Dr. Ericka Wills, M.S. '08, Ph.D. '15

Andrew Purnell Jr. Trailblazer Award Winner

• Tenure-track assistant professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Workers; Middleton, Wisconsin

• Major: English

Dr. Ericka Wills is a dedicated workers’ rights advocate, labor educator, and union activist. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin School for Workers, the oldest university-based labor education program in the United States. She adopts a community-engaged scholarship approach to her integrated research, teaching, and service, which promote a collaborative partnership with labor organizations, workers, and local groups to achieve shared goals.

Wills draws on her involvement with labor struggles, unions, and workers to bring firsthand experiences into her labor education classes, bridging economic and political concepts with workers’ everyday experiences. She is as comfortable teaching in a rural union hall as a university lecture hall and is as apt a communicator with underground coal miners as graduate students and academic colleagues. She has taught thousands of worker-participants representing dozens of employment sectors across North America—from steel workers to flight attendants and teachers to copper miners.

After spending time in U.S.-Mexico border region copper communities, Wills helped develop an innovative cross-border training program with the United Steelworkers and National Union of Mine, Metal, Steel and Allied Workers of the Mexican Republic (Los Mineros). This education program brings together miners who share transnational employers to learn about global trade agreements, national policies, workplace health and safety regulations, and other factors that impact workers on both sides of the border.

Annually, Wills teaches in an American Federation of Labor-Coalition of Industrial Organizations summer program, hosted by a different state each year. Closer to home, she has partnered with empowHER, a Wisconsin organization composed of women in the building trades, to develop and facilitate a mentoring program aimed at recruiting and retaining women in family-sustaining jobs in the construction industry. Since her grandfather was a union construction worker, she personally understands the importance of supporting new workers entering this sector. Wills recently returned to Bloomington-Normal for the opening of the McLean Country Museum of History’s exhibit A Deadly Deception: The Asbestos Tragedy in McLean County, in which her grandfather was included as one of the workers who died of asbestosis after working at the local asbestos factory.

Her teaching, research, and service to workers and their communities demonstrate her unique ability to connect as an individual with diverse workers while also taking the 30,000-foot view and gauging the impact of union decisions and collective worker actions. This provides not only a beneficial, fresh perspective for our labor movement, but also her long-term, on-the-ground engagement with contemporary worker struggles has led to academic scholarship and public writing that might otherwise not exist. She has published on Wall Street corporate investment’s impact on workers; worker health and safety issues; and United Auto Workers, Association of Flight Attendants, American Guild of Variety Artists, and other union organizing and contract campaigns. After spending time on the picket line and with workers and their families during the United Mine Workers of America’s (UMWA) nearly two-year strike against Warrior Met Coal, Wills is currently writing a book about the UMWA’s evolution over the past three decades.

She conveys a deep passion for what she teaches and researches, because she understands that history, politics, or economics are not abstract concepts; rather, they are embodied in the everyday material living and working conditions that we strive to have collective agency in shaping. She serves on the Wisconsin Labor History Society state board and the editorial board of Labor Studies Journal. She volunteers at empowHER events across the state, in strike food pantries, and with the UW-Madison chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Wills has two children, Wylie and Willow, who enjoy traveling and learning about new places.