Cultural Diversity LS265
Not currently offered
This program currently has no scheduled dates. For more information, please contact the regional office nearest you.
Racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation and cultural identity relations shape contemporary American unions just as they shape the workplace and society at large. This course will examine how labor's diversity affects the experience of contemporary union membership and expectations for equity (fair treatment, non-discrimination), recognition (respect and openness to difference) and inclusion (opportunity for influence and participation).
Course dialogue will invite participants to think together to analyze how diversity issues have played out in the labor movement as a whole, as well as in local unions. Particular attention will be given to organizational strategy and leadership skills for building solidarity across a diverse membership.
Instructor
Susan Woods is a workplace educator and facilitator with expertise in diversity and inclusion, union-management relations, interest-based bargaining and organizational change. She sees diversity and inclusion as a central issue for the labor movement. In 2006, she retired from Cornell University ILR after 25 years. She is a former director of the Buffalo Labor Studies program. During her tenure at Cornell, she taught various courses and workshops on diversity and unions.
She has published several practitioner articles on diversity including: “People, Unions and Diversity: Building Solidarity Across a Diverse Membership” (1998) and “Women and Unions: An Interview with Linda Chavez Thompson” (1999) in The Diversity Factor, “Value in Participation” (2003) in Profiles in Diversity Journal and “Union-Management Diversity Partnerships and the Shop Floor” (2003) in the Linkage Link-n-Learn Newsletter. From 1992 to 2002, she co-directed The Workplace Diversity Network, which developed a framework for building inclusion in organizations. Later she collaborated with colleagues, Robert Rich and Lisa Nishii, on the development of an organizational inclusion assessment. Susan holds an MA in Economics from Duke University and a MS in Labor Studies from the University of Massachusetts.