Blue-Collar Classroom

Abstract

This article examines how a labor studies program, most of whose students come from unions in the building trades, wrestles with a deeply rooted perception about the relationship between an individual's skill and her wages. Aspects of tradition and experience in the unionized building trades validate it, and public discourse today sees it as a basic economic truth. Other aspects of building trades' tradition and experience, as well as current mobilizations by low-wage service workers, show that collective power determines wages and enables a conversation about the social wage that decouples individual skill from wage levels.Over the course of a semester in our university-based labor studies program, students from various classes come together for what we call "Food for Thought" discussions of current issues relevant to the labor movement. These sessions are student driveneither directly through presentations by panels of students or through presentations by outside speakers that students feel will begin a compelling and relevant conversation. In two recent sessions, fast food workers shared their personal stories, their strike efforts, and their campaigns for $15 an hour.Fast food workers are on the front lines of union organizing in a way that our students, as relatively privileged members of the building trades, are not. In spite of a strong sense of brotherhood fostered in their own union, Local #3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), one of our students asked the fast food workers what qualifications and training they had that would qualify them to join their yet-to-be-attained union. We sensed that underlying this question was the notion that fast food workers have to prove themselves "skilled" in some way in order to join a union, or that an apprenticeship program such as Local #3's was required to demonstrate the "right" to increasingly higher wages and other benefits. Another student asked a related question-"If you want better wages why don't you better yourself and get a better job?"-which emphasized the all-too-accepted-notion that fast food and other low-paid workers are unskilled and, therefore, paid what they are worth.The majority of the students at the Food for Thought discussion were sympathetic and supportive of the fast food workers' campaign, and those that raised questions did so respectfully. In fact, one student, a former fast food manager, stated that fast food workers have to have a range of skills-from knowing how to cook (so "they don't kill someone") to knowing how to deal with all kinds of quirky and unruly customers. But still, the discussions during these sessions, attended by more than 200 of our students, captured a central challenge to our program, The Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Center for Labor Studies, State University of New York (SUNY)/Empire State College. In the classroom, our students, like much of the general public, often engage in discussions through the lens of the prevalent and powerful belief, deeply embedded in American history, that it is self-...