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Calumet College of St. Joseph is proud to announce its new Working Class Studies Program, which will be available in the Fall 2010 semester.  It is designed to provide students with a broad set of skills, including skills in communications, leadership, organizing, and movement-building and provides an additional focus of the College’s long-standing commitment to social justice. 

In today’s difficult and competitive labor markets, workers need to know their legal rights as well as those that come with a union contract.  Laws such as the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act mean very little if a person does not know what is due them under the law.  This new curriculum will empower students to know and understand their rights and to understand the need to organize in order to obtain a voice on the job. 

The Working Class Studies Program will be directed by distinguished professor Dr. Ruth Needleman.  Dr. Needleman  served two years as national director of education for the Service Employees International Union and has received the AFL-CIO Community Service Award.  She taught Labor Studies for 30 years at Indiana University Northwest .  The author of “Black Freedom Fighters in Steel: The Struggle of Democratic Unionism”, Dr. Needleman has also written extensively on labor, race, class and gender, African American history and women’s studies.  In the early 1990s, she was instrumental in creating a special college degree program for steelworkers – Swingshift College.   

According to Dr. Needleman, “This program integrates some of what currently is offered through Labor Studies and Working Class Studies programs in other universities in a limited fashion.  Like these programs, this Working Class Studies program is inter-disciplinary, focused on working people and the challenges they face on the job, in the community, and as citizens in a democratic society.  The program incorporates some of the pragmatic, skill-based information of labor studies, examining laws and contracts, and teaching organization-building and organizing.  The courses will integrate comparative, historical and analytical approaches to labor in every course.“ Along with her passion for social justice and activism, Dr. Needleman also brings adjunct faculty members with her, all of whom have extensive experience in labor and community organizing.
            
This unique program will be presented in three formats:

1. Working Class Studies can be taken as one of five options  in the College’s  School of Adult Learning Program, a new construct designed to enable adults with little or no college to attend part-time and earn a degree in as little as four and a half years.
2. Working Class Studies classes can also be taken as a concentration in the Organization Management Degree Completion Program.  This option allows adults with two years of transferable college credit to complete their degree in about 18 months by attending class one evening per week.  Other available concentrations include Human Resource Management, Management Information Systems, and Quality Assurance. 
3. A post-baccalaureate certificate in Working Class Studies is offered as well.  It will prepare students who already hold bachelor degrees to work in faith, community, and work-based organizations as well as other non-profit and NGO fields.  The program will emphasize the knowledge, skills, and consciousness essential for engaged citizenship, not only nationally, but globally as well. 

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