Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Helena Worthen
The Labor Education That Workers Need Most
The Labor Education That Workers Need Most Published August 28, 2025 What kind of knowledge do you need the most in order to make a decent living and avoid getting injured or beaten up by your job? It’s not those hard skills that take years of costly training, or the work-ethic skills that workforce development planners promote. It’s labor education.
The Labor Education That Workers Need Most
What kind of knowledge do you need the most in order to make a decent living and avoid getting injured or beaten up by your job? It’s not those hard skills that take years of costly training, or the work-ethic skills that workforce development planners promote. It’s labor education. Narrowly defined, it means how to organize a union, plus all the ancillary leadership, mobilizing, negotiation, education, and enforcement responsibilities that come with that. Much of this is quite technical.
Higher Education Unions Mobilize to “Kill the Cuts”
On Tuesday, April 8, a coalition of labor and civil society organizations, organized by Higher Ed Labor United (HELU), will hold demonstrations in more than 30 US cities. These demonstrations, called Kill the Cuts, will escalate over the next months as more and more campuses join in. The Kill the Cuts website has a map of where demonstrations will be held and lets people sign up to organize their own.
How to Qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness and Avoid the Traps
Photo by marcos mayer on Unsplash The US Department of Education recently issued a statement on the federal student loan servicer website, myFedLoan.org, that should be noted by anyone with a federal student loan who works full time for a nonprofit, the government, or other public agency (veterans also qualify).
Race, Racism, and the Liberal Arts: A Conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley and Naomi R. Williams
Are academics working class? Is the university a space where we can realize racial and economic justice? How can we reshape higher education to be a democratic and inclusive public good? On February 23rd, NPQ’s Economic Justice Editor Rithika Ramamurthy and scholar Dennis Hogan moderated a conversation between Professor Robin D.G. Kelley (UCLA) and Professor Naomi R. Williams (Rutgers) to explore this set of questions.
Power Despite Precarity: The Contingent Faculty Movement as a Social Movement
The following is an excerpt from Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education by Joe Berry and Helena Worthen (2021), reprinted with permission from Pluto Press. Use the code NPQ30 at Pluto Press for an exclusive NPQ reader discount.
The Power Of Recognizing Higher Ed Faculty As Working-Class
Above Photo: Rutgers University AAUP Rally, April, 2021, (Eric Ruder). Just over 20 years ago, Michael Zweig published The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret. At that year’s How Class Works conference at SUNY Stony Brook, academics from history, political science, labor and industrial relations, and other fields debated Zweig’s use of the term “working class.” Some thought it was a throwback to the 1930s or a tip-off that someone was a Marxist.
The Mansion of the Kavanaughs
I was forwarded your recent article As Kavanaugh Allegations Widen, Elite-College Alumni Recall Harassment From Decades Past Students, By Lindsay Ellis September 27, 2018 As a 1965 graduate of Radcliffe (which was in the process of becoming Harvard), I am being urged by family and husband to write something about all this. You may not be the right person for me to reach out to, but your article is what prompted this, so here goes. I have a slightly different take on the #MeToo stories.
Power Despite Precarity
Joe Berry is a founder of the Chicago Coalition of Academic Labor and a long-time leader of the international COCAL and New Faculty Majority. He has served on many national contingent faculty committees. He is the author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (Monthly Review Press, 2005). Helena Worthen is a novelist, union activist and retired contingent faculty worker. Her book, What Did You Learn at Work Today?
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Helena
Contact Helena, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack