Workers and Politics
TORCH Labour Network Day Conference
Friday 12 June 2026, 9.30am - 5.30pm
Learning Centre, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, University of Oxford
Free, but registration required.
If you would like to attend the conference as an audience member, please send a short note about yourself to labournetwork@torch.ox.ac.uk.
This interdisciplinary day conference organised by the Oxford Labour Network, the only group organised around the study of labour at the University of Oxford, investigates and draws lessons from the historical relationships between workers and politics. The relationship between the social history of labour and the history of states and political organisations was once a key focus of students of labour. After reduced interest during the 1990s and early 2000s, the return of workers to the polarised discourse of global politics suggests now is an opportune moment to rethink the historical relationship between workers and politics. The speakers at this conference are interested in the historical moments in which workers navigated through, organized in, demonstrated against, and at times, successfully transformed the political orders in which they lived. While workers and other non-elite groups always operate in circumstances that limit their range of possible action, there are moments and arenas in which the political space is more or less hostile to collective action. Papers will be presented on how labour related to politics in democratic, colonial, and authoritarian contexts across several time periods and spaces. The participants will focus on the interaction between workers and political parties, military, police, and courts, national and local and international officials, planners, and administrators, and rural and urban authorities. Studies of workers’ experience of the stabilisation strategies of various forms of public and political authority will be a central concern of the conference participants.
Programme
Coffee/Tea and Pastries, 9.30am-10am
Welcome and Introduction: 9.50am - Matt Myers (University of Oxford) and the Oxford Labour Network
I. Workers and Political Agency, 10am-11.30am
1. Alex Beard (University of Oxford) , 'A Revolution, Frustrated: The Failure of Worker Self-Management in the German Democratic Republic, 1989-1990'
2. Ruggero Giovannetti (La Sapienza), ‘When Roads Diverge: Metalworkers and the Italian Left in the 1996-97 Labour Dispute’
3. Xuan Jin (Zhejiang University), ‘Towards Authoritarian Corporatism: The Transformation of Singapore’s Labour Movement, 1961–1968’ [online]
Discussant: Freya Willis (University of Oxford)
Coffee/Tea Break, 11.30am-11.40am
II. Workers and States, 11.40am -13:10pm
1. Maya Aderath (LSE), 'The Non-Associational State: Revisiting the Exceptionalism of American Labour'
2. Bruno Settis (Florence), ‘US Labor’s «role in world affairs» - and in Foreign Policy - under Kennedy and Johnson’
3. Sandipan Sen (The Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Hyderbad), 'TISCO’s 1928 Strike Scientific Management and the Limits of Taylorism in Colonial Industry' [online]
Discussant: Matt Myers (University of Oxford)
(Sandwich) Lunch, 13:10pm-14.00pm
III. Workers and Authority, 14.00pm-15.30pm
1. Paul Csillag (South Tyrolean Museum of Mining) 'Panem et Vinum. Miner Conflicts with Medici Authorities' [online]
2. Lucas Privet (Ecole Normale Supérieure – Ulm), ‘James Thompson Bain and trade union and political struggles in the South African mines: between white labourism, working-class solidarity and agrarian radicalism'
3. Katerina Szylo (University of Oxford), ‘When the Canary Collapsed: The Ukrainian Coal Miners' Strikes and the Fall of the Soviet Union’
Discussant: Grace Whorrall-Cambell (University of Oxford)
Coffee/Tea Break, 15.30pm-15.45pm
IV. Workers in Hostile Environments, 15.45pm-17.15pm
1. Isaac Stephenson (University of Oxford),‘Trade organisation and labour politics: the gunworkers of Liège, Birmingham, and the Black Country, c.1886-1914’
2. Alessandro Brizzi (Scuola Normale/Nanterre), ‘Rebuilding the “red palace”: Workers’ responses to the crisis of mutual societies in Northern Italy (1921-1925)’
3. Srajit M. Kumar (Heidelberg), ‘The Strike as a Waiting Game: Temporality and Working-Class Politics in Kanpur, 1924-38’
Discussant: Rohini Thyagarajan (University of Oxford)
V. Feedback and future plans, 17.15pm-17.30pm
Conference drinks and dinner (White Rabbit, 18- [21 Friars Entry, Oxford OX1 2BY])
