Helena Worthen

Helena Worthen is a labor educator, author, union activist, and retired university faculty member whose career has centered on workers’ rights, collective organizing, and the labor movement. She began her career writing plays and novels and teaching English in California. As a member of the California Federation of Teachers (AFT), she became increasingly involved in organizing adjunct faculty and addressing the insecure employment conditions facing contingent educators.

After completing her Ph.D. at the University of California Graduate School of Education, Worthen moved more fully into the labor movement. She served as Education and Political Action Director for a Joint Board of UNITE, combining worker education with union political activity, and later worked with the National Labor College. In 2000, she joined the University of Illinois Labor Education Program, where she taught and worked with unions and workers until 2011 and is now Director Emeritus.

Much of Worthen’s work has focused on adjunct and contingent faculty organizing, workplace democracy, collective bargaining, job security, academic freedom, and the relationship between workers’ conditions and broader economic inequality. She has argued for grassroots union organizing and greater participation by rank-and-file workers, particularly within higher education, where contingent employment has dramatically reshaped the academic workforce. Her scholarship and activism connect struggles within universities to the wider labor movement and questions about who holds economic and institutional power.

After retiring from the University of Illinois, Worthen continued her labor work nationally and internationally. With her husband and fellow labor educator Joe Berry, she taught labor relations at Tôn Đức Thắng University in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, a trade-union-sponsored university. The two later coauthored Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education, examining union democracy, organizing strategy, precarious employment, and the movement for greater power among contingent faculty.

Worthen has remained active in organized labor and higher-education advocacy. She is involved with Higher Education Labor United (HELU), a national coalition seeking to unite faculty, staff, graduate workers, and other higher-education employees around a broader labor agenda; HELU currently identifies her as a coordinator of its Media & Communications Committee representing the National Writers Union. Her decades of work have consistently linked education with union organizing, economic justice, democratic participation, and the effort to strengthen workers’ collective power.