Abstract
Labor education programs exist across the country. Some are parts of certificate- or degree-granting programs, others are sponsored and presented by unions, and still others are ad hoc community initiatives to address specific crises or needs. Other worker-education efforts are finding new life through community groups and activist initiatives. Labor education is an important component of the labor movement. It creates memberships that are engaged with what their unions are doing and are knowledgeable about what the labor movement has done and is attempting to do. Labor education can nurture the union leaders of tomorrow and build membership ranks that can withstand ideological, financial, and political attacks on organized labor. It also can mobilize membership to achieve a range of social justice goals, not only bettering themselves but also improving the world around them.
At the 2015 United Association for Labor Education (UALE) Conference, three panels of papers addressed this topic. This special issue of Labor Studies Journal (LSJ) presents five papers from these panels—four articles as well as an additional Innovations piece that discusses how one educator used community theater to transform labor education. The authors represent a range of disciplines—labor studies, political science, sociology, labor education, and crime and justice studies—and come from both sides of the Canadian/U.S. border. As they discuss labor education in a range of contexts—union halls, colleges and universities, worker institutes, summer schools, and community theater—the writers in this special issue address critical questions in understanding where labor education has been, what challenges remain, and how labor education might evolve in the future.
The article by Twarog, Sherer, O’Farrell, and Coney addresses women’s labor education programs, focusing specifically on residential summer schools. These programs have a rich history of enabling and empowering women to assume greater leadership roles at local, regional, and national levels. Today, annual regional summer schools continue to serve as critical multiunion settings for women’s leadership development and movement building, though the schools also face many challenges. Drawing on new survey data from recent summer-school participants and the deliberations of leaders in the field of women’s labor education, these authors discuss key components of union women’s leadership development coupled with the growing diversity of the labor movement. For example, to effectively serve the needs of today’s labor movement, the schools may need to offer classes in a range of languages, to offer child care for working mothers, and to secure greater financial assistance from unions and other sources. Such accommodations are critical not only to develop diverse groups of new women leaders in the labor movement but also to build a stronger labor movement for all working people. However, the authors emphasize that these changes in the residential summer schools cannot happen piecemeal in only certain geographic areas or without increased support. They must bring together stakeholders from different communities and be coordinated across the various regions of the United States that offer these summer schools. In doing so, women’s workplace concerns will become more clearly linked with wider issues of social justice, and the labor movement will benefit from more women in leadership positions.
Larson’s article explores how labor education can be a vital tool for the labor movement to heighten its solidarity with diverse communities. He warns that unions will face substantial difficulties in building bridges across demographic groups if they do not have greater understanding of the relationships between the criminal justice system and today’s “colorblind racism.” Larson specifically explores how the labor movement can engage with the Black Lives Matter movement. Labor educators, he writes, must teach about systemic and institutional racism. In doing so, Larson encourages them to draw on a range of examples—from specific incidents of police brutality to historic and structural analyses, such as that explained in the film, Slavery by Another Name. If antiracist analyses of racism and its intersection with crime-control policies and incarceration are not incorporated into current labor strategies, these communities will distance themselves from unions. As labor educators enable their students to understand the pervasive and persistent nature of antiblack racism in society, the students, the labor movement, and society at large will benefit.
Incorporating social justice issues into labor education is also a concern of Szymanski and Wells. In their article, they draw on their recent teaching experiences at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Center for Labor Studies to explore students’ understanding of the connections and contradictions between a worker’s skills and his or her wages. These State University of New York (SUNY) students tell Szymanski and Wells that they want to expand their skills in order to increase their earning power. Szymanski and Wells grapple, in their article and in their classroom, with how to educate their students about the many forces that determine one’s wages far beyond an individual worker’s skills. To raise their students’ consciousness of the social and political issues around wages, they invited low-wage services workers who were campaigning for $15 per hour. Sometimes, they found that their students were resistant to this perspective, especially since they had framed their own hard work as the key to their personal financial betterment. Other times, however, their students relinquished their belief in neoclassical human capital theory and embraced the understanding that social forces and societal power are what enables one group to enjoy higher wages than another group. In doing so, these students and teachers probed the meanings and importance of working for a social wage. After the panel of fast food workers, more students acknowledged that when working people gain baseline economic security—such as affordable housing, health care, and minimum wage—each individual worker will experience enhanced circumstances, detangling the concepts of individual skill from wage levels.
The article by Dolgon and Roth addresses the tension between skills training to enhance workers’ human capital and more radical class-conscious labor education, contrasting the current situations in the United States and Canada to inform their discussion. Dolgon, an American academic, and Roth, a professor in Canada, explain that while labor education in both the United States and Canada has drifted from the more class-conscious, radical roots, university-based Canadian labor education engages an ideologically oriented curriculum more than in the United States. For example, the authors contrast the unionist-focused labor education curriculum of the Canadian automobile industry with the U.S. Program for Emerging Leaders (PEL), where management cocreated the labor education curriculum, creating a less class-conscious program. Dolgon and Roth explain that labor education has become more about workforce development needs and competency-based education, lauded for increasing workers’ human capital and raising their wage levels. In contrast, they call for a new labor education that challenges corporatization, emphasizes class struggle, and employs a social justice pedagogy, engaging community members and building the labor movement. Dolgon and Roth contend that these programs should not be taught within colleges and universities but rather by unions themselves.
In the Innovations article, Walsh describes how he, himself, moved his labor education courses from the classroom and brought them to the community in the form of theater. A political science professor at the University of Colorado Denver, Walsh created the Romero Troupe, a community-based theater group, dedicated to telling the stories of working people. The students and community members drew on their own experiences and their own words to create their labor education and to educate others. Walsh calls for labor councils and unions to support arts-focused education- and consciousness-raising initiatives, working with the arts to educate their members and build bridges into the communities. He also challenges labor studies programs in colleges and universities to include arts-based activism and community theater within their programs and to provide financial support for faculty willing to lead these initiatives. While the challenges to such community-theater initiatives are substantial, Walsh provides examples from his own work to demonstrate how these efforts can produce profound educational opportunities outside the classroom and throughout diverse communities.
Labor education, despite its long history, continues to sit at the precarious intersection of formal higher education and labor union activism. The articles included in this special issue pose and address serious questions. They raise various possibilities for the future of labor education. Although the articles included in this special issue addressed different aspects of the discourse of labor education, they all contribute meaningfully to the debates on the current state of labor education and where its trajectory might and should be targeted.