For the past seven years, Working Class History has been a Twitter feed, podcast, website, and gallery of images and information in labor rights across the world. It’s a trove of multilingual milestones in collective organizing and worker action, mining the archives and not-so-public records. And the project is growing fast. The team at WCH is crowdfunding to launch an app.
The place to start, if you’re new to @wrkclasshistory, is “On This Day,” a series that in the past few days has commemorated one of the most iconic strikes of the 1970s, when a workforce of predominantly South Asian and East African Asian women in London banded together and walked off the job for nearly two years, and marked the 97th birthday yesterday of Madeleine Riffaud. The French resistance fighter, at 20 years old, in 1944, overtook a Nazi supply train with three other resistance fighters. She also wrote poetry and became a journalist, and Picasso drew her portrait for her poetry collection. Here’s an inspiring interview with Riffaud when she was 92 years old; hat tip to historian Anne Sebba.
Working Class History’s English-language campaign is here; in Arabic (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), Farsi (Twitter, Instagram, Telegram), French (Instagram, Facebook), Norwegian (Facebook), Portuguese (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter), Romanian (Facebook), Spanish (Instagram, Facebook), Swedish (Facebook). Coming up: Hindi, Italian, Irish, German, Turkish, and several other languages.
