There was once a time when the Catholic Church was at the forefront of worker education in the United States, and when labor schools — which brought together workers from different industries to learn the basics of union organizing, parliamentary procedure, collective bargaining techniques, labor law and history, and public speaking — played instrumental roles in training everyday men and women to assert their power in the workplace.

Labor education programs still exist in a few academic settings — at Cornell, at Penn State, and at the Boston Labor Guild, which the Archdiocese of Boston has administered for almost seventy years. But at many universities worker schools have come under attack in recent years from conservative think tanks, nonprofits, and politicians. Meanwhile, the decline of the community-based labor school movement coincides with the drastic reduction of union membership since that period.

But in an era of increasingly non-democratic, arbitrary control of workers’ lives by employers, there is a corresponding need for organized labor educational programs like those that were once common in the heyday of union power — schools that will train working-class students in the fundamentals of labor law and organizing tactics, that will empower rank-and-file union members, and that will give them the opportunity to develop the sort of communities that are essential for revitalizing unions.