Solidarity schools: researching workers’ cultural education in the context of deindustrialisation

Workshop (1990) is an anthology by the East End Writers and Artists, a Workers’ Educational Association-associated writers’ group which ran in the East End of Glasgow in the 1980s and 1990s, and features poetry, prose and polemic by local working-class writers. In its introduction, tutor Maureen Monaghan reflected on the choice of an image of a factory in the throes of production as the volume’s cover image: 

…it represents the skills and tradition, and above all, the energy of Glasgow. In recent years this energy has had to find new and varied outlets. Membership of one of the many writers’ groups now established in the city provides such an outlet for many people, and the “products” of these groups are as much a part of Glasgow’s identity as the great ships and locomotives. 

These words emphasise the complex position of culture in an era of deindustrialisation. From the late 1970s, cities like Glasgow undertook large culture-led ‘regeneration’ projects, which claimed to offset the wounds of factory and shipyard closures. Instead, these projects paved the way for further privatisation of the city, while commodifying and sanitising its cultural heritage. Yet oral histories I undertook with people about grassroots writing and publishing projects in mid-late twentieth century Glasgow told another story about culture at that time. They told me about working-class writing and adult education groups in local schools and community centres, poetry readings in pubs, and nights spent pasting anthologies together at kitchen tables. Almost everyone remembered the profound and sometimes life-changing impact of these projects, renewing their confidence as they and their loved ones lost jobs, and supporting them to reimagine and fight for their communities.  

In April, I visited six archives in the US to explore how these cultural shifts played out in two major cities, Chicago and Detroit. In Glasgow I’d drawn on invaluable archival collections like Spirit of Revolt and the private collections of interviewees, as well the Workers’ Educational Association archive in London. These materials and testimonies illuminated a network of radical adult education projects which drew on the ideas of Paulo Freire to help people negotiate and challenge closures and displacement in the 1980s and 1990s. With some important exceptions like the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers archive and the Working-Class Writing Archive among others, informal working-class writing from this era isn’t always preserved in coherent literary archives; much of the work was self-published, or published by community education projects, whose focus was front-line community support, rather than maintaining literary-historical records. Equally, such writers didn’t always assign literary or historical value to the work they created.

To address these gaps, I searched for traces of workers’ cultural education projects in Detroit at the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University, and in Chicago at the Roosevelt University, the Vivian Harsh Collection and Harold Washington Collection at Chicago Public Library, the Newberry Library, and the University of Illinois. In almost all of these collections I was overwhelmed by the rich and well-preserved legacy of earlier projects. There were plays performed by women garment workers as part of education projects by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Industrial Department of the YWCA in the 1930s, oral histories with women packinghouse workers funded by the Works Progress Administration, and poetry from the Federal Writers’ Project. The scale and preservation of cultural projects in these archives speaks to the position of organised labour, as well as the welfare landscape, in the mid-twentieth century US.  

Similar material from the 1970s to the 1990s in these archives was, however, much scarcer, despite a renewed concern with the need for workers’ education against encroaching deindustrialisation. The First Chicago Labor Conference for Worker Education in 1988 called for the need to identify where job losses might occur and ‘design programs to help workers keep their jobs, retrain for new ones and move into better paying ones’ to provide the ‘skills necessary to function effectively in our society and to contribute to an increasingly competitive global marketplace.’ While developing skills was important for some people I interviewed in Glasgow, they also remembered how radical adult education which validated their experiences through cultural expression showed them their value, rather than emphasising their deficiencies. As Robin Usher and Richard Edwards argue, in the context of economic ‘crisis’: ‘more responsibility is placed on education and training systems as a major cause. This is itself significant discursive movement, as it veils the roles and responsibilities of the state, financial institutions and employers in bringing about the “economic crisis” (Usher and Edwards, 1994). Educational programs which deliver ‘retraining’ in a top-down way can play into this paradigm.

Materials in the James and Grace Lee Boggs Papers in the Walter P. Reuther Library told another story. Their collection comprises records from projects like Detroiters for Dignity, Detroit Summer, and National Organisation for an American Revolution and its publication Awakenings. In contrast to reshaping workers to meet a ‘competitive global marketplace’, this work was aimed, in the words of Grace Lee Boggs, at ‘Transforming people.’ As she writes, ‘when we realise how destroyed people have been, how empty they are now are, we have to see the need to Rebuild people.’ Pamphlets featured poetry, local writing, and adverts for groups like Horizons in Poetry which brought together ‘workers, teachers, community organizers and welfare mothers.’ These projects used culture as a way to connect deindustrialisation to broader community struggles, against gentrification and displacement or for better education. Importantly, they provided not just an elegy for a bygone era of workers’ education, but a rethinking of these principles which stressed the value of individual experiences of class, race and gender. Projects celebrated Blackness and womanhood, for example, encouraging people to have more confidence in their worth – as individuals and as a collective – and help them confront the injuries of deindustrialisation.   

My brief visit to the US emphasised the slow nature of this kind of historical work. It also reminded me of the importance of local understanding: building connections with local archivists, and acknowledging the work of community workers, scholars and activists who have been undertaking this work for years, in both formal and informal ways. Equally, it reminded me of the deep and profound nature of the interviews I did at home, and the value of conducting oral histories alongside this kind of archival work. It’s a modest contribution to broader transnational work which tells an important yet often lesser told story about how people use culture to resist and negotiate deindustrialisation.