“There is no greater calling than to serve your fellow men. There is no greater contribution than to help the weak. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well.” –Walter P. Reuther

The Reuther-Wheeling Library was founded as a research and study center on the life, times, and thought of Wheeling, West Virginia native Walter Reuther. An important part of the library’s mission is to promote the literary works of local authors about the heritage, history, and culture of the city of Wheeling. The library also contains numerous titles related to economics, politics, labor history, social justice, human rights, education, and the environment. The library is maintained by the Wheeling Academy of Law & Science (WALS) Foundation and is located, fittingly, in the “State Cellar” of the First State Capitol Building, where West Virginia’s first governor, Arthur I. Boreman had his offices and where West Virginia’s ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery, as well as the 14th and 15th amendments, occurred.

The Reuther-Wheeling Labor History Archive was added in May, 2017, and is dedicated to collecting, maintaining, preserving, digitizing, and making accessible to educators and researchers, photographs, documents, books, ephemera, media, and other artifacts related to the life and work of Wheeling’s native son, labor leader and human rights activist, Walter Reuther, and the Reuther family, as well as such material related to the history of organized labor, unions, and the working class in Wheeling and the Upper Ohio Valley region.

But why does Wheeling deserve to be the home of a labor history archive? And why Walter Reuther?
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Transitioning to the New Energy Economy

On Thursday, October 5, 2017, the Wheeling Academy of Law and Science (WALS) Foundation invited all members of the community to participate in the discussion program, “Transitioning to the New Energy Economy.”

Forty people gathered at the First State Capitol to hear a program focused on the growth of jobs and opportunity in energy efficiency and renewable energy for our region and our coal mining communities.  A panel of experts in the New Energy Economy provided an overview of where we are now, and where we are headed, followed by an audience and panel discussion session.

Our panelists included:

Dan Conant, founder of Solar Holler. He has an MS in Energy Policy from Johns Hopkins and is a former advisor to the US Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative. Dan partners with Coalfield Development, to provide WV coal workers access to education and work opportunities, and Rewire Appalachia enterprise, specializing in renewable energy training and jobs.

Evan Hansen founder and president of Downstream Strategies. Downstream Strategies offers consulting services to help build resilient communities, promote economic development, and protect the environment. Hansen received a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from M.I.T. and an M.S. in Energy and Resources from U.C.- Berkeley.

James Van Nostrand, Professor and Director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at WVU College of Law. He received his LL.M. in Environmental Law from Pace Law School, his J.D. from the University of Iowa College of Law, his master’s degree in economics from SUNY at Albany, and a B.S. in economics from the University of Northern Iowa.

Sean O’Leary, Senior Policy Analyst with the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. He has authored numerous reports on working family issues, economic development, and state and federal budget and tax policy. Sean holds a B.A. in political science and economics and a Master of Public Administration from West Virginia University.

Feature image courtesy Rosemary Ketchum

What follows is a transcription of the Jobs First Agenda program presented on September 7, 2017 by WALS President Patrick Cassidy.

Click here to listen to a podcast of the same program.

“My dad was a hard working coal miner as a young man, and a hard working steel worker for most of his life, and I’m sorry, but I will never believe what I heard from the titans of industry in my early years of practicing law, as to who was responsible for the loss of the steel industry, was my father.” -Pat Cassidy

Thank you all for coming tonight.

I know this is not great timing. Seven o’clock on a Thursday evening. But I appreciate your response. This is really the kickoff of a discussion series but I’m a little sorry to say that my presentation tonight will largely be in a lecture format, because I don’t know how to introduce this idea of the jobs first agenda without doing it this way. And those of you who know me know that my other career choice, up that road I did not go down, was a desire to be a philosophy professor. And so I still feel I’m somewhat of a frustrated old philosopher at heart. And I’m not going to read to you. But I do have to follow my notes closely because, unlike some other people you might see on TV who are able to speak without teleprompters, I don’t want to get into that kind of trouble. And so I have to refer to my notes from time to time.

But I do want to leave a little time at the end for some questions comments and I promise, along with our executive director Sean Duffy, that the rest of the series will not be in a lecture format, it will be more of a discussion group with the panelists. One of the moderators representing WALS will introduce the panelists and briefly pose some questions and then we’ll ask the panelists and you know we want input from the community. And we hope you’ll stay with us throughout the series or at least attend as many as you can because we want and need your feedback.

The jobs first agenda is an experimental idea we have been studying at our foundation for a number of years and are still studying. We want to know if it can work. If it can help solve or lessen the myriad problems and maybe even some crises facing our community and our nation today. And I don’t expect everyone to agree with what we are calling a Jobs First Agenda. That’s OK too. But we want to hear from you as we go along in this series, especially if you think our ideas are based on observed and experienced facts and not just opinions. So you may have some alternatives to our ideas that might be either incorporated in the agenda or even cause us to scrap it in favor of your ideas. And we want our discussions to be engaged in in a civil manner, which I know all of you people will do. And we do want to set one standard, and that is, I will quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan, our late great senator from New York, who said that, and you’ve heard this, I’m sure, before: “everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts.” So we hope to have a discussion based on facts, not political reasons, not political ideology, either from the left or the right, because we want this to be a non-partisan thing. We think that we can incorporate the best ideas from the left and from the right, and still come up with a workable solution — really a revolutionary solution–revolutionary, but a quiet revolution, one without guns, one without discord necessarily pitting people against each other. In any event the ideas underpinning our jobs first agenda have been plucked and borrowed from many sources: people — historical personages, institutions. Read more