Monthly Archives: December 2015

  The students’ final presentations were supposed to be stories about what people did in the workplaces to make their work lives better. Theoretically, the stories were supposed to be about collective action: organizing or leadership. However, we emphasized that what was most important was to tell what really happened, not to make something up.Continue reading “What Did We Learn from Student Reports? (2)”

All the reports summarized and put into a table, printed out and taped together.   This will be the first of several posts on this topic. In this post, I’m just describing the  initial sorting process that had to be done with all the student reports when they came in. Combining Joe’s class and mine,Continue reading “What did we learn from the student reports? (1)”

I have mentioned walking through the terraces on the ground floor of the buildings and seeing displays of work done by the various design departments. Early in our days here, we saw fabulous gowns and sharp costumes. We also saw what was apparently an architecture final project that involved designs for resorts, something that IContinue reading “Design at TDTU”

Rich Trumka, AFL CIO President, with locked-out AFSCME 3494 workers.   Effingham: From Organizing to Contract   I never expected to hear the word “Effingham” pronounced in the middle of a sentence in Vietnamese, but it has now happened numerous times. I used the Effingham story, in which the workers at Heartland Health Services organized as AFSCMEContinue reading “Effingham”

  We’re getting near the end of our semester. We each have one more class. I’m beginning to think in terms of how to best use these last opportunities. It’s time to lay it out there and see if anything hits the fan.   There have been a couple of key moments.   One wasContinue reading “Some Key Moments”

The first stories that come up when a bunch of old labor educators are killing a couple of bottles of wine are health and safety stories, like the generator that exploded and the printing press that blew across Michigan Avenue. Then we start remembering stories told us by other people: Emanuel Blackwell, RIch Egeland, Gary Gaines. Pretty soon we’re talking aboutContinue reading “What stories do we tell?”