Trish Marasigan and Neenah Williams, current students in our on-campus MHRIR program, were honored as recipients of LERA’s national essay competition awards! They traveled to Seattle to attend the Labor and Employment Relations Association’s 77th Annual Meeting in June. Trish reached out to reflect on her experience and the connections she made.
Increasingly polarizing headlines, jockeying for public attention, can make honest, nuanced conversations feel rare, especially when considering labor, policy, and change. This is what made attending the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA) 77th Annual Meeting especially meaningful to me.
Heading into the conference, I felt a mix of nerves and excitement. I was nervous because I had never previously attended an event like this, and I had deep reverence for the many great LERA members who are leading scholars, writers, and activists in the field. Excitement because I had never been to Seattle before, and my family couldn’t have been prouder of me for winning my first-ever essay competition. To speak more on the work that brought me from Champaign, IL, to Seattle, WA, I’ll admit that writing the essay was challenging. In 500 words, I grappled with the conference’s theme: “Promoting Authentic Dialogue in Polarized Times.” This was an intellectual challenge I felt equipped and excited to handle, given my experience in LER.
Over the past two semesters, I have grown much more confident in my analytical and academic thinking. This is largely because of the LER professors who excel in educating and creating psychologically safe classrooms, where my peers and I enthusiastically gather to discuss everything under the labor and employment relations umbrella, from arbitration to zero-sum negotiation. It was my pleasure to hear many of my professors presenting to captivated audiences, moderating panels, and having their research referenced by so many others outside of LER throughout the conference.
I’ll also mention that my positive LER experience is not unique. My classmate, Neenah Williams, was also awarded in the LER/LERA essay competition for her exemplary writing, similarly informed by our shared LER background. Neenah was the most joyful company to join me for the weekend in Seattle!
Once at the LERA conference, Neenah and I were repeatedly awed by the research for which we were front-row witnesses. LERA’s reach is impressive in geographic and multifaceted senses; the very first session we went to, a symposium titled “Spicy Trends in Union Research,” featured researchers based in Canada, and the second panel we attended, “How Parties Negotiate Themselves into Deadlock,” featured panelists from the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union and the Education Labour Relations Council. These sessions provided enriching insights into labor negotiations and workforce trends in legal and cultural contexts that are very different from what I typically discuss in class.
Note that this takeaway was in addition to the countless Ph.D. researchers, employment lawyers, union organizers, and so many more professionals of this milieu across the world that we networked with at lunch, chatted with in between sessions, and, of course, connected with on LinkedIn throughout the weekend.
LERA provided us with an invaluable opportunity to learn about various perspectives in labor and employment relations, and that’s certainly a masterclass in promoting authentic dialogue in polarized times.
