The labor movement has tremendous momentum heading into 2025, as well as stark opposition with the incoming administration. This year at LRAN, we are cultivating steadfast, stubborn, rebellious hope - because our movement, fueled by the power of organized working people, remains undaunted and solidarity is as crucial as ever before. How can we look to our history to inform the fights of our present? What can we learn when we expand our vision for a just society beyond the bounds of the U.S.? What is working now and how do we protect those sparks from countless headwinds?
Co-hosted by the Rutgers' School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR), the LRAN conference will gather in New Brunswick, New Jersey to hold space for a broad range of labor activists, practitioners, scholars, and others to connect, learn, and strategize together.
LRAN invites participants from universities, unions, worker centers, policy organizations, and others involved in the work of labor justice to submit proposals (including trainings, workshops, roundtables) for 60-90 minute sessions that address one of the following tracks:
- Sustaining the movement - protecting and growing recent gains in labor justice through winning organizing campaigns, worker protections, policies at the state and local level and making these rights real on the ground
- What’s working now? - More expansive organizing strategies, political education, and working class engagement in the age of Trumpism
- Spreading bottom-up worker organizing — recent successes and prospects ahead for growing a movement, inside and outside the traditional/legal framework.
- We’ve been here before – Learning from historical and global movements of organizing and resistance to win in the future.
- Keeping each other safe - How we defend, protect and organize workers and communities in the cross-hairs administration, including undocumented immigrants, transgender people, and women, from repeated and new anti-worker tactics, such as worker surveillance, automation of work, data privacy, and workplace raids.
LRAN conferences have always included a range of workshops proposed and organized by attendees from labor, NGOs, and academia. We encourage all proposals to include intersections with environmental, racial, and gender justice issues. Proposals that include a range of participants from different fields or perspectives (i.e., academics and labor activists and organizers), and that clearly detail a focus on research-to-action case studies or new research skills will be prioritized. We encourage a wide range of formats that engage participants, including trainings, roundtable discussions, video/film screenings and panels.
Submit your proposal at the below link by COB Friday, February 21st 2025 at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdN2XFXWj7ULAR2BYAnIKaGVKKN1GZu9SecbahKdoacH1AQ4g/viewform?usp=sf_link
LRAN 2025 strives to be an accessible, multilingual conference. Interpretation and other supports for access needs are available upon request. Please denote which languages in your proposal and any additional access needs. This conference is in person only. More detailed information about the conference will be provided when registration opens in the spring. Please feel free to reach out to Erin Johansson (erin@jwj.org) with any further questions or if you have any specific needs that you feel need to be addressed.
