Last week was Welcome Week at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and I spent part of it tabling at Go Blue Bash alongside academic departments, student organizations, and community partners. As people stopped to ask what CLCS does and why UM-Dearborn has a labor center, I kept coming back to the word public. What does it actually mean to be a public labor institution?
We use the word “public” easily. Public university. Public education. Public service. But being public is not simply a legal designation or a matter of governance structure. It is a question of accountability, access, power, and purpose.
We generally understand public universities to have obligations beyond educating individual students. They create and share knowledge, expand access to opportunity, contribute to the public good, and use their resources to strengthen the communities around them. Those commitments are reflected in UM-Dearborn’s own mission, including its emphasis on access, community impact, the common good, and meaningful partnerships with the communities we serve.
Public universities have rightly been criticized when they fall short of those ideals. Large institutions can pursue growth, revenue, prestige, and institutional expansion while students, workers, and communities experience scarcity and limited influence over the decisions that affect them. Universities that promise opportunity can still reproduce class inequality. Institutions that study democracy and inequality can exercise concentrated power over their own workers.
There is also a deeper question about whose knowledge counts. Universities often treat credentialed experts as the producers of knowledge while workers and communities become people to study, consult, or educate. Research can extract experience from communities without giving those communities much power over the questions being asked or how the resulting knowledge is used.
For a labor center housed inside a public university, these contradictions matter.
Labor centers face their own tensions. From one direction comes the familiar argument that universities should remain “neutral,” and that education designed to strengthen workers or unions crosses a line into advocacy. Yet public universities routinely invest significant resources in management education, entrepreneurship, business development, engineering partnerships, and economic development. Education serving employers is rarely treated as inherently political. Education serving workers often is.
At the same time, simply identifying as a labor center does not resolve the problem.
Being inside a university gives labor education resources movements need: staff, classrooms, research capacity, continuity, legitimacy, and institutional memory. But institutions can also become bureaucratic, cautious, professionalized, and distant from the people they were created to serve.
A labor center can become too academic to be useful. It can focus on established organizations while missing workers who are unorganized or excluded. It can become very good at teaching people how to navigate existing labor-relations systems without helping them ask harder questions about why power is distributed as it is, or how those systems might be changed.
A center created to serve labor can gradually become a center that serves labor institutions. Those are not necessarily the same thing.
I do not think the answer to these contradictions is to pretend they do not exist. I think they help clarify what our responsibility should be.
For me, being a public labor institution means starting with working people as part of the public.
Not only workers as individual students preparing for careers, but workers as organizers, union members, stewards, leaders, community members, and people acting collectively to shape the institutions around them.
That means our first responsibility is to democratize knowledge.
Universities contain extraordinary resources for understanding law, economics, technology, climate, history, policy, organizations, and social change. Those resources should not flow only toward people who already possess degrees, wealth, or institutional authority.
A labor center should help make that knowledge usable by working people trying to understand and change the conditions of their lives.
But democratizing knowledge also means recognizing that expertise does not travel in only one direction. Workers possess knowledge about workplaces, production systems, technology, organizations, communities, and the everyday operation of power that universities often do not.
Our job should be to produce knowledge with working people, not simply about them.
Our second responsibility is to help build democratic power.
Democracy does not stop at the workplace door.
Most people spend an enormous portion of their lives in workplaces where decisions about wages, schedules, technology, safety, staffing, and the organization of work can profoundly shape their lives. Labor organizations are among the institutions through which people learn to deliberate, represent one another, elect leaders, negotiate disagreement, bargain collectively, organize, and act together.
Labor education is therefore not only job training or professional development. It is democratic education.
And it matters because workers and corporations do not enter economic life with equal resources. Employers can hire attorneys, economists, consultants, engineers, lobbyists, researchers, and communications professionals. Workers also deserve institutions that help them develop the knowledge, analysis, relationships, and strategy necessary to act collectively.
Our third responsibility is to help build infrastructure that lasts.
Leaders retire. Staff leave. Campaigns end. Organizations change. Political moments pass.
Movements need institutions with memories longer than any individual campaign.
A labor center can help carry relationships, educational traditions, organizing knowledge, leadership networks, and lessons learned across generations. It can create spaces where people from different workplaces, unions, communities, industries, and political traditions can learn from one another and think beyond the immediate crisis in front of them.
That responsibility has particular meaning here in Michigan.
You cannot seriously understand this state without understanding workers, unions, industrial capital, race, migration, and collective struggle. Working people helped shape Michigan’s economy, politics, communities, and our expectations about what a decent job should provide.
But our job cannot simply be to preserve that history.
Michigan is changing again. New technologies, electrification, artificial intelligence, changing supply chains, public investment, and transformations in manufacturing and service work are reshaping workplaces across the state.
Too often, workers enter those conversations only after the major decisions have been made, when the question becomes how they will be retrained, reskilled, or asked to adapt.
A public labor institution should ask a different question: how can working people have the knowledge, relationships, organization, and power to help shape what comes next?
That is the standard I want us to keep asking CLCS to meet.
Are we making university resources genuinely accessible to working people? Are we learning from workers as well as teaching? Are we developing leadership and collective capacity rather than simply delivering programs? Are we preserving what labor movements have learned while also creating space to imagine what workers will need next?
That is the spirit in which we are opened our doors last Friday.
Last week, CLCS hosted a community open house and office-warming at our new offices at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Workers from across SE Michigan joined us to celebrate the new space reconnect with old friends, and meet new ones.
We saw workers from several unions—United Auto Workers, American Federation of Teachers, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, American Association of University Professors, National Education Association, Service Employees International Union—as well as community organizers, all sharing space and ideas, building strong, solidaritous connections.
With this event and the weekend’s Labor Day marches still fresh in our mind, I hope we can think of the holiday not only as a commemoration of what working people have won in the past, but as an invitation to think seriously about the institutions workers will need for the struggles ahead.
If CLCS is going to be the kind of public labor institution that working people in Michigan need, we cannot define the Center’s educational work by ourselves. It must be shaped in relationship with the people and movements we exist to serve.
