Corporate Research Course Set for June 10-15
For students who wish to work as researchers in unions and at social justice organizations, understanding how to mine data on corporate America is key. Students now have the opportunity to gain such skills through an intensive, hands-on, weeklong course at Cornell University on Strategic Corporate Research. The June 10-15 session in Ithaca, N.Y., is co-sponsored by Cornell and the AFL-CIO Center for Strategic Research. Registration deadline is May 17, 2012.
“The Strategic Corporate Research course taught me how to create a well-structured, informative, first draft research packet on an identified corporation,” says Angela Cox, a recent graduate.
I worked with a diverse group of students during the course, exposing me to different ideas and points of view regarding organizing campaigns. I completed the course in 2010 and was hired two months later as a researcher at Transport Workers Union. The skills I learned during this course remain useful and relevant today. I maintain regular contact with my former classmates, utilizing this network as an additional resource while providing my own support to their projects in return.
Labor practitioners and Cornell faculty co-teach the course and are led by Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of Labor Education Research and a senior lecturer at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Bronfenbrenner is the author, co-author or editor of numerous books and journal articles on union organizing strategies, bargaining in the global economy, employer behavior in opposition to organizing campaigns and union leadership development.
Other instructors include Glenn Perusek, director of the AFL-CIO Center for Strategic Research; Tom Juravich, a University of Massachusetts-Amherst sociologist who teaches courses on labor issues and advanced corporate research; and Danielle Newsome, an AFT organizer who helped coordinate corporate research training for the labor federation in South Africa. All are committed to assisting students find employment following the course.
Scholarships are available, based on need, if taking the course for credit. For more information, contact Kate Bronfenbrenner at 607-254-4749 or scrsummer@cornell.edu .
Enrollment details and a course description are available here .
