LERC brings together a faculty with a broad diversity of academic training, and therefore is able to offer courses across multiple departments for UO undergraduate and graduate students. LERC Director Bob Bussel regularly offers labor, political, and social history courses through the UO History department. Prof. Gordon Lafer teaches classes on employment policy and the politics of the workplace, through the Political Science department. Professors Marcus Widenor and Marc Weinstein have both taught courses on Industrial Relations through the Business School. And LERC runs a unique internship program that allows UO undergraduates of any major to undertake a four-credit internship with labor organizations throughout the state. Finally, LERC faculty also serve as advisors to undergraduate theses and PhD dissertations.
Among the credit courses offered by LERC faculty in recent years are the following:
History 410/510 | Labor Pains : The American Working-Class Experience in the Twentieth Century
This course seeks to help students examine and understand the complex, multiple forces that have affected the fortunes of workers and unions during the twentieth century. [ Bob Bussel ]
History 410/510 | 'Proud Decades or the Age of Anxiety'?
American Culture and Politics, 1945-1960
The aim of this class is to grapple with contested views of American politics and culture from 1945-1960, better understand how this crucial period profoundly shaped late twentieth-century American history, and consider its relevance for contemporary times. [ Bob Bussel ]
History 407/507 | Class Dismissed: The American Labor and Working-Class Experience since 1945
This seminar has three principal aims: to illuminate key themes and developments in the history of workers and unions following World War II, to encourage critical reading and evaluation of different forms of historical evidence, and to provide students with the opportunity to engage in archival and primary source research.
[ Bob Bussel ]
Political Science 399| The Politics of Work
Upper-division course combining political theory, employment policy and studies of power relations at work, focusing on encouraging students to analyze the workplace as a site of political contestation.
[ Gordon Lafer ]
Political Science 399| Regulating the Working Class
Upper-level class focused on political, ethnographic and policy-oriented analyses of workplace relations and public policies affecting work.
[ Gordon Lafer ]
The Borderless Economy: Working Conditions, Capital Mobility and Labor Migration Between Mexico and the United States
This course examines the reality of economic relations, migration, labor conditions, and union organizing on both sides of the US-Mexican border.
[ Gordon Lafer ]
LERC 406| Union Internship Program
LERC places UO students in internships engaged in research and organizing projects with Oregon unions, workers’ organizations, public policy organizations, and legislators concerned with labor and employment issues. Students generally meet with a faculty advisor bi-weekly in addition to their internship work. There is no prerequisite for this internship. It is pass/fail, counts for four credits, and may count as Sociology credit for students in that major.
[ Supervised by Gordon Lafer ]