Twenty-First-Century Workers’ Education in North America

Introduction

What is the current state of workers’ education and labor studies programs, and where should they rightly be located: at colleges and universities? In union halls? Or perhaps some “third place” or hybrid organization where popular education and class-conscious analyses can be leveraged for social justice? In the United States, university administrators and their corporate funders and trustees have successfully marginalized most labor-related programs and financially strangled college-based labor extension efforts (Giroux 2007; Luce 2005). Ironically, while labor studies withered over the past decade or so, civic engagement—the practice of linking students and faculty to community service, research, and action—has flourished. Yet even the integration of root cause scholarship with experiential pedagogy has faced a stiff neoliberal and right-wing attack to the point that many faculty and service-learning staff feel intimidated to speak openly about politics. Ironically, both worker education and civic engagement staff carefully construct curricula to avoid political engagement or pointed ideological critique, at the risk of offending administrators, foundations, and even the more conservative unions or agencies who occasionally fund them. Generally speaking, due largely to the newly corporatized nature of educational institutions, the course curricula of most social justice programs (including labor and civic engagement) housed in higher education lack any meaningful attempts to include a sharp, incisive, class-based analysis of social injustice (Etienne 2012; Kliewer 2013; Stoecker 2015).

For many, the civic engagement movement seemed promising. Building on the radicalization of student and civil rights movements in the 1960s and 1970s, many educators believed that developing pedagogy based in activist experiences and embedded community relationships could create not only a democratic form of education, but the kind of education that could revolutionize our own democracy (Giles, Stanton, and Cruz 1999; Saltmarsh and Hartley 2011; Saltmarsh and Zlotkowski 2011). But the field quickly foundered, stalled in its inability to challenge the forces of institutional stratification, growing professionalism, corporatized administration, standardized curricula, and the massive social and political inequalities of an increasingly right-wing, anti-intellectual mainstream. In the present neoliberal atmosphere of U.S. colleges, most worker education programs (where they still exist) and civic engagement programs (where do they not exist?) avoid radicalism, revolutionary critique, significant class analyses, or any serious attempt at using popular education pedagogy aimed at developing a revolutionary consciousness and social transformation. Sadly, the prospects of any immediate resolution to this dismal situation are faint, indeed.

To be sure, in Canada, worker education programs are generally relegated to the national, provincial, or local union bodies, while labor studies programs exist in their own silos, and are relegated to a handful of public universities and colleges across the country. The Canadian Association for Work and Labor Studies (CAWLS) lists only eight undergraduate labor studies programs, two college programs, two graduate programs, and four research institutes (CAWLS 2015). Civic engagement programs are a relatively new but growing phenomenon in Canada, and are often housed in the so-called “Work-Integrated Learning” (WIL) curriculum, which, as in the United States, espouses a highly individualized, antiradical, neoliberal pedagogy. Here, civic engagement is mentioned in the same breath as attributes such as “increased self-confidence,” and “personal growth” (Sattler 2011). But it is in the union halls that education programs using a “social unionist” approach (in contrast to U.S.-business unionism) have developed a radical (or a “radical-lite”) pedagogy. Baines (2008) writes that:

A social unionist approach [involves] representing their members at the bargaining table as well as within the wider political arena on a host of social and economic issues, and speaking for a broader working class and its allies on issues such as the environment, social programs, violence against women, health care, immigration, and world peace and international issues . . . National Canadian unions have been at the forefront of struggles for universal child care, as well as for fair trade, shelters for victims of domestic abuse, and expanded services for homeless people.

We are reminded by Baines that social unionism, also known as social movement unionism, has “. . . also buffered and slowed the impacts of neoliberal restructuring, or third-wave marketization, with unions providing active leadership and resources in defence of social programs and Canada’s relatively developed welfare state.” She notes that “Canada’s labour movement and labour studies programs have been shaped by these struggles within and against the American reality; however, they have a distinctive trajectory requiring distinctive analysis and solutions” (Baines 2008). Further complicating matters is the national-linguistic divide between a usually progressive Quebec and a lagging English Canada. Ironically, this relationship tends to parallel U.S.-Canada union relations where a Canadian branch of an international union pushes their U.S. parent “. . . beyond their usual business unionist agenda . . . opening up spaces for activists’ voices and reform agendas” (Baines 2008).

The trade union movement was born out of the determination to improve the position of workers in our society. Trade union education is, therefore, different from other kinds of education. It is not about developing skills that will improve productivity or about acquiring skills that will lead to better career opportunities. Rather, it is about defending working people and developing the understanding, commitment, and confidence to change and improve the world through class struggle (Gereluk 2001). While trade union education in Canada and independent worker education in the United States face similar corporate and neoliberal challenges, university-based labor education in the United States has tried to adapt to such challenges by appearing less radical.

A case in point: in a recent paper delivered to the United Association for Labor Education (UALE), Greg Mantsios (2015), the director of City University of New York’s (CUNY) Murphy Institute, reconceived worker education and labor studies, suggesting that, “labor educators can build on historical and contemporary models of ‘education for workers’ to integrate both liberal arts and job-related education into our field.” Using historic examples that included the International Ladies’ Garment Workers and Amalgamated Clothing Workers unions’ language and civics training, Mantsios called for a “reclaimed” “workforce development” “in the name of workers” that can “help workers master a ‘craft’ and land a desired job.” It seems hard to distinguish the purpose of this type of worker education from the kind of mainstream “social mobility” pabulum put forth by U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan, and workplace competency guru, Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University.

To be fair, Mantsios’s vision calls for a holistic educational enterprise that “integrates the social sciences and humanities into the educational experiences we as labor educators provide to workers.” As he explains in the introduction to the institute’s programming, “Murphy’s Labor Center is dedicated to research, public programming, and serving the needs of labor and the broader community,” including research and analyses for union use. Such claims for holism, however, sound more like accommodation when he asserts that, “labor educators can champion workforce development programs that put the needs of workers and workers’ movements first” (Mantsios 2015). Although individual workers may benefit financially from competency-based education that helps them gain new job skills and possible job promotions, one is hard-pressed to see how such efforts stimulate the labor movement or even local union organizing. The idea of integrating a critical humanities and social science curriculum with a focus on movement organizing and struggle does harken back to the kind of radical worker education that Ronald Filippelli (1980) once described as studying, “The impact of industrialization on the social structures, values, and traditions of society.” Filippelli continued:

While a class analysis frequently provides the underpinning for these investigations, it is class defined not merely by occupational categories, but by studying the impact of industrialization on people’s productive relations, their ideas, their families, and their social, cultural, and political organizations. This emphasis on working-class culture goes well beyond the study of the worker as a trade-union member. . . . it is the broader class experience that informs trade union activity and without which the study of labor organizations is of limited lasting value. If labor educators adopt this broader view, national labor unions and their leaders . . . will be de-emphasized in exchange for the study of those broader categories of workers once considered inarticulate and lost to history. The challenge to the instructor will be to provide an educational setting that will enable students to probe the nature of historical change on a scale that makes possible close observation and analysis. In short, labor educators must place worker-students in situations where, on a limited and manageable scale, they act as historians.

And sociologists, and economists, and anthropologists, but, most importantly, as historical materialists whose examination of history and the making of history must always be shaped by critical praxis.

Both the U.S. labor movement and its allies within higher education have been beaten badly over the last half century or so. Despite periodic murmurings of becoming more multicultural or rank-and-file driven, more attuned to burgeoning service sector or immigrant labor issues, or even adopting community organizing tactics and alliances, formal labor unions often teeter on the heels of irrelevancy (Clawson 2005; Fine 2007; Mantsios 1998; Milkman and Voss 2004; Moody 2014). To maintain some semblance of legitimacy with struggling workers while at the same time garnering depleted resources within higher education, we should not be shocked that the best that most university-related worker education groups can do is adopt a “wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing” approach—downplaying their radical intentions and anti-capitalism (if they exist)—in hopes of hunkering down and doing some good. But the wolf itself was long ago tamed by business unionism, Taft-Hartley, McCarthyism, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) merger, and formal labor’s split with most 1960s social movements (including the economy vs. environment debate that still poisons most labor/green coalitions). ¹ We are left with mostly old livestock dreaming of their mythological toothy days when class consciousness and popular education fueled a revolutionary consciousness of radical change from below. With little to no mention of genuine worker empowerment or a revolutionary class consciousness to challenge the neoliberal regime, little in Mantsios’s (or the bulk of any U.S. college-based worker education program for that matter ² ) parts ways with the platform of the U.S. Democratic Party, or for that matter, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, which bills itself as “The Voice of Canadian Business™” (Canadian Chamber of Commerce 2015). As U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities steadily align themselves with the forces of corporatization, we contend that the job of a class-led, resistance-based labor education pedagogy should be conducted in union halls and community classrooms, rather than the halls of academe.

In his “revisioning” of college-based labor education programs, Mantsios (2015) echoes the language and approach of the contemporary civic engagement movement within higher education as he calls for a “new labor college”:

These colleges would have a broad vision, an ambitious mandate, and a comprehensive approach to labor education. They would represent a hybrid model of higher education that embraces both liberal arts and professional/vocational studies; attracts both scholars and practitioners; conducts research and provides service to labor and the broader community. The colleges would take the same holistic approach to its research as well, engaging in both scholarly and applied research; producing popular educational materials as well as academic journals. In its service to the community, the colleges would address global as well as local issues.

Like the civic engagement movement—which we will describe in some detail below—this familiar small-L liberal and small-D democratic approach to education lacks a class/power analysis, and does little for working-class students, or a radical working-class movement in general. But the “bottom-line” objective is not aimed at radicalizing the working class. Here, in Mantsios’s conclusion, we see that enlarging student enrollment and the survival of labor education within the academy stand as the visionary’s chief goals. He states,

A bigger tent for labor education—one that includes worker education and workforce development—will mean more options for worker/students, a factor that will increase enrollments in our programs significantly . . .

Ironically, this language—now common in many brochures and reports for university-based worker education—echoes the civic engagement narrative that continues to tout student learning outcomes and community service hours while almost completely ignoring the lack of impact on structural inequality and neoliberalism (Barber 2012; Hyatt, Shear, and Wright 2015; Simpson 2014).

We argue that the absence of anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, or pro-labor efforts in the contemporary story of higher education’s relationship to worker education in particular and civic engagement as a whole relates directly to these movements’ increased alignment with neoliberalism and the forces of corporatization in contemporary university life. By not challenging these forces directly and, in essence, not doing what SDS President Paul Potter suggested we must do fifty years ago—“name the system”—the radical possibilities of worker education promoting class struggle are lost in the maelstrom of corporate hegemony and market-based institutional restructuring. In contrast, by using the principles and tools of a more radicalized labor/community engagement, a movement focused on organizing that brings workers and intellectuals together collectively and collaboratively as class-conscious educators, researchers, and brothers and sisters in struggle, we could truly revitalize labor education in particular and social justice movements in general.

We believe such examples of a revitalized form of labor education can be found in the Paid Education Leave (PEL) program of the newly merged Canadian union, UNIFOR, ³ whose predecessor, the Canadian Autoworkers (CAW), was described by Gereluk (2001) as a union that “has probably one of the most comprehensive and dedicated policies on labour education today.” There are others, ⁴ to be sure, but we believe the six founding principles (see Table 1 and discussion below) of the original PEL program provide us with an excellent beginning. Before presenting these, we first present a more detailed look at the way that corporatization and neoliberalism have impacted the civic engagement movement that once offered a possible example of how worker education—especially in the United States—could be radicalized within higher education.

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Table 1.

Six Key Elements of UAW/CAW PEL.

Ideological orientation	PEL is designed to provide CAW members with an ideological view rooted in a working-class orientation.
Adult education	While there is a course text housed in four binders, as well as course lectures, the emphasis is on group discussion and the collective experiences of the participants. Gindin claimed that, on the whole, there is little sense of a “top-down” approach.
Peer training	PEL shuns paid professionals and instead uses peer tutors drawn directly from the workplace, called “LUDLs” to guide classroom conversations.
Blocks of education	PEL takes place over an extended period of time, allowing workers to return to their jobs and families for a period of reflection.
Residential	PEL emphasizes the informal learning and sharing that takes place “after hours” on the site of the CAW Education Centre.
Company-paid	PEL is completely funded by a negotiated “tax” on employers. Yet PEL is “completely administered by the union.”

Source. Gindin (1995).

UAW = United Auto Workers; CAW = Canadian Autoworkers; PEL = Paid Education Leave; LUDLs = Local Union Discussion Leaders.

Civic Engagement: Another Toothless Hound in Sheep’s Clothing?

Civic engagement was one of the most notable, promising, and progressive trends in contemporary higher education. Devoted to experiential pedagogy and campus-community partnerships, the civic engagement movement offered an opportunity for students and faculty to design course content linked to service, research, and action projects with social movement organizations and other public agencies and nonprofits (including unions and other auxiliary labor groups; Butin 2010; Saltmarsh and Hartley 2011). In many ways, service learning and civic engagement ought to be a natural link for union activists and organizers interested in tapping into college students’ growing interest in community service and applied learning, as well as faculty’s increasing embrace of engaged research and teaching. Yet, the civic engagement movement and its connections to labor, labor issues, and labor movements have been surprisingly absent. In part, it stems from civic engagement practitioners’ own framing of the field’s evolution in both the United States and Canada.

The movement’s chroniclers often trace their historical roots back to the intellectual and institutional work of Ernst Boyer and his efforts to have “engaged research and teaching” play a more vital and institutionalized role in higher education (Boyer 1990). Or they return to Robert Sigmon’s first publication on service learning and the trend for 1960s and 1970s activists to bring their experience and inclinations for political engagement back into the college classrooms of the late 1970s and early 1980s (Sigmon 1979). Sometimes such narratives include the work of John Dewey on experiential education and Jane Addams on the pedagogical practices of the Settlement House Movement (Harkavy and Benson 1998; Harkavy and Puckett 1994), or Canadian Budd Hall’s Freirean-influenced inquiry via Participatory Action Research (Hall 1982). But rarely do the activist and engaged teaching and learning of the labor movement get their due in these narratives (Dolgon 2014).

One way to consider this dynamic is to note that despite the concrete impact of labor education and workers’ colleges on early links between civic engagement and higher education in North America, the current movement almost completely ignores the issue of class. Such silences about working-class identities or struggles are not new for colleges and universities. Historically, higher education, especially in the United States, has had an uncomfortable if not outright antagonistic relationship toward workers in particular, and the working class in general (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013; Hurst 2014). On the one hand, institutions of higher education generally promoted themselves as producers of elite knowledge and the “intellect workers” who processed that knowledge (Baran 1961; Boggs 1993; Noble 1977), primarily for the purpose of creating privatized wealth or better managing and exploiting the working class. On the other hand, while some exceptions existed, and education as a social institution has always been “contested terrain,” even land grant schools and public universities expanded under the heavy weight of market and military research, the bureaucratic and rationalized professionalism of academic disciplines, and the promise of class mobility for a second and third generation proletariat (Geiger 1986; Newfield 2003; Trumpbour 1999).

The more recent literature on the “corporatization” of higher education makes clear both the comprehensive commercialization of the institutions themselves, their evolving function as “workforce development” for the professional, pre-professional, and managerial class, and the hegemonic function they play by producing knowledge for the elite (Giroux 2014; Washburn 2006; G. White 2000). Given the overwhelming corporate and state power to determine the politics, economics, and culture of higher education, it should be no surprise that the struggles of the working class “as workers” for democratic political and economic power have rarely found harmony in the halls of academe. Unlike the shop floor or the dark mines, college classrooms are not the places “where isolation and alienation due to competition” are replaced by the association of workers with each other (Marx and Engels 2007). ⁵

While these relationships between university elitism and power and working-class identity and struggle may have been accommodated somewhat differently in Canada and the United States, in both cases, we believe that the majority of class-conscious worker education has occurred outside higher education and in independent or autonomous places such as labor colleges, union-led training programs, and other popular education machinations. According to Martin Carnoy, situating such practices external to state sanctioned or privately funded higher education institutions created a “counter-hegemonic” possibility to develop organic intellectuals, “mobilize disillusioned bourgeois intellectuals and traditional working class intellectuals, and offer alternatives to schools that maintain and expand bourgeois dominance” (Carnoy 1984). It is these types of organizations and institutions that we concern ourselves with here, using the example of Canada’s twenty-two-day PEL program, as first negotiated by the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) Canadian Region. ⁶

Because our investigation of worker education is linked to a study of community engagement and engaged pedagogy, it is worth noting two things: (1) labor education and workers’ colleges undoubtedly developed and inspired just the kinds of pedagogy considered best practices by the movement for service learning and civic engagement today; and (2) the new fields of engaged teaching, learning, and scholarship have ironically avoided the question of class and the role of labor when engaging with “community” and promoting the concept of “democratic citizenship” (Kliewer 2013). In the end, we will argue that these oversights are in fact related to the “problem of class” in civic engagement and higher education as a whole—and, perversely, at work in depoliticizing what is left of the university-based labor education in North America today.

A Brief History of Workers’ Education in the United States

While mass public education began in the early to mid-nineteenth century in the United States, its main foci were creating racial and ethnic assimilation, an efficient and obedient workforce, and a patriotic and civic-minded citizenry (Adams 1995; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Ziegler-McPherson 2010). Thus, early notions of education and civics often bolstered the exploitation of labor and class inequality. This irony has not been lost on some critics of neoliberalism and capitalism’s impact on civic engagement in higher education today. To find a more independent, anti-corporate, and anti-capitalist worker education in the United States, one would have to point toward the rise of the labor college movement in the first part of the twentieth century.

While prototypes of workers’ colleges began in New York (United Hebrew Trades union) and in Duluth, Minnesota (Finnish Peoples College), the most notable twentieth-century establishments were The Work People’s (Chicago, Illinois), Commonwealth (Mena, Arkansas), and Brookwood (Katonah, New York) Labor Colleges, as well as the Rand School of Social Science (New York City), WorkersUniversity, and eventually the Highlander School (New Market, Tennessee). A focus on political education distinguished these schools from other labor training and union programs. According to Richard Altenbaugh, they also stood, “In sharp contrast to the cultural and economic reproductive functions of the formal education system.” Instead, these institutions “served liberating rather than adjustive outcomes, and upheld working-class culture, providing adult worker-students with the knowledge and skills necessary to serve the labor movement” (Altenbaugh 1990; Bramfield 1941).

In Oregon, Portland Labor College founders explained the mission as preparing . . .

The individual as well as the organization for a share in the responsibilities of democratic control of industry, such preparation requiring the knowledge of the history of the practices, problems, and policies of the labor movement and of the fundamental principles of the production and distribution of wealth. (Lembcke 1984)

Even more conservative approaches to worker education, such as those promoted by Horace Kallen of the New School for Social research, suggested that an educated workforce could exert autonomy and creativity in the solution of workplace problems for the improvement of workers and industry. According to Shawn Taylor, “In a few short years, there were upward of seventy-five workers’ colleges, labor temples, and study programs in twenty-one states across the country.” By 1926, workers’ education had reached its peak with an enrollment of forty thousand worker-students spread over three hundred industrial centers in thirty states throughout the nation (Cummins 1936; S. Taylor 1998).

A second wave of workers’ colleges often with greater focus on a broader and more political class analysis occurred throughout the 1930s. Socialist and Communist Party efforts arose in Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, Seattle, and San Francisco. Not only was the very successful Rand School run primarily by the Socialist Party in New York City, but the Communist Party USA developed the Jefferson School of Social Science to coordinate their national labor education movement. These projects, while often hosting college and university faculty, evolved primarily as off-campus and independent institutions with goals similar to those as espoused by the Seattle Labor College in their newsletter, The Vanguard:

Eventually, the workers’ education movement would be mainstreamed by projects that grew under the auspices of the New Deal’s Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA) and the somewhat progressive leadership of Hilda Smith, a former social worker and suffragist. Smith founded Bryn Mawr College’s Summer School for Women Workers in Industry in 1921, stressing women’s role in bringing about social harmony and middle-class values. In Joyce Kornbluh’s definitive chronicle of the Workers’ Education Project, she suggests that, despite its brief existence and the demise of so many of the era’s labor colleges and education programs, “They left an enduring legacy of the democratic educational ideals and practices of the progressive adult educators of the 1920s to the union activists of today” (Kornbluh 1987).

Eventually, all of these institutions, programs, and projects disappeared, as many of them suffered from inadequate funding and poor administration. Others were torn apart by internal conflicts over ideological dogma or radical party and sectarian fights. More often than not, however, red-baiting and local political pressure—sometimes including conservative vigilantism and violence—destroyed worker education sites in both major urban areas as well as small rural hamlets. The only surviving institution of any significance has been the Highlander Center whose combination of local cultural integration with an uncanny ability to embrace a changing social justice landscape has made it a mainstay for radical, class-based, political organizing up to the present day (Glen 1996; Horton 1997; Kohl 1991).

Still, some university-sponsored labor programs have endured as well. Originating during the same period as the independent workers’ college movement were John Commons’s efforts at the University of Wisconsin and Richard Ely’s project at Johns Hopkins University in the 1920s and 1930s. Labor studies in higher education grew dramatically after World War II and then again in the 1970s and early 1980s under the guise of linking higher education and public service. These programs often served dual purposes of offering academically substantive courses about labor history, economics, politics, and culture while also offering pragmatic, “nuts and bolts” lessons on labor organizing, contract negotiations, labor law, and so on. Ironically, according to Francis Ryan in Eric Arnesen (2007), “the stronger alliance between organized labor and higher education in the post-1945 period reflects a corresponding decline in class consciousness among American workers.” For Ryan, the disappearance of independent labor schools suggests the parallel decline of a separate working-class culture that had characterized the initial rise of labor education in the United States. In fact, we contend that the infusion of labor studies with higher education may have had a depoliticizing impact on practices and resulted in some of the “taming” of radical knowledge production and anti-corporate/anti-capitalist movement building.

During the era of radical social movements on campus and the resulting changing of racial, ethnic, and gender politics, labor studies programs did address the challenges of deconstructing the powerful and hegemonic role of colleges’ and universities’ support for elite knowledge production. But like many of the ethnic, women’s, and peace studies curriculum that began as anti-colonial, anti-hierarchical, and anti-military, labor studies, too, seemed hardly counter-hegemonic by the 1980s. Eventually, Reagan’s war on labor and the rapid right-wing turn in American political life took its toll on colleges’ and universities’ formal labor studies links. Still, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, labor programs seemed to make a slight comeback, according to Byrd and Nissen (2003). ⁷ But by 2005, students at the University of Massachusetts fought to save their graduate labor studies program as similar programs at universities across the country were being threatened. The Daily Kos reported that,

As conservative state governments and university administrators gain power, programs about unions and workers’ organizing have been among their first targets. The Labor Studies program at the University of Indiana suffered huge cuts, and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reached into the University of California’s budget to take $3.8 million out of its labor research and education programs.

And, just last year, Michigan legislators threatened to fine Michigan State University $500,000 for any course found to be “promoting unionization.”

College and university-based labor education in the United States has lost tremendous ground along with the labor movements’ own decline since the 1980s. It is clear that the continued success of conservative politics and pro-capitalist hegemony has not only diminished the ranks of radical and progressive labor studies programs, but it has influenced the practice and strategies of worker education itself (Worthen 2015). Thus, once again, the great irony exists that civic engagement and democratically driven experiential education have triumphed on college campuses at the same time that university-supported labor studies programs now seem on or moving toward life support (Howlett 1993). To some degree, civic engagement has been more successful at partnering with the neoliberal project, suggesting that volunteer service, educational access, and economic development are the tools for reducing inequality and fostering democracy. While experiential pedagogy and other community partner programs emanate from worker education programs, labor’s historical and integral struggle against corporate triumphalism resulted in a different kind of welcome at most colleges and universities. Unfortunately, the dynamic seems to have inspired all too many labor education programs to emulate civic engagement and look for alliances with the more liberal wing of corporate hegemony.

But, as we will see below, the linkages between worker education and class consciousness have followed a somewhat different path in Canada.

Canadian Labor Education: A Brief Summary

Livingstone and Mangan (1996) found that in Canada trade union membership itself was a mediating factor whose “influence on class consciousness [is] at least equally as strong as class position.” But creeping business unionism and the development of overly bureaucratic union organizations found understandable disapproval from many radical and progressive intellectuals. ⁸ And yet, what other social organization offers as much opportunity for developing both a curriculum and a set of pedagogical practices that are sympathetic to the needs of the working class?

It is rarely acknowledged that unions are among the most democratically structured organizations in North American society: union leaders are elected for limited terms and are often subject to recall by their membership; monthly meetings of the general membership provide genuine opportunities for active members to present and pass motions by the membership as a whole; union dues generate necessary resources from their members to construct and sustain the organizational tools necessary for democratic social change, and this includes their own educational programs (Livingstone and Roth 1998). In part due to the tendency to promote from within, those few labor education programs that are housed in universities tend to sit alongside other social sciences programs, and rarely produce graduates who go on to work for unions. However, the potential for an effective, politically driven, union-and-community-based labor education program that might also be used as a tool for external union recruitment and the internal development of the membership cadre has never quite been fully realized in English Canada. ⁹ While Canadian rank-and-file graduates of the PEL program often move on to elected positions in the internal union hierarchy, and on occasion participate in the organization of political campaigns, they are not generally used to politicize the population at large.

Historically, Canada’s labor education system did not always spurn formal affiliations with colleges and universities. In the 1920s, Canada’s Workers’ Educational Association of Canada (WEA), which was based on the British model, sought to work with universities “to provide non-credit, inexpensive evening classes to a working-class constituency” (J. Taylor 2004). This worked well between about 1920 and the early 1950s. But the effort was short-lived, and a proliferation of independently accessible WEA teaching materials (available via labor radio broadcasts, study circles, film and film strips, summer schools, and regular conferences)—the keystone of the WEA’s “mass education strategy”—made WEA dispensable. Taylor notes that “. . . by about 1945 the WEA had a national labor education system in place.” A trade unionist interested in education might begin independently, by attending a study circle that was timed to coincide with a radio broadcast, and eventually work their way to a WEA-affiliated university course, taught by a sympathetic professor who was well-versed in the nuances and tools of the labor movement.

This system was so successful, so autonomous, and so independently accessible, that by the late 1940s, unions would emulate the WEA’s strategy and build in-house education programs without the need for “outsiders” from the WEA. This is understandable, in spite of Taylor’s misgivings that “college and university workers” were not used, and despite his pronouncements that central-labor-body-affiliated and unionized university faculty would have been able to provide “the widest possible opportunity for their members” (J. Taylor 2004). Not coincidentally, the WEA’s very successes led to its own demise. Drummond Wren, the general secretary of the WEA from 1929 to 1951, was a canny operative who knew his way around the labor movement and would work with unionists from a range of political factions. In the Cold War era, this did little to dispel the suspicion surrounding the WEA and its “red” teachers and sympathizers. That it was an independent and self-governing organization was itself a source of suspicion in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Combined with distrust for the WEA’s independence—anything other than vociferous denunciation of Communism was itself a sign of a possible Communist sympathy, or worse, association—the WEA saw most of its union-partners disappear in an era that was fogged with the taint of suspicion (J. Taylor 2001).

The late 1970s PEL program of the then-Canadian CAW union provides us with a sterling example of a bold, politically astute, and sharply class-conscious union education program that might be undertaken in retreats and union halls across the United States and Canada. This program goes well beyond the typical “tools” course in its forging of member education and mass public education.

Our pioneering thirty years ago in bargaining Paid Educational Leave (PEL) in North America has influenced others. Interestingly, at least one major Australian trade union has successfully negotiated a similar program. Other unions have emulated our summer Family Education program with equal success. (White and Armstrong 2006)

Since 1977, then-UAW Canadian Region, now UNIFOR, has been committed to engaging in socioeconomic and political training. Rather than practicing a narrow form of trade union economism, they preferred a commitment to broader social justice issues and trade union values. This is even reflected in the choice of using peer trainers, rather than professional teachers or university lecturers:

While academia has recognized our union in many ways, our education programs have been and must continue to be developed and delivered by our activists and staff—workers committed to trade union and social justice principles and skilled with the knowledge of CAW policies, history, curriculum development, training, and worker’s needs. (B. White and Armstrong 2006)

The roots of the CAW’s PEL program can be found in the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention 140, which was adopted in 1974 and called for a national PEL program to be adopted by its member-nations. PEL was defined by the ILO as: “[l]eave granted to a worker for educational purposes for a specific period during working hours, with adequate financial entitlements,” and each member nation was urged to

. . . formulate and apply a policy designed to promote, by methods appropriate to national conditions and practice and by stages as necessary, the granting of paid educational leave for the purpose of (a) training at any level; (b) general, social and civic education; (c) trade union education. (ILO 1974)

The northern European folkshul (folk school) movement provided Canadian labor education pioneers with further inspiration to include a critical understanding of issues related to the political-economy, society, and the workplace in the CAW’s PEL curriculum.

PEL: Creating an Engaged Membership

Many Canadian unions’ internal education programs generally follow one of two paths: local union education committees design and deliver “tool-based” weekend or evening courses, covering committee person (or steward) training, grievance procedures, collective bargaining, workers’ compensation, among others. Then there are programs that seek to develop a social union cadre, including Workplace Change and Competitiveness, Unions and Politics, Human Rights, Empowering Workers of Colour, Women’s Activism, and, of course, the PEL program. ¹⁰

PEL describes itself as an alternative education program that is “established by workers” and “controlled and delivered by workers.” PEL was initially established in 1977 by the then-Canadian wing of the UAW, but was won at the negotiating tables of the “Big Three” domestic auto manufacturers during a tense round of pattern-bargaining with General Motors (GM) in 1979. Of those early negotiations, then-UAW director for Canada, Bob White, recounted that: “. . . the GM top bargainers [were] making cracks like ‘what are you going to teach them—Marxism?’” (Roth 1997). The first director of PEL recounted that during the GM negotiations, the company negotiator offered to select “. . . which union members can go to the course and what the curriculum should be.” White declined the corporation’s pressure. In contrast to the ideologically oriented curriculum won by Canadian autoworkers, the U.S. PEL program differed substantively. U.S. auto manufacturers had a hand in the selection of participants, and co-created their curriculum, with an emphasis on global competition and participatory management techniques.

UNIFOR’s initial PEL curriculum includes subject areas such as labor history, sociology, political science, and economy as well as public speaking, communications, and media literacy. PEL’s stated goal is to build leadership within the ranks and to cultivate activists with a commitment both to the union and to social transformation in what is labeled social unionism. The CAW Family Education program also brings social union principles to the member’s family and community. Gindin (1995) explained that the unique feature of PEL is its combination of the six elements outlined in Table 1.

PEL’s goal of arming worker-students with an ideological viewpoint rooted in class analysis and class politics provides a coherent narrative of society to UNIFOR members, and attempts to make up for the lack of a class narrative in public education. As we can see above, Canadian high school history teacher Bob Davis also calls for a pedagogy that analyzes resistance within the framework of exploitation. Civic engagement for workers has the potential to overcome, or at least ameliorate, the vast deficiencies of a “class-free” public education system.

Early PEL course content included subject areas such as labor history, sociology, political science, and economy as well as public speaking, communications, and media literacy. The basis of PEL’s pedagogical form lies in group discussion. Sessions typically include shared readings, films, videos, song, and a mix of intimate “buzz groups” and plenary sessions. “Buzz groups” consist of an inner core of participants (the “working party”) who are scrutinized by an outer core of observers. Roles are then reversed, after which both sets of observers might comment on the proceedings. Thus, a democratic participatory framework is formed. Class consciousness, overcoming oppression, ideological struggle, and establishing frameworks for social analysis are the key messages here. A set of discussions are kicked off around the subject of who is served by the postindustrial revolution school system, with a series of statements in a Bowles and Gintis (1976) framework:

. . . schools in capitalist societies have been assigned a particular role: the maintenance and reproduction of capitalism and the values on which it depends . . . [and] Most fundamentally, schools and their curricula often serve to perpetuate and legitimize inequalities of social class, either by refusing to deal with them or by making them appear to be natural and inevitable. The “corporatization” of public education and corporate intrusion into the school curriculum is discussed through an examination of Goodyear Tire’s incursion into a Napanee, Ontario high school. (UAW 1980-1981)

PEL recasts participants’ individual experiences as collective experiences, and thus enters the arena of an “oppressed class” and class consciousness. Courses included focused study of “class analysis,” “the rise of capitalism,” “history and role of the state,” among other courses promoting a radical praxis.

Several minimal goals were laid out: an explicitly critical (i.e., class-based) analysis for working people, the encouragement that workers “develop their individual skills” and abilities to better meet the “goals and aspirations of all working-class people” and the confidence to participate in their union and society in a “democratic fashion” and becoming “involved in the struggle for social change” (Roth 2008). In summary, the PEL story reminds us of the power of trade unions and the labor movement, and it informs us that no comparable institution comes closer to challenging the power of capital.

Labor Matters Today

In Canada, unions embedded themselves into mainstream politics because of the success of a socially democratic, labor-involved political party, the Canadian Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and its successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP). State and organizational support for formal labor education and organizing maintained a healthy workers’ education program, directly tied to union activity and growth until successive neoliberal regimes chipped away at these, beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This success, however, legitimized anti-communism, linked unions to state policies, funding, and in ways similar to U.S. labor’s deference to Democratic Party politics, depoliticized the radical edge of union education. Meanwhile, continued red-baiting—ultimately part of rationalizing and mainstreaming labor in the United States and Canada—also purged Communists, Socialists, and other radical educators from the movement. Thus, while labor education has historically been more successful and widespread in Canada than in the United States, it has suffered a similar depoliticization and decline in both countries (Heron 1996).

Generally speaking, most Canadians find their identity tightly wrapped in a notion of duality: whatever they are, it is definitely not American. So it should come as no surprise that when comparing our respective trade union movements with one another, Canadians too often take on self-congratulatory airs. This is little more than hubris, especially in light of Canada’s steadily declining union density rates and too-frequent cannibalization of union memberships. Two decades ago, Panitch and Swartz (1993) made a similar claim when they wrote,

While the difference between union orientation in the two countries is real enough, it should not lead to naive celebrations regarding the strength or well-being of labour in Canada. This only seems to be the case if we take the sorry experience of American labour as a benchmark in contrast with an American union movement on its knees, ours is bound to look tall. [emphasis in original]

Indeed, Canadian unions have had to make concessions that were similar to those experienced by their U.S. brothers and sisters, and in those instances where Canadians have remained resolute in the face of corporate demands, employers have often opted to pack up and move—frequently to low-regulation, “right-to-work” states in the United States. This was precisely the case in 2012 with Caterpillar Corporation’s flight from their sixty-two-year-old Electro-Motive diesel engine plant, located in London, Ontario (two hours west of Toronto), to the newly declared “right-to-work” state of Indiana. Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana signed the legislation only one day prior to Caterpillar’s fateful announcement (Maynard 2012).

In the United States, the demise of labor is legendary. The term legendary might be appropriate in two ways: first, because of the magnitude of union decline and dwindling of popular support for unions; and second, because it is just as much a part of the triumphant narrative told by capital’s minions—that global corporate hegemony has rendered unions powerless and obsolete. But that, too, is a myth. After all, capital’s arrogant tale is part of the ideological class struggle itself. Unions still exist. Workers’ movements and organizing still exist. Working-class associations and demonstrations still exist. And Joe Hill ain’t never died. While labor is somewhat obsessed with its own new narratives and how such stories might inform new strategies, working, unemployed, poor, and homeless workers still struggle unabated and often unorganized and ignored by formal unions. One conversation that labor in both the United States and Canada must have more often, and more analytically, is about the composition of, strategy for, and camaraderie among a twenty-first-century working class as it struggles with twenty-first-century capital.

In this capacity, university and college-based labor studies have demonstrated that they can have a role in the struggle as faculty and students continue to fight for workers’ rights and workers’ power. Programs for student/labor coalition work at places such as the University of Colorado’s student worker alliance program (SWAP), Pitzer College (Jose Calderon’s work linking student engagement and day laborer centers), and the national student farmworker alliance supporting the Coalition of Immokalee Workers set new paths for such integrated and collaborative efforts, and there are dozens of other smaller networks struggling to create the best opportunities and the right spaces for major battles with corporate hegemony and neoliberalist policies. Possibilities do exist for worker education and civic engagement to create a powerful class-based, social justice pedagogy with programmatic support from both on campus and off.

Yet these efforts have lost too much ground to promote institutional skirmishes over university programs and curricula to be a powerful democratic force for economic and social justice. The neoliberal university is as elite, and in service to capitalist hegemony, as ever. Even the language of major research universities’ labor studies programs are tied to neoliberal buzz words, catchphrases, and pseudo-corporate problem solving. At Cornell, while activist scholars such as Kate Bronfenbrenner continue to support an active and progressive labor movement, the University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) identifies its mission:

Students and faculty explore and gain an understanding of human behavior through the lens of the workplace [emphasis added]. Students also learn how organizations work and how they fit into the larger society and economy. As a result, they acquire knowledge and skills that help them to solve problems on-the-job and to build and manage productive work relationships [emphasis added]. An ILR education, for students and professionals, is practical and applied. ¹¹

The workplace seems like a trope for academic theory and the professional intellect worker. Problem solving and troubleshooting and developing “productive” management-worker relations seems hardly advanced from the conservative Team Quality management that has always been about capitalism first and worker integrity second or third.

Similarly, while places such as the Murphy Institute still boast radical activists such as Stanley Aronowitz and Frances Fox Piven, and labor specialists Ruth Milkman and Gregory Mantsios, the Institute itself survives and thrives, in part, by adopting the language of workforce development. Describing one of its three major academic programs, the Institute explains,

The Murphy Institute collaborates with CUNY colleges, unions, and labor-management education funds to offer college programs that meet both the educational needs of workers and the workforce development needs [emphasis added] of the City. These programs provide workers with the intellectual and technical skills they need for occupational advancement [emphasis added]. They also help the City meet some of its most pressing needs for a well-educated and technically proficient workforce [emphasis added].

Of course, the “City” capitalized is an entity whose leaders would define those needs as corporate and market-driven. Not the language of an independent, anti-corporate or anti-capitalist labor organization, but the language of neoliberalism; the very same neoliberal message as can be found in Mantsios’s vision for the future of U.S., college-based, labor studies programs.

Yet, while a similar vision can be found in recent treatises on university-based civic engagement and democratic movements, the practical applications have had surprisingly little impact on the local, national, or regional political landscapes. In fact, higher education has not been a place where community-based pedagogies and scholarship have driven local movements or broken down the elite barriers of power and privilege. Civic engagement has not effectively addressed the “problem of class” inherent in its cultural practices, political allegiances, economic funding sources, and structural reproductive role.

To return to Mantsios’s work, it would be unfair to suggest that such negotiations and debates are completely new. According to Historian Eugene McElroy, some of the earliest debates over labor education exposed “inherent tension between the labor and academic communities over the objectives and direction of the labor extension programs (History of Labor Education at Rutgers University (n.d.)).” In describing the conflicts between Dr. Norman Miller, a Penn State and Rutgers professor who advocated vocational training and the merits of an “educated workforce,” and Spencer Miller Jr. (no relation), a trade union president who advocated class-based and organizing focused education with “trade union control in shaping the objectives and curriculum of labor extension programs with universities and faculty playing a supporting and subordinate role”: Norman Miller believed that universities and their industrialist-dominated boards had to maintain control over the direction of labor education, while Miller Jr. promoted an independent labor education program with university endorsement, maintaining a widespread labor sentiment of distrust toward colleges and universities. Almost a century later, and such debates remain current and often influenced by the power of corporate leadership and influence in worker education (McElroy 1995).

Thus, for the new, more flexible and nimble labor studies programs within higher education, such failures may emanate from the ironic language and practice of Mantsios’s own call for “service to” both labor and community. First, colleges and universities are not places where class awareness or analysis, let alone working-class-based “commitments,” find fertile ground. Second, Mantsios simultaneously assumes the intellectual distance between these “colleges” and labor itself (academic journals, professional status, etc.) but ignores the hegemonic mission and power relations of higher education altogether. Maybe a strategy of accommodation does not seem like accommodation if you pretend it was your idea in the first place.

Conclusion

Only an independent, popular labor education movement focused on a new working class, grassroots organizing that brings workers and intellectuals together as educators, researchers, and brothers and sisters in struggle can truly revitalize labor education in particular and social justice movements in general. But it is hard to understand what role colleges and universities might play in these. Independent labor colleges in the United States and labor-led adult education programs in Canada pioneered engaged pedagogies using student-centered learning and reflecting on field experiences. They created community-based and participatory action research projects that offered knowledge production in support of (and as part of) social justice work: creating redistributive and inclusive public policies, movement strategies, and organizational sustainability. Questions of reciprocity and partnerships seemed less intractable or insurmountable than they do in the civic engagement literature or visions of the “new labor college.” The workers were the community. Popular education pedagogies differed from community-based research and service learning as they avoided the complex navigation and alchemy of partnership reciprocity. Such practices were more organic and more revolutionary.

Like contemporary labor studies and worker education programs, the best a “civic engagement movement” within higher education may offer is a modicum of resources, strategic legitimacy, and credentials, and an occupational home for radical and progressive, public intellectuals and activist scholars. Such real resources for organizing and mobilization should not be scoffed at lightly. They should be encouraged and nurtured with the full intent of promoting radicalized resistance. Yet these efforts cannot be confused for or conflated with autonomous and radical worker education, class struggle, or fundamental social change. These goals cannot be realized from inside the elite halls of academe where “specialized” programs administered by deans, and provosts, and corporate Boards of Regents run the show. Nor can real democracy and economic power be nurtured through the language of workforce development and the corporate competency-based learning objectives of physical and virtual diploma mills. It is for precisely these reasons that the most sharply class-conscious and contentious political elements—the historic hallmarks of labor education—should be seized from the ranks of the elite neoliberal university and restored to the union halls. Let the colleges have the “tools” courses, where they do the least harm, but in the tradition of the PEL program, with its principles of Ideological Orientation, Adult Education pedagogy, and Peer Training practice, that unions should reassert their right to teach and lead a new class-conscious struggle into the twenty-first century.