LRANetwork

Paula Brantner

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Welcome to the Labor Research & Action Network

The Labor Research and Action Network (LRAN) is a dynamic collaborative effort to connect workers’ rights organizations, academics and students to build workplace and economic power for working people in this country.

The LRAN online community includes a website, listserve, and an experts database to facilitate connections between scholars and practitioners working on worker campaigns. The listserve is a private, members-only, web-based forum that combines the functions of a listserve, online forum/newsgroup, and a wiki. You must be a current LRAN member and must register for access to the private network areas of this website. There is a $25 annual registration fee in order to access the LRAN listserve and database.

To join LRAN, simply complete our online member registration form. For those who make a minimum $25 tax-deductible donation to LRAN on our online membership donation page, website registration is free.

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Labor Research and Action Network Aims To Connect Researchers and Scholars with the Labor Movement

BY JEFF SCHUHRKE

When 100,000 protesters occupied the Wisconsin State Capitol in early 2011 in an attempt to thwart Governor Scott Walker’s bill revoking the rights of public sector employees, a group of labor researchers and scholars were motivated to coordinate their efforts to better serve the interests of the working class.

“We knew we needed academics with credibility saying that what was happening with Wisconsin’s attack on unions was not right,” says Erin Johansson, who at the time was a researcher for the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group American Rights at Work.

Johansson believes academics bring a level of trustworthiness into public debates that is crucial to the labor movement. After the Wisconsin uprising, she and others felt there needed to be a central hub to connect scholars and the movement. “That kind of coordination is really critical when we lack the resources that our opponents have,” she says, noting the influence of well-funded right-wing think tanks.

The result was the creation of the Labor Research and Action Network (LRAN), an open, volunteer-driven forum to match academics with campaigners, share skills, design trainings, and award research grants to emerging scholars.

This past weekend, about 150 representatives from unions, worker centers, academia, and nonprofits from around the country gathered in Chicago for the sixth annual LRAN conference. Hosted by the DePaul University Labor Education Center, this was the first time the conference was held outside of Washington, D.C.

Presenters included Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, labor lawyer and author Thomas Geoghegan, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre, and AFSCME Council 31 Executive Director Roberta Lynch, as well as dozens of worker activists, strategic researchers, organizers, and scholars. The conference’s themes included linking racial and economic justice, defending public services from austerity, building innovative research and educational programs, and organizing outside the traditional collective bargaining framework.

“You can’t function without information,” Lewis told conference participants, emphasizing the role of research in challenging anti-worker narratives. “Academia can provide a vision [for the labor movement], help refine it, and articulate information to a broader audience.”

As an active LRAN member since its first conference in 2011, Beth Gutelius—a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago—has helped groups like Warehouse Workers for Justice and the National Domestic Workers Alliance conduct surveys and prepare reports shedding light on some of the country’s most marginalized workers.

“Being able to use credible, rigorous research to back up claims that organizers are making about the state of an industry can be very powerful,” Gutelius tells in In These Times. Without such research, she explains, it is much easier for policymakers and regulatory agencies to dismiss concerns raised by workers and organizers.

In its short existence, LRAN already has several accomplishments. With the help of the network, the organization In the Public Interest connected with a group of scholars and recently produced a report revealing how charter schools profit from privatization. LRAN has also organized trainings to help campaign researchers uncover predatory practices of the finance industry, and recently got 250 academics to sign onto an open letter in favor of the new federal overtime rule. In addition, this year LRAN awarded over $15,000 in research grants to three graduate students studying labor issues.

LRAN is a project of Jobs with Justice (JwJ)—a national network of labor, faith, and community coalitions. Now JwJ’s research director and LRAN coordinator, Johansson says “LRAN is sort of our academic arm…As local Jobs with Justice coalitions are engaged in fights, they’ve made use of our contacts with researchers and academics to work on projects together.”

“Academics are workers too,” says Matt Hoffmann, a researcher for SEIU Local 73 who moderated a workshop at the conference on the struggles of adjunct faculty. “One of the big shifts in academia we’re seeing is that academics at all levels of tenure and contingency are struggling and their working conditions are deteriorating.”

A former adjunct instructor at Loyola University Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, and Illinois Institute of Technology, Hoffman came into the labor movement as an activist with SEIU’s Faculty Forward campaign to unionize non-tenure-track faculty.

“We’re starting to see people who used to be in comfortable research positions are now interested in organizing and having a say in their working conditions,” Hoffman says. “We have a lot of work to do as academics, organizing ourselves to connect to the wider labor movement.”

“It’s one thing to just sit around and have conversations,” Karen Lewis told academics at the conference. “It’s another thing to have conversations one-to-one directly. It’s another thing to build solidarity and have real relationships.”

Some of this solidarity is already being built between the adjunct activists with Faculty Forward and fast-food activists with the Fight for $15 campaign, who have come to each other’s rallies in Chicago. As Hoffman explains, “There was a lot of surprise from fast-food workers to see that people with Ph.D.s are still living in poverty, still applying for welfare… It shows that education isn’t necessarily the thing that will launch you into a middle-class lifestyle.”

Gutelius believes scholars benefit from engaging with social justice movements. “I think it makes us smarter to be challenged to make our ideas more useful,” she says. “It makes us more honest. We’re not accountable to anyone in the academy, but when we work with community groups or unions, we get some of that accountability… It makes you think though your decisions and figure out how to explain yourself.”

Going forward, Johansson tells In These Times that she would like to see LRAN’s nearly 1,000 members start to do more self-organizing around projects and pool more resources for research grants. She notes that members in Chicago “organically” came together to form their own local chapter, and says there’s nothing stopping members in other parts of the country from doing the same.

“The model of people meeting locally is nice and we encourage that elsewhere. It’d be great to see more chapters form that way,” she says. “We’re not highly bureaucratic, you don’t need a charter or anything like that. If someone wants to form a chapter, we’ll give you a list of local people, and you can start one yourself.”

Jeff Schuhrke is a Working In These Times contributor based in Chicago. He has a Master’s in Labor Studies from UMass Amherst and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in labor history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was a summer 2013 editorial intern at In These Times. Follow him on Twitter: @JeffSchuhrke.

This article originally appeared at InTheseTimes.com on June 27, 2016, and was reprinted with permission.

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5th Annual LRAN Conference a Success

More than 250 scholars and practitioners gathered for the fifth annual national Labor Research and Action Network conference (link to conference program) on June 15th and 16th. The two-day event, hosted by the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, brings together academics, organizers and graduate students from across the country with the aim of bridging the gap between research and worker organizing. This year’s conference opened with a conversation on the fissured economy, featuring U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Administrator Dr. David Weil, CTUL Co-Director Veronica Mendez, Teamsters Port Division Representative Christina Montorio and Workers United Organizer Jack Mahoney. All four speakers highlighted the creative and innovative strategies they are deploying to organize and raise standards given this new economic reality. A second plenary was focused on the fight for a stronger public sector, keynoted by AFSCME President Lee Saunders. British scholar Guy Standing gave a special lecture, “A Precariat Charter: A Progressive Strategy for Today’s Dangerous Class.” Workshops spread across the two days were divided into four tracks: Developing New Membership Models and Sustainability, Innovating Campaign Strategies That Build Power, Advancing Worker Rights in a Changing Economy and Holding Corporations Accountable.

LRAN, which has now grown to include more than 1,000 scholars and practitioners, uses its national conference each year as a time to learn from labor’s successes and setbacks. In addition to providing a space for researchers and practitioners to come together, LRAN supports new scholarship in the field through its new scholars research grant competition. 2015 grant winners, who were awarded a combined $16,000, presented on their ongoing research at the conference. Their research spanned topics from organizing immigrants in Chicago worker centers to labor-environmental coalitions in rural areas.

VIEW CONFERENCE BROCHURE PROGRAM

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5th Annual LRAN Conference

SAVE THE DATE! The 2015 Labor Research and Action Network national conference will be held June 15 and 16 at Georgetown Law Center in Washington, D.C. The Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor will host the conference, which will explore how labor unions and other worker-based organizations can effectively collaborate. The conference will examine methods of building worker power and advancing a new social movement in an economy where collective bargaining is imperiled, and where employer-employee relationships are increasingly fragmented. Scholars and labor practitioners from across the country will convene to reflect on this core theme, share news ideas and lessons learned, and connect around research and campaign work.

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4th Annual LRAN Conference a Success

Over 250 labor scholars and practitioners from unions, universities and nonprofits across the country attended the fourth annual LRAN conference, hosted by the Kalmanovitz Initiative at Georgetown University. The conference started with a conversation between AFT President Randi Weingarten, Harvard University scholar Theda Skocpol and journalist and author of Nixonland, Rick Perlstein, who discussed some of the obstacles workers and modest income families are facing – both in the economy and in politics – as well as the root causes. Weingarten and Skocpol both emphasized the need for greater and more consistent engagement in community issues, increasing membership-based organizing and new organizing models. The second day opened with President of SEIU Healthcare Illinois Keith Kelleher, Katie Quan of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, and Saket Soni, executive director of the National Guestworker Alliance, who reflected on their lessons learned from organizing workers and researching strategies to build worker power in a global economy. Noted labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy, presented a lecture on the trend away from the vertical integration of companies and strategies for holding the ultimate employer accountable for labor standards.

A core mission of LRAN, a project coordinated by Jobs With Justice Education Fund, is to create a space for the exchange of ideas to advance a progressive workers’ movement, and this year’s conference is clearly fulfilling that goal. Throughout the day, professors, organizers, students and researchers networked, explored ways to collaborate and shared their experiences through panels that delved into topics ranging from auto worker organizing in the South, a recent successful campaign to enact paid family leave in New Jersey, and digital worker organizing strategies. Another core mission of LRAN is to support new scholars in the field. Thanks to a Berger Marks grant, 10 women scholars and activists attended the conference and joined the foundation for a breakfast to network with each other [link here: http://www.bergermarks.org/news/2014/index3.php]. In addition, 2014 LRAN research grant finalists updated the conference on their developing research projects. To contribute to the 2015 research grant fund, donate here.

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LRAN’s Annual Conference 2014

REGISTER NOW for the 4th Annual LRAN National Conference, which will be held on June 16th and 17th, 2014, at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC. Explore the intersection of cutting-edge labor research and innovative worker organizing campaigns, and hear from the AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre, Harvard University scholar Theda Skocpol, journalist Rick Perlstein, and many more scholars and practitioners. CLICK HERE FOR THE PROGRAM. The LRAN conference is an opportunity for academics, labor leaders, activists, and supporters to think creatively and daringly about the future of the labor movement. It’s a space to question fundamental assumptions, reflect critically on victories and challenges, and propose new pathways that can propel our movement forward. We hope you can join us. Contact Erin Johansson for further information.

For more information, visit our conference details page or view the Conference Brochure.