UW Tacoma’s Honey named to Harry Bridges Chair in Labor Studies
The UW Center for Labor Studies has named Michael Honey, professor of history, African-American and labor studies at the UW Tacoma, as the Harry Bridges Chair in Labor Studies.
Honey is the third person to hold the chair, created by hundreds of union pensioners and others who contributed more than $1 million to create the only academic chair in the U.S. endowed by union members. The honor recognizes Honey’s scholarship and efforts on campus and in the community to advance the field of labor and ethnic studies.
Michael Honey
|
“Mike Honey has been a catalyst for bringing together labor and communities of color in Pierce County through the workshops and lecture series he has pulled together,” says Representative Steve Conway (D-28th District), who is co-chair of the state House Commerce and Labor Committee and a union business agent for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Local 81.
Honey says his work focuses on ethnic, gender and labor studies, while reaching out to the community on educational and social issues.
“My work is as much about African American history as it is about labor history. I think that the intersections of working-class, ethnic and women’s history are all crucial to understanding the past, but also to building a broad movement for social change in the present and future,” says Honey.
Roger Bloesflug, president of Local 23 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union - the union whose members and pensioners originally spearheaded the fund-raising effort in memory of Harry Bridges - says of Honey:
“He helps build alliances. I have met many people I never would have met if it were not for the work of Mike Honey, and they are outstanding individuals.”
Honey’s most recent book, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History (University of Califormia Press, 1999), received the Lillian Smith Award, in recognition of outstanding writing about the South, from the Southern Regional Council. His first book, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (1993), won national book awards for labor, race relations, and Southern history from the University of Illinois Press, the Organization of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association.
The Harry Bridges chair and the Labor Studies Center honor the legacy of one of the preeminent labor leaders of the U.S., who founded and led the International Longshore and Warehouse Union for more than 40 years.