The Wattis program, which technically started earlier this month with a talk by curator Makeda Best, will include research exhibitions, reading groups, talks and screenings. The entire six-month period is split into three parts, per the 19th-century workers’ slogan: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, 8 hours of what you will. The first exhibition, which features materials from the San Francisco Labor Archives and ephemera from the California Labor School, will host an opening reception on Nov. 7.
For his part, Carlsson encourages everyone — not just those on his tour — to contemplate their own role in “waking up in the morning and producing this world instead of, potentially, a different world.”
“How might that different world look if you could really make the decisions that influence the shape of that world, in terms of the labor you do, the technologies you employ, the relationship we have with nature, the way we relate to each other and other populations from other places?” he asks.
San Francisco, Carlsson writes in the essay “The Progress Club—1934 and Class Memory” (recommended reading before Saturday’s tour), “has been an important test site for our society’s most advanced techniques for improving and extending the control of capitalism.” The city’s once-vaunted labor movement has been reduced, he writes, from a roar to a whisper.
But perhaps the movements and tactics of the past, hiding in former industrial sites, under ballparks and along redeveloped waterfronts, can help us start to visualize what these organizers were working towards. Here in the present, we can try to picture, as Carlsson puts it, “a profoundly humanistic and engaged life on this planet.”
‘Hidden San Francisco: A labor history tour with Chris Carlsson’ takes place Nov. 1, 2025, 1–3 p.m., starting at Chula Lane and Dolores Street. The tour is free with RSVP. Participants must bring their own bikes.