Awards
Each year, the WCSA issues a number of awards to recognize the best new work in the field of Working Class Studies. The review process is organized by the past president of the WCSA and the WCSA awards committee. Below is a list of past recipients.

We look forward to next year's awards and hope you will submit your work for review. Due dates and guidelines are published in the fall, in the WCSA newsletter.

The results are in for the 2012 annual Working Class Studies Association Awards for contributions to Working Class Studies. The winners are listed below along with comments from the judges.

2012 Working Class Studies Association Awards

Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism
J. Malcolm Garcia, Freelance journalist, Winnetka, Illinois
"Smoke Signals: They Survived Iraq—and Died at Home", The Oxford American
"Smoke Screen", Guernica
"Breathing In", Virginia Quarterly Review

Garcia's submissions were meticulously researched, intelligently constructed and superbly written. He makes me proud to be a journalist. Garcia came out on top mainly because he had to dig far deeper to unearth his story, and what he uncovered was far more revelatory. He circled the globe to expose a tragedy that had previously been hidden from the eyes of the world.

These pieces, individually and collectively, are incredible—reporting "from the trenches" literally. Here is nonfiction writing that ranks with the best of fiction. Most importantly it is written with empathy, compassion and engagement. Unlike most "war reporting" it recognizes the realities and horrors visited upon the Afghans, as well as U.S. grunts. Pulitzer stuff, this is.

This original story, published in The Oxford American, captivated from the start. Garcia reveals the problem early on: defense contractors are operating toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan around the clock, and the U.S. government has been slow to acknowledge the health hazards. Those findings alone make this an excellent piece of reporting, but Garcia tells the story through the experiences of two wives who meet through a Facebook support group started by one of the women. We are drawn in by the stories of two women coping with their husbands' debilitating illnesses and eventual death, only to struggle with a seemingly unsympathetic military that seems to fight their pursuit of benefits. Excerpts from the women's Facebook messages further punctuate the narrative. In "Breathing In," Garcia shares the struggles of two Iraq veterans, Tim Wymore and LeRoy Torres, as they fight the effects of toxic exposure to burn pits. And in "Smoke Screen," Garcia gives us a first-hand account of a burn pit, ending with the startling revelation that "burning was just the easiest and cheapest thing to do in a screwed-up, throwaway country like Afghanistan." This is a very compelling package worthy of the Studs Terkel Award.

CLR James Award for Best Book
Franco Barchiesi, Professor of African American and African Studies, Ohio State University
Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa, SUNY Press

A very ambitious and impressive theoretical analysis of employment/waged labor as a signifier of citizenship in a precarious post-Apartheid economy. A big book, with big ideas. Certainly has the most intellectual heft of the lot.

Strongly grounded in ethnographic evidence and in theory, this important account of post-transition South Africa describes with great specificity a local phase of a world problem. Barchiesi shows how precariousness emerged as a category, without separating it from proletarianization entirely.

Works to establish precariousness as a theoretical paradigm without sacrificing either concrete focus on the local or historical reach.

CLR James Award for Best Book
Sean Burns, Teacher, Musician, Gardner, Berkeley, CA
Archie Green: The Making of a Working-Class Hero, University of Illinois Press

An accessible, exceptionally researched biography which manages to offer both appreciation and critique and to capture the very complex political and intellectual sources of Green's energy and ideas. This would also honor Green, probably the greatest practitioner of working class studies in our lifetimes.

Wide-ranging, nuanced, and well-written, and generally avoids hagiography.

Honorable mentions:
Francis Ryan, Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Temple University
AFSCME's Philadelphia Story: Municipal Workers and Urban Power in the Twentieth Century, Temple University Press

Deborah Cohen, Associate Professor of History, University of Missouri—St. Louis
Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico, The University of North Carolina Press

CLR James Award for Best Article
Stephen Brier, Professor of Urban Education, CUNY Graduate Center, and Ferdinando Fasce, Professore Ordinario of History, University of Genoa
"Italian Militants and Migrants and the Language of Solidarity in the Early-Twentieth-Century Western Coalfields," Labor Studies in Working Class History of the Americas

The all around excellence of this essay puts it at the top of a heap of worthy candidates. I was especially impressed with the ability of the authors to neatly blend in clear concise language a multitude of perspectives on a complex subject.

"Italian Militants and Migrants" is a prize-winning article. In a clearly written study, Brier and Fasce trace the activities of Carlo Demolli, an immigrant from Lombardia, whose activities as a trade-union journalist and agitator in the Western coal fields, reinforce some and challenge other assumptions about the role of Italian immigrants in the organization of the multi-ethnic coal miners around the turn of the century. The article shows that the Italian workforce was willing to solidarize with miners from different backgrounds, including African Americans. Most important, they show that even while living under the heel of utterly callous brutality by the corporate owners, which caused extreme hardships on their families, the Italian union members evidenced an extraordinary degree of solidarity with their fellow workers. This essay provides a most convincing refutation of the canard that Italians were "amoral familists" incapable of united action for wider purposes. Strewn throughout the article are insights on a wide range of issues that, in other hands, would in themselves have constituted separate articles. By weaving the narrative of this dramatic piece of American labor and American immigrant history around the biography of Demolli and Il Lavoratore Italiano, the union newspaper for which he worked, the authors add something quite rare to their monograph—literary quality.

Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing
Mary Bucci Bush, Professor of Creative Writing, California State University, Los Angeles
Sweet Hope: a Novel, Guernica Editions

Echoes of Silone's Fontamara, Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, and even Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio itself—this novel makes the reader feel the hopelessness, the loss, the unceasing struggle of the Italian laborers and their families who came to Arkansas—but also to so many other places in America—to find only a keen hardship and bitter iron of a new kind of slavery. The shared strife of the African American community and the Italian immigrants is powerful and moving.

Sweet Hope represents a little known event in American labor: the indentured servitude of Italians brought to the American South with false promises. As the immigrants struggle to survive, they are befriended by American blacks, and form bonds that cannot be tolerated by ruling whites. Labor, strikes, exploitation, and community relationships are all explored in this ambitious work.

From the opening line comparing Italy to "a dried-up fig, all leather and seed, hard and bitter on your tongue," Sweet Hope by Mary Bucci Bush not only masterfully creates a lyrical novel sweet to the senses but an astonishing act of witness to Italians who were slave laborers on a cotton plantation in the turn of the century South. Inspired by family stories and painstaking research, the author's passion to expose this little-known piece of history commands every page.

Constance Coiner Dissertation Award
Jamie K. McCallum, Middlebury College
In Dubious Battle: A Case Study of the New Labor Transnationalism

In Dubious Battle exemplifies careful, important research on the current dilemma of labor markets in transnational economic structures. McCallum gives us a close reading of a specific situation and links it to the broader structures of labor in the new order.

Jamie McCallum offers an important case study, and in many ways a potential blueprint, toward addressing one of global society's most pressing issues: the diminishing power of the working class. Offering an analysis that breaks free of rigid narratives that view labor weakness as an inevitable result of global capitalism, In Dubious Battle illustrates how global union campaigns can work on the local, national, and global level. Conducting close to 100 interviews in 9 different countries, McCallum's dissertation is well researched and provides a critical window into the lives of everyday workers in the global arena.

2011 WCSA Award Winners
Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism
Chris Hedges (text), Joe Sacco (photography), "City of Ruins"
Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing
Jeanne Bryner, No Matter How Many Windows: Poems
CLR James Award for Best Book
Jarod Roll, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South
CLR James Award for Best Article
Heath W. Carter, "Scab Ministers, Striking Saints: Christianity and Class Conflict in 1894 Chicago"

2010 WCSA Award Winners
Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism
Michael Zweig, Trish Dalton, Mike Konopacki, "Why are we in Afghanistan?"
Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing
Jenifer Rae Vernon, Rock Candy
CLR James Award for Best Book
Steven K. Ashby, C.J. Hawking, Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement
CLR James Award for Best Article
Elna C. Green, "Relief from Relief: The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike of 1937 and the Right to Welfare"
Constance Coiner Dissertation Award
Tiffany Knight Raymond, Labor, Performance, and Theatre: Strike Culture and the Emergence of Organized Labor in the 1930's

2009 WCSA Award Winners
Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism
Gabriel Thompson, "Meet the Wealth Gap"
Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing
John Marsh, You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-41
CLR James Award for Best Book
David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
CLR James Award for Best Article
Alan Derickson, "'Asleep and Awake at the Same Time': Sleep Denial among Pullman Porters"
Constance Coiner Dissertation Award
Michele Fazio, Between Mothers and Sons: Narrative Performances of American Identities in Italian-American Literature

2007 WCSA Award Winners
Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism
Pepi Leistyna, Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class
Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing
Jim Daniels and Charlee Brodsky, Street
CLR James Award for Best Book or Article
Nicholas de Genova, Working the Boundaries: Race, Space and 'Illegality' in Mexican Chicago
Constance Coiner Dissertation Award
Terry Easton, Temporary Work, Contingent Lives: Race, Immigration, and Transformations of Atlanta's Daily Work, Daily Pay