Join us as we interview Bill Barry, Director of Labor Studies at Community College of Baltimore County and author of Union Strategies for Hard Times: Helping Your Members and Building Your Union in the Great Recession.
Bill has been the Director of Labor Studies for CCBC since 1997, and has maintained a program started in the 1970s by Rev Everett L. Miller, Sr., to help put the move back into the labor movement. The program offers an Associate Degree in Labor Studies, and is one of the very few in the United States which has not become either a research facility or been swallowed up into an “industrial relations” program. The program offers all of the basic union training courses, trying to answer the basic question: how are workers trying to make their lives better? The programs stresses worker self-reliance, and has a motto “Teaching Workers to Teach Themselves.” Classes are taught through the middle-Atlantic states, and on-line, and the program is experimenting with pod casting and with streaming video.
The book, Union Strategies for Hard Times: Helping Your Members and Building Your Union in the Great Recession, has chapters on how to handle grievances, negotiate contracts without concessions, how to make your union the center of activity for active and laidoff members, and their communities.
There is a brief historical discussion of how we got where we are and how unionism is the solution, and not the problem, for the current economic crisis.