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CWA Members: New Degrees of Freedom with Queens College Program |
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In the photo, proud grads in caps and gowns are beaming as they hold their diplomas. You know at a glance this is their special day.
But what the photo can’t communicate is the connection among all the graduates: They’re all members of New York City area unions and have participated in one of the best higher-education benefits available to union members in the city: The Urban Leadership Program.
Several are members of Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1180. Their local union has joined with Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY) to put together the program, a discipline that includes courses in public policy and administration designed especially for Local 1180 members. Run by CUNY’s Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, the program offers classes in Queens and midtown Manhattan and soon will expand to the Bronx, Staten Island and Brooklyn.
The biggest benefit if you’re a Local 1180 member: Up to 24 credits toward your Urban Leadership Program degree—whether it’s a bachelor’s or master’s degree—are entirely free.
The local union and the Murphy Institute have designed the program to fit the on-the-job experiences of Local 1180 members. Miguel Santana, a local union staff representative, points out that the vast majority are administrative employees of the city government.
Murphy Institute Director Greg Mantsios notes that most of the students are in “some type of supervisory role, some serve as office managers, others as assistants to high level bureaucrats.”
They’ve been working for the city for many years, yet nobody’s ever asked them how things might be improved. But the first day in an Urban Leadership Program class, they find out that this is what they’ll focus on. They’ll be looking at an issue like health care, or housing, or criminal justice, reading the literature, going on field trips, and then writing a task force report with solutions. Sometimes they’re published in the union newspaper. Other times, elected officials hear their reports. It’s very empowering.
The Urban Leadership Program offers an opportunity to improve job skills and enhance career opportunities says Santana, who also says that after he graduated from the program at Queens College, the degree changed his life.
It was in 1999 that I came on board as an 1180 member. I was working as a principal administrative associate, and I found out about the education benefits with the local. It’s a tremendous incentive.
Not only did he get a good education—”it allowed me to take stock and analyze things critically”—but it led him in directions he’d never been before. Santana got involved in lobbying the City Council for more funding for Queens College and participated in local political campaigns for Manhattan borough president and mayor. Eventually, he was hired as a staff representative with the local union that created the Urban Leadership Program.
The program is a success, says Mantsios, because it
responds to the important needs workers have for personal intellectual growth and individual occupational advancement and places a premium on furthering the collective good within the union, the workplace, and the community.
For proof, just ask the 27 proudest people in New York City—the delighted new alumni of the program who posed for their picture together on the graduation day they’ll never forget.
The Urban Leadership Program isn’t the only place where workers have been using their union membership to get the education they need to move ahead and build a better life. At another graduation on June 24, 122 union members and leaders from 33 unions across the country got their bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md., which is the nation’s only union-based college. The National Labor College focuses on preparing union leaders through training sessions such as the leadership development program and the university-accredited degree programs. The college offers Bachelor of Arts degrees in seven major areas and more than 70 intensive, weeklong continuing education programs in organizing, union building and leadership development.
So far, more than 900 working women and men have earned degrees from the National Labor College since 1997.
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