Ashby, Hawking Say Farewell

This month, two well-known labor activists say farewell to Bloomington to return to their old stomping grounds in Chicago.

Prof. Steven Ashby and Rev. C. J. Hawking came to Bloomington in 1998 when Steven was hired to teach in IU’s Division of Labor Studies. During his tenure here, Steven helped create the Division’s online program of courses. He also coordinated it the last two years, primarily to counter the threat to Labor Studies’ existence when Indiana legislators eliminated a special state appropriation for the Division in 2005. Last year, the online program, only the second such in the U.S., offered over 100 sections with 3,000 enrollments, generating $2 million of income for IU.

Steven’s online labor expertise led to his successful recruitment by the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois. “The new U of I president declared that he wants to build the largest and best online program in the country,” Steven says. “In addition to coordinating the new Labor Studies online program, I’ll get to do more teaching in union halls for Chicago-area unions.”

When you ask Steven about his proudest accomplishments while in Bloomington, he first mentions his and C.J.’s adoption of a daughter from an orphanage in Kazakhstan. He also mentions the development of the online labor program, his professional growth as a “seasoned, confident labor educator,” the experience of raising the consciousness and opening the eyes of young working-class students, and his script for the Eugene V. Debs theatrical event performed in Bloomington this past spring by Voces Novae.

C.J., a United Methodist pastor who is completing an MA in Union Leadership, taught several online labor courses for IU. She helped found the Shalom Center for the homeless at First United Methodist Church, played an active role in Bloomington United, especially in the wake of the racially-motivated murder of IU student Won Joon Yoon, and served as pastor for English-speaking congregants at the Korean United Methodist Church as well as Community Outreach Pastor at First UMC.

Her labor activism sometimes took her outside Bloomington. For two years, she served as a consultant for Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ), a nonpartisan religious organization established in 1991 to educate and mobilize people of faith on issues important to working people. She also worked for the Janitors for Justice campaign in Miami, Florida, and then in Ohio and Indianapolis

IWJ’s founder and director Kim Bobo successfully recruited C.J. to become Executive Director of their Chicago affiliate, one of 60 nationally. “I will be helping the Chicago group strengthen its efforts, especially to involve clergy in pro-labor campaigns as a necessary kind of anti-poverty work,” says C.J. “Ten years ago,” she notes, “’the working poor’ wasn’t part of our vocabulary. Now we hear it every day. In the absence of excellent labor laws like those found in other countries, it’s important for people of faith in the U.S. to go to the source of the problem of ‘the working poor’ and create social change through using their moral voices.”

Some of the couple’s accomplishments while in Bloomington were team efforts. They lead a successful campaign to persuade IU to provide health benefits and better pay for its childcare workers. And they conducted 95 interviews with the Staley workers of Decatur, Illinois, for a forthcoming book from University of Illinois Press.

As he leaves Bloomington, Steven says he has “absolute confidence in the IU School of Social Work” as an academic home for Labor Studies. He notes, though, that Bloomington students make up nearly half of Labor Studies’ credit enrollment. Given that fact, he encourages local labor supporters to lobby for more labor educators on the IU-Bloomington campus to handle the load. C.J. reminds Bloomingtonians of the lousy wages of the IU support staff. “Their pay is abysmal for how hard they work,” she says. “It’s a disgrace. Where are our values as a society when we value basketball over support staff salaries?”

“I’ll miss Bloomington, the university, and especially the students,” says Steven. “And I’m grateful to have met some great people.”