The Labor Education That Workers Need Most

What kind of knowledge do you need the most in order to make a decent living and avoid getting injured or beaten up by your job?

It’s not those hard skills that take years of costly training, or the work-ethic skills that workforce development planners promote. It’s labor education. Narrowly defined, it means how to organize a union, plus all the ancillary leadership, mobilizing, negotiation, education, and enforcement responsibilities that come with that. Much of this is quite technical. It’s also philosophy. Broadly defined, it’s essentially the arts and sciences from a working-class perspective.

The narrow definition of what people learn in labor education classes reflects the reality that our labor relations system is unusually complex. In some countries, a whole industrial sector has multiple unions, and if you work in that sector, you are represented whether you are a dues-paying member or not (for example, in France). In other countries, your membership depends on your political party (India). In yet others, laws governing the workplace are set at by government leaders and enforced top-down (Vietnam). The U.S. model is different from all of thse. In the United States, if workers can self-organize to form a union, what they get is a chance to bargain with their employer. But self-organizing doesn’t necessarily lead to a union, and bargaining doesn’t have to lead to a contract. In between is a complex interplay of courts and boards, elections and contract cycles, charges and complaints. Nothing is guaranteed. All you get is the right to try. It’s sometimes called the “hunting license” model or the “ticket to fight” model. If you can get a ticket, you can fight. This complexity encourages insider knowledge which can seem and be exclusive. And even this U.S. model is not available to farmworkers, domestic workers, and public-sector workers in many states. Yet the ins and outs of navigating this interplay can be learned. Once people start learning it, and applying what they learn, doors open.

When we use the broader definition, labor education includes history, international relations, economics, psychology, the arts, and on and on. The constant is that whatever you are studying, it takes an activist, working-class perspective, and it is not just theoretical, it is applied. Therefore, it responds to whatever the current political situation may be, which means there are those who appreciate it and those who would like to see it eliminated. In this political moment, we need to appreciate the importance of labor education in the broader sense, because people should be looking for labor education programs not only to learn how to make their own jobs better but because once they’re incorporated into the labor movement they have access to a kind of collective power that could actually stand up to President Donald Trump and his anti-worker policies.

Four Kinds of Labor Education

“Labor education” is an umbrella term that can refer to four kinds of labor-related knowledge, depending on where they happen and who pays for them: union education, labor studies, labor extension, and worker education. Where a person might get any of these depends on where they live and what else they are doing.
Union education is education that takes place in, and is usually designed with, by, and for unions themselves. Union education is intended to build the union. Many big unions (but fewer now) have an education department that handles this. These classes can be very technical, like classes in how to read a contract, how to be a union steward, how to engage in collective bargaining, or more general interest topics like labor history and culture. Union apprenticeship programs will incorporate it into their technical skills training: As an apprentice, you will learn how to be a journeyperson electrician or operating engineer, but you will also learn labor history. This is necessary to your identity as a high-skilled worker. When you see high-wage construction workers doing dangerous jobs safely, it’s because they have a union.

Labor studies and labor extension programs are usually found in community colleges and state universities. Labor studies courses are likely to be for-credit classes like labor history in which students learn about labor but do not necessarily apply what they learn. Many of these are offered online. Labor extension is the type of outreach-to-the-labor-movement education that many labor educators think is one of the primary missions of public higher education. It is both theoretical and applied. It is an “extension” in the sense that it extends the resources of the institution to the public, much like agricultural, small business, and public health extension programs. There are presently about 25 labor extension programs in the United States, mostly at state universities and with some at community colleges (such as City College of San Francisco) or private nonprofits (like Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and the Harvard Trade Union Program). A survey that I did in 2014 indicated that there were about 400 total faculty in the United States in these kinds of programs. In other words: not a lot.

Worker education has a long history going back to the industrial revolution and deals with whatever workers need. This can mean anything from basic literacy to painting murals to organizing to get better public transit or health care for retired miners. This kind of education is generally done by labor-aligned organizations. The range of content that is covered through worker education can be seen at the huge biannual Labor Notes conference, which began in the 1980s. Attendees can learn about a wide variety of topics, from how to organize a union to limits on free speech in Singapore. Worker education is also happening through the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), which is sponsored jointly by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the United Electric, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). At least three states—Illinois, Washington and Massachusetts—have produced basic “know your rights”-type curricula with the help of labor education programs. These are accessible to all workers on the internet and intended to be incorporated into workforce-development trainings, although getting them included is an uphill battle.

All of these approaches take the perspective of the working class as compared to the dominant corporate financial class. This perspective runs through the content and the delivery of all forms of labor education: what is taught and learned, who teaches and who learns, what modalities are used, how programs are evaluated, and how the outcomes are judged.

Of course, this is an idealized description of labor education. In reality, the practice is another arena of struggle, and in that sense is like other aspects of higher education today.

How Is Real-Life Labor Education Doing These Days?

Labor in capitalist America is always in a struggle, and labor education is sensitive to what is going on in the labor movement, so things are always in motion. These days, despite the terrible news that keeps coming with the Trump administration’s assault on the working class, there is more organizing, more strikes, and more cooperation among unions compared to recent years, and some of this work is even taking the form of union coalitions. Workers who were viewed as impossible to organize 20 years ago, such as Starbucks employees and gig workers, are forming unions. Graduate students who will never get tenure-line jobs are looking for jobs in the labor movement instead. There is a sense that possibilities have been unleashed by the very challenges that we face.

In 2023, Melanie Kruvelis reported on a survey of the status of labor education programs at the annual conference of the United Association for Labor Education (UALE). Seventy-nine percent of the programs that responded to her survey reported increases in enrollment. This was, of course, under the Biden administration and a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB, which adjudicates organizing and other union matters) that was friendly toward labor. But Trump’s attacks on the NLRB do not mean an end to this increase. This uptick in enrollment is likely to follow the upward trend in organizing and other labor activity.

Given the ongoing attacks on higher education, one can’t help but wonder how labor education programs survive—but their survival is related both to where and why they were started and to changes in what they have taught. In a survey that I did in 2014, I found 61 labor education programs that were or had been located in colleges and universities. In some cases, what I actually found was traces of programs that had disappeared. In other cases, I found programs on the verge of disappearing. About 25 programs remained, a number that has been fairly stable even today despite shake-ups at many campuses.

One thing that has changed is the role of labor education in the labor movement. The big state university programs were set up during a time when big unions represented massive workforces in heavy industry—the 1960s through the 1970s. In 1968, the Rogin and Rachlin report, a comprehensive survey of labor education in the United States, found 27 such programs. As those workforces disappeared, so did the programs in states like Georgia, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Northern Michigan, and Ohio. Although one person might remain teaching labor relations in a human resources or industrial relations program, the labor education program was essentially gone. But community colleges were sprouting up all over the country at this time and had less restrictive hiring procedures and many community colleges offered one course or more in labor studies.

The labor extension curriculum taught at that time—up to the late 1990s—was likely to presume labor–management cooperation as a goal: through well-researched, well-prepared bargaining strategies, it would be possible to come to a state of labor peace that would stay in place until the next round of contract negotiations. Today, this would be considered a conservative agenda. Organizing, for example, was not taught—that was left to the unions. The faculty was, like most of the faculty in higher education, white and male.

This began to change when John Sweeney from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) became head of the national AFL-CIO in 1995 and restarted their education department with programs intended to boost organizing, combat fear of immigrants, and build class consciousness. This recentered labor education. A landmark program was the Common Sense Economics curriculum. Bill Fletcher, Jr., a long-time labor activist and former president of TransAfrica Forum, was the key motivator of that program. This was before Zoom calls and PowerPoints, so packs of overhead slides were sent to willing central labor councils along with an instructor’s guide. An indication of how major a shift this was in labor education policy—in the sense of what was politically safe to talk about—was that participants were shocked to see a slide illustrating the decline in union density, followed by another slide showing how the rise in worker productivity had not led to a rise in wages; on the contrary. The pairing of those two pieces of information was something new. It foretold a much more aggressive type of worker education. It suggested that something unfair had happened and there was something workers could do about it.

With the acceleration of neoliberalism in the 2000s, the Iraq War, and the global financial crisis of 2008, labor took many hits. Desperate attempts to organize labor’s way out of the problem did not work. One example was when seven labor unions broke off from the AFL-CIO in 2005 and formed the Change-to-Win labor coalition with the hope of increasing union membership through the use of new organizing tactics. In the meantime, labor education programs took direct attacks: right-wing think tanks like the Landmark Legal Foundation, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and the Freedom Foundation targeted and harassed labor education programs, claiming that they were using taxpayer money to support un-American goals, threaten individual freedoms (the right to not be in a union), and so on. In 2012, the Wisconsin School for Workers was forced to shut down an exhibit of protest art. The University of Missouri-Kansas City’s labor studies program came under attack in 2011 when Andrew Breitbart posted edited videos that appeared to show labor faculty advocating for violent organizing tactics. (See Judy Ancel, “What Doesn’t Kill You...: A Guide to Surviving Right-Wing Media Assaults,” D&S, July/August 2011.)

A different kind of hit came from within educational institutions. After 2000, labor education programs were often canaries in the coal mine for cuts that were primarily motivated by state higher education budget cuts. Institutions would try to make individual departments into profit centers, or at least make them self-supporting. This might mean letting attrition eliminate tenure, stopping tenure for new hires, charging rent for the use of facilities, pushing programs to raise fees to the same levels that were charged for business school extension programs, requiring a program to be fully self-funded (as was the case at the Labor Center at the University of Iowa), and putting labor education curricula into online courses that could bring in for-credit general education revenue. Under these conditions, in several places, a sole remaining labor educator stayed on until retirement, after which the program was allowed to disappear. All of this meant that fewer people had access to labor education.

The responses to these attacks varied enormously, depending on what was possible in each situation. Programs got creative. In some states, a direct fight in the legislature would produce funding. In others, a close relationship with the state federation of labor or a few major unions would generate political influence, revenue, and enrollment. Some university programs formed partnerships with community colleges or big apprenticeship programs. Some merged with other departments like sociology, social work, or economics. Many developed online courses that would earn general education credit. Some programs went entirely online. (This turned out to be a program-saver during the Covid-19 pandemic.) The potential of labor education to find a home in many other fields and modalities was key to its survival.

As the political climate in the United States has become more polarized, the situations in different states have diverged. In one red state, a director, who asked to be unnamed, leads what was once a large program but is now down to one full-time faculty plus a few adjuncts. This director said that faculty members in the program no longer publish, give interviews, write op-eds, or provide expert testimony. They “fly under the radar.” On the other hand, some existing programs have been expanded and some new ones (like at the University of Southern Maine, which is now home to the second program in the state) have been started. In California, a $10 million recurring commitment was made to the University of California system to expand from three labor centers (located at the Berkeley, UCLA, and Monterey Bay campuses) to one at each of the 10 campuses. Other schools’ programs continue to expand. An entirely new program was recently launched at Clark Atlanta University in Georgia, the first program of its kind at a historically Black institution of higher education. The Global Labour University (GLU), which started in Germany in 2004 in partnership with the International Labour Organization (ILO), opened its first U.S. campus at Penn State in 2014. While Penn State already had a labor education program, the GLU takes enrollees from all over the world for a master’s program that develops new leaders to strengthen the global trade union network. The aim of the program is to enable graduates to confront corporate globalization and the climate crisis and explicitly support labor movements in the Global South.

What Is Going to Happen Next?

This is being written in early June 2025, and every week brings news that appears to change the shape of what is to come. Grassroots coalitions are emerging that did not seem necessary and might not have seemed possible before the 2024 election. The vast demonstrations, from the Hands Off crowds in April to the ongoing Tesla protests and the No Kings protests in June, bring out people who do not normally demonstrate. Populations that do not typically mingle feel equally threatened—undocumented laborers; David Huerta, the president of SEIU California; and Herman Padilla, the Democratic senator from California—are all equally likely to get knocked down and arrested. In the labor movement, unions that have historically been at odds have joined together to make public statements and actively help or lead the organizing of demonstrations (e.g., through Labor for Higher Ed).

The future success with these public displays of protest is going to lie in how much they make democracy work. Of course, knowing how to do that doesn’t come out of thin air; it has to be learned. Here is where labor unions can make a difference. Labor unions provide a context in which many people have their first (and sometimes only) experience of direct democracy, since nearly everything that goes on in a union is connected to how well it represents its members, whether it’s solving a problem at work or electing a leader. Union members are also acutely aware of when their union fails to be democratic. The important thing is that the experience of the practice of democracy that workers in unions have gained is a strength that is going to be needed as these protests continue. Democracy in a union is part of its structure, and structure is what survives in the midst of confusion and struggle. Unions, with their experience of strikes and other concerted actions, can lead the way in providing systematic, well-planned, and democratically-led resistance.

This is something the labor movement knows about. It is often said, as a kind of bitter joke: “The strength of the labor movement is structure,” but also, “The weakness of the labor movement is structure.” This may be the era when the structure of the labor movement, instead of being a problem, is an asset.

Although Individual Workers Learn, What Really Learns Is the Movement

The question at the beginning of this article was: What kind of knowledge do you really need the most in order to make a decent living and avoid getting injured or beaten up by your job? That question assumes that we are talking about individual workers. But if we place this individual worker in a union, then the context is no longer a job but an organized collective with a purpose. Although labor education educates the individual, it also organizes the individual. Labor educators, who use popular education techniques that ground their curriculum in the actual experience of the people they are teaching, know well that such organizing is a long game. But it’s also a kind of learning that progresses in sudden leaps and bounds, as people get the idea of the power of concerted collective activity and the whole group changes and becomes empowered. It’s important that more people know about this. When faced with the kind of emergency that has emerged since January 2025, it’s important to have people among us who know what has to be done and how to do it.

Helena Worthen is co-author, with Joe Berry, of Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education (Pluto, 2021) and other books and articles. She taught labor education at the University of Illinois, the National Labor College, and Ton Duc Thang University in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She is co-chair of the Media/Comms Committee of Higher Education Labor United (HELU).