[lbo-talk] unions and member education

[shag carpet bomb]

Interesting Michael. In Francesca Polletta's _Freedom is an Endless 
Meeting_, she traces the roots of consensus decision-making and the value 
placed on direct democracy - the general challenge to hierarchical, 
top-down decision-making, partly to the experiences of union members who 
attended schools and colleges supported by unions. They didn't go to 
college to get vocational training but a liberal arts education, and the 
schools supported a more "leveled" interaction between students and 
teachers. People schooled in workers' universities went on to participate 
in labor, civil rights, and women's movements struggle, including some in 
the antiwar movement during WWII (IIRC). The Highlander Freedom Schools 
were founded on principles learned at these workers' colleges. And, in 
turn, those principles were spread through out civil rights and women's 
liberation struggles later in the 50s and 60s. (This trend toward 
"flattening" education, especially for workers and adults, but sometimes 
also for adolescents, was part of a larger trend in schooling ignited in 
the progressive era, influenced by Dewey's teachings, especially around the 
idea of teaching people for citizenship. Not in the sense of being obedient 
citizens who wash their hands properly, but in the sense of citizens who 
participate in a deliberative democracy. That kind of thinking was behind 
some of the development of academies and colleges such as some of us on the 
list have attended.

According to Polletta, CIO squashed all worker education and universities 
of this sort, seeing them as a direct threat to their hierarchical 
organizing. I wrote about this a few months ago, in October maybe. I don't 
have the book at my side at the moment, being too lazy to get it while I'm 
in the midst of bill paying and other housework.

At 05:10 PM 1/7/2012, MICHAEL YATES wrote:


>I am in Amherst, MA for my yearly class teaching economics to union 
>members. I hate the constant grey of the east in winter, but there is no 
>snow on the ground, which is nice. We took a walk from the UMass campus 
>where we stay into town. We met some people we know, and I mentioned that 
>enrollments seemed low. We were told that it is getting harder to recruit 
>students. One reason for this is that unions seem no longer willing to pay 
>the tuition for their members. These are regular college classes, so it is 
>true that tuition has risen over the years (I have been teaching in the 
>program for about 15 years). But it is remarkable that unions, most of 
>which pay their officers and staff a good deal of money, which own a ton 
>of valuable property, and which spent tens of millions of dollars on that 
>champion of the ruling class and ace warmonger, Barack Obama, and will no 
>doubt do so again, won't pay tuition for a few members to get a masters 
>degree. The classes here are good, the tea!
>  chers are excellent, the students make valuable contacts and friends, 
> and the students do good things after they leave (well, most of them do. 
> I have had a few who were as bad as their union presidents and one at 
> least who was a CIA operative). I get sick to death of hearing that the 
> climate for unions is awful, everything is stacked against labor, and so 
> forth. Power is built by workers from the ground up, in mass struggle. 
> Education is an important part of this, or any, struggle. Maybe if unions 
> paid attention to their members' education, unionized sanitation workers 
> in NYC wouldn't have been the ones to dump all those OWS books (including 
> some of my own) into the trash. Instead they act like Somoza in 
> Nicaragua, who said he wanted oxen not men in his country. In this 
> connection, I recommend highly Frank Bardacke's monumental book on the 
> United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, Trampling Out the Vintage. Chavez 
> distrusted his rank and file, fearful that they would want to ru!
>  n their own union and might actually see the union as a way to have a
>better, more prosperous life, rather than one of poverty and sacrifice 
>like his own (but certainly not his kids and relatives, who now run the 
>union as a quasi racket). He once said they were like pigs in their greed! 
>Oxen, pigs! Give me female lions and hyenas and wolves. They fight in 
>packs, together.
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