by Lois Weiner
Who would have thought that teachers,
who often don’t consider themselves workers, would provide the most widespread,
most sustained global
resistance to capitalism’s anti-labor assault? From Chicago to Mexico to the
UK, teachers unions are engaging in militant, head-to-head battles with ruling
elites who are remaking
education as a market and taking ideological control of what is taught. Why are
teachers unions so prominently in the news? Why are they being attacked? And
what should we be expecting from them this Labor Day?
Union density and span is one reason.
Public school
teachers comprise the largest segment of public sector workers, and
over half of all unionized public employees in the US are teachers. In 2010,
governments employed 3.2 million public school teachers, about 70% in unions,
either the National Education Association (NEA) or the American Federation of
Teachers (AFT). No other occupation in the US can claim this union density and
this national presence – not the building trades, not auto, not steel, not
health care, not federal workers either.
But teachers unions defy the Left’s
orthodoxies about working class struggle. — that mental picture of a (male)
production worker. Teaching is “women’s work” and union members are
overwhelmingly female. Teachers don’t produce anything. Whether teachers
realize or not, they engage in what sociologist Raewyn Connell describes as
socially transformative labor, educating the next generation and shaping
society. But teachers unions are now key to labor’s survival and revival
because teachers unions have what other unions (and the rest of the working
class) lack: an organization based on members who do essentially the same work,
in almost every community, in the US and throughout the world.
The assault on teachers unions and on
teachers’ competence and caring (gender
is a key element of the attack) should be seen in light of education being the
final sector of the economy that is public and unionized. Education is being
restructured in a global project
to “marketize” schooling, using the rhetoric of “modernization” and “putting
students first.” Throughout the world we see the same footprint of reform,
which includes privatization and loss of democratic oversight; use of
standardized testing to control what is taught and turn teachers into contract
labor; increasing costs to “users” while simultaneously limiting access.
Teachers union block the way to this
project being realized. This explains the well-funded, well-orchestrated
campaigns to weaken or destroy the unions, de-legitimizing them and eliminating
the right to bargain collectively or gutting what unions can negotiate.
Pushback in the US has been slow in coming, but it’s finally happening. We’re
seeing important developments here and internationally, encouraged by the
magnificent struggles of Chicago teachers, led by the Chicago Teachers Union
(CTU) which aims to build social movement unions that are democratic and work
in partnership with parents, community, and other unions in struggles for
social justice, like the current struggle
to raise the minimum wage.
What’s more, important changes are
occurring in Europe’s teachers unions, especially the UK. The upcoming national strike
of the UK’s largest teachers unions, which may be joined by other militant
public employee unions in that nation, should be watched. The National Union of
Teachers (NUT), one of the unions that will strike, is consciously shifting the
way it casts its demands, embedding in its vision for public education and
developing on-the-ground alliances with parents and students.
We’re also seeing more international
cooperation among teachers unions, encouraged by a former NUT president who
maintains a website that
chronicles global struggles of teachers and will shortly launch a research
collaborative for scholars and activists to share information and
analysis. Cooperation depends in good part on developing personal connections
among leaders and activists, so the presence of NUT’s President at the Chicago gathering
of union reformers from the USA in mid-August is a hopeful sign. In the
Americas, the Trinational
Committee to Defend Public Education, uniting teachers unions in the
Americas augments work of Latin American
teachers unions that collaborate with the British Colombia
Teachers Federation. These networks are not new (the BCTF also aided
Chicago Teachers Union reformers
in their movement’s infancy) but they are becoming more formalized. Still,
on-going struggles in Africa and Asia for teachers’ most basic rights, like
being paid, deserve far more support than they receive from unions in the
Global North. A major problem yet to be addressed is the AFT’s and NEA’s
conservatizing stranglehold on the Education International, the international
confederation of teachers unions.
The power unleashed against teachers
unions when they struggle is breathtaking in scope and intensity. Teachers are
jailed, assassinated, fired. As of yet, outside of Chicago, the unions, and in
this I include many union reformers who want the unions to be more militant,
don’t fully “get” that union battles cannot be waged for economic benefits
alone and that the unions have to be rebuilt at the school level. Changing
faces at the top, as has occurred in the Washington DC local is not by itself a
viable strategy, though the change may be an opening for activists to bring a
different message.
Traditional trade union demands must
be embedded in a vision, a program for public education that recognizes past
injustice and inequality. We can’t return
to the 1960s, when the AFT organized on the slogan “Teachers want what children
need,” as is sometimes
suggested. Teacher unionism’s rebirth in the 1960s was fatally
flawed from the start by its failure to acknowledge systemic racism and
inequality in schooling’s structures and practices. Moreover, we have to
acknowledge that neoliberalism’s weakening of unions has been accompanied by a
significant ideological victory. Teachers’ demands for a professional wage and
pensions do not have the same political resonance they did forty years ago,
when workers earned more and had not been subject to ubiquitous anti-public
employee propaganda.
With all their flaws, teachers unions
remain the most stable and potentially formidable opponent of the global
project wreaking havoc on the schools. To succeed, the unions need to find ways
to push back on restraints imposed by contracts, which don’t address many of
kids’ most important needs and teachers’ professional obligations. AFT and NEA
endorsement of the “Common Core,” a national curriculum developed and promulgated by the same powerful elites
that have imposed standardized testing, has undercut trust and sabotaged
alliances that are critical to formation of a new movement. The same is true of
both unions’
acceptance of money from the Gates Foundation, one of the worst
culprits in using venture
philanthropy to make education serve the interests of transnational
corporations.
This Labor Day marks the point when
lots of children in this country start a new school year. It’s a time teachers
and kids have traditionally greeted with excitement tinged by apprehension
about what lies ahead. Many teachers don’t sleep the night before classes
start. I always make sure I have a new outfit to wear — still in my 41st year of teaching. But political
attacks on teachers, weakening of the unions, and imposition of evaluations
pegged to students’ standardized test scores cast a pall over this year’s start
of school. Though they have come into teaching because they love children
and/or the subject they teachers, teachers must now understand that they are
workers and need strong, democratic unions. Teachers have to open their
classroom doors and engage with this global project that aims to destroy the
ideals that have brought them into the classroom and the working conditions
that permit them to make teaching a career.
As many readers of Jacobin no
doubt know already, the decision to celebrate Labor Day on the first Monday of
September was made in the 1880s, when US unions disassociated
our labor movement from the struggles of the working class internationally,
which celebrates on May 1. So to teachers and supporters of free, quality
public education for all children, I propose we all enjoy “Labor Day” as a
well-deserved holiday and make May 1 the day we celebrate and renew the promise
of international labor solidarity, needed now more than ever, for our
children’s futures.
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Lois Weiner is a professor of
education at New Jersey City University who is on the editorial board of New
Politics. Her newest book is The Future of Our Schools: Teachers Unions
and Social justice.
Reposted from Jacobin Magazine.
Reposted from Jacobin Magazine.
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