Labor Education & Research Center

The Evergreen State College Labor Education and Research Center is Washington's only statewide higher education outreach program providing direct educational and research services to labor unions and worker-centered organizations.
The Labor Center's mission is to collaborate with union and community members in designing programs that will help them develop the skills, confidence, and knowledge to become more effective leaders, staff, and rank-and-file activists. To this end, we provide educational and technical services tailored to specific unions and community-based organizations. We also organize conferences, workshops, and schools open to a broad mix of union and community activists, and serve as a resource for Evergreen faculty, students, and staff.
We have a vision of a labor movement grounded in human rights, open to all working people, and dedicated to developing strong and democratic worker organizations effective at the local, national, and international levels. We join with workers in their unions and with community members to challenge divisions between people based on race, gender, age, sexual orientation, immigrant status, disability, or other characteristics.
Our educational work is inspired by labor history but looks forward to substantial growth of the labor movement through disciplined and imaginative workplace organizing, as well as through effective union partnerships with organizations committed to social, economic, and environmental justice. Our teaching is based on a popular education model which draws heavily on the experiences of workshop participants, and which seeks to help people make sense of their experiences through an analysis of economic, political, and social power. In this way we take Evergreen’s participatory and interdisciplinary teaching principles beyond the campus borders to working-class communities struggling for dignity and justice.

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Last Updated: November 17, 2009

The Evergreen State College

2700 Evergreen Parkway NW

Olympia, Washington 98505

(360) 867-6000