122 National Labor College Graduates Step into Their Future

by James Parks, Jun 24, 2006

It’s been said that an employer’s greatest fear is an educated union member. Today, there are 122 more educated union members ready to work for economic justice on the job.

These union leaders and members and staff from across the country received their degrees today at the eighth annual National Labor College (NLC) commencement at the NLC campus in Silver Spring, Md. 

The 2006 graduates include members of 33 unions who received 106 Bachelor of Arts degrees and 16 master’s degrees through the NLC’s partnership programs with the University of Baltimore and the American University.

“I’m pumped,” says Gwen Dunivent, a Southwest Airlines flight attendant from Dallas, who received her bachelor’s degree. Dunivent, a newly elected officer of Transport Workers (TWU) Local 556, used her vacation time to take classes.

I just want to be a more powerful advocate for working people. The range of courses you have to take to get the degree gives you such a broad exposure to all aspects of the labor movement. I just hope I can use this degree to move out in the labor movement in a larger way, says Dunivent, a newly-elected officer of Transport Workers Local 556.

For her senior research project, she crafted a proposal she hopes to take to the TWU national executive board to fund scholarships at NLC for TWU members.

The NLC ceremonies featured keynote speaker Virginia Gov. Mark Warner (D), who was awarded an honorary degree. Several graduates received special honors, including Robert Gartner, a member of the Sheet Metal Workers from Heath, Ohio, who won the first Bert and Annabel Seidman prize for advancing social policy for his research paper on retiree health care costs. The award, from the Alliance for Retired Americans Educational Fund, honors former AFL-CIO Health and Safety Director Bert Seidman and his wife, Annabel. Three awards for community service were given to graduates who helped rebuild the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.

Dunivent and her classmates are part of a rapidly changing cadre of union members seeking more education, says Labor College President Susan Schurman. From the time the first NLC class entered in 1998, students represent an increasingly wider range of  unions, with more women, more minorities and more geographical diversity. The class of 2006 included for the first time international graduates—from unions in Brazil and Trinidad/Tobago.

Students also are deeply interested in the political economy, Schurman says. “I think that reflects the impact of globalization and how strongly policy decisions at the local, state and federal level affect workers’ lives,” she says. The students see the need for more rigorous study than before, says Schurman, and the NLC is one of the few places that members from all unions can put aside union politics and just focus on building skills to better represent workers.

Speaking at the ceremony, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, who in 1997 spearheaded the formation of the Labor College, which received full accreditation from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education in 2004, noted the ability of the NLC to unite diverse groups:

All of you came here to the National Labor College campus—I like to call it “America’s union hall”—to learn together and forge the future of the labor movement in solidarity.  

Here on our campus, all of the other issues that sometimes divide us by occupation or sector or geography are set aside. Here we focus on what we all have in common: A deep desire to build a better future for working families everywhere in the world.

More than 900 working men and women have earned degrees from the NLC, the nation’s only union-based college. The Labor College offers Bachelor of Arts degrees in seven major areas and more than 70 intensive, weeklong continuing education programs in union organizing, union building and leadership development. The National Labor College focuses on preparing union leaders through training sessions such as the leadership development program and the university accredited degree programs.

In the next few months, Schurman said the NLC will open its new conference center, named for the late AFL-CIO President Emeritus Lane Kirkland. The school also has signed the first in a series of partnership agreements with community colleges and universities to allow union members to take classes for credit at any of the schools. The first agreement is with colleges in the Los Angeles County area.

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