For Kerwin Simon, the chaos of Covid led to clarity around his academic and professional pursuits. “For those of us who work in healthcare, Covid was one of the saddest times,” Kerwin says. “We were putting bodies into trailers outside the hospital. A doctor said to me, ‘it’s tragic that all these people are ultimately dying of things that can be controlled, like diabetes and high blood pressure.
“To get from there to here, it is about persistence, yes, but it is also about the support I’ve gotten along the way,” says Koffi Bentum, who graduated from SLU with a Bachelor of Arts in 2021, and speaks very highly of the networking, academic support and flexibility he found at SLU – not to mention the school’s mission, which is grounded in social justice and public service. “Everything I learned at SLU changed what I wanted to do with my life,” he said.
Eugene Patron’s enthusiasm and positivity about his CUNY SLU experience shines brightly. “What I learned in the program was spot on!” he says. He received the Advanced Certificate in Leading Change in Healthcare Systems in 2022. “Each week we talked about how to apply what we were learning at work.
Steamfitting – and union membership – are in Brian Hunt’s blood. Raised in a union family, his father was a steamfitter. After an early career stint working in finance, Brian was considering going back to school when he got the call to start the Local 638 Steamfitters five-year Apprenticeship program. He started on August 1, 2007 – and that was it. “I love it,” says Brian. “I love the work, I love the trade and I love the union.”
The CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies (SLU) is proud to partner with the CUNY LGBTQIA+ Consortium and Visual AIDS for the Day With(out) Art 2023 by presenting Everyone I Know Is Sick, a program of five short films generating connections between HIV and other forms of illness and disability.
For Pedro Freire (Class of 2022, MALS) the journey has been long from South America to Connecticut to CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies (SLU) to California—and often arduous. But now he can see how all his experiences, good and bad, have brought him here, to the University of California Riverside Ph.D. program in ethnic studies.
The semester has taken off with some strong partnership with the Community and Worker Ownership Project. In early September we presented at the US Federation of Worker Coops at an in-person conference in Philadelphia where we partnered with many to explore the ways and reasons to pursue unionized cooperatives.
Steven Attewell, a policy historian whose primary interests are U.S. social and economic policy of the 20th century, teaches Urban Studies majors at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.
An expert in political economy of cities, public space, and urban transportation, CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies Professor Kafui Attoh examines the role of urban social movements in shaping mass transit policy.
Arthur Cheliotes, President Emeritus of Local 1180, Communications Workers of America AFL-CIO, where he was elected as president 11 times, serving consecutively from 1979 through 2017, is chairman of the Labor Advisory Board of the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.
The UALE has recognized Gregory Mantsios, Dean of CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies (SLUS), with the 2018 UALE Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Labor Education Award in recognition of his career as an activist and advocate for the advancement of education in the fields of labor and urban studies.