The 59th International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH) takes place at Linz, Austria, from 26-28 September 2024.

Titled Worlds of Digital Labour, the event is organised by ITH in co-operation with the Chamber of Labour of Upper Austria, the Chamber of Labour of Vienna, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Politische Bildung and the City of Linz.

Objectives

The pitfalls of platform economies, 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 would like to address questions that are crucial for the history and present of labour and digitization.

Details of the conference programme and registration process on the ITH website.