Workers’ Rights & Democracy Hub: Union Apprenticeships, Good Jobs and #WorkBootsBuiltAmerica

For a long time in America, particularly in rural America, we gave kids some pretty simple career advice.

Go to college.

If you were good at math, go to college. If you were good with your hands, go to college. If you could tear apart a transmission and put it back together before supper, somebody would probably tell you that you were too smart for shop class and ought to go to college.

We meant well. We just forgot something along the way.

#WorkBootsBuiltAmerica. And somebody still has to build it.

That’s part of the thinking behind the Workers’ Rights & Democracy Hub, created by Darryl Campbell and Kristy Vance through the Western Virginia Area Labor Federation, AFL-CIO. Campbell, who also serves on Blacksburg VA Town Council, and Vance, a UFCW Local 400 shop steward and Secretary-Treasurer of the Western Virginia Area Labor Federation, recently joined me to talk about what they’re building.

And I do mean building.

The Hub introduces young people to union apprenticeship programs and skilled trades while also teaching something disappearing from too many classrooms: labor and civil rights history.

They’ve already tested the idea through a pilot program in Roanoke. Students learned about labor and civil rights in the morning, then got their hands dirty in the afternoon.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers showed them electrical circuits. Plumbers and pipefitters demonstrated welding. Other union representatives talked about everything from apprenticeships to household budgets and what life can actually look like when you learn a trade.

That last part matters.

A union apprenticeship turns the usual education formula around. Instead of paying somebody while you learn, somebody pays you. You learn a trade, earn a paycheck and work toward becoming a journeyman with skills that can provide a good living for decades.

There’s nothing wrong with college. I went to Virginia Tech myself. But somewhere along the line we started treating college like the interstate and the trades like an old gravel road you took if you couldn’t find the entrance ramp.

Turns out that gravel road leads to some mighty good jobs.

It also leads back to what #WorkBootsBuiltAmerica is supposed to mean. The people wiring our buildings, welding our pipelines, repairing our equipment, maintaining our infrastructure and putting things together with their hands aren’t some leftover piece of yesterday’s economy. They’re the folks tomorrow’s economy can’t operate without.

Campbell and Vance hope to expand the program beyond Roanoke into surrounding counties and eventually farther into Southwest Virginia. Their vision includes summer sessions where students can experience college life while also exploring union trades. Longer term, they’d like to open similar opportunities to adults looking for a different career.

There’s another piece to this that shouldn’t get lost: they’re teaching labor history.

That matters in Virginia, and it especially matters down here in the coalfields. You don’t have to drive very far from my home in Big Stone Gap to find places where working people fought some hard battles for wages, safety, healthcare and dignity. We enjoy the benefits of those fights even when we’ve forgotten who fought them.

Near the end of our conversation, Vance brought up the 1989 Pittston strike and the power of solidarity. That history isn’t something to stick behind glass in a museum. It explains a whole lot about the rights working people have today and why keeping those rights requires somebody to remember where they came from.

Maybe the Workers’ Rights & Democracy Hub is teaching two lessons at once.

Young people need to know there’s more than one road to a good life, and they ought to know who helped pave those roads in the first place.

Because #WorkBootsBuiltAmerica & the Workers’ Rights & Democracy Hub are teaching our students to do just that!