Voices At Work

Tonight, our guest will be Steve Ashby, co-author of Staley: The Fight for A New American Labor Movement. Staley chronicles the bitterly contested labor conflict in the mid 1990s at the A. E. Staley corn processing plant in Decatur, Illinois, where workers waged one of the most hard-fought struggles in recent labor history. When the company launched a full-scale assault on its workers, Allied Industrial Workers Local 837 responded by educating and mobilizing its members, organizing strong support from the religious and African American communities, building a nationwide solidarity movement, and engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the plant gates. Through scores of interviews and videotapes of every union meeting, the authors bring the workers' voices to the fore and reveal their innovative tactics that inform and strengthen today's labor movement.

Steven K. Ashby became a union activist in the early 1980s when he worked at the American Maize corn-processing plant, similar to A.E. Staley's Decatur plant, in Hammond, Indiana. He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. labor and working class history from the University of Chicago in 1993. He was a founder and co-chair of the Staley workers' flagship support group, the Chicago Staley Workers Solidarity Committee. For five years he led a non-profit group, Calumet Project, in Northwest Indiana that united labor with religious and community groups to fight for workers' rights. Ashby taught labor studies at Indiana University at Bloomington from 1999 to 2007. He currently teaches classes for unionists and coordinates and teaches in an online Global Labor Studies credit program as an Associate Clinical Professor with the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.