Linz/Austria, 26-28 September 2024
The 59th ITH Conference is organized by the International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH) and kindly supported by the Chamber of Labour of Upper Austria, the Chamber of Labour of Vienna, the Austrian Society for Political Education, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and the City of Linz.
Preparatory Group
Gleb Albert (University of Lucerne), Laurin Blecha (ITH, Vienna), Julia Gül Erdogan (TU Berlin),
Therese Garstenauer (ITH, Vienna), Michael Homberg (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History
Potsdam), Stefan Müller (Friedrich Ebert Foundation)
Objectives
The pitfalls of platform economies, the struggles for unionisation in digital entertainment companies, outsourcing and exploitation in social media enterprises, fragile global commodity chains in hardware production: Topics of labour and digital industries are prominent in today’s news headlines. These themes, however, have a history that goes back several decades. Studying industrial relations at the dawn of computing, the struggles over automation and digitization, and the emergence of new forms of work can provide us with a better understanding of digital labour relations and struggles.
The 2024 ITH conference addresses the role of industrial relations, labour struggles and knowledge regimes in the history of computing and IT - both in computer-related industries (hardware and software) and the IT services sector shaping the “old”, established industries. Covering the time frame between the establishment of the commercial computer industry in the post-war era through the breakthrough of home and personal computing in the late 1970s until the commodification of digital communication in the 1990s, and aiming at a global perspective, we address questions that are crucial for the history and present of labour and digitization. What visions of future work were propelled by the introduction of computers, and how were these visions perceived by the workforce? Which aspects of pre-digital labour shaped the conception of digital work? What was the effect of International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH) | www.ith.or.at | conference@ith.or.at informal DIY cultures and counter-cultural ethics on structures and practices of digital labour? How were IT workers (programmers, systems analysts or operators) perceived and how did they perceive themselves within traditional structures of labour organising? To what extent did structural inequalities, especially questions of race, class and gender, come to the fore? How did unions deal with the threats (and chances) of automation and digitization? What new forms of work relations, vocational education and labour organising sprung up in newly formed digital industries such as microchip manufacturing, software fabrication or computer games production? How did the global division of labour manifest itself in the computing and IT industries over decades? How did the various pathways into the digital age differ around the globe, especially when comparing developments in the United States and Western Europe with those in state socialist countries and the countries of the Global South? What effects did the introduction of personal computing have on work relations, the atomisation of the labour force, as well as the images and narratives of small-scale entrepreneurship? How did the introduction of mobile technologies change both the digital industries and broader work relations yet again?
You will find the programme attached.