Since its founding in 2001, the Mundos do Trabalho (Worlds of Labor) Working Group of the Brazilian Historians Association has played a key role in the dissemination and exchange of the growing scholarship on the social history of labor in Brazil. The Working Group is the main network of scholars and labor historians in Brazil and effectively acts as our National Labor History Association. The group has been organizing national conferences every two years since its founding and held its first international conference in 2010—an expression of the growing impact of the academic debates around Global Labor History within Brazil.

The Second International “Mundos do Trabalho” Conference took place from November 27–30, 2012, in Rio de Janeiro. The meeting was jointly sponsored by the host institution, the Getulio Vargas Foundation (CPDOC/FGV), and the Working Group. The event was cosponsored by several Brazilian universities (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Fluminense Federal University, Federal University of Santa Catarina, and Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro) as well as a number of international institutions, such as the German project Re: Work and the Human Lifecycle in Global History Research Center of Humboldt University, Berlin, and the Dutch International Institute of Social History. It also had the support of CAPES and FAPERJ, both Brazilian funding agencies.

The 2012 meeting was the largest labor history conference ever held in Brazil, attended by more than three hundred researchers, scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and trade unionists and activists from all over the nation and seventeen other countries (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Mexico, the United States, Canada, Portugal, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Germany, Senegal, South Africa, Iran, and Turkey). Attendees enthusiastically participated in the thirty-five topical sessions and four roundtables. Many of the sessions offered simultaneous translations in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, the official languages of the event.

At the center of the conference were four roundtable discussions that brought together Brazilian and foreign scholars to discuss some of the current challenges confronting labor history both locally and worldwide: the interdisciplinary trends of the field; the current state of labor history in Latin America; the theoretical debates on the meanings of “work,” “labor,” and “working-class;” and the possibilities and challenges of a “global labor history.” The international group of scholars who participated in these discussions included Marcel van der Linden (the International Institute of Social History–Amsterdam); Peter Alexander (the University of Johannesburg); Andreas Eckert (Re:Work International Research Center, Humbolt University, Berlin); John French (Duke University); Rana Behal (University of Delhi); Carlos Illades (Universidad Nacional de Mexico); Mirta Lobato (Universidad de Buenos Aires); and Leon Fink (University of Illinois, Chicago), the editor of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. Among the Brazilian labor specialists in attendance were Angela de Castro Gomes (CPDOC/FGV), José Sérgio Leite Lopes (Museu Nacional/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), Adalberto Cardoso (State University of Rio de Janeiro), and Sidney Chalhoub (State University of Campinas, São Paulo).

The topical sessions covered a vast range of issues and themes. Most of them attempted to engage fundamental topics of Brazilian labor history from a broader, transnational perspective. This was particularly evident in the sessions dedicated to debates on the history of Brazilian slavery, manumissions, and abolition and its connection to working-class formation in the late nineteenth, and even the twentieth, century. Sessions also focused on the examination of labor-state relations, the role of labor courts, and the “populist” and “corporatist” political systems. In addition to addressing innovative approaches to some of the more traditional subjects of labor history as a discipline—such as trade-unions, strikes, gender issues, and working-class political participation—the Conference also advanced the discussion of topics less analyzed in our field. These included workers' education, literature, sports, rural workers, and labor and public history—both in terms of the portrayal of labor in history in general and the intersection of labor and public history in particular. Some of the sessions were designed to offer a comparative and transnational perspective and included the active participation of foreign scholars and students, particularly Latin Americans.

Before adjourning, the Conference elected Aldrin Castelucci (State University of Bahia) as the new National Coordinator of the Working Group “Worlds of Labor.” Footnote *The Third International “Mundos do Trabalho” Conference will take place in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, in 2014. In addition to organizing conferences, the Working Group publishes the electronic journal Worlds of Labor (http://www.periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/mundosdotrabalho).

The complete program of the Conference can be found at http://cpdoc.fgv.br/en/mundosdotrabalho/program.