Workshop Resources
Building Community through Worker Stories
Find out how UMass has used worker stories to connect immigrant workers, workers across identities, and workers and students to build community in a large diverse workplace. You will have the opportunity to explore how worker stories can enhance your own work environment. Jacob Carter, Project Director for Building Bridges, UMass Partnership for Workplace Education (WE); Joe Connolly, Director, WE; Mara Martins, AFSCME Local 1776, Digital Storyteller, WE Advisory Board; Ellen Pader, UMass Emerita Professor of Regional Planning, WE Advisory Board
Workshop Materials available here
Another Form of Expression - Creating Worker Digital Stories
Join digital storyteller facilitators and worker storytellers from Western Mass to learn about the creation and purpose of digital stories. Workers will share their stories of moments of transformation and action, and talk about how the digital story process gave expression to both their individual voices and collective struggles. Aline Gubrium, Associate Professor, and Aline Gubrium, doctoral candidate in the UMass Department of Health Promotion and Policy. They will be joined by several of the Visions Project Digital Storytellers: Ethel Everett, SEIU 509; Charlie Holmes, SEIU 1199; Dane Kuttler, Pioneer Valley NewsGuild; Hannah Levine, UAW 2322; and Donna Stern, MNA.
Digital Stories available here
Using Our Stories for Strength and Solidarity
Participants will see recent worker videos UNITEHERE uses in negotiations, and segments of a worker-created musical satire from District 65/UAW’s clerical organizing campaign at Boston University in the 1970s. Hear about and discuss how these types of worker stories can be used to support cultural engagement, mobilization and activism, and to foster worker identification with their union, as well as community support for workers' struggles. Frances Boyes, Director of Representation, New England Joint Board UNITE HERE; Ferd Wulkan, long-time labor activist who participated in the 1979 strikes by the BU clerical workers and helped put on the musical satire, currently working for Professional Staff Union at UMass Amherst.
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Learning from Our Stories - History as an Organizing Tool
This workshop explores how labor history can inform the strategies of present-day labor movements. Participants will learn about an ongoing history project between the National Domestic Workers Alliance and a team of Smith College professors. The project is producing a digital timeline on the history of domestic work and worker organizing, and a political education curriculum that allows organizers to learn from their movement ancestors. Diana Sierra Becerra, Ph.D., Departments of History and Latin American and Latino/a Studies, Smith College, and Pioneer Valley Worker Center educator.
The Domestic Workers oral history and timeline project is still a work in progress. You can learn about it here. More will be posted as elements of the project are completed and available.
Recording Our Stories – Taking Worker Oral Histories
The Valley Women’s History Collaborative has conducted over 100 interviews in the past two decades, focusing on reproductive rights, domestic abuse, and lesbian community building. Hear about and get to practice the basics of how to interview workers in ways that result in great oral histories of past and current generations of workers. Jacqueline Casteldine, Lecturer, University Without Walls, UMass, Amherst; Anne Moore, Special Collections Librarian, UMass Amherst.
Suggested reading - From Catching Stories, A Practical Guide to Oral History
Telling Our Stories - A Discussion with Labor Film Makers
Hear from and speak with film-makers who are worker-activists and observers of labor and work about their diverse stories about union histories, interracial alliances, movement-building, and reflections on labor and technology. See video excerpts, and engage with presenters on why and how they created their films. Films available here. Films and Film Makers are:
Glory Days: Colonial Packinghouse Workers of Local 11/616 Remember, Cynthia McKeown, Independent Film Maker and Dori Kalthofer, Massachusetts History Workshop and MTA: A tribute to Boston's Colonial Packinghouse Workers of Local 11 who, in 1954, survived the city's longest strike and made interracial cooperation a hallmark of their struggle.
Playing on Our Sentiments, Dr. Roslyn Feldbergand Jeanine Hickey, MNA: This documentary brings to life the City of Haverhill(MA) Hale Hospital nurses’ 1967 struggle to form a union and secure a first contract through the first person accounts of 3 nurses, including the now 93 year-old nurse who led the fight.
Street Scenes 15, Robert Lamothe, Film Our Way Films: This film shows the passion, dedication, and resolve of the people that are part of the Fight for 15 movement to gain a livable minimum wage.
Suspensions, Infinite, Patricia Silva, Visual Artist: A cinematic portrait of a Portuguese family told through individual labor histories from 1900-2002. Juxtaposing pre-industrial labor forms with deprecated technology, the filmmaker muses on vanishing labor forms, cycles of exploitation, and how human attention has become one of the most aggressively hijacked spaces in our global society—through embodied labor.
Union Women Union Power: From the Shopfloor to the Streets, Producers and Projects Directors Dina Yarmus, UNITE HERE Hotel and Foodservice Workers Local 274 Sandra Jeong-In Lane, Health Professionals and Allied Employees, AFT: (Note: This film was a selected submission for the conference, but not shown there, because the presenters were not able to attend.) The film was produced by the Coalition of Labor Union Women in Philadelphia and highlights 5 rank and file union women from difference sectors across Philadelphia introducing us to their lives and their recent fights for democracy in the workplace. The film was a product of an effort to encourage intergenerational dialogue in the labor movement in our CLUW chapter and across our city. Members of the Young Women's Committee conducted the interviews and aimed to use the final product as a tool to introduce particularly younger women to the labor movement with women as role models.
Learning from Our Stories - History as an Organizing Tool
This workshop explores how labor history can inform the strategies of present-day labor movements. Participants will learn about an ongoing history project between the National Domestic Workers Alliance and a team of Smith College professors. The project is producing a digital timeline on the history of domestic work and worker organizing, and a political education curriculum that allows organizers to learn from their movement ancestors. Diana Sierra Becerra, Ph.D., Departments of History and Latin American and Latino/a Studies, Smith College, and Pioneer Valley Worker Center educator.
The Domestic Workers oral history and timeline project is still a work in progress. You can learn about it here. More will be posted as elements of the project are completed and available.
Recording Our Stories – Taking Worker Oral Histories
The Valley Women’s History Collaborative has conducted over 100 interviews in the past two decades, focusing on reproductive rights, domestic abuse, and lesbian community building. Hear about and get to practice the basics of how to interview workers in ways that result in great oral histories of past and current generations of workers. Jacqueline Casteldine, Lecturer, University Without Walls, UMass, Amherst; Anne Moore, Special Collections Librarian, UMass Amherst.
Suggested reading - From Catching Stories, A Practical Guide to Oral History
Telling Our Stories - A Discussion with Labor Film Makers
Hear from and speak with film-makers who are worker-activists and observers of labor and work about their diverse stories about union histories, interracial alliances, movement-building, and reflections on labor and technology. See video excerpts, and engage with presenters on why and how they created their films. Films available here. Films and Film Makers are:
Glory Days: Colonial Packinghouse Workers of Local 11/616 Remember, Cynthia McKeown, Independent Film Maker and Dori Kalthofer, Massachusetts History Workshop and MTA: A tribute to Boston's Colonial Packinghouse Workers of Local 11 who, in 1954, survived the city's longest strike and made interracial cooperation a hallmark of their struggle.
Playing on Our Sentiments, Dr. Roslyn Feldbergand Jeanine Hickey, MNA: This documentary brings to life the City of Haverhill(MA) Hale Hospital nurses’ 1967 struggle to form a union and secure a first contract through the first person accounts of 3 nurses, including the now 93 year-old nurse who led the fight.
Street Scenes 15, Robert Lamothe, Film Our Way Films: This film shows the passion, dedication, and resolve of the people that are part of the Fight for 15 movement to gain a livable minimum wage.
Suspensions, Infinite, Patricia Silva, Visual Artist: A cinematic portrait of a Portuguese family told through individual labor histories from 1900-2002. Juxtaposing pre-industrial labor forms with deprecated technology, the filmmaker muses on vanishing labor forms, cycles of exploitation, and how human attention has become one of the most aggressively hijacked spaces in our global society—through embodied labor.
Union Women Union Power: From the Shopfloor to the Streets, Producers and Projects Directors Dina Yarmus, UNITE HERE Hotel and Foodservice Workers Local 274 Sandra Jeong-In Lane, Health Professionals and Allied Employees, AFT: (Note: This film was a selected submission for the conference, but not shown there, because the presenters were not able to attend.) The film was produced by the Coalition of Labor Union Women in Philadelphia and highlights 5 rank and file union women from difference sectors across Philadelphia introducing us to their lives and their recent fights for democracy in the workplace. The film was a product of an effort to encourage intergenerational dialogue in the labor movement in our CLUW chapter and across our city. Members of the Young Women's Committee conducted the interviews and aimed to use the final product as a tool to introduce particularly younger women to the labor movement with women as role models.