Progressive Change Needs Strong Civics Education
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More than 100 years ago, a commission, charged with examining how well high school students were being taught about government, politics and citizenship, found that a poor civics education linked to the plethora of bad politicians and weak public servants dominated turn-of-the-century American government.
Today, says Andrea Batista Schlesinger in a Point of View guest column at the AFL-CIO website, a renewed and strong emphasis on civics is even more vital in the 21st century.
We have to start caring a lot more about civics. If we want to ensure that a pro-worker progressive movement is in our future, we need to raise a generation of young people who feel connected to the institutions of their democracy, who understand how to navigate them and who understand from an early age that it is their right—and their responsibility—to question them.
Schlesinger is the author of The Death of Why: The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy. She is on a leave of absence from the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, where she served as executive director.
Unemployed Workers Have Lifeline Because of Frances Perkins’ Legacy
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With U.S. unemployment at 8.5 percent in March, the highest rate in 25 years, more than 6 million Americans are making ends meet because of the idea and determination of the nation’s first female Cabinet member, Frances Perkins, a “canny but little-known social worker” who became President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s labor secretary during the Depression.
In a Point of View guest column at the AFL-CIO website, Kirstin Downey, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Washington Post, says the vital need for many New Deal programs is especially clear now as we struggle through our current economic crisis.
Downey, author of The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience, says Perkins and Roosevelt “propelled into existence” the unemployment insurance system, part of the package of social safety proposals born in the New Deal, including Social Security. Perkins brought her drive and commitment to the effort, and Roosevelt won the political support that allowed the package to pass, Downey says.
Unions Pave Way for African American Progress
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Union membership has been a pathway to the middle class and leadership for generations of African American workers. Unions have done more to provide jobs, physical safety, education, adequate housing and medical care for African Americans than any other institution, according to labor educator Edgar Moore.
In “African Americans Win With Unions,” a guest column at the AFL-CIO website, Moore, a faculty member at the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s William Brennan Institute for Labor Studies, writes:
Unions serve the African American community well. It is true that unions, like the rest of American society, delayed opening their doors to African Americans for too long, but enormous progress has been made since it happened.
In turn, the union movement benefits from African American membership, Moore points out. He cites a study that shows more African Americans hold leadership positions in labor unions than in any other social institution in America, except the black church.
