“Archives are often not an environment that working class people feel particularly comfortable in but all the wonderful archivists we met were able to prove to our volunteers that archives were for them and about them.”
Dr Greig Campbell, Labour and Social Historian
Giz a Job was a participant-led community project documenting the 1981 People’s March for Jobs when 500 protestors marched from Merseyside to London.
The 30-day march passed through 25 towns experiencing mass redundancies and culminated in Trafalgar Square for one of the biggest political rallies in post-war history.
Giz a Job was conceived in 2022 by Dr Greig Campbell, Working Class Labour Historian, alongside Liverpool’s Vauxhall Law Centre (VLC), which offers free advice and legal representation to people experiencing social welfare issues. Together, they secured funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and recruited 22 volunteers through VLC’s networks, local universities and arts organisations, and callouts through the Liverpool Echo and BBC Merseyside.
The project attracted a diverse range of volunteers, many of whom came from working class backgrounds. The cohort received training in archival research and exhibition curation from The Liverpool Central Library and Archives. They also visited The People’s History Museum, The Museum of Liverpool and the Working Class Movement Library to do archive research on The People’s March.
Following training with The Oral History Society, each volunteer conducted an oral history interview with someone from the march. These were combined with existing research to produce an exhibition at Liverpool Archives that 56,000 people attended. They created a 162-page book and a digital archive including excerpts from the interviews, which were all deposited at Liverpool Archives for public access. A mural was also installed in Liverpool by local artist John Culshaw.
Facilitators empowered the volunteers to take responsibility for the project but supported any who were nervous about the oral history interviewing. The project also focused on the marginalised groups who were poorly represented within The People’s March. This included women, people with disabilities and people of the global majority. Exhibition boards were produced on each group and volunteers assigned themselves to topics they were informed in through their lived experience.
Dr Campbell had initial conversations with interviewees to build trust and introduce them to the project before they were paired with a volunteer. As a facilitator, Dr Campbell’s professional experience working on anti-unemployment projects, and his personal experience growing up in a steel town where family members lost their livelihoods, contributed to a sense that people’s stories would be represented accurately and respectfully.
The facilitators commissioned an independent evaluation of the project and the team are now using this to inform a bid for another archive research project on The Kirkby Unemployed Centre. They hope to adopt a mentoring buddy system where new volunteers will be paired with the existing cohort from Giz a Job, but both will continue to receive training.