Cornell has been ripe with unionization activity, from students protesting Cornell’s relationship with Starbucks due to the corporation’s anti-union actions to graduate students winning their unionization election.
This action recently extended to the classroom with the American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten ’80 leading an advanced seminar course on how labor unions can foster democracy in various public spheres from March 4 to March 7.
The course aimed to teach students how to analyze primary tools utilized by labor movements as well as labor movements’ role in bettering the lives of working people and communities.
The course culminated in a final project where students diagnosed a problem with an actionable solution within the three main topics of the course — education, politics and labor.
Weingarten centered one of these subjects each day of the four-day course, incorporating guest speakers into every topic.
Weingarten, who studied industrial and labor relations as an undergraduate student at Cornell, became interested in unionization due to her observations as the child of a union schoolteacher.
Weingarten particularly saw “both the struggle and the solidarity” of the 1975 Nyack teachers strike where 227 teachers went on strike to demand higher pay and lower class sizes. Her mother was on strike for six weeks, Weingarten said, with the movement leading to “a really important win for freedom and respect for the teachers” in the district.
As AFT president, Weingarten is part of a body of 1.7 million members that encompass teachers, higher education faculty, nurses, healthcare professionals and other workers, all dedicated to fighting for issues from attaining family-sustaining wages to creating healthy working environments.
“You learn that you need to get engaged with politics to change the rules so that working people — the working class — are the priority in America. Politics is a means towards an end, not an end in itself,” Weingarten said.
Britt Snider grad took Weingarten’s course and enjoyed its relevant guest speakers.
“I really enjoyed hearing Amanda Ballantyne, the director of the AFL-CIO Tech Institute, discuss the emergence of generative artificial intelligence and how that affects workers and labor unions. Hearing the impact of what could be in that space was really inspiring to me,” Snider said.
Weingarten wanted to create a platform to present different voices so students could hear first-person experiences, which she believes are integral to teaching about current events.
“I think guest speakers can give you a very personalized and in-depth look about the topics they are coming to speak about because they are the subject matter experts in the field. They are really able to answer questions that professors often would not be able to answer,” Snider said.
Hazel Rak ’25, another student in the course, said she took away a greater understanding of the impact of unions.
“The idea of power and how to build union power was touched upon by a lot of my other classes, but it was really interesting to hear Randi’s perspective on it. Especially now that union density is so low, community is really the new density and so we need to get student parents involved as well,” Rak said.
Rak, whose mother is a teacher and has been engaged in her local union for a decade, is interested in the intersection of collective bargaining and education.
“For my end-of-course project, I’m planning on writing about the impact that state standardized testing has on students’ mental health and analyzing what levers of power could be used to address the problem and work towards minimizing and eliminating it statewide,” Rak said.
For Weingarten, being able to give back the knowledge she has gained through her work is why she has kept coming back to Cornell to offer guest lectures, such as her 2012 keynote speech at Union Days.
“I graduated from the ILR school in 1980 which now seems like generations ago,” Weingarten said. “Look at how lucky I am to be able to do the things I do every single day. I certainly feel the need to give back”.
Weingarten works to pass on the experience she has acquired in her field to empower more students to envision solutions to the current issues at the intersection of education, labor and politics.
“All of the division that is happening around colleges right now is really undermining the pursuit of knowledge, the University campus and what young adults can get from being part of this community,” Weingarten said.
Weingarten said seeing the passion of young people while teaching the course has brought her hope.
“Watching students in this course so engaged on issues that have been so important to me for generations was so empowering,” Weingarten said. “In the end, what I got away from teaching this course was this — a renewed sense of optimism.”
Catherine Zhu ’27 is a Sun contributor and can be reached at [email protected].