Susan Schurman, Director of the George Meany Center for Labor Studies in the United States and IFWEA Vice-President, analyses the changing direction of American labour education. 

Lois Grey, a widely respected American labour educator, pointed out that unlike labour education in most other western countries, the curriculum of American labour education was really labour relations training as opposed to education for governing and administering trade unions. The "core curriculum" of labour education was collective bargaining, contract administration, grievance and arbitration and so forth. The biggest change in American labour education in the past decade has been the re-emergence of union leadership as a central focus of the curriculum. This change has taken a number of concrete forms. Before I get to these, a brief word about the structure of labour/workers' education in the United States as ours is quite different from most of the rest of the world. 

For reasons unique to the American context, the delivery system for labour education is almost equally divided between trade union institutions and Labour Education Centres attached to universities and colleges. Some unions provide most of the education and training to their own leaders and activists; others rely almost completely on the programmes offered through the university and college system. Most unions use both systems. In addition, the AFL-CIO (national trade union centre) has an Education Department that provides certain types of education and training along with curriculum design and train-the-trainer support. Finally, the George Meany Center for Labor Studies - The National Labor College is both a trade union education centre, heavily used by most AFL-CIO affiliates, and a member of the university and college system providing baccalaureate and graduate level instruction in labour studies.

Education for union organising
By far the most important development in American labour education in the past decade has been the explosion of curricula on union organising in both union-sponsored and university-sponsored programmes. This is a result of the fact that union density (the number of eligible workers who are union members) has continued to decline even as the American workforce burgeoned during the '90s (though the actual number of union members has remained the same for 45 years). As is well known, trade unionism in the United States has historically been dominated by a focus on advancing a workplace agenda through collective bargaining. Since, unlike France for example, American labour law does not, in most cases, extend the "coverage" of collective bargaining agreements to non-members in the same sector or enterprise, union membership is critical to the success of union strategy. Consequently, the American labour movement has made organising its top priority and most unions are struggling actively to find new and better ways to attract members.

A brief glance at the syllabi for these organising education programmes quickly reveals, however, that there is little consensus about the content of organising education and training. This lack of consensus reflects the fact that there is no real consensus on organising strategies and tactics among American unions. There is not the space here to describe the Byzantine intricacies of American private sector labour law and the extraordinary obstacles it places on workers who wish to form or join unions. It is more difficult for citizens to exercise their statutory right to unionise in the United States than in any other democratic country. The structure of union membership is determined by the formation of units to engage in collective bargaining with individual employers. Trade union structure therefore in the United States is highly fragmented and decentralized. This, combined with the sectoral and geographic shifts in the labour force over the past two decades, has eroded traditional jurisdictional agreements among unions. In many cases, the result has been increased competition between unions during organising campaigns. This competition has complicated the task of designing effective organiser training programmes especially for those labour education programmes that offer open courses to multiple unions. 

More recently, American unions are learning to cooperate in multi-union organising campaigns in particular regions or sectors. For example, a group of unions recently joined together to win pubic sector collective bargaining rights in Puerto Rico and in the State of Maryland.

Related to the emphasis on organising, is the growth of "strategic research" and "strategic campaign" training. The former is intended to improve union capacity to use sophisticated information - especially internet-based information - to select potential organising targets and prepare effective organising drives. Strategic campaign training is aimed at improving union effectiveness during either organising or bargaining campaigns. Strategic campaigns typically involve multiple trade unions, often in different countries, coordinating their activities to bring maximum bargaining leverage to bear on corporations. This kind of multi-lateral coordination, especially across national borders, is relatively new to American unions and there is a great need for education and training to help union leaders and activists learn the new skills required for this work.

In order for American workers to understand the need to unionise, they need to understand some basic lessons of political economy. There is no such course in our primary/secondary school curriculum and economics is not a requirement for technical or baccalaureate study. Even if it were, the perspective of the course would be neo-liberal. To address this problem, in 1997 the AFL-CIO Education Department launched a new curriculum called "Common Sense Economics" (CSE). Designed to be delivered to rank-and-file members through a train-the-trainer format, the programme has now been delivered to nearly 700 trainers in 39 states. These trainers have fanned out to deliver the curriculum to union members at union halls, central labour councils, conventions, and just about anywhere else where union activists and workers congregate. Some national unions, have integrated CSE into their other education programmes. For example, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, has incorporated CSE into its Construction Organising Member Education and Training (COMET) programme. The COMET program has proved highly effective at making the case to construction union members about the need to organise and, according to several IBEW leaders, CSE has just made it stronger.

In the past several years a number of new leadership curricula have been developed both by individual unions, by university labour centres and by consortia of unions and universities. For example, the Service Employees International Union has developed an extensive new leader education programme that involves several academic institutions in the delivery. In New York, the New York State and City Central Labour Federations have joined with the New York State School of Labour and Industrial Relations (Cornell University) to develop an extensive new union leadership training programme. In California the labour movement successfully obtained a large appropriation in the State budget to develop a new Institute that links the Labour and Industrial Relations programmes of UCLA and Berkley. Union leadership education is a primary focus of the new Institute.

As I write this piece, a new curriculum on immigration and the global economy is being field tested by the AFL-CIO Education Department in collaboration with the Public Policy Department, the International Affairs Department and the Meany Center. This is a clear signal of the new awareness of the global economy and the need for a strong engagement with the international labour movement by the American labour movement.

At the George Meany Center, the faculty and administration have engaged in an extensive review of the curriculum to add new courses and redesign traditional programmes to reflect the focus on union building, growth and activism. For example, our arbitration classes no longer simply emphasise the legal and technical aspects of arbitration but also include how unions can use arbitration cases to mobilise and activate members. Perhaps the most significant development at the Meany Center is the growth of degree-based instruction. In 1997, when the decision was made to form the National Labor College and expand the B.A. in Labour Studies programme, there were fewer than 200 students enrolled. Today that number has grown to nearly 4 thousand. Even more significantly, the number of women and minorities enrolled in the B.A. programme has grown from under 10% to over 30% in each case. 

In general workers'/trade union education in the United States seems to be undergoing a bit of a renaissance. I don't want to overstate the case; we're still far from viewed as "strategic" by the top political leaders of unions. But there does seem to be a dawning recognition that the magnitude of the transformation required of unions poses major learning demands on leaders and activists at all levels. Many labour education programmes report an increasing demand for traditional labour relations training as well. Unions realise that they still have to perform the services related to bargaining, contract administration, and health and safety in order to attract and keep new members. We in the workers' education field in America are trying hard to meet this challenge with new courses and revised approaches to traditional courses, all aimed at helping our unions to increase their density and therefore their power. We are reaching out to our colleagues around the world for your assistance and your solidarity.

For more information contact Susan Schurman at: George Meany Center for Labor Studies - National Labor College, 10000 New Hampshire Avenue, Silver Spring, Maryland 20903; +1-301-431 5401 (phone); +1-301-434 0371 (fax); sschurman@georgemeany.org (email).