Labor City

Friday's work was in Tacoma, a city of great contrasts. It is, on one hand, a gritty industrial city etched with polluted industrial waterways that are crossed by bridges of varying designs and sizes. Freight railways serve the port and enormous rail yards also divide the area.

Yet, along the recently detoxified Thea Foss Waterway (site of a Superfund clean-up), a downtown district of magnificent beauty has arisen from new and renovated structures. Museum Row houses five art and history museums, including the standout Museum of Glass (its motto: "Hot glass. Cool art."). It features an art-filled pedestrian overpass, the Chihuly Bridge of Glass, that links the museum to downtown Tacoma.

I met with

 union members at Bates Technical College in downtown Tacoma. Frankly, the college blew me away. Bates offers an amazing array of vocational programs. The courses are competency-based, rather than "credit unit" based. In other words, when you know how to do something well, you are finished with the course, not before.

The college offers programs in boat building (appropriate for this area that relies on its waterways for business), sheet metal technology, digital media, electronic engineering, making dentures, broadcast and video production, biomedical service technician, apparel construction and patterning-making technology, architectural engineering, hearing instrument technology and at least 50 more programs.

But that's not all—for 65 years Bates has offered apprenticeship training programs in conjunction with local labor unions. Annually more than a thousand apprentices learn employable skills in 16 disciplines, from pipefitting to meat cutting.

I often wonder how Californians find their way into union apprenticeships. If there's anything this extensive in California community colleges, I haven't seen it yet.