Labour history online course: a critical resource for trade unionists, and labour activists and researchers

Edlira Xhafa - Executive Director of the Online Academy of Global Labour University

Peter Rossman - Professor, Online Academy of Global Labour University

In collaboration with an international team of trade unionists and labour historians, educators and activists, the Global Labour University has developed an innovative online course in labour history.

Why a course on labour history?

The course aims to stimulate creative thinking about today’s labour movement through critical engagement with its rich past. Much of this past is difficult to access for labour activists today. For decades, labour education has been declining in scope and content. What remains is narrowly technical, with little or no attention to the history and variety of worker organizing. Meanwhile, politically committed labour historians must contend with academic specialisation and isolation.

This online course seeks to bridge this gap. While capitalism by nature is in constant mutation, many of the core problems facing working people today are by no means new and have always accompanied the emergence of working classes and their struggles. Excavating the memories of past labour struggles – their achievements along with their tensions, contradictions, and defeats – is a vital task for labour movements today.

How does the course approach labour history?

In developing this course, we were confronted with a series of questions.

First, how to tell the remarkably rich history of the labour movement - spanning more than two centuries and with such a profound impact on the historical trajectory of countries across the globe - in an online course? Rather than offering a chronological or institutional account we decided to organize the course around some key questions facing the global working class today: Why and how have working people organised through a labour movement? The question may appear self-evident, but can be easily lost if ‘organising’ is restricted to industrial relations and collective bargaining. What have been the movement’s aspirations and political projects for the working class and society at large? What has been the role of working class struggles in advancing democracy and responding to authoritarianism? Where can we locate the main tensions and contradictions? How has labour responded to the continual and ongoing challenge of migration? And what can we learn from the relationship of labour to other social movements? While each question is addressed in a separate chapter, the content of each chapter sheds light on the others.

Second, how to engage with these guiding questions? We decided to organise each chapter as a combination of case study videos analysing a particular historical episode and a core video that seeks to bring together the main learnings from these stories and identify questions for further discussion. None of these case studies can aspire to be complete. Keeping the videos short means pressure to condense and focus on only those aspects of the history that are most relevant to the theme of the chapter (although the key reading accompanying each video seeks to provide additional context). The purpose of each case study is neither to analyse every possible aspect of a story, nor to provide a definitive version on which we can all agree. Instead, they seek to provide inputs for a comradely discussion about difficult questions and tough debates. This process is supported by a series of zoom workshops with the course contributors during the tutored mode, which help to deepen the learning process.

And third, how to make stories from a specific historical and geographical context resonate with activists from across the world? From the inception phase of this course, we aimed to include case studies from all regions in every chapter. However, despite our best efforts, some regions and sub-regions remain underrepresented. The Exercise questions accompanying each video lecture are an important pedagogical tool to fill this gap. They provide a possibility for the course participants to reflect on the topic of the video and in doing so reflecting and telling the labour history of their own country.

How to use this course?

First, you can enrol through a very easy registration process here and complete the course.

Second, you can bring the learnings of these stories from the past into your own organisations to inspire political debates.

And finally, you can also invite labour educators to use the the content of the course for worker education. The content can be accessed by simply enrolling in the course.

Study for free, get a certificate.

You can study at your own pace and get a Certificate of Participation once you meet the requirements set in Chapter 1.

You can also get a Certificate of Accomplishment if you study in tutored mode and meet the relevant requirements. The next tutored phase of the course starts on May 1st, 2025. Enrol today and receive information about online events with the labour historians and trade unionists