UALE 2012

A Steelworker’s Intellectual Journey:

Blast Furnace to University

By Mike Olszanski

March 2012

Paper presented at the Panel, “Workers and Working Class Students” at the 2012 Annual Conference of the

United Association for Labor Education (UALE) Pittsburgh, PA

The Swingshift College program at Indiana University Northwest 1993-2010, A university-based college credit program for working adults, inspired by Popular Education theories of Paulo Freire, Myles Horton and bell hooks, as experienced by student and staff member Mike Olszanski.

A way of teaching is never innocent. Every Pedagogy is implicated in ideology, in a set of tactical assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed. (Sherry Linkon, 153 from Berlin, James, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” College English 50, No. 5 Sept. 1988, pp. 492, 479.)

I grew up poor and working class in Hammond, Indiana in the 1950’s. My

dad came over from Poland around 1914. He was in his 50’s when I was born. He

was class-conscious, though he didn’t have the words to describe himself as such.

The Great Depression, low paid labor jobs, joblessness and the CCC Camps

clarified any doubts he may have had about his class status. He understood what

the capitalists were, and never doubted that we were working class, or that our

interests were opposite from theirs. Nobody I knew talked about a “middle class”,

unless they meant the local bar or grocery store owner, or maybe the boss or mill

Superintendent.

Raising three kids on low wage factory jobs, Pa used to cuss the

Republicans and the capitalists in front of me when they came on TV. He went to

union meetings regularly, but never felt qualified to run for office. He taught me

that a union was the only hope a worker had to get any respect or dignity on the

job. Between strikes and layoffs in the 1950’s, he and my mother scrimped and

saved and voted straight Democratic and tried to keep our heads above water. My

mother cleaned bed pans at the hospital to help out.

Teachers told me I was smart. I read Hemingway, Plato and Aristotle as a

kid, and dreamed of a “liberal education.” Of being a scholar and a writer. The

world of ideas and literature fascinated me. But the real world and its ruling class

had other plans for me. My world was a working-class world. I was on track for

other things.

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I started at a Blast Furnace labor job at Inland Steel’s Indiana Harbor

Works, a union shop, right out of high school in 1963. In this, I was like millions

of working class “baby boomers” in this country in the 1960’s. Our futures , if

we were lucky, were the mills and factories. If not, Viet Nam or something worse.

College was not an option, it was for rich kids or “middle class” kids -- unless I

could take evening classes while working full time. My first pay check from

Inland was bigger than any my father had earned in his life. I signed up for

evening classes at Saint Joe College, then Purdue Calumet, but shift work and

forced overtime soon made college impossible. In fact, overtime was mandatory.

A History Professor at Purdue put the issue clearly, “You’re trying to work and

take classes at the same time? You’re going to have to choose one or the other.

You can’t do both.”

By then married and with kids on the way, my decision was made for me.

School would have to wait—for over 25 years, as it turned out. Interestingly

enough, Inland Steel provided its own version of a swing-shifted educational

program in the 1960’s and 1970’s, long before Dr. Ruth Needleman invented

Swingshift College at Indiana University Northwest. Classes in its Electrical

apprenticeship, the Purdue-Inland Training Program , were repeated morning

and evening for shift workers. I took their training—the equivalent of an

Electrical Engineering Technology (EET) Degree without the college credit. I got

the job of Electrical Technician –a union job in the bargaining unit. I could be

college-trained at Inland’s expense and with convenient class times, to do their

electrical work; but Political Science, History, Sociology and Labor Studies would

have to wait.

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At the same time, around 1970 I became active in Local 1010 of the United

Steelworkers Union. Raised in a pro-union family, I saw the union as my best

chance for respect on the job, and as a potential force for change in the community

and the country. Uninvolved and unsupportive of the civil rights, antiwar and

environmental movements of the 1960’s, The USW didn’t seem very progressive

to me then, but I thought it was up to us, the members, to make it so. Soon I was a

griever steward (handling first step shop floor grievances), delegate to the

Convention and Executive Board member.

In 1971, Jim Balanoff recruited me to the Rank & File Caucus at Local 1010

—a center-left, Black White and Latino coalition that had been around since the

CIO organizing days of the 1930’s. Since Balanoff was constantly red-baited

and accused of being a Communist, I reasoned that he and the Rank & File must

be doing something right. Working with progressives like Balanoff, Joe Gyurko,

Cliff Mezo and others in the Rank & File Caucus, I helped organize the first

Environmental Committee in a USWA basic steel Local, focusing on air and water

pollution from our mill, and especially the Coke Plants. District 31 Director Ed

Sadlowski appointed me to organize a District 31 Environmental Committee based

on the 1010 committee. I chaired the committee under Ed and continued when Jim

Balanoff was elected Director in 1978.

We supported insurgent Ed Sadlowski for USW president, and in 1977 put

120,000 member District 31 in the front ranks of the Anti-Nuclear Power

movement nation wide. Our most clear cut victory was permanently stopping

construction of the Bailey Nuclear Plant a few hundred yards from the Bethlehem

Steel Mill on Lake Michigan.

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In the process I even got to visit Jimmy Carter’s White House on behalf of District

31, advocating a renewable solar and wind energy alternative. I’m proud to say

we were ahead of our time on renewable energy, and it does my heart good to see

hundreds of wind generators springing up all over the Indiana cornfields, and to

see the Steelworkers Union joining with environmentalists in the Blue-Green

Alliance fighting to secure jobs for U.S. workers building them. In 1979 we

elected Bill Andrews the first Black president of 1010, and in 1985 I was elected

vice president. When Bill left to go on the International Union staff in the middle

of his term, I became president of Local 1010. Self taught, I was writing

newspaper articles and papers on union democracy, energy and the environment

and political economy.

Through union activities, my consciousness had been raised, and reading

Marx and other political economists in my spare time gave me a basic

understanding of how the world works. Marx especially provided insight into the

alienation I had felt since starting work at Inland Steel. I read him in the toilet at

work, a great place for an epiphany. Still, I longed for a formal education, and a

chance to research in depth what makes the world tick—especially politically and

economically. But for me as for many adult workers shift work, and forced

overtime still got in my way

In the ‘90’s, when the union negotiated straight days by seniority, and our

department agreed to overtime waivers, I finally went back to school, this time at

Indiana University Northwest (IUN) where I already knew many of the faculty,

including Dr. Ruth Needleman in Labor Studies. I started in Spring of 1993, 28

years after I had left Purdue. Coincidentally, so did Swingshift College.

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Beginning with a one credit L290 Labor Studies class, “Steel at the

Crossroads.” in 1993, Professor Needleman created Swingshift College. The

program was directed by Cathy Iovanella (Hall) from 1996 to 2008 on a shoe-

string budget. Aimed initially at Steelworkers, Swingshift helped us to take

advantage of the education benefit negotiated by the USWA in their 1988

contracts with US Steel, Bethlehem, Inland , LTV and National/Midwest. The

educational benefits for steelworkers are administered by a national office, the

Institute for Career Development (ICD) established by the USWA and located in

Merrillville, Indiana. Based in the Labor Studies department at IUN, Swingshift

was a “customized college program” employing techniques aimed at motivating

workers to take an active, pro-worker role in their unions and community. In

August, 1994 a Gary Post Tribune editorial lauded Swingshift college as part of a

new “vision for education” (Gary Post Tribune, August 24, 1994)

Swingshift College at IUN, aimed at providing just what shift workers like

myself had lacked for many years—the opportunity to take classes morning and

evening, and even miss classes when necessary and keep up with video tapes. In

addition to Labor studies, classes in Psychology, Sociology, English, History, even

math and Geology were offered, so students could get the credits they needed for a

degree. Drawing students from the big six area steel mills, Swingshift admissions

were helped by the full tuition benefit for USWA members in Basic Steel. Faculty

and Staff at Swingshift cut through the University’s red tape for workers,

circumventing the admissions and registration and billing process, and even

delivered students’ books to them in class. The program offered Associate and

Bachelors degrees in Labor Studies, a Bachelors degree in General Studies, a

Certificate in labor studies, and basic courses needed to complete other degree

programs.

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But it was much more.

For Dr. Ruth Needleman, education for workers needs to be anything but

neutral. Ruth made it crystal clear that Swingshift College, like the Labor Studies

program she had headed for some years, aimed to educate and empower workers

to enable us to build our own movement. Based on the Popular Education ideas of

Paulo Freire and Myles Horton, Bell Hooks and others which in turn grew from

ideas of counter-hegemony first proposed by Antonio Gramsci, Swingshift classes

aimed at developing class-conscious worker intellectuals. Organic intellectuals, to

use Gramsci’s term. The Swingshift College vision understood that the Labor

Movement would benefit greatly from the training of potential leaders in

Swingshift College. And the society as a whole would be transformed by workers

who knew how to think.

Swingshift College stressed critical thinking, counter posing the perspective

of Political Economy to the conventional economic and political theory promoted

by the dominant class. Swingshift College placed a premium on the knowledge

adult learners had already acquired and brought to class with them.

In a Labor History class, the president of a steelworker Local Union

explained how negotiations with Mittall Steel work, while members of other locals

questioned the new USW contract that combined job descriptions on a huge scale.

A 30 year steel mill veteran and union officer told the class he had been wrong in

supporting Company/Union partnerships in the 1980’s and now believes they have

hurt the union.

A young Walmart employee told the class he was regularly expected to

come to work on his day off on call from his boss, and older students from the

unionized steel mills explained to him that this, plus his low wages and lack of

benefits, were good reasons he needed a union.

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Dr. Jim Lane’s History of the Viet Nam War class had Viet Nam combat

veterans and veteran anti-war activists debating the U.S. actions in South-East Asia

and learning to appreciate one-another’s perspectives on the war as well as their

definitions of patriotism.

The system worked. For many of us epiphanies ( what we called “light bulb

moments”) happened regularly in many of our sessions. The idea that much of

what we had been taught in school was aimed at making us docile “citizens”

accepting of the status quo and our role as workers in a society controlled by

capitalists was not totally new to us. But we learned to name things like “cultural

hegemony”—the dominance of society’s very way of thinking by the ruling class

and in their interests.

“Education is never neutral” became our watchwords, as professors like Dr.

Needleman and Dr. Thandabantu Iverson showed us how class, race and gender

bias affects how everything in this country is taught, and learned including even

physical science and math.

Swing Shift college was indeed subversive and counter-hegemonic in the

most positive ways. We taught and learned from each other, as well as the

professors. We debunked myths, and substituted a working class analysis that

recognizes the larger interests of society’s 99%--to use a recent term.

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Physically located across the hall from IUN’s Political Science department long

run by an extremely reactionary professor, Labor Studies offered a view of the

world perfectly inverted from what was taught there. Swingshift professors—a

small group of progressive thinkers who understood the kind of people they were

dealing with--marveled at how well older workers, many of us out of school for 20

years and more, took to college level discourse. Most would agree they learned as

much from the students as they taught us.

While constrained by the demands of the University in terms of grades,

curriculum, time-tables, etc., Swingshift College was the best attempt I know of

to integrate popular education theory and practice with university undergraduate,

and more recently, graduate level education. Beginning, in the tradition of Freire,

Horton, and contemporary Canadian popular educators with the knowledge

already possessed by adult students who may be union activists or officers, the

method utilizes the “Spiral method” of Popular Education explained in detail in

Education for Changing Unions by Burke, Geronimo, Martin, Thomas and Wall.

Building on what workers already know, through experience and life learning, the

method added information, promoted group analysis, and tested hypotheses against

real world issues—always taking a position on the side of the working class.

What does Popular Education mean in the classroom? Praxis is, after all the

application of theory to practice. So how does the practice of popular education

transform the classroom, the students and the teacher? Or, as Needleman put it,

“That’s talkin’ the talk. What about walkin’ the talk?” How and where does the

rubber meet the road?

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Dr. Ruth Needleman, in bell hooks’ words, “employ[s] pedagogical

strategies that create ruptures in the established order, that promote modes of

learning which challenge bourgeois hegemony” (hooks, Teaching to

Transgress,185). This professor takes more pride in her working-class credentials

(she worked as a loader for UPS) than her Harvard degree. Ruth’s Labor Studies

classroom is a good place to view the theory of popular education in action or

“praxis”.

Simultaneously a student and staff member, I had the opportunity to view

her technique from a unique perspective. Our classroom was a space created to

enable trade unionists, working class intellectuals and ordinary people of every

race, background and gender to share, compare, explore, and analyze our

experiences in the light of any and all theory we find useful. Here, in a “safe

house” of brothers and sisters, guided, facilitated but not dominated by an expert

in the use of analysis, we students began with our own experience, and with what

we had already learned from that experience. Here Needleman in Myles Horton’s

words, would “…build on people’s own experience; it is the basis for their [our]

learning” (Horton, We Make the Road by Walking, 137).

Here we were challenged to use new tools to understand the social causes of what

many of us—isolated and alienated as we were—had assumed were our personal

problems. 1

1 Professor of Sociology in the Swingshift Program Chuck Gallmeier uses a theory of C. Wright Mills—“The Sociological Imagination”--to define this new consciousness.

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In Swingshift classes, students and professors decided collectively on the

questions we wanted to discuss. Black white and brown, women and men, straight

and gay, 18 to literally 80, we found common interests, and came to understand

how those vital commonalities far outweigh our differences, confronted as we are

by the hegemonic system of capitalism. We explored the intersections and

compounding of oppression based on class, race, gender and sexuality. White men

like me confronted and were challenged to understand our own male/white

privilege. There was pain—real learning and transformation cannot avoid it. We

discovered the basic conflict between the owning/ruling class and the working

class. We found ourselves uncovering the truth of our own identities as first of all

members of the largest, and potentially most politically powerful class in history.

In this space we were encouraged to use all the tools we could find from the

teaching of Jesus and the poet Shelley, as Myles Horton would have it, to the class

analysis of Marx in our struggle to understand the forces which oppress, repress

and exploit us. The simple fact that the theories of left-wing thinkers were

included, given respect and weight, rather than dismissed as “subversive” or

“idealist” or “dangerous” or “discredited” or “passé” enabled a kind of academic

freedom often espoused but seldom found in practice on U.S. campuses. As Myles

Horton has said, “When you want to build a democratic society, you have to act

democratically in every way” (Horton, 227). The Swingshift College method of

teaching is perhaps the most democratic one is likely to find in a university setting.

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In the tradition of Horton, the jargon or “big words” of popular education,

terms like “praxis” “hegemony” etc., were defined then (especially in Needleman’s

class) set aside in favor of less formal, more familiar and accessible words. The

emphasis is on understanding. As Horton puts it, “If they don’t understand the

process, they may be able to go back and mouth it, but they can’t live it” (137).

The aim was to balance rigor with clarity. One seldom left a Swingshift class

without a clear explanation of the concepts in question.

A student in one class offered her own colorful definition of cultural

hegemony: “It’s like when everyone around you is respecting Donald Trump,

saying he’s smart and his ideas are correct and we ought to follow them because

he’s rich and successful.” And counter hegemony: “It’s like people in our class

saying he’s a crook and he ought to be in jail.”

Counter-hegemony, in our classroom, meant a space where we empowered

ourselves through collective analysis to debunk the powerful myths projected by

the educational, social, cultural, economic and political institutions of capital. It’s a

space where we realized in the process how collective action, e.g., through a

progressive and militant labor movement, women’s movement, peace movement,

civil rights movement, poor people’s movement, can be our vehicle to do

something about our situation: to fight back. Counter-hegemony for us was an

organizing principle to understand the system but also to gather the strength in

protected spaces to begin the process of changing it.

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The intellectual courage of our facilitator (leader, in the best sense of the

term) became contagious. Freed of the oppressive thought-controlled milieu of

bourgeois culture, media and especially the educational system, we explored ideas

which transformed us, and empowered us to transform society. As the acute need

for social change became obvious and logical analysis dispelled the

misinformation and disinformation which had clouded our thinking, the means to

effect that change began to present themselves.

Within this space the early adjournment of a class session in order to join a

picket line was recognized as a practically seamless transition from theory to

practice, from analysis to action. The process of learning engendered by popular

education enabled, nurtured, developed us as “organic” intellectuals. Together we

created new knowledge. A cohort of students became, in a sense, a “cadre” of

class conscious leaders committed to social change, and clearly conscious of which

side we are on. This was a program where, as Horton puts it, “people [leaders]…

multiply themselves” (Horton, We make the Road by Walking 57).

Bonds of newly discovered brotherhood and sisterhood that extend beyond

the boundaries of the classroom were created and strengthened. As we picked apart

the racist and sexist ideas which contaminate our larger society, we strengthened

those bonds. Whether we celebrated a happy event, mourned a loss, won a strike,

rode the bus to march on Washington, or just had a beer, a new circle of friends

and allies (dare we say comrades) had been created, based on a collective

understanding of the struggle we share.

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The ideas of Freire, Horton, Hooks and popular educators from all times

and places came to life in the Swingshift College classroom . I became convinced

that these ideas, clearly subversive in the very best sense of the word, can enable

the oppressed peoples of the world, and specifically of this country, to grow our

own intellectuals and leaders, to organize, to resist, fight back, and finally, prevail.

Like hooks, Needleman saw grades as something students should be

allowed to “…control by their labor in the classroom” (bell hooks, Teaching to

Transgress, 157). Students were urged to refine, re-work and re-submit work in

order to get the grade we wanted. We were encouraged persist in our effort order to

improve the quality of our writing and analysis. Grades in Needleman’s classes, as

she herself told us, tend to be mostly A’s, B’s and incompletes. Swingshift students

more than any other cohort I have seen wanted A’s, and wanted to know what was

wrong if they didn’t get them. To a great degree, they earned A’s. Records show

Swingshift students’ grades in regular university courses were generally higher

than their traditional student counterparts. Workers put down by bosses and society

for years as less than became scholars. At last we owned our education.

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For me as a student, Swingshift College courses enabled me to research the

history of my own union, to analyze the politics that had made it what it was when

I was active, and to understand the larger context of labor and international history

and politics in which the United Steelworkers and my Local in particular

developed. My research reinforced much of what I had heard from old timers in

the union about how the left played a critical role in building my union and the

CIO itself, and the purges of the 1940’s and 1950’s nearly destroyed it. While a

Swingshift College student and Staff member, I wrote papers on the history and

politics of my own union, and co-authored a volume with Dr. Jim Lane on the

Rank and File movement in Steel.

After I retired from Inland in 1998 , I went to work Part-Time Temporary as

assistant to Cathy Hall, then Coordinator of Swingshift College. Attending many

of the classes as a student, I also videotaped, kept attendance, and helped students

with writing assignments , registration, books, and all the minutiae of getting an

education while working shiftwork. It was probably the best job I’ve ever had. It

was difficult, especially for Cathy and Ruth. Finding professors willing to teach a

three hour class twice in one day was challenging, though nearly every one who

did said it changed their lives. Working students are very motivated. Most have

already been through the “School of Hard Knocks.” Perhaps a little weak in

English Comp, they make up for it with street smarts, a willingness to work, and a

knowledge of history, economics and politics garnered from living.

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When Swingshift graduate Charlie Brooks replaced Cathy Hall as

Coordinator of Swingshift College in 2005, I worked with him trying to convince

a business-oriented administration of the value of this unique program. Charlie

and Ruth appealed to supporters in the university, organized labor and the

legislature to help save Swingshift. But our opponents were relentless, our

supporters weakened by a failing economy and a tough new management culture in

the mills. Our students were forced onto twelve hour shifts, and the expense of

paying instructors to repeat a class twice a day were deemed unsupportable in a

climate of cost cutting. Labor Studies classes became mostly on-line.

And this kind of pedagogy invites red-baiting. Each semester, word would

filter back that a student or local union officer or someone had commented (often

behind the backs of the faculty and staff) on the leftward slant of Swingshift

College. This was, I think symptomatic of a larger, more insidious bias against

the program, fueled by latent anti-communism.

The inevitable friction of Swingshift College with Local, District and

International leadership of the USWA as well as management of the steel

companies, fueled by the rabid anti-communism infecting some of these officials

reflected itself in conflict with much of the mission expressed by the program. It

should come as no surprise that many older former cold warriors found the theories

of Myles Horton, Paulo Freire, bell hooks and certainly those of Gramsci

“socialistic” or “communistic”.

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Pleasantly surprising is how far a frank discussion of the principles of

worker education Swingshift College attempts to employ can dispel

misinformation and paranoia among reasonably open-minded students.

Unfortunately, top university administrators apparently did not share such open-

mindedness. Perhaps more attracted by the idea of the Corporate University than

one serving the needs of working adult learners, they chose to bow to the desires of

business interests.

In short, the program always had enemies, and in the end, one could say,

they prevailed.

Swingshift College was terminated in 2010.

While I worked for Swingshift College, I had the opportunity to teach and

co-teach a number of credit and non-credit Labor Studies classes, and I can’t

overstate the high quality of working class learners and “organic intellectuals” I

worked and studied with in Swingshift College.

I graduated with a Bachelors degree in General Studies in 2001with a

minor in Sociology and a Certificate in Labor Studies, and stayed with the program

until it was ended in 2010. I was retained by Labor studies in 2011 on a part time

temporary basis to work with outreach.

I have graduate hours in Labor Studies and look forward to future research

and scholarship, as well as labor activism.

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Bibliography

Burke, Bev, et al, Education For Changing Unions, Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002

Frère, Paulo and Horton, Myles, We make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, Edited by Brenda Bell, John Gaventa and John Peters, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

hooks, bell, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, NewYork: Routledge, 1994

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