ORGANIZING A LABOR COLLEGE

...Graduates could enter a community college, and more than a third did, but the need for a labor college was as obvious as it had been for a high school equivalency program...

...to make a typist a secretary, not a better typist...

...Something new at DC 37 is what may be the first accredited labor college (i.e., unionsponsored) in the history of American, if not world, unionism.* It will not be the last...

...As those of us at universities know, institutional loyalty is almost a vanished attribute of college life...

...Results were as good, some staff members judged, as the writing of most competent college students...

...The Fund is invested in some innovative ways—all to the purpose of career growth for city employees: a high school equivalency program, exam preparation, college reimbursement, and now the labor college...

...The mature and experienced students at the labor college now get up to 30 hours of credit for what they have learned outside schools...

...No big bureaucracies, absentee administrators, clerks hidden away somewhere who won't give you the exam scores...

...It is, in fact, a very fine union, but it has a name that, while describing its jurisdiction, can hardly be expected to shake the world...

...Colleges, slow enough in usual cases, are often especially thoughtful about admitting quantities of (a) workers, (b) minorities (of which there are many in DC 37), and (c) working adults, who rarely follow in the professor's academic footsteps...

...NOTEBOOK 349 winners chosen by lot...

...New Rochelle was an active partner from the first...

...A family assistant earns 60 hours of credit and becomes a parent program planner —again, more responsibility, more money...

...Size is also important...

...When they have a gripe, they know to whom to complain—a steward, someone higher up in the union...

...From the beginning," Taaffee says, "I thought of the New Resources Program as a possible path to a bachelor's degree for the working person...

...The purpose of the Education Fund is to upgrade workers, not make them better employees...

...The college started up with 153 students, 20 in the labor leadership training program (with instructors provided by Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations), and 130 in the regular liberal arts program...

...The city announces an opening for senior clerk and there are 10,000 clerks eligible to take the exam...

...AFSCME, or alternately "State-County," suggests nothing of the prodigious vitality of that union...

...A large part of the upgrading work consists of training people to take civil service exams...

...Applicants were given an editorial from the New York Times and asked to write their reaction to it...

...The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, District Council 37 is the New York City district (and the dominant one) in a union headed nationally by Jerry Wurf and locally by Vic Gotbaum...

...What is it—a license plate...

...The city wants the union to train workers to do their jobs better, but the union declines, assuming that the city is more suited to that task...

...The union tries, however, to let members know that they are not in dead-end jobs, that they can move up...

...Pushing and pulling on it are New Rochelle (which has an experimental, inter 350 disciplinary approach) and some of the unionists (who seem to favor a more traditional academic and vocational approach...

...Tom Taaffee, at the invitation of Joe McMurray, then president of the College, had been given several years to develop the New Resources Program, through which the DC 37 students now earn their BA...

...Because AFSCME's jurisdiction includes virtually all government workers except those at the federal level and at local levels, teachers and some uniformed services (firemen, police, transit), it has a wildly heterogeneous membership, one that looks much like the IWW, the one big industrial union...

...I would add that she is one of the most remarkable women in American life (not to mention the labor movement)—and one of the most unrecognized...

...About half these students pay their own tuition and half get full reimbursement...

...and who have been around a long time and understand union ism...

...Enrollments are climbing as fast as the membership of AFSCME, which is currently over 600,000 nationally, and about one in six of these are in DC 37...

...The hospital workers, who came into the Union only six years ago, are among the most wellorganized, partly because they are concentrated in only 20 large public hospitals, and partly because of Lil Roberts, their extraordinary leader...

...It has a large and loyal membership, it is job-based, it has offices, staff, classrooms, a newspaper, regular meetings...

...In this case the loyalty is based on the students' sense that the college and the union are "theirs," elected by their votes, paid for by their dues...

...Its opening was announced in DC 37's newspaper...

...It is accountability and participation, and trust and loyalty...

...The loyalty facilitates communication and learning, and the school becomes less institutional and impersonal, more like home, familiar, nonalien...

...Both worked with the full support of the College's new president, Dorothy Ann Kelly...

...The chief movers, on the College side, were Joe McDermott, director of the New Resources Program, and Tom Taaffee, who is now the full-time head of the DC 37 campus...

...No politics, no elaborate testing, no admissions deans to make subtle distinctions based on gross impressions...

...Its popularity is such that there has never been, in its four-year span, enough space to accommodate all those who apply...

...All things considered, it has probably done more to lift up the poor than programs specially designed for that purpose...

...Hundreds applied...

...The money comes from the Union's Education Fund, a unique endowment that is administered solely by DC 37 and into which the city, by union contract, contributes about $1 million a year for career upgrading...

...The union also acts to change the upgrading system, to redefine jobs and job qualifications, to get the city to make the rules more reasonable and flexible, to persuade it, for example, to let hundreds of people (who in the Union program were on the brink of getting a high school diploma) take an exam for senior clerk that only high school grads had been eligible to take...

...2) Also, mainly as a result of Harry Van Arsdale's efforts, Empire State College (a school "without walls" and part of the New York State University system) has founded a labor college in New York City, but it is of a rather different genre, without walls or classes...

...Take AFSCME DC 37, for example...

...It has raised wages, pensions, medical and dental care, though many public workers are still barely over the poverty line...

...A few unions are better endowed, but not many...

...The Program made the first contact—though the union had actively, and vainly, sought a college sponsor...

...State and local governments are now the fastest growing sector of the economy...

...Almost every occupation and ethnic group is present...

...These, plus a mission to teach people, yielded this new educational happening...

...This necessity mothered the invention of the labor college...

...The Union's high school equivalency program is reputed to be the strongest in New York City, with the lowest attrition rate and the highest percentage of students passing the equivalency exam...

...A nurse's aide, seeing 400 others pass the Licensed, Practical Nurse exam, figures she can do it too...

...A family worker earns 30 hours of college credit and becomes a family assistant—a better job and more money...

...In a sense DC 37 and Vic Gotbaum are now almost synonymous, so closely tied is the District's image and accent to his leadership...

...The union tried to work with colleges in the city, but it found they couldn't meet the special needs of a small group of workers...

...On the whole, complaints are minimal, enthusiasm is maximal...

...The union bffers exam training to those who want it...

...Almost all the hospital workers are women, and almost all are black and Puerto Rican...

...In other cases, the need was for a college that would respond quickly to specific worker demands, such as studies in the allied health professions, social work, technical subjects...

...Few unions can do this because few private employers have a career upgrading system for unskilled and semiskilled blue- and white-collar workers...

...Students want homework, but most complain there is far too much of it...

...Only about three people have dropped out, and attendance is almost perfect...

...Reflections of that luminous image, and marks of its quality, are Lillian Roberts and a mem bership that is expanding in knowledge and capacity as well as in size...

...Last but best, DC 37 has Lillian Roberts, the number two person in the district...

...It has trained leaders and organized people to influence their own lives...

...The most solid unionists are the bluecollar workers, who are mainly male and "ethnic" (Italian, Irish, etc...

...She is the champion of the district's educational work and the person who conceived the idea of a labor college (also a medical school which she thinks the district should have one day) . A one-time nurse's aide from Chicago, she is now the leader of the union's hospital workers...

...All the makers of decisions are on the spot...

...The union, in an unusual symbiotic relation with both workers and employers, offers its members upward mobility as well as a new kind of "class struggle...

...It is the institution itself, the intimacy of relations between staff and students...

...A lot of time and money was spent training about 400 nurses' aides to become Licensed Practical Nurses, whereupon they were moved out of the union's jurisdiction...

...The college opened in the fall of 1972, only about two months after Bernie Rifkin, the union's education director, first talked with New Rochelle, the sponsoring college...

...What seems to matter is less the subject than the people who teach it...

...The college, running on the trimester, offers a four-year liberal arts degree...

...Its relation to government gives it more bargaining leverage than unions in the private sector, and more influence in politics and the formation of public and employer policy...

...DC 37, for example, has five * This includes about 3,800 in traditional union education (about 1,900 in stewards' training classes and about 2,000 in out-of-town stewards' conferences...

...If institutions were given medals as people are, I would love to hang one on New Rochelle...

...Students were chosen in an inspired way: by lottery...

...If the group was large, the college would say it needed two years lead time to get organized, and then wanted guarantees that the program would last three or four years...

...Before finding New Rochelle College, the union had talked with some 15 other schools...

...Call it participation, involvement, or workers' corttrol—but it's there, and it works, just as it would in factories...

...She is black, beautiful, able, articulate, tough but very hu man and womanly...

...The cost of the college is not great, nor is it small: about $33 a credit point, which is reimbursed to half the students after successful completion of courses...

...it is modest and functional and allows people to sense their own authority rather than their masters...

...People are sometimes trained, in effect, to leave the union...

...major job divisions: clerical (about 28,000 members), school, except teachers (about 14,000), hospital (about 16,000), blue-collar (about 12,000), professional (about 15,000...

...Both the union and the men are relative newcomers to big-time unionism, and perhaps partly for that reason are outstanding among their peers, as judged by integrity and energy of leaders, loyalty of members, internal democracy, bargaining gains, and, not least, phenomenal growth in a jurisdiction (government) that seems likely to expand...

...Morale of city employees has risen sharply because of it...

...To qualify for admission, students needed a high school diploma or its equivalent and the ability to write acceptable English...

...Bogdan Denitch, who teaches a course there (as do Mike Harrington and Gus Tyler), calls it (and I quote) a "darling little college...

...The swift consummation of this brief courtship was possible because New Rochelle is small and maneuverable (also Catholic and headed by a woman, a nun), and because the union, any union, is the institution most likely to succeed in recruiting adults for education...

...THE CURRICULUM of the college is still being shaped...

...The building is not meant NOTEBOOK to awe people or commemorate the powerful...

...NOTEBOOK THE EQUIVALENCY PROGRAM works so well because it has an immediate payoff: better jobs, more money...

...The union is at its best, not in the classroom but at the bargaining table...

...In some cases, the problem was with college credit for life experience...

...None was interested enough to proceed...

...It may not be high drama, but it is the daily fare that makes life worth more to many thousands of people...

...Then she may conclude that she, like others, can become a registered nurse...

...The labor college grew out of the union's high school equivalency program and is the latest episode in the development of the career growth concept, an idea that desperately needs more application to private employment...

...After about 500 students got their GED (General Education Diploma) through the union program, people began to wonder, what next...

...Either way, it may not matter much...

...In 1972, a grand total of about 43,000 people took part in DC 37's education work...

...The names of the * The claim needs a few footnotes: (1) The college was created and largely funded through DC 37, but it is technically the DC 37 campus of New Rochelle College, which runs the academic program...

...UAW—the name is short and has a certain symmetry...

...An evaluator need not examine the outcome with fine instruments to see that the college works beautifully...

...Under the reimbursement program, about 1,500 covered employees got tuition remissions last year, for whatever college they attended, up to $450 per person...

...The college is housed in an adequate but unprepossessing AFSCME building in downtown Manhattan...

...Teamsters—yes, for some people, the word at least suggests something...

...It has gone far in promoting career growth and job upgrading, the labor college being only the most recent effort...

...Vic Gotbaum, who stimulates so much activity by example, and Bernie Rifkin, who planned and pursued the college, call her the labor college's "secret weapon...

...It includes about 5,000 in career training and upgrading (about 1,100 in high school equivalency, about 1,800 in training with the hospital corps, about 2,100 in exam preparation courses of various kinds, about 10,000 in a TV exam training program on income maintenance...

...Simple, fair, and enormously appealing to workers, who are more sceptical than most people of the "merit and ability" criteria of selection...

...It also includes about 8,000 in peripheral activities (travel, ballet, retirees' activities, summer camp, art classes...

...The average age of students is about 40, so they feel more comfortable together than among younger students at evening colleges...

...Advancement in city jobs is based to a large extent on training, education, exams...

...It might not speed us on our road to socialism, but it might nudge us a bit in that direction if the organizations we look to for leadership and enlightenment had names that were compelling or at least rememberable...

...All this adds up to a sizable educational enterprise...

...Fully employed students can, however, earn a degree in less than four years by assuming an extra homework load and taking 36 credits each year...

...But, as Bernie Rifkin says, "they feel they're not going to get screwed when they deal with the union...

...Since there are now about 500 applicants, the college will expand to about 180 next term, and perhaps one day to a top of about 2,000 students...