EDUCATION IN THE WORK PLACE:
A BRIEF OVERVIEW
Robert A.
Carlson
INTRODUCTION
Let me indicate to you at the outset that I am
something of a newcomer to the study, specifically, of the education of
workers. I did touch on the subject from time to time in dealing with the
history of Americanization. More recently, some vexing problems in my own work
place prompted me to survey current research in this area in the hopes of
finding some clues as to effective ways of handling our situation. This recent
study and my reading for this conference of the abstracts of the presentations
on worker education and related themes have convinced me that worker education
must become a focus of my future research efforts. I believe this area is of
major importance to us as adult educators who are rethinking current and past
practice of our field. I suspect, as well, that this research area may have
implications we could explore at future conferences regarding our own
situations as "academic workers" committed to the values of adult
education but working within old, often hierarchical and autocratic
institutions oriented primarily to business interests and to the preservation
of the status quo in society.
As I reviewed the abstracts, it seemed to me that I
could provide a useful function at this point in the conference today by
drawing together and interpreting some of the findings of the earlier papers,
by bringing a few more key actors in worker education a bit closer to center
stage (including employer, employer-supported private educator, and the
government), and by setting what might be a helpful overall political context.
With this set of purposes in mind, I revised my paper to attempt a somewhat
broader effort than originally intended.
THE CONFERENCE PAPERS
In his presentation Wednesday Sean Courtney noted the
deep interest in social integration that marked this century. He pointed to the
influence of that Zeitgeist in and through the social sciences. Harold
Stubblefield told us about two u.s. manifestations of the Danish Folk High
Schools, both of which were associated with the values of social
integration--either seeking to make people feel they were a meaningful
part of the society or attempting to help people empower themselves to become, in
fact, a meaningful part of the social structure. The Southern Summer School
for Women Workers in Industry, described by Mary Frederickson, also seems to
fit this pattern in some ways.
Michael Welton, Patrick Keane, and Gordon Selman
added an international dimension to the concept of social integration via adult
education. In describing the Antigonish Movement, Welton showed the. U.S.-shared Canadian aversion to the notion of inevitable conflict
between capital and labor. Keane indicated that the international
mechanics institute movement, too, "proclaimed community of interests
between capital and labor. .." And Selman showed
how the Liberal government that came to power in British Columbia in 1933
attempted to utilize "social planning" and adult education
(governmental and private) in behalf of a "new social order," one
that would bring all groups together in a happy, harmonious community.
What a difference from the Work People's College
described by Richard Altenbaugh. If this College was truly a radical
manifestation of adult education, one can understand the nervousness with which
most adult educators in the U.S. and Canada might have viewed it, assuming they
were aware of it or acknowledged it as an adult education organization. Work People's
College, in seeking to create "a cadre of labor agitators" and in serving
socialism and the Industrial Workers of the World, seemed to want to achieve
"structural transformation," a goal Welton noted was unacceptable to
many adult educators. This Duluth, Minnesota outfit would likely have been one
of those early 20th century workers' movement institutions which Welton
indicated were perceived as "dangerous and threatening to
social order."
From the abstract it was hard to understand how the
Work People's College could continue in its radical approach for two decades
after what Rita Heller in her presentation identified as the beginning of
"the American Workers' Education Movement" in 1921. Perhaps it is
unfair for me to add one further word to her description of 1921 and to call it
the beginning of the sanitized American workers' education movement.
After all, the involvement of so prestigious an institution as Bryn Mawr
College with its Quaker heritage of a deep commitment to peace could well help
legitimize this sort of worker education to those who wanted cooperation, not
conflict, between capital and labor. Bryn Mawr College and a school for workers
may have been an "unnatural" coalition to Mary Beard. None the less,
this was just the sort of social bridge, just the sort of "social
integration," many in the progressive reform movement were working for in
the early 20th century.
THE POLITICAL CONTEXT
A number of the so-called Progressives worried that
the United States had gone off course. An increasingly urbanized and
industrialized nation was straying from Jefferson's view of an America based on
the yeoman farmer, on small agricultural holdings worked by the owners of those
holdings. The Progressives viewed askance the rise of the new captains of industry--"robber
barons," they called them. The appearance of this group in American life
conflicted dramatically with Benjamin Franklin's plans for the nation as a
"happy mediocrity," a happy and harmonious community.
In 1909 Herbert Croly articulated the Progressives'
fear that the U.s. was at risk of becoming a
class-divided society, the very antithesis of the purpose for which the
republic was ostensibly established. "... The more intelligent and
progressive American workingmen," he wrote, "are
coming to believe that the American political and economic organization does
not sufficiently secure the material improvement of the wage-earner." It
bothered Croly that "the militant unionists are beginning to talk and
believe as if they were at war with the existing social and political order--as
if the American political system was as inimical to their interests as would be
that of any European monarchy or aristocracy. . . "(1)
Croly's description of the problem went this way:
The large corporations and the unions occupy in
certain respects a similar relation to the American political system. Their
advocates both believe in associated action for themselves and in competition for
their adversaries. They both demand governmental protection and recognition, but
resent the notion of efficient governmental regulation. They have both reached
their existing power, partly because of the weakness of the state governments,
to which they are legally subject, and they both are opposed to any
interference by the Federal government--except exclusively on their own behalf.
Yet they both have become so very powerful that they are frequently too strong
for the state governments: and in different ways they both traffic for their
own benefit with the politicians, who so often control those governments. Here,
of course, the parallelism ends and the divergence begins.
The corporations have apparently the best of the situation, because existing
institutions are more favorable to the interests of the corporations than to
the interests of the unionists; but on the other hand, the unions have the
immense advantage of a great and increasing numerical strength. They are
beginning to use the suffrage to promote a class interest, though how far they
will travel on this perilous path remains doubtful. In any event, it is obvious
that the development in this country of two such powerful and unscrupulous and
well-organized special interests has created a condition which the founders of
the Republic never anticipated, and which demands as a counterpoise a more
effective body of national opinion, and a more powerful organization of the
national interest.(2)
Thus, did Croly characterize the situation of labor and
capital in his day. Croly's Progressive counterpoise,
indeed the Progressive solution, was to be the intervention of a
reformed government as honest referee and broker between the two interests.
SOME OF THE OTHER ACTORS
In this role, government was soon to involve itself
in worker education, also, often in indirect ways, by encouraging the
educational efforts of the two protagonists. Experience in the state of
Wisconsin would provide the forerunner in the United States of protective labor
legislation, of expanded company welfare and safety programs, and of industrial
management techniques that have become widespread.(3) With the Progressive wing
of the Republican Party in control of the Wisconsin Statehouse and with the
support of its friends in the social sciences, such as Professor John Commons
of the University of Wisconsin, a new State Industrial Commission began by 1912
to enforce state industrial safety and sanitation regulations in Wisconsin. It
was also the force that ensured implementation of a state workmen's
compensation act that overcame some of the common law advantages previously
enjoyed by capital over labor.
Managements of some of the larger companies, notably
International Harvester which maintained an important operation in Milwaukee,
had already put in place educational activities for their workers within
voluntary welfare programs intended, at least in part, to win worker loyalty to
the company and away from unions. The programs also had to be justified on the
grounds that they would improve worker productivity. International Harvester,
for example, decided on its own to provide workers with such services as pure
drinking water, medical aid for those injured on the
job, and recreation and education facilities, including schools for
apprentices.
The companies also accepted outside assistance from
private educators. International Harvester's central headquarters plant in
Chicago was among factories accepting the offer of the YMCA to provide immigrant
workers with English lessons. The YMCA became heavily involved for a time in
such educational endeavors for workers in America's factories. Other private educational
organizations that were invited into the factories by employers also became
involved. These private educational groups were motivated by the desire to
enhance social cohesion in the nation.(4)
Within the International Harvester home office in
Chicago a significant internal struggle was fought early-on over the philosophy
of education to prevail at Harvester. One of the combatants was Henry Bruere, a
University of Chicago graduate recommended by John Dewey, who took a broad view
of industrial education. He wanted to use it, according to Gerd Korman, in "serving
the entire industrial community" and in "uplifting workers in general."(5)
Among those on the other side of the struggle was Charles W. Price, a company
functionary who informed himself about safety and welfare issues and was
rewarded by appointment as supervisor of International Harvester's welfare
program. Price subscribed to what Korman termed a philosophy "of welfare
activities as a means of harmonizing the relations between capital and labor,
but always on company terms."(6)
That philosophy did not bother the Progressive
government of Wisconsin or John Commons. In 1912 the government hired Price on
the recommendation of Commons to direct the welfare and safety enforcement program
of its new Industrial Commission. Both Commons and the government wanted to
create harmony between capital and labor. What better person than Price to
convince the recalcitrant among businessmen of both the self-interest and the
public interest of their cooperation with government in rationalizing working
conditions for labor and thereby improving relations between management and
labor!(7)
Progressive policy in Wisconsin was to enable
government to intervene legally to regulate the work place should employer
cooperation not be forthcoming. If the economic costs of accidents on the job
were not clear enough, worker compensation decisions and penalties would bring
the costs directly home to uncooperative employers. Woe to the employer
experiencing an industrial accident involving an employee who had received no
on-the-job safety instruction! One of the results was extensive expansion of
employer safety education programs for workers.
Korman interpreted this and other aspects of what he
called industry's "comprehensive welfare program" as "designed
to develop company loyalty, employment stability, and harmonious relations with
workers." The employer welfare and safety experts, he said, "working
on behalf of their companies," had collaborated with the government's
regulators. "Together they had. . . started to
spin the web of rules and practices which made government agencies the partners
of management in developing more sophisticated techniques for controlling the
work force. "(8)
The one-sided nature of this cooperation by
government during the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover pro-business era of the
1920s eventually became discredited. By 1929 university professor Sumner
Slichter, who had been one of the social scientists in support of Progressive
policy earlier on, was complaining publicly about "The Current Labor
Policies of American Industries."(9) Slichter worried that the results of
the cooperative government-employer rationalization process had become
"one of the most ambitious social experiments of the age" in which
employers used their expanded welfare programs to encourage worker dependency,
to discourage class consciousness, and to diminish worker interest in trade
unionism.
In light of this critique, the New Deal in the 1930s
and 1940s tended to tilt government more in the direction of labor. The Roosevelt
administration established a labor education program in 1933 under the direction
of Hilda Smith from Bryn Mawr College. In 1934 and 1935 she administered the
federally-supported teacher training centers, as Joyce Kornbluh indicated, with
labor-oriented content and materials. This program was soon absorbed by the WPA's
Workers Service Project, an educational service to labor that continued until
1942.
That same year the ubiquitous Hilda Smith launched a
campaign to get Congress to establish a National Labor Extension Service. The
proposed organization was to provide educational services for unions as the
agricultural extension service provided educational services for farmers. Her efforts
failed, not because of the politicians in Washington but because of the
concerns of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
The AFL thought the agricultural extension model put
too much control of labor education in the hands of the state universities. It
preferred to maintain its labor education under its own control in order to
educate on its own terms, a point of view paralleling the employer attitude
toward control of such programs expressed earlier by International Harvester.
The AFL wanted any labor extension service to supply only "research and
the materials so that unions could start their own educational classes."
It wanted to prevent what it imagined to be the radical influences of the
universities from being exerted on its members. Indeed, the AFL's education
committee included some influential members who seemed to hold political biases
in tune with right-wing employer groups. "The Hilda Smith proposal,"
one of the education committee members wrote, "foreshadows education as
she did it under WP A . . . when so many 'Commies' found jobs as teachers."(10)
The AFL refused to join other union groups in
endorsing the Smith proposal. By the end of 1950 the bill was dead. For the
unions, this failed effort seems to have marked the high water level of
government interest in supporting labor education.
CONCLUSION
In more recent years, of course, a neo-conservatism
has taken power in Washington. With Ronald Reagan's political attack that broke
the air traffic controllers' union, an era more akin to the
Harding-Coolidge-Hoover period seems to be in sway. And it would be interesting
to analyze the degree to which government, labor unions, and business are
currently cooperating in worker education in behalf of social integration, the
American tradition of worker education since the Progressive Era.
NOTES
1. Herbert Croly, The
Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 128, 130.
2. Ibid., 130, 131.
3. See Gerd Korman, Industrialization, Immigrants and
Americanizers: The View from Milwaukee, 1866-1921 (Madison, Wisc.: The
State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1967), for an outstanding description
and analysis of the Wisconsin situation. I am indebted to him for much of the
detail on the Wisconsin situation, on International Harvester's activities in
welfare and safety education, and for his excellent historical interpretations
that are noted in the text.
4. See Robert A. Carlson, The Americanization
Syndrome: A Quest for Conformity (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987),
Chapters 7 and 8.
5. Korman, Industrialization, Immigrants and
Americanizers, 95.
6. Ibid., 107.
7. Ibid., 88, 116-20. 8. Ibid., 199, 200.
9. Sumner Slichter, "The Current Labor Policies of
American Industries," Quarterly Journal of Economics 43 (May 1929):
432-35; cited by Korman, 193.
10. Author unknown, unpublished manuscript submitted to Adult Education, circa 1978. Research financed by a grant from the Rutgers Research Council. This article provided the source of data regarding the attempt to establish a National Labor Extension Service.
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