Shaun Richman

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.