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This chapter examines the bourgeois claim to be a universal class, open to all men of appropriate character, by looking at the bourgeois patronage of the workers and the indigent. Bourgeois patronage of worker association focused on imparting a limited set of bourgeois values and associative practices. Mutual aid was the first form of worker association to engage bourgeois interests. In the 1860s, adult education classes and popular libraries offered workers the opportunity to emulate bourgeois regard for instruction. Finally, in the late 1860s, a few bourgeois innovators turned their attention to worker leisure. The bourgeois patron wanted the worker to imitate — to produce a copy of certain bourgeois virtues such as thrift and sobriety. Working-class interpretations of mutual aid or leisure were of no interest to the bourgeois; they were simply affronts to bourgeois leadership. Workers, not surprisingly, resisted their assigned role of mimic.

From the moment that garment workers began reading to each other on the garment shop floor to make up for their inability to attend school, the drive for education was a central thrust of industrial feminists in the labor movement. Fannia Cohn, long-time activist in the ILGWU Education Department was a visionary in that struggle. This chapter traces her commitment to educate workers and her isolation by male leaders of the ILGWU. Also it examines cross-class collaborations such as the Bryn Mawr School for Women Workers.

This chapter discusses the aims and functions of workers' education, as set forth by the ILGWU's national education program. The purpose of the educational activities of the ILGWU is to provide the labor movement with intelligent, well informed, clear thinking men and women, as they can more effectively organize themselves in order to abolish the inequalities and injustices which they suffer. The courses provided by this program are geared toward the laborers' industries, organizations, and the labor movement as a whole. These courses also provide practical lessons concerning relations with fellow human beings, as well as inspiration via lessons in literature. The chapter then concludes with a sampling of the available courses in the ILGWU's Workers' University, which deal with a variety of topics.

This essay revisits the historiographical debates about the “Americanism” of the Popular Front era. It shows that efforts to Americanize Marxism and build a cultural front began in the 1920s as organized workers and their radical intellectual allies came together in the workers’ education movement, the magazine Labor Age, and the relatively unstudied Conference for Progressive Labor Action to construct a democratic theory and practice of Marxism. By focusing in particular on the movement’s two leading lights, A. J. Muste and Louis Budenz, this essay argues that their “American approach,” at its most expansive, offered an interpretation of the world that centered and validated working-class American experiences and agency, while simultaneously promoting transnational solidarities. At its most limited, it devolved into a sentimental nationalism that could be easily co-opted by the dominant culture. In the end, the movement was undermined by the American labor left’s culture of sectarianism, even as its guiding ideas and leading personalities were incorporated into the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the broader Popular Front of the 1930s.

This chapter is a collection of some announcements gleaned from radical Yiddish newspapers. These passages show how working-class men and women created numerous self-education societies in cities around the country during the 1890s. In doing so, they demonstrated the extent to which they had internalized the values of intellectuals who had become—through their involvement in labor organizations, political parties, and the Yiddish press—leaders of the Jewish working class. The first announcement comes from the New Haven Educational Club, which held a banquet to host scientific lectures for the intellectual public. The second comes from the Socialist Pamphlet Fund and Workers' Education Group, which has taken upon itself the task of educating workers through systematic lectures on various elementary branches of science.

This chapter describes disaster worker protection strategies and health surveillance activities in terms of temporal phases to address disaster safety management before, during, and after a disaster event. The protective strategies discussed in the chapter integrate assessments of on-scene hazards and health or safety impacts and require pre-event planning and coordination across multiple entities. The chapter also addresses the integration of physical, psychological and behavioral health approaches. The chapter addresses the complexities of hazard assessment and control, worker education and training, worker illness and injury surveillance, and access to healthcare services, along with a box on community preparedness. These activities are performed by diverse groups of occupational and environmental health professionals. Various illustrative examples are presented to describe how basic concepts of protection and medical evaluation are applied in specific situations. The U.S. federal system for protecting disaster rescue and recovery workers is described in detail.