"Labor at a Crossroads"

Gas prices.

Global economics.

Climate change.

At ILR's Union Leadership Institute seminar this week, 80 people are discussing where labor and its leaders fit in to the pressing issues of the day.

"What we're talking about are issues that face all working people," said Fred Kotler, director of the Union Leadership Institute at Cornell.

The voices come from private and public sector union leaders and staff working in diverse jobs in diverse fields – construction to health care and public safety to education.

Remilda Ferguson is a Teamsters' union official representing public housing employees in New York City.

Michael Hunt is a high school history teacher and president of the 600-member Mahopac Teachers Association.

This week is a rare chance for Hunt, Ferguson and others to connect with colleagues from other unions and from other industries and geographic locales.

As Kotler explains it, "A laborer can be sitting next to a physicist."

It's not enough for the 80 to return home Saturday more empowered, more skilled to lead their unions, Kotler said.

It's about leading a larger constituency.

"We want union leaders to think more broadly – to be thinking of themselves as leaders of the labor movement and of working people," Kotler said.

"We’re at a critical time, when the old paradigm is clearly in need of a big shift," he said.

Jeff Grabelsky, director of Cornell University's Union Building Strategies Program, Monday urged the union leaders to think strategically as a labor movement rather than as stand-alone unions.

The statewide seminar, sponsored annually since 2001 by Cornell University and AFL-CIO, draws a racially and professionally diverse group to the institute’s home base on the Cornell campus.

Unions send leaders to the event as part of the institute's 13-month, 12-credit certificate course. Four, two-day weekend workshops along with elective courses and individual projects.

During "Labor at a Crossroads," this week's conference, participants will hear perspectives from ILR faculty and staff and from national labor leaders. They will learn how and where to tap union expertise statewide.

"It's as much emotional as it is intellectual," Kotler said. "The most important thing that happens is creation of a group bond."

Participants go home with a new network of leadership colleagues, he said .

"The idea is to enable unions to cultivate the next generation of leaders," he said.

Featured speakers this week include:

• Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy, University of California Berkeley, "From Walter Reuther to Andy Stern: Can Labor’s Past Inform Its Future," Tuesday.

• The Rev. Nelson N. Johnson, executive director of Beloved Community Center of Greensboro, Inc. and pastor of Faith Community Church, Greensboro, N.C., "Building a Movement for Social Change: Challenges and Opportunities for the 2008 Presidential Election," Thursday.

• Jeff Faux, founding president of the Economic Policy Institute, Washington, D.C., "The Global Class War," Friday.

More information about the institute can be read at: www.ilr.cornell.edu/uli/Curriculum/residential/JulySeminar.html.