Category: school

I’m back from Amherst and I’m really excited. The Master’s degree that I’m working towards seems so besides the point. I hate the idea of ever having to stop going to ULA. The real value of the program is the ability to step back from my day-to-day work and see the forest from the trees.

I found the Labor Education class that I took to be a stumbling, fumbling frustration for nine of the ten days. This morning, however, I think I came to an epiphany, while I sat quietly and reflected on the readings and discussions. It’s too soon to tell, but it might have been a life-changing event.

We read a lot about Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School, the open learning center in the South that trained CIO organizers, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. In his book, “The Long Haul,” Myles talks about movement periods and organizational periods.

The movement period is when shit just happens because people are fed up and feel emboldened enough to take action on their own. For example, in the 1930’s, millions of people organized unions at their jobs. It is not an exaggeration that, all over the country, co-workers organized themselves, sat down, stopped production and then called the union office and asked, “Can you ‘organize’ us?” Today, however, we are clearly in an organizational period. We are working our asses off to try to preserve and build our existing union organizations. It’s very much official, legal and staff-driven. Organizers, like me and so many of my friends, go out to the shops to talk to workers and convince them why they should form a union. Even at our best, that model can only organize hundreds of thousands of people a year when we need to organize millions. We need workers to organize themselves.

Labor experienced a movement period in the 1930’s partly because of the Depression but largely because leftist rabble were well-educated by the Wobblies, the Commies, the Yipsels and the Debsies and well-placed throughout industry to educate, agitate and organize all those untold millions.

How do we replicate that organic learning that took place so that we can experience a new movement period?

The answer, I think, can be found in another lesson from Highlander: the Citizenship Schools of the civil rights era. The idea of the Citizenship Schools was remarkably simple: black citizens sit in the round and, drawing from their own experience and desires, teach each other to read and write in order to vote and be involved in the political process. At the end of each session, each participant could go out and teach the next class, allowing the program to multiply and grow as an organic movement, not as the project of a single organization.

We need citizenship schools for the workplace, with a long view for planting the seeds of the next movement period. This is not an original idea, and I can’t imagine that someone out there isn’t already doing this. If I find them, and they’re doing it well, I will join them. If not, my comrades and I should start something new. We are already having those initial discussions. I need to look and see what’s out there. I want to study the old Trade Union Education League. I need to check out Labor Notes and the Troublemakers School. I should look into Brazil and other Latin American education programs.

I want to find more people who are interested in moving in this direction to have more informal discussions and brainstorming sessions. In the meantime, as luck would have it, Hunter College is having a conference this weekend on popular education in New York City. I’ll be there for more field research.

Amherst is one of those funny, left-liberal college towns. The cover story of yesterday’s Springfield Republican had a hysterical sob story profile of some of the town’s poor maligned conservative minority.

“In Amherst, I can’t watch a production of ‘West Side Story’ but I can see the ‘Vagina Monologues’ at the high school and watch a junior throw up her arms like (Olympic gymnast) Mary Lou Retton and shout the c-word,” said fifth-generation Amherst resident Larry J. Kelley.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Newsday has begun trying to turn the public against next year’s citywide hotel strike. Our friend Kate Bronfenbrenner weighs in:

Hotel workers say they are not afraid to walk out. The last New York City hotel strike, in 1985, lasted 27 days. “This is a union that knows how to prepare a strike and knows how to win,” Bronfenbrenner said.

We have a great mix of people at the ULA program here in Amherst. That’s one of the biggest appeals that this program held for me when I applied. In my narrow corner of the New York labor movement, I’m just not likely to make friends with Machinists and Auto Workers, nor with Canadian trade unionists or union activists from the South.

My brother Dave Rossi, a Canadian Auto Worker (he’s the guy with the cheerleader on his shoulders in this picture; no, he did not throw her in the air), can get pretty riled up when he sees a pro-union bumper sticker on the back of a Toyota or a Honda. In an atmosphere where everyone is boycotting something (don’t buy Coke, don’t shop at Wal-Mart, avoid Poland Spring water, cancel your Verizon cellphone contract, etc.), it’s easy to feel a little outraged when your comrades buy a non-union product that competes directly with the company that you work for to undercut market share and threaten good union jobs.

My only quibbles are, first, that I used to drive a Toyota. It was an 18-year-old model that was given to me by a good friend when I was in dire straits and which I promptly drove to death. Income limitations and the nature of used cars makes principled shopping difficult for many. (The same goes for shopping at Wal-Mart; there’s really no excuse for driving out 25 miles from Queens to Valley Stream or Garden City in order to get cheap underwear, but it can be awfully hard for someone living in rural Arkansas to find anything but Wal-Mart to shop at.)

Second, I’m frustrated that “Buy American” auto campaigns serve to support bad, antisocial business decisions by the Bosses. SUVs are a crime against nature. Trucks and minivans are too fucking big for city streets. But these behemoths are what Detroit produces and promotes. I didn’t see many ads for compact, fuel efficient American cars during last night’s Patriots game. I saw Hummers and SUVs and pickups. Those are sexy and manly and exciting, according to the ads. With the exception of the Chrysler PT Cruiser (which, let’s face it, is German), I can’t think of a compact American car that is designed nearly as stylishly. This feels like a conspiracy to me. Since there’s not as much profit in those smaller cars, the Big Three promote the monster trucks instead and then say, see, Americans aren’t interested in compact cars. And we support this with our “Buy American” campaigns, which shoppers are clearly tuning out as they go on buying their compact Hondas and Toyotas.

It reminds me of working for the Hotel Employees union, where our emphasis shifted from insisting that if Indian casinos were to be built in the Catskills that their employees should have the free choice to join a union to lobbying to build those casinos in order to create more jobs – the destructive effects of gambling on society be damned! It’s not our job to promote the Boss’ business. It’s our job to organize workers to defend their interests on the job.

Speaking of which, Honda and Toyota have built plants in the southern United States. But where is the United Autoworkers’ organizing directed? Graduate teaching assistants in the Northeast! Yes, of course those are Right-to-Work states, and the challenges are many and the odds are long. But it’s not like the law was on the UAW’s side when they conducted sit-in strikes in the 1930’s. It’s not like Ford welcomed Walter Reuther with open arms. This is our challenge. Where are our priorities?

In the meantime, Dave Rossi is right. A good trade unionist has no business buying a new Honda or Toyota. Look for the union label, comrades.