Archives West Finding Aid

USU Special Collections has a variety of materials on the cooperative movement in Utah, through the work of Joseph A. Geddes and the records of the Utah Cooperative Association that he helped organize. It also has the papers of Leonard J. Arrington who co-authored a book on the cooperative movement in the Pioneer period in the LDS Church and early Utah. Dr. Hansen's donation augments these materials by adding a substantial number of items and documents about the lesser known but very significant worker-owned cooperatives in the United States and Europe, and especially the story of their expansion in the 20th century.

The worker cooperative movement in the United States and Canada was revitalized in the 1970s and 1980s with the help of a number of people, including Frank T. Adams and Gary B. Hansen. This section includes the correspondence and materials that Dr. Hansen accumulated in his 23 years of collaboration and friendship with Frank Adams, writing about worker cooperatives. Their cooperative work, together with the development of Employee Stock Ownership Plans promoted by the 1971 Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) legislation passed by Congress, are now important components of the worker cooperative, workplace democracy and job creation movements in North America, Europe and elsewhere.

The section also includes the documentary materials generated by Dr. Hansen during his work with the International Labor Organization (ILO) Cooperative Branch from 1990 to 2004. During that time he helped conduct workshops and wrote documents on worker cooperatives for use by the ILO at their headquarters in Geneva and at the Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok to assess the need and interest in using cooperative forms of entrepreneurship to generate jobs and employment in several of the countries in the region as well as in other parts of the world. Also included are materials about the Mondragon Cooperative, a worker-managed manufacturing and retail company based in Spain. The materials in the Helen Foster Snow Section add an important dimension to those contained in this Section.

These materials can provide researchers and scholars of worker cooperatives and the cooperative movement in general with an extensive set of published and unpublished materials about the expansion of these unique forms of economic activity in the latter part of the 20th and early 21st centuries and complement the other cooperative materials at USU.

This series contains one of the best and most complete collections of materials on worker dislocation and plant closings resulting from structural changes in the American economy. It could be of inestimable value to scholars and researchers and anyone wanting to know about worker adjustment programs or large-scale worker displacement and its impact on individuals and communities and learn how public policy to deal with these issues in America has been fashioned during the past quarter century, especially as the country continues to deal with these same problems today and will in the future. Dr. Hansen accumulated this extensive collection of materials about worker dislocation and plant closings through his active participation in regional and national responses to formulate adjustment policies and programs to address the problems.

Beginning in the late 1970s, faculty members and graduate students at Utah State University were among the first to conduct research and demonstrate how dislocated workers and plant closings affected workers and communities in the mining and sugar refining industries in Utah and neighboring states.

In the early 1980s, worker dislocation resulting from mass layoffs and plant closings became a national concern in America and elicited a number of private and public responses. Subsequently, research on plant closings and worker dislocation expanded throughout the entire country and eventually led to the passage of national legislation: the Economic Dislocation and Worker Adjustment Assistance Act (EDWAAA).

In early 1983, Dr. Hansen was asked by the Ford Motor Company and the United Auto Workers Union to document the closing of the San Jose Assembly Plant in California and the Sheffield Aluminum Casting Plant in Alabama. The adjustment assistance and training programs they provided to displaced Ford workers at these two plants was among the most effective and successful carried out in the United States and served as a model of how this process should be done. The documents and materials collected and reports resulting from these projects are in this section.

In 1985, Professor Hansen served on the U.S. Secretary of Labor's Task Force to study worker dislocation in America and to recommend what should be done to address and ameliorate this problem. After a year of work, the Task Force completed its deliberations and submitted its report. The recommendations of the Task Force were subsequently incorporated into the EDWAAA legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. All of the documents, materials and papers that were part of Prof. Hansen's work on this task force are included in this section.

Materials in this section provide a bird's eye view of how millions of American taxpayer dollars were used to help the nations of Central and Eastern Europe promote democratic forms of planning at the national and local levels and to transition to market economies. They provides a wealth of information on how the U.S. Department of Labor and the U. S. Agency for International Development used Support for East European Democracy (SEED) Act funds passed by Congress to conceptualize, design and implement technical assistance and training programs in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, and Ukraine, and some World Bank funded projects in Romania and Serbia from 1993 - 2004.

Beginning in 1991, after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the demise of the Soviet Union, the USDOL was among the first U.S. federal agencies to use SEED Act funds to provide technical assistance to governments in the Central and Eastern European region transition from centrally-planned economies to market economies. The USDOL initiated projects to help the new governments create: western style employment services; learn about western style labor-management relations and dispute resolution practices and cooperative approaches to collective bargaining; assist the governments in dealing with the unemployment problems created by privatizing inefficient state-owned industries; help workers displaced in the process; and to assist national and community leaders in affected communities learn about and implement community planning and local economic development concepts and design and implement local economic development projects.

These materials also provide insights about how difficult it has been to provide technical assistance to CEE governments. They also illuminate some of the problems and issues related to the practice of federal government bureaucrats and politicians outsourcing technical assistance to the private sector in order to reduce the numbers of federal employees.

Most of the materials in this section are directly related to Central and Eastern Europe and contain a variety of materials, including the community economic renewal (CER) and local economic development (LED) guides and workbooks developed for the use of local community leaders in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Macedonia, and Bulgaria as part of the USDOL projects carried out in Central and Eastern Europe. It also includes the manuals and guides prepared in 2003 for the USAID and made available for use in other countries in the region at the conclusion of USDOL projects.

Materials were also collected as part of a technical assistance project under the auspices of the International Labor Organization carried out by Dr. Hansen for the ILO for the Chinese Ministry of Labor (MOL) in 1998. Dr. Hansen was asked to design a survey instrument based on his visits to several pilot cities selected by the Chinese MOL in Shenyang and Chin Dao, China. Information gathered during the site visits was used to write a questionnaire for a baseline survey conducted by the government to ascertain the training needs of managers of local economic enterprises created by local governments, to facilitate the creation of training programs and projects to help communities and to provide employment to unemployed workers in the government designated target cities and regions, and to help enterprise leaders more effectively manage existing enterprises to address the employment needs of workers in their areas of responsibility.

This section contains a variety of documents and materials on apprenticeship and industrial training in Great Britain and the United States that was accumulated over three decades, including materials about the system of apprenticeship and industrial training in Great Britain created by the Industrial Training Act of 1964, materials from a three-year grant from the USDOL in the 1970s to create a pilot Manpower Development Service at Utah State University, materials from a 1978 USDOL Manpower Institutional Grant under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, and documents, correspondence and papers collected by Prof. Hansen during his three year term as a member of the U.S. Federal Committee on Apprenticeship from 1990 to 1993. Anyone interested in apprenticeship and industrial training in America or Great Britain will find this material of considerable interest and value.

This section also includes materials collected in Great Britain about the operation of "residential colleges"--a unique form of education for working people in that nation.

In 1964, Parliament created a new system of apprenticeship and industrial training in Great Britain by the passage of the Industrial Training Act of 1964. It set up a system to organize and operate Britain's apprenticeship and other forms of industrial training in its major industries, created Industry Training Boards in each industry to direct the process, and established a levy-grant system to finance and improve on the training then available.

In the early 1970s, Dr. Hansen obtained a three-year grant from the USDOL to create a pilot Manpower Development Service at Utah State University to provide diagnostic and other forms of training and technical assistance to small- and medium-size businesses in Utah and the Intermountain region to determine if the human resource and training needs of these enterprises could be improved by such means. At the conclusion of the three-year project a report and recommendations were made to improve the nations jerrybuilt system of industrial training.

In 1978, Dr. Hansen obtained a "Manpower Institutional Grant" from the USDOL under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act for a four-year project to provide technical assistance and training to employment services and other agencies dealing with unemployed and disadvantaged workers in Region VIII of the USDOL--Utah Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota. Through this project, a Masters degree in Human Resource Administration was created at USU and short courses and other training projects were developed and conducted throughout Region VIII.

From 1990 to 1993, during his three year term as a member of the U.S. Federal Committee on Apprenticeship, Dr. Hansen collected a number of documents that explain the work of the FCA and reflect the political dynamics between labor and management. The FCA was eliminated after Dr. Hansen's term expired.

During the 1980s the United States Department of Labor (USDOL) Bureau of Labor-Management Relations and Cooperative Programs facilitated the development and promotion of new approaches to labor-management relations in the United States to reduce conflict among labor and management and to increase the adoption and use of more cooperative approaches to Labor-Management relations. This new approach was then spread through a variety of means, including publications, training workshops and seminars. USU was one of the first educational institutions in the U.S. to pilot test and use these concepts and materials in the classroom. In addition to being promoted and used in the U.S., these same materials were also translated and used in Central and Eastern Europe from 1991 to 2000 as part of the technical assistance projects carried out the USDOL with the assistance of people like Dr. Hansen.

This section contains sets of these materials, plus other documents and materials covering a variety of efforts developed to deal with collective bargaining and labor management relations in the United States from 1970 to 2000.

During his more than 40 years of travel and personal and professional activity, Professor Hansen collected a variety of documents and materials about the LDS Church and labor and economic topics related to Utah; e.g., the history of the Utah Copper industry; and the work of L. L. Nunn, a pioneer developer of electricity in Utah and other Western states. Nunn, a visionary, was interested in combining work and education in new and innovative ways in the early part of the 20th Century through the Telluride Association and Deep Springs College. This section contains materials about Deep Springs and copies of the annual reports published by the Telluride Association that were stored in the attic of the Telluride House in Ithaca, New York.

This section also contains materials about the efforts Dr. Hansen and others made to encourage the LDS church to develop educational and economic development programs in several countries, materials about missionary work carried out in Great Britain during the New Era of 1959-1961, plus other materials related to these and other topics.

This section covers a number of periodical publications that span the rise of interest in worker cooperation and Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) in the United States and Canada from the 1970s to 2005. It also contains a number of newsletters related specifically to worker cooperatives, ESOPs, workplace democracy, and other issues relating to these subjects. Anyone doing research on worker cooperatives and ESOPs would find this unique collection of newsletters of utmost value and interest.

This section includes Prof. Hansen's professional papers and correspondence from 1967 to 2005, including memoranda and papers related to his academic work as a faculty member in the Department of Economics at USU for over 31 years. The 7000 plus pages, filed in chronological order, cover his involvement in virtually all of the topics and sections included in his collection.

The items in this section are from Dr. Hansen's personal collection along with Dr. Hansen's correspondence with Helen Foster Snow. Dr. Hansen became acquainted with Helen Foster Snow in 1988 while conducting research on worker cooperatives and their value as a means of job creation and economic development in developing countries. In the course of their friendship, Helen gave him materials on worker cooperatives in China, including typescripts and other published materials, and corresponded with him for several years prior to her death. Dr. Hansen also traveled to the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, CA, where he went through the materials on China that Helen had given to that institution and xeroxed all the materials in their collection relating to worker cooperatives and the Gung Ho movement.

Helen Foster Snow was a Utah native who went to China in 1931, met and married Edgar Snow, and lived in China for nearly 10 years. In 1938, she and her husband Edgar along with a number of other international and Chinese friends started what became known as the "Indusco" worker-owned cooperative system (sometimes called the Gung Ho movement) to provide work and income to Chinese workers dislocated by the Japanese invasion of China prior to World War II. This movement subsequently created over 2,000 worker cooperatives and employed some 30,000 people during its peak wartime period of operation.

This series contains materials originating from Gary Hansen's father, Clarence J. Hansen, including a journal and other items brought home from his World War I service as a Field Artillery Officer in the American Expeditionary Forces in France. After the Armistice in November 1918, his unit traveled into Germany as part of an occupying force. His unit sailed from France to New York in the spring of 1919 where he was mustered out of the Army and returned home. It also contains a 30 plus page account of his wartime experiences, including a typescript version of his journal and a speech that he gave on Memorial Day in 1952 to students at Ben Lomond High School in which he talked about his wartime experiences.

The section also includes a 26 page account prepared by Dr. Hansen of the World War I nursing service of his aunt, Ruth Hansen Bruerton. He prepared and submitted this document about her and the Lt. C.J. Hansen document for inclusion in the national Veterans History Project.

The items in this series are from the personal collection of Gary B. Hansen and include a number of historical documents and papers that he acquired from Lena B. Hansen around 1970. They represent the lives and work of his maternal grandparents, Joseph Barker and Frances Alice Chadwick, who were born in North Ogden, Utah, to pioneer settlers. Lifetime residents of Weber County from 1867 to 1937, the couple married on November 21, 1888, and operated a farm and dairy in the North Ogden and Huntsville areas.

This section includes the five categories of documents and other items relating to their lives: (1) Joseph Barker's missionary journal and the letters he wrote to his wife Frances while he served an LDS mission to Great Britain from April 1894 to May of 1896, plus a photocopy of Joseph Barker's mission call by President Wilford Woodruff, a typed copy of Joseph Barker's missionary journal, photographs of Joseph Barker and his missionary companions, and miscellaneous articles and notes. (2) Joseph Barker's farm records, correspondence, Articles of Incorporation of the Cold Water Creek Irrigation Company, biographical sketches and other items about farming, etc. (3) Joseph and Frances Barker's school notebooks, report cards, slates Joseph and Frances used along with other materials while they were in school. (4) Journal kept by Joseph Barker of the trip he and his wife made to the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, NY in 1901. (5) "Joseph and Frances Alice Chadwick Barker Family Narrative," a history of their family written by their daughter Lena B. Hansen on May 20, 1971, and a reel-to-reel tape and cassette tape of Lena B. Hansen reading her "Joseph and Frances Alice Chadwick Barker Family Narrative."

When Hansen graduated from high school in 1953, he attended Utah State Agricultural College (now Utah State University), where he graduated with a BS in 1957 and received a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the United States Army Ordnance Corps. Lt. Hansen entered the U.S. Army in July 1957, serving at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and Tooele Army Ordnance Depot in Utah, and received an honorable discharge as a 1st Lieutenant in June 1959.

This series is made up of family letters, the majority of which being between Robert Gardner and Nellie Barker Gardner. Robert and Nellie got married on August 30, 1916, and had three children; Ellen born on May 29, 1920, Wilford Robert born on October 19, 1925, and Herbert Reed born on November 1, 1928. Nellie is the sister of Lena Barker Hansen, Gary B. Hansen's mother. The letters date from 1913 to 1956 and include Robert's letters to Nellie both during courtship and marriage, and also Nellie's letters to her parents and sister Lena.