The Labour Heritage Register aims to elicit an active engagement with heritage as a living, historically-based aspect of public life. All those interested in heritage whether documenting, preserving, or celebrating it - will find this book an invaluable tool. 

The Register is a guide to collections and sites of labour heritage in Sydney, its suburbs, and regional New South Wales. It contains 3 databases. 

The unique feature of the book is a list of sites that reveals the labour precincts of New South Wales. 

Unlike other heritage registers, which start from extant sites, this one has been constructed through systematic research of documentary sources like newspapers and commercial directories between 1890 and 1980. 

The data for each site is arranged by decade, so the list can be used not only to mark out labour precincts in the present but also to reveal the changing contours of the precincts over time. 

There is also a database of existing heritage sites of working-class leisure, housing and work. A third database lists labour memorabilia held by private persons and organisations. 

An introductory essay discusses the labour precinct as a patterned and historically changing set of sites where labour organising and education for citizenship occurs, and defines the relationship between labour and industrial heritage. 

Terry Irving is a labour historian and political scientist. He is Federal President of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, and an Honorary Associate in Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney. He writes on class analysis, labour intellectuals, and the history of youth politics. 

Lucy Taksa is President of the History Council of NSW, Vice President of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Director of the Industrial Relations Research Centre and member of the School of Industrial Relations and Organisational Behaviour at the University of NSW. Her research has focused on social and industrial protest, management history, community and the Eveleigh railway workshops.