Abstract
What roles should women’s labor education play in the twenty-first-century labor movement? This question sparked a series of research, collaboration, and long-range planning activities undertaken by the Union Women’s Labor Education Project starting in 2013. This article builds on work undertaken to date by the Union Women’s Labor Education Project (in collaboration with the Women’s Caucus of the United Association of Labor Educator [UALE] and the Berger-Marks Foundation), presenting a new analysis of relationships among women’s labor education, leadership development, and movement building, with a particular focus on regional UALE women’s summer schools as a case study.
We don’t want to strengthen what we have. We want to transform what we have!
What roles should women’s labor education play in the twenty-first-century labor movement? This question sparked a series of research, collaboration, and long-range planning activities undertaken by the Union Women’s Labor Education Project starting in 2013. Under the leadership of the Women’s Caucus of the United Association for Labor Education (UALE) and in partnership with the Berger-Marks Foundation, the project ultimately brought together twenty-six women representing diverse women’s labor education programs—including single- and multiunion programs, university labor education programs, state-based or regional programs, and workers’ centers—who gathered at a four-day retreat at the historic Highlander Center in the fall of 2014 to discuss this larger question. Drawing on survey data, collected curricula, and multiple generations’ worth of labor educators’ expertise, retreat participants assessed strengths and weaknesses of existing women’s labor education programs and looked ahead to the future.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor (2015), women now make up nearly 50 percent of the U.S. workforce yet continue to earn less than men, are segregated into low-wage jobs, and lack critical support such as paid family leave, paid sick days, affordable child care, health insurance, and pensions. Moreover, while women are fast approaching half the membership of unions and union women earn more and have better benefits than nonunion women (Schmitt and Woo 2013), they remain underrepresented at all levels of leadership in most established labor organizations. At a February 2015 meeting, AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Liz Shuler told the AFL-CIO Executive Council, “We haven’t done a good job of selling ourselves as a movement that gets it,” and pointed out that women head only seven of fifty-one AFL-CIO state labor federations and hold only 31 percent of secondary offices in those bodies. Shuler went on to argue that “We have a unique opportunity to be the place where all women—across class, race and immigration status—can come together and make the case for fair treatment and a fair economy” (Gruenberg 2015). This same vision has long been a primary goal of women’s labor education—linking women’s workplace struggles to broader social justice movements, while moving diverse groups of women into leadership roles at all levels of the labor movement.
This article builds on work undertaken to date by the Union Women’s Labor Education Project (hereafter “the Project”), presenting a new analysis of relationships among women’s labor education, leadership development, and movement building, with a particular focus on regional UALE women’s summer schools as a case study. Expanding on the Project’s final report (Shaughnessy et al. 2015), the opening section provides an overview of the history of education for women workers in the United States, starting with the Women’s Trade Union League in the early twentieth century and leading up to the (re)establishment of regional union women’s summer schools in the 1970s.
A second section focuses on contemporary women’s summer schools as a case study of existing relationships between women’s labor education and women’s leadership development. A new vision statement developed by Project participants gathered at the 2014 retreat articulates the multifaceted mission and purpose of such schools: The four regional UALE summer schools, (Western, Midwest, Southern, and Northeast) provide a space and time for women in the broad-based labor movement to come together to develop leadership and create community with women from other unions and organizing projects. Summer school is a place where women build their skills, confidence and knowledge of the forces shaping our workplaces, families, and communities. It is a place for transformation, where women can be supported as agents of change. It is a place for building solidarity across unions and alternative labor and community organizations. In addition, summer school provides a safe space to examine the ways that gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, sexual identity, and other forms of oppression serve to divide us, and helps us find ways to unite around our common struggles. The education model we embrace is education for action. Our approach is learner-centered, experience-based, and participatory, leading to individual and collective change. (Shaughnessy et al. 2015) To assess how women themselves experience such programs, we present results of a 2014 survey of contemporary UALE summer school attendees within the framework of recent scholarship on women’s leadership development. Survey results coupled with retreat discussions and subsequent Project outcomes confirm that multiunion summer schools continue to serve as a unique gateway to leadership for rank-and-file women, offering opportunities to develop confidence and skills necessary to take on new roles, forge solidarity across unions, and situate themselves in relation to a larger, increasingly diverse, and changing labor movement. It is also clear that the women’s labor education faces challenges and must evolve along with a changing labor movement that faces severe economic and political challenges in a global economy. The need to identify, mentor, and support new young leaders is more important than ever to union survival, growth, and effectiveness. The AFL-CIO has launched a new Young Worker Leadership Institute, a National Labor Leadership Institute, and unions across the country have created new leadership programs (such as United Steel Workers’ [USW] “Next Generation,” American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees’ [AFSCME] “Next Wave” and “Women’s Leadership Academy,” International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ [IBEW] “Reach out and Engage Next-Gen Electrical Workers [RENEW],” and many others).
A third and final section of this article thus considers how new tools and emerging institutional structures created via the Project might provide significant new guidance and support for summer school coordinators and instructors, while identifying some of the serious challenges summer schools continue to face. Given the importance of developing new women leaders, we argue that efforts to meet these challenges will complement the new labor education programs and lead to a stronger labor movement for all workers.
History of Women’s Schools in the United States
If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you’re going.
In 1975, the Task Force on Programs for Union Women within the University and College Labor Education Association (UCLEA; the predecessor of the UALE Women’s Caucus) was established (Wertheimer 1981b). Their major contribution was the establishment of the first regional summer school hosted by the University of Connecticut in 1976. With the support of the AFL-CIO and the newly formed CLUW, the schools soon expanded to four regions (Northeast, Southern, Western, and Midwestern), creating a pattern still followed today for regional, multiunion women’s summer schools hosted on a rotating basis by university-based labor education programs in partnership with unions. Such schools were not established in a vacuum but were rooted in a rich history of women’s labor education that preceded the explosion in women’s labor union membership in the post–World War II period.
One hundred years ago, the Training School for Women Organizers was established by the National Women’s Trade Union League in Chicago. This was the first residential workers’ education program in the United States. Between 1914 and 1940, there were at least ten women’s educational programs with residential components throughout the industrial North and South. In the 1920s, comprehensive programs such as the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women in Industry and the Southern Summer School for Women Workers emerged, tailored to the needs of wage-earning women. At their peak in 1930, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) held ten-day summer conferences where fifteen thousand women received leadership training (Frederickson 1984a; Kornbluh and Frederickson 1984).
Women’s programs were rooted in the Progressive movement, which saw education as one way to improve the lives of all workers. They were complementary to, but not part of, the labor movement. Other worker education programs that developed during this period were coeducational but served mostly men who made up the large majority of union members. In 1921, the University of California at Berkeley joined with the California State Federation of Labor to form the first labor extension service. Other schools independent of labor but rooted in the socialist tradition included Brookwood Labor College in New York, founded in 1921, and the Highland Folk School, established in 1932 in Tennessee (Kornbluh 1987).
Women’s programs of this era had a strong humanistic approach, with weeks and sometimes months to explore economics, history, literature, and psychology, as well as music, art, and theater (Kornbluh and Frederickson 1984). Rather than relying on traditional hierarchical teaching, instructors engaged in popular education teaching techniques that included role-playing and the discussion method, driven by workers’ own lived experiences. Women were encouraged to write journals, songs, and plays. They learned from each other as well as from instructors in a democratic setting. Classroom learning was intended to lead to social action (Kornbluh and Frederickson 1984).
A cross-class collaborative approach brought elite women and factory girls together. The students were often immigrants with little formal education and English as a second language. The instructors were primarily college-educated middle- and upper middle-class women (and some men) who were social reformers concerned with suffrage rights, workers’ rights, class inequality, and racial justice. The schools were funded through the efforts of progressive reformers with ties to the settlement house movement, progressive social reform, and women’s colleges. Kornbluh and Frederickson (1984, xv) conclude that “each program sought to provide experiences that would give women workers needed information, personal and organizational skills, and support for their participation in the labor force and in workplace organizations.”
The schools often introduced women from different religious backgrounds (Protestants, Catholics, and Jews) to each other for the first time, while some, but not all, addressed racial issues. Schools in northern states, such as the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women, were integrated and included women from different racial and religious backgrounds. Consumer and labor activist Esther Peterson—a white women raised in a Mormon household in Utah—recalled using a common racially derogatory slur while teaching at the Bryn Mawr School. The students grew quiet and explained to Peterson why her “off-the-cuff” remark was racist. Peterson (1976) realized at that moment that she too had a lot to learn. Such racial inclusion was not the norm, however, and it did set the Bryn Mawr School apart from others. The Southern School for Women Workers made a conscious decision not to challenge the segregation of the Jim Crow South in their residential program. They drew solely on white wage-earning women who, like the Lowell Mill girls a century earlier, had left their agricultural life to work in textile mills (Frederickson 1984b).
As unions grew during the Roosevelt Administration, workers’ education was increasingly folded into union activities, with women attending training programs offered by their unions. Unlike the humanist popular education model of summer schools, many unions focused on skills training in subjects like grievance handling, contract negotiation, and parliamentary procedure, as administration of collective bargaining agreements became more widespread under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Some unions like the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union [ILGWU] had their own education programs, but by the late 1930s, they too began to shift from broad cultural education to include union skill-specific training (Katz 2011; Kornbluh and Frederickson 1984).
Many former women’s schools instructors joined New Deal programs or took staff positions with unions during this period. Hilda Worthington Smith, founder of the Bryn Mawr School (which had shut down in the early 1930s), joined the Roosevelt administration as a specialist in Workers Education in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, where she developed the “She-She-She Camps” to train unemployed women under the New Deal (Kornbluh 1984). Caroline Ware and her husband Gardner Means—both Bryn Mawr instructors—also took positions with the New Deal administration. Similarly, Esther Peterson, the instructor who was schooled by her students, took a staff position with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA). In the late 1930s, Hilda Smith founded the Hudson Shore Labor School for women and men, and the Southern School also began to admit men (Kornbluh and Goldfarb 1981).
Starting in the 1940s, in an effort both to recognize the increased number of women workers and to quell the frustrations and, in some cases, the protests among industrial women workers who were displaced during the post–World War II reconversion, many industrial unions established women’s departments (LaBarbera-Twarog 2011). For example, the large and powerful United Automobile Workers Union (UAW) formed a Women’s Bureau that later became its Women’s Department. Led by Carolyn Davis, the focus was on achieving equal pay for equal work, equal seniority protection, and ending discrimination in hiring, promotion, and training. In 1952, the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE) passed a resolution calling for equal pay and an end to discrimination. African-American women like Gloria Johnson in the IUE and Addie Wyatt with the United Packinghouse Workers began to assume leadership roles, joining women such as Esther Peterson from the ACWA and Kitty Ellickson at the AFL-CIO (Cobble 2004).
Union women were very much a part of the social changes that took place during the second half of the twentieth century. What historian Dorothy Sue Cobble called “the other women’s movement” sought equality at work while also recognizing women’s multiple identities. Their steady advocacy during the 1940s and 1950s formed the basis of President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1961. Under the leadership of union women such as Esther Peterson, then an assistant secretary of Labor and director of the Women’s Bureau, for the first time, the federal government undertook a comprehensive assessment of women’s status at home and in the workplace and acknowledged discrimination against women. With the Commission’s support, the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, shortly before the final report was issued. By the late 1960s, women union leaders such as Dorothy Haener of the UAW, Catherine Conroy of the Communication Workers of America, and Betty Talkington of the IBEW and Iowa AFL-CIO helped found the National Organization for Women (NOW), an organization the UAW’s Solidarity House in Detroit played a crucial role in supporting (Love 2006; O’Farrell 2015; O’Farrell and Kornbluh 1996).
The shift in focus to sweeping goals such as women’s equality was not uniformly supported by all women union leaders. Esther Peterson, for one, saw the broad calls for equality as short-sighted. In an oral history, Peterson (1976, 287-288) recalls, . . . the phony stuff that just got me. Those women were for long-distance things but not for real gutsy immediate things . . . There was no doubt about it that the long-range goal would be to have the Equal Rights Amendment. But the long-range goal was not to have the Equal Rights Amendment until we had in place a little bit more equality for the low-income working women.
Similarly, Myra Wolfgang, a leader in the Hotel Employee and Restaurant Employee Union (HERE), led a campaign against the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment for fear that it would diminish protections already in place for working women (Cobble 2004).
Meanwhile, many union women did not feel the women’s movement was addressing their needs. In 1974, over three thousand union women gathered in Chicago to form an organization that would bring the women’s movement and labor movement together in an effort to build women’s leadership within the labor movement, organize nonunion women workers, raise issues of gender within the labor movement, and engage more women in politics (Roth 2003). Calls for greater equality in the workplace and in the labor movement led union woman of all industries and races to seek more opportunities for leadership development.
The landscape of labor education was also transformed from the 1950s to 1970s. While proposed national legislation to support labor education extension services did not become law, university-based labor education programs expanded when, as Wertheimer (1984, 288) explains, “Increasing labor unrest and impatience with stringent governmental wage controls in the post war period led state legislatures to fund labor education centers at state universities in an effort to promote industrial peace.” From within these programs in the late 1970s—at a moment when faculty and students were agitating for the establishment of women’s, ethnic, and racial studies departments and when numbers of working women were on the rise—a new generation of university women labor educators began advocating for labor education programs directed at women. Led by Barbara Wertheimer, the founder of Cornell University’s Institute for Women and Work, with the support of Lois Gray, then associate dean and director of Extension and Public Service at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and Joyce Kornbluh, founder of the Program on Women and Work at the University of Michigan, these women reintroduced the idea of women’s summer schools to colleagues at the UCLEA. The educators highlighted how few women were in union leadership positions and their correspondingly sparse representation in leadership education programs.
As women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers in the 1970s and 1980s, the demographics of union membership also changed. Despite an overall decline in union membership from the 1970s forward, by 1977, 27 percent of union members were women (Wertheimer 1981a). Despite an overall decline in union membership from the 1970s forward, the proportion of women in unions continued to steadily rise from 18.6 percent in 1956 to 24.2 percent in 1978, to 37 percent in 1988 (Milkman 1985, 2007). Even though women continued to be concentrated in the lowest paying jobs, the share of union membership for white women and women of color steadily increased, in part due to organizing and growth in the public sector. Despite their increased presence in the workforce and in the labor movement, women continued to face barriers to education and leadership. They identified personal barriers such as lack of self-confidence and family responsibilities, economic concerns about the cost of courses as well as expenses such as child care, and institutional failures in recruitment, lack of support in the programs, and materials and instructors that did not reflect the women’s experiences (Elkiss 1994; Wertheimer 1981b, 7).
For university-based labor educators and women in union leadership positions, the time was ripe for a renewal of women’s labor education. Women workers flocked to the early summer schools, but the necessary institutional support did not immediately follow. For example, Marge Rachlin (2014), a labor educator at the now-shuttered George Meany Center for Labor Studies, ran the first Southern Women’s Summer School in Montreat, North Carolina, in 1977. While loosely coordinated through the labor program at Florida International University, she recalled, “I had to put up the down payment at Montreat myself.” Although unions and universities were initially reluctant to support the schools, key women like Dorothy Shields, director of the Education Department at the AFL-CIO, offered “cautious, but effective support,” in the words of Rachlin. And within the Ivory Tower, women labor educators “stood up quietly and tactfully to their bosses” to secure critical support from host institutions.
The new women’s residential summer schools entered the landscape of, by then, well-established labor education programs that included both university and union-sponsored short courses, conferences, and credit programs at the local and national levels. While loosely based on the Bryn Mawr model, there were differences. The new schools were much shorter, typically lasting three to five days, and tended to focus on skills courses such as contract enforcement along with developing union leadership skills. Cross-class collaboration was replaced by an emphasis on union and university collaboration through team teaching. Yet placing women’s experiences within broader economic and political frameworks remained a central aim of the schools, along with the concept of education leading to action. The schools continued to provide women a space where they could share experiences and develop self-confidence and skills to assume more leadership back home (Wertheimer 1981b).
Over the course of the past thirty years, several other state and regional women’s schools were founded in addition to the UALE summer schools. In recent years, many unions and workers’ centers have established their own women’s labor education programming and conferences aimed at building women’s leadership on the local and national level. Reflecting this diversity, Project retreat participants included both experienced UALE summer school coordinators and women labor educators based in unions and workers’ centers (see Appendix B for a complete list of participants).
In 2000, Workers’ Education Local 189 (formed in the 1920s) and UCLEA (started in 1960) merged to form the UALE, dedicated to “promoting education as an essential tool in the process of union transformation, to develop new leadership, and to strengthen the field of labor education” (UALE 2014). UALE has carried on support for the Union Women’s Summer Schools as part of this mission. Starting with one of the earliest schools in 1977 that drew seventy participants to 2014 when the four regional schools enrolled over three hundred participants, the summer schools have cumulatively reached thousands of women over four decades.
Today, the four schools rotate between three to five university labor programs within each region. They range in size from fifteen to two hundred participants and in length from three to five days. While format and teaching styles differ, each school offers a core leadership component, skills workshops such as grievance handling and public speaking, and plenary sessions often focused on broad economic, political, and international issues, as well as labor history, cultural programming, and collective actions. All the schools are increasingly reaching out to immigrant communities, younger women, and the new alt-labor organizations such as workers’ centers, minority unions, or issue-focused groups such as “Fight for 15.”
The residential schools are designed by committees of labor educators from unions, workers’ organizations, and universities. They bring together rank-and-file workers, union officers and staff, as well as members of community-based worker organizations. The schools are a place where women can share experiences and give one another support. A standard measure of success has been examples of women who attribute their union leadership, at least in part, to this transformative experience. The 2014 Union Women’s Leadership Education Project attempted a more in-depth assessment of the schools and their effectiveness, and in the next section, we share some of the project’s findings.
Women’s Labor Education and Gendered Leadership Gaps
I would not be involved in my union at all without the tools I got from summer school.
Today, almost half of union members—45.9 percent—are women (Schmitt and Woo 2013). Yet the limited research conducted on women in unions continues to document personal and institutional barriers to women attaining union leadership positions. Despite the recent election of several women to visible, top-level union leadership positions (e.g., Liz Shuler, IBEW, is the first woman and youngest person ever elected as secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, Randi Weingarten is president of the 1.5 million-member American Federation of Teachers [AFT], and Mary Kay Henry is president of the 2.1 million-member Service Employees Union), in most unions, women remain vastly underrepresented in elected or staff positions at national, state, and local levels in proportion to their numbers (Gray 2001; Kaminski and Yakura 2008). In a new survey of black women union leaders, 65 percent of respondents said they had aspirations to become a union leader, but 49 percent said there is a “glass ceiling” preventing many black women from attaining such positions (Brown and Bayard 2015). At the same time, both anecdotal reports and existing research often cite labor education and programming specifically for women as positive leadership development experiences (Gray 2001, 2014; Hanson 2012; Kirton and Healy 2004; Twarog, Worthen, and Ancel 2015).
At the 2013 UALE Conference in Toronto, recent coordinators of UALE summer schools exchanged reflections on the continuing importance of regional women’s summer schools as well as the significant challenges the schools face in sustaining themselves and expanding their impact. UALE Women’s Caucus members also observed that at a time when new urgency about labor’s future had spawned increased commitments from unions and the AFL-CIO to high-level multiunion leadership development programs and young worker programs, these commitments had not necessarily encompassed new or renewed commitments to labor education specifically for women. Likewise, though the regional women’s summer schools originated as a project of UALE’s predecessor organization, the UCLEA, and continue to be one of UALE’s signature annual projects, generational transitions in the field of labor education had left many UALE members unaware of the schools’ history and contemporary function.
Data and Method
Members of the Women’s Caucus developed a proposal for UALE to collaborate with the Berger-Marks Foundation, a foundation dedicated to bringing the benefits of unionization to women workers and to assist organizations committed to those principles. The proposed project was designed to build on existing relationships between UALE and the Berger-Marks Foundation, which had in recent years provided much-needed scholarship funding to support greater participation of younger women and women of color in the regional summer schools. Berger-Marks Foundation representatives had previously approached UALE Executive Board leadership about interest in assessing the summer schools and funded a preliminary round of observations of all four schools (O’Farrell 2011). In 2014, Berger-Marks agreed to fund a year-long project to assess current practices, evaluate program outcomes, and strategically plan ways to increase the impact of women’s leadership development programs (Shaughnessy et al. 2015). The resulting UALE/Berger-Marks Union Women’s Labor Education Project represented the first attempt since 1981—when founders of the regional summer schools took time to outline the schools’ goals and outcomes after five years—to assess the impact of the regional summer schools (Samper and Rosen 1981; Wertheimer 1981a).
The Project’s preconference assessment phase included a survey of recent summer school participants, intended as an exploratory effort to identify trends and to provide guidance for subsequent retreat discussions. An examination of the Project survey’s open-ended responses in conjunction with a look at recent scholarship on women’s labor union leadership development offers some of the first concrete insights we have into how women today view their summer school experiences in relation to their self-perception, their roles in their unions, and their leadership journeys one to two years after having attended a summer school.
Electronic surveys were sent in the spring of 2014 to email addresses available for over five hundred women who had attended one of four regional women’s summer schools in 2012 and 2013. One hundred eight women responded. Responses came from forty-one women who had attended summer schools in 2012, fifty-eight women who had attended summer schools in 2013, and ten who had other relationships to the summer schools. In numbers that are somewhat reflective of the relative sizes of the regional schools in recent years, fourteen came from women who attended the Midwest school, thirty-four from the Northeast, two from the South, and forty-eight from the West. Survey respondents were primarily women union members, including twenty-eight who identified themselves as union officers, forty-two who identified themselves as stewards or delegates, and twenty-four union staff (respondents were able to mark more than one category of union activity). Three responses came from women in workplaces without unions and seven from women who self-identified as members or staff of community-based organizations or workers’ centers.
Findings and Discussion
Broadly speaking, our survey results corroborate the findings of earlier research suggesting a direct link between participation in women’s labor education programs and subsequent increases in union activity or movement into elected union office (Elkiss 1994; Gray 2014; Hanson 2012; Kirton and Healy 2013; Twarog, Worthen, and Ancel 2015). To more closely analyze the dimensions of this impact on contemporary summer school attendees, we draw on the model of women’s union leadership development outlined by Kaminski and Yakura (2008, 463-464), who observe that women who pursue and attain leadership positions in unions often move through four distinct phases of development: (1) finding one’s voice, or “understanding oneself as a person with power in an organizational setting”; (2) developing basic skills, which might mean “working on a committee, taking workshops . . . or learning a technical skill that is central to the union”; (3) figuring out the politics, or understanding “how things really get done in the union”; and (4) setting your own agenda by “initiat[ing] and lead[ling] projects that others carry out.” In suggesting interventions to assist women at each stage of development, Kaminski and Yakura (2008, 468) themselves note the importance of women’s summer schools for those seeking to “develop basic skills,” and our survey results indeed confirm that many women view summer schools as an important opportunity to attend “skills courses” within a “supportive environment.” Our survey results further suggest, however, that summer schools also appear to provide important leadership development support to women at all four stages of development, including some who attend while in early stages of “finding their voices” and those who attend after already having attained positions in which they are “setting their own agendas.”
Survey Responses
Surveys emailed in 2014 to addresses available for 553 women who participated in UALE women’s summer schools in 2012 and 2013 resulted in 108 responses (19.5% response rate). Although from a self-selected (and therefore nonrepresentative) sample of attendees, survey results nonetheless reinforce instructor and coordinator anecdotal observations that participants associate summer school attendance with significant impacts on their self-confidence, increased activity in their home organizations, and effectiveness in leadership roles.
In response to the open-ended question “What impact did summer school have on your involvement with your union or organization?” seventy-three of ninety respondents who wrote answers identified a specific impact on their levels of confidence, skill, knowledge, engagement, activity, or leadership (fifteen respondents reported no impact). In order to analyze the types of outcomes women associated with attendance at summer school, we coded answers according to five categories of self-reported impact: Increased Motivation or Confidence, Increased Competence, Increased Action, Increased Relationships, and No Impact. Twenty-one respondents associated summer school attendance with Increased Motivation or Confidence, an impact that was often linked to new perceptions of themselves as an important part of a larger whole, and a strengthening of their voices in the context of experiencing support and solidarity from others. Examples of answers in this category include the following:
“More confidence. More communicative and supportive of diversity in sister members.”
“Made me feel more secure in what I am doing.”
“Changed the way I saw myself—joined to something bigger than I had ever imagined. Very empowering experience.”
“I grew stronger knowing that I have the support from my sisters. I have realized how important it is for women to step up in our locals and become strong leaders. I think we are the new leaders for the labor movement.”
“Gave me a stronger sense of solidarity and more confidence in my role in the labor movement.”
Answers in this category correspond closely to the first stage of leadership in Kaminski and Yakura’s four-stage model. Kaminski and Yakura (2008, 463) refer to this stage as “finding one’s voice” and associate it with “the first step in understanding oneself as a person with power in an organizational setting.”
Twenty-four respondents linked new skills, tools, or knowledge acquired at summer school to Increased Competence to carry out duties associated with leadership roles. Answers in this category came, in many cases, from women who described themselves as active leaders prior to attending summer school, and who viewed summer school as an opportunity to deepen competence in areas that would expand or improve their capacity to carry out current leadership roles or prepare them for moving into new roles. Examples included the following:
“My leadership role hasn’t changed, but I was a new local president, and what I learned at [summer school] has helped me.”
“My leadership role didn’t change, but the school helped keep me updated on current events and ideas. Being Chief Steward full time where I work is challenging to say the least and any education is great.”
“I stepped up my involvement on a national level and made use of the information and techniques I learned at the summer school.”
“It gave me tools to be a more effective leader in the roles that I am in.”
“Enhanced my ability to advocate for members.”
Answers in this category correspond closely to Kaminski and Yakura’s second stage of leadership development, “developing basic skills,” and it is not surprising that women who have already “found their voices” and assumed local leadership roles highly value the summer schools as a means to develop new skills, knowledge, and tools that can increase their effectiveness.
Kaminski and Yakura (2008, 465) dub the third stage of development “figuring out the politics,” characterized as “learning how things get done” in the union and “leading projects.” Of survey respondents who mentioned new skills or knowledge, four specifically referred to new understandings of union structures, rules, or systems as a key outcome of their summer school experience. Examples include the following:
“I was able to have a better understanding of union infrastructure, how to better develop political and legislative components of the program I staff.”
“Helped me understand union rules and limitations.”
“Better understanding of the union structures.”
Thirty-two women reported that their level of activity or involvement in their home organizations increased after attendance at the school. Of these, five indicated that they had attained or were in the process of seeking elected office within their unions, and another indicated that she was considering running for office. Two specified that their increased activity was focused on mentoring other women. Some respondents viewed their new levels of activity as entirely dependent on summer school:
“I’m running for a position on the bargaining team, would’ve never done it before [summer school].”
“I would not be involved in my union at all without the tools I got from summer school.”
A smaller group of eight women identified new relationships that resulted from networking opportunities at summer school as central to its lasting impact, and some linked their increased activity directly to new support networks they had established via summer school:
“I have started a women’s committee with the guidance of the women at the summer schools. It has been life changing, for me as well as my sisters in my union.”
“I am also able to build a friendship and support of sisters around the area that support and lift me up. They are there if I have questions or need something or just to talk.”
Women who valued the school primarily as a networking opportunity were often those who noted having already attained significant leadership positions, including those who participated in summer schools as facilitators, instructors, or staff.
“I had new tools and connections. As one of two educators at the training I learned so much about other unions.”
“Predominantly it was a great opportunity for me to network with union members and staff from other unions.”
“As the international affairs officer . . . For me the best impact is networking with other union officials and making international connections.”
These answers reflect experiences of women who appear to be in or moving toward the fourth stage of leadership development—“setting your own agenda”—and who see new relationships with peers, colleagues, or mentors outside their own organizations as a means to support their implementation of that agenda (Kaminski and Yakura 2008, 464).
A second open-ended survey question asked attendees to describe their “most important memory” from summer school. Of eighty-six women who wrote answers to this question, thirty-two hearkened back to positive experiences of Networking (new relationships with peers, role models or mentors), while powerful feelings of Solidarity (collective strength associated with expressions of mutual support, sisterhood, unity) were mentioned almost as often (twenty-nine responses). Experiences associated with Empowerment (increased or renewed feelings of self-worth, motivation, confidence, or faith in one’s potential) were recalled most strongly by twenty-one respondents, and another twenty-one recalled new Knowledge (information, ideas, skills, or resources). Of those whose answers fell into this category, four specifically mentioned exposure to the history of labor and/or women’s movements as their most powerful memory, and two recalled public speaking classes.
Fifteen respondents mentioned aspects of Diversity (exposure to or interactions with others from a range of different identities or backgrounds) in relation to their most important memories. While some answers from this category simply refer to “differences” or “a diversity of women,” specific types of diversity frequently mentioned include interactions with others from different unions, different states, regions, or countries, and different occupations. Except for one respondent who mentioned different “ethnicities,” identity categories such as race, age, and sexual orientation were not explicitly mentioned in any responses, though one respondent whose answer fell into the “Knowledge” category mentioned “discussions about discrimination” as her most important memory. Many women whose answers fit the “Diversity” category gave answers that also fit the “Solidarity” category (and less often also the “Empowerment” category), and often Diversity and Solidarity were explicitly linked in women’s memories:
“Sense of community with a diverse set of women and collectively feeling empowered”
“The diversity, the sisterhood”
“Meeting so many fabulous sisters in various union and roles and learning how to use our differences and similarities to build solidarity.”
Clearly, many women value the summer schools as spaces where aspects of “difference” are recognized and even celebrated within a context of interactions and activities that promote community and solidarity.
Survey responses suggest that the summer school experience can successfully offer concrete benefits to women who arrive at various stages of leadership development. For many women, the school is a place to “find one’s voice” and develop the consciousness and confidence necessary to begin actualizing their potential to speak and act within an organizational context. For others who are already seeking or assuming some level of organizational responsibility, it is a place to “develop basic skills” that will increase their level of competence or help them prepare to take on additional duties and new roles.
When asked to identify which summer school class was “most useful,” top choices among all respondents included leadership training, collective bargaining, labor law, public speaking, organizing, and grievance handling. Likewise, when asked which topics are “important to your leadership skills development in the next five years,” half of respondents said learning to facilitate leadership among members was important, while understanding labor and employment law was deemed important by nearly half; other frequently selected answers included communication skills, managing conflict, working with a diverse membership, and building consensus. Access to education on core leadership, communication, and representational skills appears to be seen and experienced by many attendees as essential to advancement, legitimacy, and self-confidence. Desires to deepen abilities to communicate well, work with diverse members, manage conflict, and build consensus speak to those seeking to “figure out the politics,” while for others who are already “setting their own agenda” in their organizations, the schools appear to be viewed as important sites for establishing new relationships with peers, building support networks, and engaging in mentoring.
Survey results also point out important challenges. Because only a small subset of four respondents mentioned impacts corresponding to Kaminski and Yakura’s third stage of leadership development, “figuring out the politics,” this may be an area where the summer school curriculum could be expanded. While summer schools are clearly meeting critical needs for women especially at the first two stages of leadership development, it is less clear whether they are assisting women with addressing the potential pitfalls of this third stage, which Kaminski and Yakura (2008, 464) describe as a frequent “danger point for aspiring women leaders” who, if they lack the tools to navigate unexpected political roadblocks or unsupportive local leaders, can too often “become disillusioned” or “disengage from labor activism.”
The positive experiences survey respondents report should likewise not obscure that for many women, significant barriers may remain to getting to school in the first place. When asked to identify any challenges that “made it difficult for you to attend the summer school,” thirty-nine respondents selected “cost,” and thirty-six selected inability to secure a scholarship. That nearly half of respondents in a survey sent only to women who did ultimately attend a summer school still identified “cost” as a barrier reveals the seriousness of this challenge. The next frequent answer, “child care,” received twenty-six responses, underscoring the importance of finding ways to incorporate child care or children’s programming into summer schools (while some schools have experimented with offering child care in recent years, it has not traditionally been offered).
In summary, survey responses confirm that many women associate summer school attendance with a concrete impact on their leadership capacity and activity upon return to their home organizations. Indications that summer school attendance is often correlated with self-reported increases in organizational activity or leadership, including in some cases election to office or appointment to new leadership roles, is a promising sign that the summer schools are fulfilling their mission to develop and promote women’s leadership.
Highlander Retreat Outcomes
According to one veteran labor educator, the 2014 Project retreat held at the Highlander Center marked the first time she really understood what all four schools were doing. In this section, we summarize the key findings and practical tools that were born out of this gathering of women labor educators.
Each of the four summer schools nominated two educators from union and university programs to attend the Project retreat based on conversations headed up by the planning committee’s regional representatives. Planning committee members consciously prioritized generational, geographic, and racial diversity in assembling the final group of attendees. To foster intergenerational knowledge transfer and mentoring, nominees included a mix of seasoned and newer coordinators of schools. Other union-based labor educators, university-based labor educators, and worker center educators were invited to share their experiences with women’s labor education, including two representatives from Canada. The retreat participants ultimately included three unions with strong internal women’s education programs, one worker center educator (two of whom were invited), a representative of the CLUW, and women experienced with other multiunion women’s summer schools such as the Regina V. Polk Women’s Labor Leadership Conference (Polk School) in Illinois, the Women’s Institute for Leadership Development (WILD) in Massachusetts, and the Prairie School for Union Women in Saskatchewan, Canada (see Appendix B for complete list of attendees).
During the four-day retreat, attendees
Assessed the scope and effectiveness of current multiunion women’s labor education and leadership development programs.
Shared best practices in program design, coordination, and participant recruitment methods.
Exchanged core curricular resources and established a process for creating an accessible archive of women’s leadership development curricula.
Crafted strategy to boost women’s leadership development capacity across programs and regions and, where appropriate, better align women’s schools with emerging labor movement leadership development priorities.
Built relationships among multiple generations of women’s school coordinators across regions and created infrastructure for ongoing collaboration.
This work led to the creation of three committees tasked with continuing work in key areas: Recruitment and Outreach, Coordinators’ Handbook, and Curriculum and Development. To be clear, the goal of these committees was not to enforce uniformity among the four schools. Rather, the committees’ goals were to embrace the diverse contributions of each regional school while also creating a cache of living tools that could be passed from school to school and generation to generation.
The Curriculum and Development Committee’s most immediate undertaking was the final drafting of a new vision statement (See Appendix A) and statement of principles. 1 Both of these statements were developed over the course of the retreat, as women used in-depth small group discussions to articulate and reach consensus on priority goals for women’s labor education. The resulting “Five Principles” of effective women’s labor education are as follows:
These principles were subsequently introduced at the 2015 UALE Conference in Orlando, Florida, as part of a plenary session titled “Women’s Labor Education and Leadership for a Changing World: Building the Future from the Ground Up” and then formally approved by the UALE Women’s Caucus as a guiding framework for all four regional summer schools. The long-term goal for the committee is to collect existing women’s labor education curriculum, develop an organizational system for the materials as well as link individual lesson plans to the Five Principles, and make materials available for use at the summer schools through a password-secure online website. Together, the vision statement and principles for the first time provide regional summer school organizers and participants with a unifying overview that ties the mission of the four schools together.
The work of the Recruitment and Outreach Committee focused on building upon the legacy of the schools and growing their capacity. Most immediately, the committee developed joint promotional materials for the 2015 schools that presented the schools as four parts of a whole. While this sounds quite obvious, our gathering and survey revealed that many women participants and instructors do not realize that their regional women’s school is part of a network of schools held annually. The committee’s second goal was coordinating a workshop at the UALE 2015 Conference focused on challenges and best practices associated with outreach and recruitment for the schools. Given the varying levels of attendance noted earlier (fifteen to two hundred participants), there are lessons and tactics to be shared as well as collaboration needed to add to the cache of tools.
The Coordinator’s Handbook Committee was charged with compiling planning materials from each school and drafting a handbook to serve as a roadmap for future coordinators to use in planning a successful summer school. Again, the purpose of the resulting handbook is not to mandate that schools coordinate themes, curriculum, or programming each year. Rather, the handbook is intended to be a flexible tool available to both new and seasoned coordinators, containing step by step instructions on everything from picking a location to forming a planning committee, writing a budget and fundraising to evaluating the school at its conclusion. The Handbook Committee precirculated a draft to all Highlander Retreat participants, and the revised working draft debuted at the 2015 UALE Conference. Future plans include soliciting feedback from each of the 2015 coordinators who have had the opportunity to use it. The Handbook is a living document, which will be available electronically to allow for its evolution. It will also be accompanied by sample documents (agendas, fliers, brochures, budgets, scholarship application forms, etc.) that coordinators may choose to use as templates.
Within two short years, women labor educators representing the broadly defined labor movement came together to create a new set of guidelines, instructions, and tools to plan the next forty years of women’s summer schools. The resulting tools are not exclusive to the UALE women’s summer schools and could be applied to the coordination of any multiunion women’s education program. But, to be clear, they are the outcome of the sweat equity of forty plus years of women labor educators collaborating, sharing experiences, making mistakes, and establishing shared norms and best practices for future schools.
A Road Map for the Future
. . . I think [women] are the new leaders for the labor movement.
Women’s labor education has historically lived on the periphery of both the feminist and labor movements from which it emerged. It has been perceived as “in addition to” and not as an essential component of the education of rank-and-file women union members. As our project and other studies demonstrate, multiunion, residential women’s labor education programs create unique spaces in which women can access the knowledge, skills, and relationships essential to movement through what Kaminski and Yakura (2008) describe as the four stages of women’s union leadership development: finding one’s voice, developing basic skills, figuring out politics, and setting your own agenda. Yet as Linda Briskin (2014, 119) recently observed, today, women workers are increasingly “. . . troubled by re-emerging challenges to the legitimacy of women-only spaces and the diminishing room for women to come together to build skills, discuss issues, and develop strategies.” The Union Women’s Labor Education Project has developed a useful set of principles and tools that can help guide the future planning of women’s summer schools. But tools will only take us so far.
If women’s summer schools, reimagined and strengthened to reflect a changing labor movement, are to build on forty years of experience and make positive changes for women and all workers in the twenty-first century, they will have to find ways to overcome a number of significant challenges. Moving forward, the work of the Project suggests a need to emphasize three areas—sustainable funding, recruitment, and collaboration. First, all four schools need to seek sustainable funding and sources of long-term institutional support both regionally and nationally. Second, the schools must prioritize the creation of spaces that welcome women who historically have either not attended or attended in low numbers—women who speak different languages, younger workers, workers outside of traditional labor unions, and women with child-care needs. Third, Project participants and school coordinators must actively sustain new forms of collaboration emerging within and across all four regions.
While resources are scarce and both union and university education programs face multiple pressures, Project findings underscore that existing structures and traditions associated with the regional summer schools offer a strong foundation from which to build. As noted earlier, historically, each region has functioned independently from the others. Taking the long view, some critical differences among the regions and their summer schools can be traced back to the industrial history of each region and the legacies of free and unfree labor (Frederickson 1984). Over the past forty years, variable staffing of labor education programs has also characterized regional differences. For example, in the Northeast, women labor educators who mentored a current generation of women labor educators ran many of the university-based labor education programs. By contrast, in the Midwest, despite the presence several strong women labor educators, such formal intraregional mentoring traditions did not develop. Additionally, given much lower union density and correspondingly fewer labor education programs, school coordinators in the South must contend with very different realities than those faced in the other three regions.
For many years, the Northeast and Western schools have had steadfast union partners and committed hosts based in university-based labor education programs. This is highly beneficial financially because host campuses know well in advance when they will coordinate an upcoming school. This, in theory, allows a host campus several years to reach out to area unions and organizations for funding and in-kind support. In the Midwest and Southern schools, however, such an established rotation has rarely existed, and, as a result, a campus may commit to host with less than six months to plan, making both recruitment and strategic fundraising much more challenging.
To extend the reach of each school, future summer school coordinators and the newly established Recruitment and Outreach committee will need to carry on work with existing partners to build relationships with many other unions, workers’ centers, and labor organizations in our regions. There is room to more fully engage international unions (especially those with strong women’s departments), central labor councils (CLCs), and state federations in this partnership as well. In the west, for example, the British Columbia Federation of Labor periodically hosts the summer school in rotation with several university-based programs. Such partnerships can potentially support the expansion and sustainability of women’s summer schools, while also demonstrating the important role that university-based labor education programs working in concert with unions can play in providing high-quality multiunion leadership development programming in each state. With the help of the Recruitment and Outreach committee as well as regional school coordinators, a move to integrate the summer schools into the educational programming of unions, CLCs, and state federations is possible. But it will require concerted efforts on the part of those already engaged in the summer schools along with a conscious effort to recruit more summer school organizers.
When the summer schools were reintroduced in the late 1970s, they received partial funding from UCLEA (now UALE), some grant-based funding as well as funding from the Department of Labor. The UALE has continued to support the schools with annual funding that often functions as critical seed money or scholarship funding, but this welcome support covers only a small portion of each school’s costs. And while the Berger-Marks Foundation has provided scholarship support in recent years, they are frequently the sole grantmaker, and this funding is not guaranteed from year to year. As new innovative apprenticeship programs are being funded by the Department of Labor, it is not without reason to consider looking toward other government-based funding opportunities. Going forward, multiyear funding commitments from unions, foundations, and other funders who understand and are committed to the holistic vision and significance of women’s summer schools will be essential to enabling schools to become sustainable and accessible on the scale necessary to meeting the needs of today’s labor movement.
Ongoing discussions within the UALE Women’s Caucus and among regional coordinators are attempting to address ways that planning committees can commit to structural changes that promote access to leadership education for all women workers—including multilingual outreach materials, programming, and planning; affordable child care; and scholarships for organizations that lack budgets to send women to the schools. Retreat attendees also committed themselves to “recruiting significant numbers of young women into future schools (with many citing 50% participation of young women as a goal for 2017 and beyond)” (Shaughnessy et al. 2015). New commitments to collect demographic data, centrally compile attendee and instructor contact information for each region on an ongoing basis, and implement new methods of follow-up with summer school participants may significantly help with both future recruitment and building stronger assessment-based cases for the schools’ impact and importance.
There is no question that planning committee members are committed to creating open and welcoming summer schools. Perhaps the most illustrative example in recent years is the 2012 Western Regional Summer Institute on Union Women hosted by the University of California at Berkeley’s Labor Center. Funding provided by the Center supported hiring of a dedicated skilled organizer to coordinate the school. Based on her ability to spend time conducting targeted outreach and recruitment over the course of several months, the 2012 summer school attracted over two hundred women workers from unions and alt-labor and offered courses in three languages (Mandarin, Spanish, and English). More typically, resource constraints mean that language interpretation is offered (if at all) on an as-needed basis, while promotional and registration materials are only available in English. Similarly, wide variations exist year to year and region to region in host institutions’ ability to offer child care or additional scholarships. New recruitment strategies must focus on immediate needs (registering an adequate number of women for each year’s schools) as well as long-term goals for building a new generation of labor leaders and educators.
Finally, collaboration is the piece that ties all of this together. Moving forward from the Highlander Retreat, there is a strong commitment across the regions to collaborate throughout the year. In the fall of 2015, the Recruitment and Outreach Committee plans to host a national conference call of all summer school coordinators to debrief the summer schools. Early collaborative planning is intended to better identify strengths and weaknesses as well as share ideas, curriculum, and tools for fundraising, recruitment, and organizing. Each of the new tools and structures developed via the Union Women’s Labor Education Project are designed in part to encourage coordinators to invite young labor educators and workers to the planning table and to encourage experienced labor educators to mentor new educators learning to practice participatory education models. Taken together, these collaborative efforts have the potential to transform the summer schools into a cohesive program that increases the impact of labor education on women’s leadership development.
Conclusion
Women’s labor education programs, and residential summer schools in particular, have a long and ongoing track record of successfully launching women into local, regional, and national leadership roles within their organizations. This success has, however, always been limited both by the number of women who are able to access the schools and by persistent systemic barriers to women’s access to leadership positions at work and in their unions. If women’s summer schools, reimagined and strengthened to reflect a changing labor movement in the global economy, are to build on forty years of experience and make positive changes for women and all workers in the twenty-first century, they will need to overcome these challenges.
The final report of the Union Women’s Leadership Education Project calls for an ambitious program to renew and expand the summer schools’ mission for the twenty-first century, including Aggressive recruitment of young women through issues they care most about, greater institutional buy-in, social justice curriculum that speaks to young and immigrant workers, and curriculum that engages women in understanding the “big picture” (how political and economic systems operate). (Shaughnessy et al. 2015)
The history of women’s labor education, existing research on women’s development as union leaders, and new outcomes of the Union Women’s Leadership Education Project all suggest the urgent need to support these goals and to recognize women’s labor education as a key ingredient in building the strong, vibrant, and equitable labor movement today’s working women both desperately need and fully deserve.
Footnotes
Appendix A
Appendix B
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the peer reviewers and Elizabeth Hoffmann for helping us write a stronger, more focused article. We also want to acknowledge that this article is only possible because of the hard work and expertise of all the women who participated in the 2014 Highlander Retreat.
Authors’ Note
The authors were participants in the Union Women’s Leadership Education Project and have tried to accurately reflect the history, activities, and conclusions of the Project. Any errors of fact or interpretation, however, are solely their responsibility. These principles were presented and unanimously adopted by the United Association of Labor Educator (UALE) Women’s Caucus at the 2015 UALE Conference in Orlando, Florida. See Appendix A for the unabridged version of the Five Principles.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.