USW members in the Level 4 Leadership Scholarship Program staged a rally in Downtown Pittsburgh in July 2024 to call attention to a major victory—the union-backed national infrastructure program that’s creating millions of jobs and modernizing America.
The rally coincided with “Picklesburgh,” a festival that drew thousands of visitors to the city and ensured a large audience for the class members’ important message about the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
The group of aspiring union leaders made signs, wrote chants (such as “Infrastructure: It’s a Big Dill!”) and organized a march and press conference. On the day of the rally, some class members spoke about the infrastructure program’s impact on their workplaces, industries and communities while others took cellphone footage and produced videos—a skill they learned in the program—to share on social media.
The skills required to organize the rally—mobilization, communication and media outreach, among others—are the same ones that workers use to build power in the workplace and influence public policy. While planning this action, in fact, the class might have been mistaken for a local union team organizing a parking-lot rally to support collective-bargaining demands.
The USW’s Department of Education and Membership Development creates and delivers a broad variety of educational programs to empower workers and build the union.
The four-year Leadership Scholarship Program serves as the cornerstone of the department’s efforts. It annually enrolls a Level One group of about 90 members—selected by the districts—and graduates a Level 4 group following a capstone event like the infrastructure rally.
The program’s design enables members to learn as much from each other as they do the facilitators.
Helping Leaders Find their Voices
It is difficult to overstate the program’s transformative impact on participants.
Over the course of a week every year, members from Canada and the United States (including Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands) learn that they have a great deal in common, even though they hail from workplaces as diverse as steel mills, nursing homes, containerboard plants and university offices.
The program’s design enables members to learn as much from each other as they do the facilitators who steer discussions and activities over a variety of topics.
Simultaneous interpretation breaks down language barriers, enabling speakers of English, French and Spanish to communicate with each other.
In the first year of Leadership Scholarship, participants help one another become more confident and poised public speakers. Members deliver weekly reports in front of their peers and learn to accept feedback, better structure their narratives, anticipate questions and stick to their talking points.
These skills serve as the building blocks for others.
During the third year of the program, for example, class members learn how to be effective negotiators. In mock contract talks, they bargain against instructors and staff representatives playing their management counterparts. It’s an experience that builds confidence along with analytical and decision-making capacity.
Leadership Scholarship also continues to focus on the organizing skills that members need both to build solidarity in their workplaces and bring the union to new groups of workers.
Responding to Emerging Needs
As workers’ needs and challenges evolve, so does the Leadership Scholarship curriculum. In 2023, for example, we introduced mental health education into the first and fourth years of the program.
The change occurred because of feedback from local union leaders, who reported growing levels of stress, anxiety and burnout in the workplace. With the boundaries between work and home becoming more porous, difficulties in one area often bleed into the other.
The mental health curriculum—developed in conjunction with a psychologist who studies the relationship between unions and emotional health—teaches members about the centrality of work in a person’s life and its connections to well-being.
Class members learn to identify warning signs of declining mental health and, more important, how to encourage an at-risk co-worker to seek professional help from a caregiver or faith leader.
Alumni help to keep the program current and dynamic. In 2023 and 2024, several graduates returned as facilitators, enriching the classes with stories about their experiences as local union leaders and Leadership Scholarship participants.
Making Their Mark
Just as intended, participants and graduates go on to make profound differences in their local unions, workplaces and communities.
Since completing the program, for example, Desirae Beatty, Local 9002 unit president and a longtime certified nursing assistant at a Kane Community Living Center in Western Pennsylvania, organized a stewards’ network to better represent members at the county-owned nursing home group.
Beatty also joined Roxanne Brown, USW vice president at large, in representing the union at the Biden-Harris administration’s Black Labor Leaders Roundtable at the White House in February 2024. The two offered insights not only on the administration’s efforts to support workers and grow the middle class but stressed the importance of unions to health care and public-sector workers.
Jenn Turner, another graduate, serves as vice president of Local 1944, an amalgamated union representing Canadian workers in communications and other industries. She helped to organize four Starbucks stores and an ADT by Telus workplace while chairing the local’s grievance and pay equity committees.
Besides those contributions, Turner helps to lead the Project for United Membership Action (PUMA), a Local 1944 communications network that enables union leaders and members to quickly share information about bargaining, safety and other important issues.
Building the Union
In addition to Leadership Scholarship, the department offers courses on a variety of subjects, in a number of formats, to empower members and grow the union across districts, workplaces and sectors.
Among many other examples, we expanded our capacity over the past few years to deliver collective bargaining training to districts and local unions.
In Districts 1 and 11, we facilitated three-day collective-bargaining seminars that amounted to “boot camp” for bargaining committees with contracts nearing expiration. The culminating mock bargaining exercise challenged bargaining committees to present and respond to proposals from management while maintaining cohesion and speaking with one voice.
Across the union, stewards serve on the front lines.
They enforce contracts. They protect and maintain our hard-fought gains in negotiations. To leverage lessons learned across sectors and districts, the department provides steward and grievance-handling classes that promote the sharing of experiences and ideas.
We also revised our curriculum for local union officers, which we provided in workshop format at numerous district conferences and sub-district events. In March 2024, we conducted a “train-the-trainer” on this subject with District 10 staff representatives, who then facilitated the class across the district after local union elections in the summer of 2024.
Reaching Members Virtually
Online education, first offered in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has greatly expanded the union’s reach and become a permanent, growing part of the department’s work.
On most Tuesday mornings and evenings, we offer online classes on nuts-and-bolts topics such as past practice, representing co-workers in disciplinary disputes, and the Family and Medical Leave Act.
These sessions, known as Teaching Tuesdays, enable local union officers and grievers to sharpen the skills and knowledge they need to perform their duties. Classes on labor history and women in the workplace also proved to be popular topics.
Just as with on-site training, online education creates a space for members to meet and learn from each other. And post-pandemic changes underscore the importance of virtual classes and workshops.
More and more USW locals report understaffing and high turnover rates in their workplaces, making it more difficult for officers to attend educational programs requiring travel and time away from the job. Teaching Tuesdays bridge the gap, making education available to activists across shifts and time zones with little to no impact on local union treasuries.
The department remains committed to growing this training and creating unique programs as needed. In the fall 2024, for example, we taught several one-hour classes on the duties of recording secretaries for District 11.
Education on the Front Lines
In USW workplaces, members learn from each other in one-on-one discussions and breakroom chats. Likewise, every grievance committee member’s meeting with a staff representative has the potential to be educational.
The department sees an opportunity to harness this organic membership development and support a broader culture of learning throughout the USW. To that end, we are now prioritizing the development of short, accessible material that can be distributed and reproduced in workplaces and on social media.
The department began publishing the Stewards Corner newsletter in 2021, and since the 2022 convention, this monthly resource has featured articles about screening grievances, menopause as a workplace issue, and the importance of workers-only spaces on the job. Many local union leaders print copies of the newsletter for stewards and distribution at membership meetings, and the department envisions more of this type of outreach going forward.
Building the Bench
A generational shift is underway across the USW as veteran local union leaders retire or step back to make space for newer activists—a change that underscores the importance of intergenerational solidarity, mentoring, and coaching at every level of the USW.
The department plans to memorialize this shift by recording and capturing the oral histories of International officers, staff representatives and members as they retire.
The union undertook a similar project in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the cohort that built the USW began to retire. Today, their histories—held at the USW archives at Pennsylvania State University—offer an incredible wealth of knowledge about organizing, bargaining, and legislative and political action.
Documenting our union’s history is an important step in educating and inspiring current and future members about the power of a union. Celebrating the past is a worthy and useful goal amid the department’s innovative efforts to move the union forward.