Helena Worthen wrote plays and novels and then started teaching English in California. Luckily, she had a good union to belong to, the California Federation of Teachers (AFT) and was soon more interested in organizing adjuncts than teaching essay-writing. She went back to graduate school (back in the days when it was nearly free), got a job as Education and Political Action Director for a Joint Board of UNITE, and then came to the Chicago Labor Education Program where Helen Elkiss hired her and told her, point blank, that she had to do Polk. This was an amazing privilege and the most fun anyone could have. She did this from 2000 through 2011, loving it all. Now she and her labor educator husband Joe Berry are retired back to the San Francisco Bay Area, with one exception: between August 2015 and February 2016 they are Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam, teaching labor relations at a Trade Union -sponsored University, Ton Duc Thang. She is using role plays developed at Polk to show students here what labor under capitalism looks like.

To contact Helena you can email her: helenaworthen@gmail.com
Vietnam blog: helenaworthen.wordpress.com