WITHIN THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT

 

national Ladies’ Garment Workers, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and
the American Federation of Hosiery Workers, set the example for current
newly formed groups. They formulated three programs, “mass education,”
“classroom education,” and “training for trade union service,’ which might
lead workers to new economic, political, and social horizons.

Young groups, including automobile, rubber, steel and textile workers, are
adapting old devices to their needs. Struggling to strengthen their economic,
business structure, they necessarily are emphasizing pragmatic instruction.
Interest in political and consumers’ problems, however, is dawning and por-
tends an educational movement which may expand as their trade unionism
broadens.

Still other categories of workers are borrowing educational ideas from the
older groups. Hitherto ostracized by the official trade union movement, white-
collar, agricultural and Negro workers and the unemployed are learning their
part in labor organization. Because of their youth, they are developing
workers’ education slowly, from community to community. Local needs,
therefore, determine the emphasis of specific programs, sometimes mainly
economic, and sometimes socially and politically motivated. They can well
utilize the means of the older immigrant trade unionists, who had to fight
for acceptance within the working class as well as within the life of the
nation.

Despite slight differences, the trade unions which endorse workers’ educa-
tion conform to one main pattern. Instruction is related functionally to col-
lective bargaining; the core is the experience of the workers. Many groups
outside of the labor movement have recognized this relationship and con-
sequently have raised opposition. Naturally, opposition stems from antag-
onism to organized labor as a whole. Hilda W. Smith, Director of the
Workers’ Service Program of the Work Projects Administration, has analyzed
the hostility as follows:

The major part of the criticism, however, is probably inevitable, given the
nature of this program, its emphasis on current economic questions of a con-
troversial nature, and its close relationship to the needs of the labor move-
ment. In spite of their legal status, the unions still have much to do before
their very right to exist is recognized by the American public. And the
struggle of workers’ education to establish itself as a sound teaching program

is bound up with the struggle of labor unions for recognition, and for the
tight of collective bargaining. Once these rights are taken for granted by

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