TESC Labor Center moves to South Seattle

I recently came into contact with a friendly pink booklet that, though only forty-one pages long, offers a detailed glimpse into the history of Evergreen’s relationship to the labor movement. Page sixteen and seventeen are devoted to photographs arranged in a yearbook-like spread. Smiling faces beam up from the pages: Four women sing into microphones in front of a banner reading “Summer School for Union Women, June 1993.” Staff at an outdoor food stand offer “Solidarity Shakes” to participants at a conference. A group of union workers in a wooded setting sit in folding chairs, listening raptly to a speaker. Several women unionists gather around a table covered with binders, papers, and cups of probably something caffeinated, deep in discussion. The booklet is titled “Labor Center Review 1986-1993.”

I went looking for memories of the Labor Center’s early years at Evergreen just as the relationship between the two is ending—or at least changing a lot. As of July 1, the Labor Center will no longer be headquartered at Evergreen. It is moving to South Seattle Community College’s Georgetown Campus.

There are several reasons for the move, according to Peter Kardas, director of the Labor Center. He admits that, while the Center has accomplished a lot in its nearly twenty-four years at Evergreen, our college, tucked away in the woods, has never been an ideal geographic location for an organization that seeks to build ties with unions. In contrast, South Seattle is in an area that has the highest union density in the state; dozens of unions have their headquarters within a fifteen-mile radius of the campus. There are other union education programs at South Seattle, and union leaders in the area have expressed support for the move. Overall, relocating will provide more opportunities for the Center to fulfill its mission of “providing direct educational and research services to labor unions and worker-centered organizations.”

But geographic location was by no means the only factor that contributed to the decision to move. “The Center has been seriously underfunded since its inception,” explained Kardas in an e-mail announcing the transition to South Seattle. The Labor Center’s educators have never been paid salaries comparable to similar positions at other schools, and many of them have had to work part-time due to lack of funds. In 2007, after several years of organizing to increase the Center’s budget, Labor Center staff celebrated a victory when the legislature approved a measure to double their funding. Kardas was able to hire on two educators full-time, Nina Triffleman and Juan José Bocanegra, to focus on women workers and immigrant workers, respectively.

The victory was short-lived. When the economy tanked in the Fall of 2008, the college dealt with budget constraints by cutting the public service centers’ funding in half. The Labor Center was right back where it had been in early 2007.

If there had been hope that when the economy improved the funds would be reinstated, perhaps the folks at the Labor Center could have weathered the storm. But Evergreen’s administration has historically shown little support for the Center in times of financial distress—going so far as to propose that the center be eliminated when the college faced budget cuts in 2001. At the time, the administration actually told Kardas that it was a tradition in the Academic Division to look to the Labor Center when cuts needed to be made.

Even in sticky situations that didn’t deal with finances, the administration has failed to support the Labor Center. In 2008, an extremely right wing lawyers group (this group nominated Rush Limbaugh for the Nobel Peace Prize and is known for having attacked labor centers at other universities) accused the Labor Center of “thwarting federal and state law enforcement” by conducting workshops for immigrants workers on how to deal with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. The administration complied with their request for an audit of the Center. The auditor’s findings, which rested on a very rigid and highly contested interpretation of state law, mirrored the bogus accusation. The administration didn’t act on the findings, but never officially stated their disagreement. The provost at the time promised the Labor Center he would make an official statement saying that the Center never violated any laws, but never delivered.

Combine these factors, and it’s understandable that the Labor Center folks began to consider moving last November. Their budget will be the same at South Seattle, but in a more supportive environment, there is a better chance the Labor Center will succeed in securing more funding and broadening its reach. Still, the future remains uncertain. Triffleman and Bocanegra are out of a job and Kardas and Sarah Laslett, the remaining educator, will have to reapply for their jobs, competing with a nationwide pool of applicants.

As for the Evergreen community, we’re definitely losing an incredible resource. The Shop Stewards of Evergreen’s classified staff union issued a statement expressing this loss:

“The Labor Center staff, through the years, have contributed tremendous educational and professional benefits to the employees and students at T.E.S.C. This departure will be felt deeply not only in the curriculum, but on this campus broadly.”

As I turned from the pink booklet to the Labor Center’s website where pdf’s of their newsletters are available, I found photos that told more recent stories of the Labor Center’s impact on the Evergreen community and workers from all over Washington: Graduates of the 2008 Spokane Rank-and-File Leadership School stand smiling in front of a mural-sized timeline of labor history made by an Evergreen student intern. A Pu’repechan (an indigenous people of Mexico) band plays at the 2008 Worker’s Assembly on Immigration. Women march in protest outside of the ICE Detention Center in Tacoma as part of the Women of Color and Allies Summit of 2007—in the accompanying article an Evergreen student is quoted saying, “I liked the age-diversity at the Summit and the different perspectives this brings to movement-building. The Detention Center action was awesome! All those bodies in one location were absolutely energizing.”

In contrast to these upbeat photos, is a picture of a Latino immigrant worker tying a bundle of wood blocks cut from stumps on the Olympic peninsula. The article explains the risk of injury involved and the lack of recourse for the workers. Most aren’t eligible for worker’s compensation coverage, they labor in an isolated area, and receive piece-work wages, which are diminished by steep, built-in costs including transportation of the wooden blocks by helicopter. When the Labor Center newsletter featured this article, Bocanegra, was working along with other organizations to get to know the Latino community of Forks, and help connect the forest workers to unions in an effort to develop a synthesis of worker-community organizing in the area.

Another sobering photograph pictures a cemetery in El Paso, Texas where Asarco’s lead and copper smelting plant has caused serious environmental damage and health problems in the community. El Paso is one of several locations where Evergreen professors Anne Fischel and Lin Nelson have worked with communities on a documentary film that exposes Asarco’s crimes and follows workers and their families as they seek justice.

What the photos in the pink booklet and on the website show is over twenty-three years of work that has linked Evergreen students, staff, and faculty with workers all over Washington and beyond, in the struggle to obtain and maintain rights for workers. The Labor Center has fostered these connections by providing workshops where educators teach public speaking, collective bargaining, community building, and economics; by creating spaces where different unions can come together to learn how other unions work and discuss common issues, or where members of one union can meet to develop strategic plans; by providing internships and work-study jobs to students, who gain skills in organizing and researching; by providing a space for disadvantaged workers to convene to learn and share their experiences; and by offering a structure for doing all of this that allows for fun, for singing, making new friends, making art, listening to music, and drinking a Solidarity Shake while getting down to the very difficult business of wresting control of our futures.

How the administration missed all of that, I don’t know. But I believe that on this matter they don’t represent the rest of us. Labor Center, Evergreen will miss you.