A special issue of ILWCH on labor and environmental history. This special issue of ILWCH will include articles that approach working-class history as environmental history and environmental history as working-class history. The goal is to include articles that bridge the two often divergent fields.

A number of recent studies have tried to elucidate the entwined histories of ecological degradation and the alienation of labor, the commodification of labor and the commodification of nature, focusing on the dialectical relationship between ecological change and both capital and working-class formation, the role of nature and worries over the health of bodies and environments in shaping working-class movements and labor conflicts. These include John Soluri’s Banana Cultures on Honduras, Thomas Rogers’ The Deepest Wounds on sugar plantations in Brazil, Thomas Andrews’ Killing for Coal on the Colorado coal mines, and Linda Nash’s Inescapable Ecologies, a history of “ecological” ideas of the body in California’s Central Valley, to name a few recent important works.

This issue of ILWCH will draw on this growing literature in environmental and labor history. Possible areas and themes for articles include, but are not limited to, the following themes:
- Work, the labor process, and ecology. Articles might analyze the rationalization of the labor process through engineering nature with the introduction of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, GMO crops, and green revolution technologies. A focus on ecology as central to rural workers’ control over land and labor, and new interventions to produce ecological management as part of labor management and deskilling.

- Gender, nature, and work. Issues of gender and women, more generally, have been left out of the few studies of labor and the environment. Articles might analyze conflicts over water, environmental pollutants in both factories where men and women labor and in working-class communities, as well as local mobilizations that have often been led by rural and urban working-class women.

- The role of environment and environmentalism in shaping working-class politics. Articles might analyze critiques of commodification and market relations that are informed by ideas about nature and the environment or the impact of the international environmentalist movement on local political struggles over natural resources and labor rights, as well as links and tension between environmentalist and labor movements.

- Labor, the environment, and public health. Articles might explore the labor movement and issues of public health and worker rights.

- Workers, the environment in non-capitalist societies undergoing agricultural modernization and industrialization, eg communist China, the Soviet Union, and Cuba.

- The labor movement and global climate change.

Prospective authors should send a letter and an abstract of no more than 500 words of work they wish to submit to the journal. Editors will determine whether the proposed work fits thematically in an upcoming issue. The deadline for abstracts is January 15, 2013. The deadline for first drafts of articles is May 31, 2013. Style and submission guidelines will be sent to authors whose work the editors wish to review.

Send correspondence to:

Editor, International Labor and Working-Class History
Rutgers University
50 Labor Center Way
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
or via e-mail to: ilwch@smlr.rutgers.edu, tmk5k@virginia.edu, kbrown@umbc.edu