Workers’ education, understood to mean the education of workers by workers for purposes they themselves determine, has always been highly contested terrain, just like work itself. If there is to be an adequate global history of workers’ education, it will need to be guided by a suitable general theory. Hegel most expansively and Durkheim most persuasively argued that societies are cognitive and moral projects, of which education is constitutive: knowing and social being are inextricably bound up with one another. In the global democratic revolutions of the last 250 years, the labor movement distinguished itself as simultaneously a social movement, an education in democracy, and a struggle for a democratic education. The history of workers’ education is a history of workers striving to remake their communities into democracies and themselves into democrats. This brief essay introduces a collection of essays representative of a new generation of scholarship on the history of workers’ education, which we hope will help both traditional and emerging labor movements understand their past and think more clearly about their future.

In Sweden, workers’ education—Arbetarbildning—is part of the all-embracing popular adult education movement that assumed its organizational consolidation in the late 1800s. Popular education—Folkbildning—is a culturally determined practice of social communication with roots in the Reformation and the Enlightenment, playing a decisive role in the shaping of the Swedish labor movement in the late 1800s, the history of which is intertwined with democratization and the transformation of Sweden into a highly developed welfare society. The pedagogical and ideological configuration of labor education in Sweden is surveyed from a historical perspective through the lenses of the Workers’ Educational Association (ABF) and the labor movement's most powerful branches: the Social Democratic Party (SAP) and the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO). Workers’ education was utilized as a political strategy for a just and equitable society, via successive reforms, based on knowledge and initiated and supported by well-informed citizens.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the provision of better education for working-class men and women became one of the various and broad-ranging set of preoccupations of the cooperative movement in Britain. Much early cooperation was economic, concerning alternative means of production and distribution. However, local societies also turned themselves toward other forms of societal improvement, including creating the facilities and contexts that would promote and support the education and learning of adults. The archive of the Lincoln Equitable Co-operative Industrial Society offers a rich body of source material for a microhistorical investigation of the expansion and diversification of one local cooperative up to the First World War. The members’ magazine of this local society in particular records the evolution of its purpose—economic, political, social, and cultural. This included achieving progress through various forms of educational provision—although the opportunities for men contrasted with those made available for women. This research illuminates what is a relatively underresearched area—that is, exploration of the complexities, dynamism, and phenomenology of local cooperative adult education and the significance of what it had to offer the development of the labor movement in particular places.

The European labor movements developed in different directions during the twentieth century. The class formation literature has tried to explain these differences but left unexplored the internal dynamics of the labor movement and, above all, the differences in ideological schooling. Workers’ education constitutes a forum for ideological schooling of members, and these educational settings can be identity constitutive and thus play an important part in the class formation process. In this article I analyze the institutions for workers’ education in Sweden and Britain and I suggest that the variation of the design and practices of workers’ education had an impact on the movements’ developments in terms of identity formation and cohesiveness.

The Working Pupils’ Association of High Schools was founded in 1960s’ Greece as an organization of working boys and girls who attended secondary evening schools after having finished their daily waged work. Acting simultaneously as a conventional union and as a collective that encouraged artistic activity, the association elaborated new meanings about the relation between work, education, and youth. The postwar period saw the rapid expansion of secondary schooling to the lower classes, which affected deeply both youth and the working class. However, significant attention has not yet been paid to pupils generally, let alone to those of the working class. Addressing this lacuna, this article suggests a new perspective on the relation between the histories of youth, class, political acculturation, and social change in the second half of the twentieth century.

This article reconstructs the educational policies of the Latin American Confederation of Christian Trade Unions (CLASC)—the name of which was later changed to the Latin American Central of Workers (CLAT) —in the context of the Latin American Cold War. It provides an empirical description of its pedagogical praxis, showing how it was shaped in constant dialogue with the region's conflictive context. It explores how they viewed political training in relation to both their organizing efforts and struggles, applying a conception that brought together “action, organization and training” as integrated elements, in the run to foster class awareness, build up a “new society,” and “workers’ organized power”.

Drawing on evidence from research interviews, workers’ memoirs, oral histories, and a range of secondary sources, the development of popular workers’ education is traced over a thirty year period, 1955 to 1985, and is rooted in the proletarian culture of South Yorkshire, UK. The period is seen as an historical conjuncture of Left social movements (trade unions, the Communist and Labour parties, tenants’ movements, movements of working-class women, and emerging autonomous black movements) in a context of trade union militancy and New Left politics. The Sheffield University extramural department, the South Yorkshire Workers' Educational Association (WEA), and the public intellectuals they employ as tutors and organizers are embedded in the politics and actions of the labor movement in the region, some becoming Labour MPs. They develop distinctive programs of trade union day release courses and labor movement organizations (Institute for Workers' Control, Conference of Socialist Economists, Society for the Study of Labour History). Workers involved in the process of popular workers' education become organic intellectuals having key roles in local and national politics, in the steel and miners' strikes of the 1980s, and in the formation of Northern College. The article draws on the language and insights of Raymond Williams and Antonio Gramsci through the lens of social movement theory and the praxis of popular education.

In June 1988 hotel-workers in Cape Town were amongst many dismissed in the then biggest stay-away against planned anti-union attacks. For months they met daily, organising their struggle for reinstatement: the site of an ongoing collective process of radical worker education for liberation. Workers shared this through a process of documentation and solidarity celebrating their collective agency, reflecting on past, making current, and envisioning future history. A different capitalist market-driven education for competitiveness now dominates postapartheid South Africa. A reflection written in 1994 illuminates the denigration of working class collectivism, successfully resisted by the dismissed workers but even then developing.

This keynote address, delivered in December 2015 at the International Federation of Workers’ Education Association General Conference in Lima, Peru, refutes the standard trope of labor movement decline and provides evidence for the global rise and feminization of labor movements worldwide. Trade union women’s commitment to emancipatory, democratic worker education helped spur these changes. The origins and effects of two historical examples are detailed: the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers held in the United States annually from 1921 to 1938 and the first International Women’s Summer School of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) held in France in 1953. The latter experiment, attended by women labor leaders from 25 countries, energized the Women’s Committee of the ICFTU. It led to the adoption of “The Charter of Rights of Working Women” by the ICFTU in 1965 and helped make possible the election of Sharan Burrow and other women to top office in the International Trade Union Confederation. The address concludes with a discussion of what the history of trade union women’s education teaches about strengthening future labor movements.

The following is a detailed description of a training program offered by the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) Academy to introduce new members to the organization and its work. SEWA describes its main goals as “to organize women workers for full employment,” by which it means “employment whereby workers obtain work security, income security, food security, and social security (at least health care, child care and shelter).” The organization works to achieve its goals “through the strategy of struggle and development. The struggle is against the many constraints and limitations imposed on them by society and the economy, while development activities strengthen women's bargaining power and offer them new alternatives.” SEWA describes itself as “both an organisation and a movement,” which is enhanced by “the sangama or confluence of three movements: the labour movement, the cooperative movement and the women's movement.” SEWA also describes itself as a Gandhian movement: “Gandhian thinking is the guiding force for SEWA's poor, self-employed members in organising for social change. We follow the principles of satya (truth), ahimsa (nonviolence), sarvadharma (integrating all faiths, all people) and khadi (propagation of local employment and self-reliance).” In practical terms, SEWA carries out its strategy “through the joint action of union and cooperatives.” As a trade union, it has nearly two million members, half of whom are in the organization's home state of Gujarat, India. It also operates or is affiliated with nearly two dozen sister organizations and cooperatives.

Norway in the year 1900 would be more easily recognizable to a person from the global South than to a citizen of present-day Norway. One of Europe's smallest countries, with a population of 2.2 million, it was also one of the poorest. Still a predominantly agrarian country, it suffered from the side effects of early industrialization that other European countries had known for decades. Under pressure from a growing labor movement and an increasingly restive citizenry, the Liberal Party was spearheading reformist social policies and further democratization in Norway, whereas the Conservative Party resisted such reforms. A third party—the Norwegian Labour party—was founded by some local trade unions in 1887, but remained a marginal influence at the turn of the century even if the party won sixteen percent of the votes cast in the election of 1900. However, it was about to begin its meteoric rise from obscurity to political dominance. In 1899 a number of trade unions came together to found a national superstructure—the LO—with 1,500 registered members. This prompted employers to do the same. The Employers’ Association dates back to the year 1900. Next, the right to vote was extended to new groups of voters. Before 1898 only men with an income above a certain minimum could participate in elections, but universal suffrage for men was introduced in 1898. Women were then given the right to vote in local elections in 1910 and in parliamentary elections in 1913. These reforms were introduced by the Liberal Party.

The achievements of the labor movement in the Caribbean are generally historicized without highlighting the contribution of labor colleges to the function and survivability of trade unions. For more than fifty years, labor colleges have played a critical role in developing the knowledge and skill sets of union members who had an interest in labor studies. Many will attribute the heydays of the Caribbean labor movement in the mid-1900s to the intellectual thrust given to the trade union movement by labor colleges. During this period, trade unions relied heavily on labor colleges for intellectual support and advice primarily on matters that required in-depth academic investigation. Support from the labor colleges enhanced the reputation of the labor movement by shifting popular notions that the trade union movement consisted only of the poor and illiterate working class. The effects of these parallel training activities have been positive for both the leadership of the trade union movement and the overall impact they have had on labor-management relationships. There has been a noted change in the pattern of trade union leadership where “the first generation leaders, considered by many as demagogic and messianic, have given way increasingly to a younger and more formally educated second and third generation leadership”.

In this essay, we address the educational program and experiences of the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), as found in its camps, settlements, schools, and political training courses. One of the most active organized social movements in Brazil during the last thirty years, the MST combines political struggle with the organization of worker-controlled enterprises and educational opportunities for landless workers and their families. We begin with an excerpt from a report by one of us (Janaina Stronzake), which illustrates the ways in which the material conditions of an MST encampment led to a different kind of school, focused on the needs of students from the countryside.

Oskar Negt is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Hannover and a prolific writer, best known in the Anglophone world for two books written with the film maker and novelist Alexander Kluge: Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, published in Germany in 1972 and in the United States in 1993 (then reissued by Verso Books in 2016), and History & Obstinacy, which appeared in Germany in 2008 and in an English translation from Zone Books in 2014. In addition to his sociological and theoretical reflections, however, Negt is also a well-known worker educator, whose first major publication in 1971 was Soziologische Phantasie und exemplarisches Lernen: Zur Theorie und Praxis der Arbeiterbildung [Sociological Imagination and Exemplary Learning: On the Theory and Practice of Workers’ Education], which has never been translated into English. Soziologische Phantasie und exemplarisches Lernen was an influential, widely read text that provoked considerable discussion in European workers’ education circles, some of which can be followed in the 1978 anthology edited by Adolf Brock, Hans Dieter Müller, and Oskar Negt entitled Arbeiterbildung: Soziolgische Phantasie und Exemplarisches Lernen in Theorie, Kritik und Praxis [Workers' Education: Sociological Imagination and Exemplary Learning in Theory, Critique and Practice].

La pensée ouvrièrere pendant la second république et le second empire, Georges Duveau's classic but largely-forgotten study of French artisanal workers, focuses on changing attitudes toward work and education between 1848 and 1870, years which Duveau himself lauded as exceptionally fertile and creative in French social thought. How to explain such extraordinary fecundity? Partly, it can be explained by intensified police repression after Napoleon III’s coup, when the educational institutions of workers were repressed and they had to design new ones under the eyes of a suspicious state. Perhaps a more important factor, one suggested by the recent work of Thomas Piketty, is the ever-growing need to produce workers capable catering to the ever more sophisticated needs of the fabulously wealthy. The highly skilled artisanal production in Paris combined with the growth of factories created the distinctive conditions of French economic growth.

Much of the recent debate in early modern European labor and economic history has centered on Jan de Vries’s concept of the industrious revolution. Briefly, he claimed that workers during the period 1650-1800 chose to labor longer hours, often at greater intensity, in order to consume novel manufactured goods and imported commodities. Moreover, plebeian families increasingly pursued new employments beyond the household to pay for these objects. As a result, men, women, and children spent ever more hours in waged labor, and their growing purchasing power proved decisive in stimulating large-scale European industrialization. My work on the history of French and English papermaking raises fundamental challenges to this model. First, paperworkers already labored exhausting hours at the outset of de Vries’s period of newfound industriousness. Second, masters and workers alike knew that they had to both “speed up” and “take their time” to turn out quality paper at the expected rate. Third, women and adolescent workers toiled for wages in paper mills long before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the eve of large-scale mechanization, enduring shopfloor realities, skills, and quotas prevented a surge of productivity beyond papermaking’s familiar standards. With the demand for paper rising rapidly, it was the absence of an industrious revolution in papermaking that turned the manufacturers’ attention first to enlarged mills and small technological shifts, and finally, to the development of a papermaking machine.

The article proposes the institutional analysis of convict labor as an alternative to both (profit-oriented) economic and (discipline-oriented) political explanations. The specialized labor-based prisons in Turkey from 1936 to 1953 are brought to light by archival research and are presented here as a rich case to discuss the experiential/subjective conditions of unfree labor regimes and the structural effects of institutions on the convicts’ experiences. I argue that the state department responsible for prison labor in Turkey was transformed into a capitalist corporation with bureaucratic management, and the target of convict labor system was neither profit nor discipline, but the creation of the corporate bureaucracy itself. As a consequence, both for prisoners and for the prison staff, labor-based prisons appeared as privileged places. Hence, unfree labor was volunteered.

The first conference of the European Labour History Network (ELHN) took place on December 14–16, 2015, in Turin, Italy. It was, for the time being, the culmination of a development that has been going on for a number of years. Increasingly European labor historians work together across borders. Since the 1970s the number of research projects comparing two or more national cases has grown considerably, while in recent years transnational connections have attracted more attention as well. Likewise, labor historians now take Europe's imperial, colonial, and neocolonial past very seriously, and therefore the labor dimension of that past is explored more intensely (chattel slavery, indentured labor, convict labor, and so on).