deployed skillfully by activists.An article by Annelise Orleck also focuses on care work, but in a more global setting. Orleck brings to life the world of domestic workers, lured by labor contractors to work for wealthy families from Dubai to Singapore, New York, and London. She focuses on a fascinating organization, Waling Waling, founded in London in the 1980s to lobby for legislation to protect immigrant domestic servants. Originally representing predominantly Filipinas, the organization has expanded to include any domestic worker, including many from the Middle East. Shaped both by Philippine anticolonialism and a critique of neoliberal globalization, Waling Waling found creative ways to support undocumented immigrant domestic workers in the United Kingdom, providing them with medical care as well as English classes and even shelter when needed. Orleck's examination of the group foregrounds their struggle to build a more global organization while also examining the "politics of racial resentment" domestic workers face in contemporary Britain.A final article, by Peter Dreier, shines a light on the labor history of baseball. The influential labor leader Marvin Miller, who built the Major League Baseball Players Association into one of the most powerful unions in the United States between 1966 and 1982, provides a case study for understanding not only the rise of unionism in that sport but also the conservatism of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Antiunion from its beginning, the Hall of Fame blacklisted Miller for many years, not recognizing his achievements until long after his death. As Dreier shows, owners and executives who despised both Miller and the union dominated the committees that voted on inclusion year after year. He analyzes the gradual transformations, including growing popular support for unionism across the United States, that finally led to Miller's inclusion in the Hall of Fame.In our Point/Counterpoint section, leading historian Shelton Stromquist discusses his magisterial new book Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers' Fight for Municipal Socialism with founding Labor editor Leon Fink. Claiming the City examines the importance of cities as sites for challenging elite rule and fighting for social justice for working people. It demonstrates the global sweep of this municipal movement, the ways activists shared strategies and goals, and the parallels between movements and their demands across Europe, the United States, and New Zealand and Australia. The book ambitiously reinterprets the global history of labor and socialist politics over more than fifty years. In his conversation with Fink, Stromquist identifies key themes of his complex work while also reflecting on the quandaries local movements faced when buffeted by global war, imperialism, and capitalism.Capturing visual images of the working class became the dedicated vocation of the extraordinary British photographer Chris Killip, and in this issue Lewis Mates reviews an exhibition of his work. Along the way, Mates brings to life the world of unsung British workers in the late twentieth century, from sea coalers to miners to anarcho-punks who struggled to live and protest amid the harsh reality of Thatcherite deregulation and unemployment. Mates insightfully places Killip alongside a range of other social realist photographers, from Diane Arbus and August Sander to LaToya Ruby Frazier. Mates concludes by considering the light Killip's oeuvre sheds on contemporary British class politics.The reviews in this issue consider books that rethink chronologies we have long taken for granted. Andrew J. Hazelton's Labor's Outcasts shows how early struggles over braceros built a crucial bridge that shaped the United Farm Workers in the 1960s; Sara Matthiesen's Reproduction Reconceived examines the difference Roe v. Wade failed to make due to women's lack of access to resources needed for family planning; in Changing Land Niall Whelehan demonstrates that nineteenth-century Irish struggles over land ownership and tenant farming shaped radical labor internationalism at the end of the century. And Walter Johnson rethinks the history of St. Louis to show that it truly is "the bleeding heart of America"—the center of US imperialism and racism. These and more, thanks to the skilled hands of Labor's reviewers, await you.