Labor Studies Journal

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.

This article uses labor history and black history to highlight how labor education can be a crucial tool for unions to respond to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in a way that supports and respects its main demands. It suggests that unions are unlikely to answer the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organization’s (AFL-CIO) call for the labor movement to be “partners, allies, and fellow community members” of the BLM movement unless they recognize the structural nature of contemporary “colorblind racism” and confront the root causes of divergent attitudes about the fairness of the criminal justice system. Such causes include the long-standing associations of blackness with criminality and whiteness with innocence, which have long justified the punishment of black workers and the control of all U.S. workers. This article highlights the structural violence of mass incarceration, the spectacular violence of police murder, the symbolic violence of anti-black cultural production, and the sexual violence directed at black women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) blacks. Building on black feminist theory, it argues that labor education that foregrounds the interwoven histories of race and crime, and examines how racism works through class, gender, and other kinds of hierarchies, could serve to capacitate grassroots bridge-builders inside unions. The article suggests that the history of domestic work could be a particularly valuable way for labor educators to discuss the fundamental messages of the Movement for Black Lives.

This article examines how a labor studies program, most of whose students come from unions in the building trades, wrestles with a deeply rooted perception about the relationship between an individual’s skill and her wages. Aspects of tradition and experience in the unionized building trades validate it, and public discourse today sees it as a basic economic truth. Other aspects of building trades’ tradition and experience, as well as current mobilizations by low-wage service workers, show that collective power determines wages and enables a conversation about the social wage that decouples individual skill from wage levels.

The main response (Mantsios 2015) to neoliberalism and the marginalization of labor studies in higher education has been the call for a “new” labor college—one that integrates “workforce development” and liberal arts, yet separates worker education from its working-class roots. This article interrogates the state of worker education and the impact of neoliberalism on various civic engagement efforts at colleges and universities. The authors argue for a critical reevaluation of workers’ education and labor studies programs, calling for organized workers to retake control of such projects to avoid the deradicalization of class politics now ascendant in neoliberal institutions.

This article traces the development, method, and mission of Denver’s Romero Theater Troupe, beginning with its origins at the University of Colorado Denver. The article also connects the troupe’s process and foundation to the important antioppression work of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. The Romero Troupe has developed an all-volunteer, arts-based approach to community organizing and pedagogy that provides a unique model for today’s weakened labor movement. The troupe’s “organic theater” also provides a challenge to traditional forms of pedagogy that exclude too many students from working-class backgrounds.