WHO WE ARE.
New Labor Forum is owned and edited
by the Queens College Labor Resource Center, City University of New
York, and published three times a year by the Taylor and Francis Group. The
first issue of New Labor Forum was distributed in Fall
1997. With the journal, we provide a place for labor and its allies to test new
ideas and debate old ones. Issues we explore include, but are not limited to:
the global economy’s impact on work and labor; new union organizing and
political strategies; labor’s new constituencies and their relationship to
organized labor’s traditional institutions; internal union reform and new
structural models for the labor movement; alternative economic and social
policies; and the role of culture in a new, revitalized labor movement.
New Labor Forum began in 1997 at a time of hope and a growing sense of revival after labor’s decades-long decline.
The times have grown more perilous since then. Labor faces enormous, perhaps life and death, organizational and political
challenges both at home and abroad. All the more reason for a journal dedicated to probing the strategic and practical
conundrums that must be resolved if those inspiring promises of just yesterday are to stand much chance of being kept.
Movement-building today takes place in a context that is radically different from that of labor’s pioneer days.
The current challenges are not just those posed by unionism’s traditional enemies. Now they include challenges posed
by an economy, society and a culture which are all undergoing rapid transformation.
WHO READS US. Our core constituency consists of leaders and
activists in organized labor, as well as intellectuals, academics and
community-based activists whose work is linked to the causes championed by, and
of interest to, organized labor. Our readers’ broad areas of interest cover the
entire range of the humanities and social sciences. We have a subscription base
of 2,000 readers.
WRITING FOR NEW LABOR FORUM
WHAT WE ASK OF
AUTHORS. We
seek concise, informed, well-argued articles.
Contributors should avoid jargon, assumptions, technical language, “academese,” and rhetoric.
Spell out full titles and put acronyms in parentheses at their first
use, including commonly used union acronyms. We are looking for what is
sometimes referred to as “high impact writing”: writing that is credible,
sharp, persuasive, and to the point.
Articles should start with a clear and pointed argument. We ask authors to avoid familiar rhetoric,
instead making provocative arguments or providing new, concrete information. For book reviews, we ask authors to go beyond
summarizing the book to engage with the contents of the book in question. We also ask that all references and notes be
incorporated, to the extent possible, into the main text of the article. Where
endnotes are necessary, please refer to The
Chicago Manual of Style, 14th Edition.
We exclusively publish work that has not been
previously published, and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere,
with the exception of specific arrangements made by the author with our
editors. When submitting
manuscripts, please either e-mail the document as an attachment or send a labeled
disk. (We prefer submissions in Microsoft Word format for IBM.)
EDITING PROCESS. We utilize a multi-tiered
editing process. One of our editors will
read each article and return comments to the author. Sometimes we will seek a second or third
round of revisions. We will send every
article to our publisher, who will copyedit, proofread, and make changes for
consistency. The publisher will send authors the proofs of their article for
review. The publisher will incorporate these changes and perform a final
proofread to ensure that the article is ready for publication.
