Chicago teachers march with supporters during their strike to defend quality public schools
UNIONS TODAY are in an existential struggle for survival, from the
draconian anti-labor policies of Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin and the
spread of right-to-work laws to half of all U.S. states, to the raiding
of pension funds and the imposition of concessionary contracts in the
era of austerity.
These are not just assaults on organized labor, but part of a broader
attack on working class living standards. While some sectors of the
economy have recovered the crisis hit its low point in 2008-09, much of
that recovery has been on the backs of working people. Unemployment
remains high--specifically in Black and Brown communities--while wages
have remained low, unlike heath care payments, tuition rates, and local
rents.
Meanwhile, unions are weaker than ever. Their strategies of backroom
deals and political negotiations--the failed model of "business
unionism," which still dominates the labor movement today--have left
rank-and-file members demobilized and union leaders without much
leverage.
Faced with this dire situation, many labor activists argue that
unions need to adopt a new strategy of "social justice unionism"--an
approach that begins with the premise that an attack on organizations of
the working class requires a wider working class response.
From this standpoint, building a strong union movement requires
broadening the fight beyond the specific demands of one union to
class-wide or "social justice" demands-- which include traditional
"bread and butter" issues, but are not limited to them.
"Given the horrific attacks on unions and teachers, business unionism
is suicidal," argues education and labor theorist Lois Weiner in
The Future of Our Schools.
"Fighting for the social good," she goes on to write, "which is what a
social movement union does, is actually the more practical option."
This tradition of unionism based on struggle, class solidarity and
movements for social justice has a long and successful history in this
country--from the IWW to the sit-down strikes of the 1930s.
In its latest incarnation, social justice unionism has attracted a
generation of radicals from the global justice protests and Occupy Wall
Street--as well as movements for environmental, educational and racial
justice--who became political through different social movements and
turned to unionism in search of a force with the power to win.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
PUBLIC-SECTOR workers--particularly unionized public school
teachers--are central to these struggles, both because they represent
one of the last bastions of unionized workers and because their
struggles for fair wages and working conditions are intimately bound up
to the fight to defend public services and the living conditions of the
working class as a whole. As a result, while this article will argue for
the importance of social justice unionism generally, it will focus
primarily on how it has emerged within teacher unions.
Social justice unionism is a necessity because the only way that teachers unions can survive and make real gains for teachers
and students is by allying with the communities they serve.
Many contractual issues are, in fact, social justice issues because
the conditions of teachers' workplaces impact the learning environment
of students. At the same time, if teachers want parents and communities
to fight for the contract that teachers deserve, they must broaden the
scope of traditional trade unionism and be ready to stand with them on
issues that most impact parents' and students' communities.
Bob Peterson was elected president of the Milwaukee Teachers'
Education Association following the 2011 Wisconsin labor uprising that
battled heroically--but unsuccessfully--against the imposition of the
draconian anti-public sector Act 10, which significantly eroded
collective bargaining rights and requires annual recertification of
unions by 51 percent of all eligible employees.
In a recent article in Rethinking Schools, Peterson argues that we need a revitalized movement based on social justice unionism--one that:
builds on the strengths of traditional "bread and butter" unionism. But
it recognizes that our future depends on redefining unionism from a
narrow trade union model, focused almost exclusively on protecting union
members, to a broader vision that sees the future of unionized workers
tied directly to the interests of the entire working class and the
communities, particularly communities of color, in which we live and
work.
This is a sea change for teacher unions (and other unions, too). But
it's not an easy one to make. It requires confronting racist attitudes
and past practices that have marginalized people of color both inside
and outside unions. It also means overcoming old habits and stagnant
organizational structures that weigh down efforts to expand internal
democracy and member engagement.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WHILE PETERSON'S vision of social justice unionism might indeed be a
sea change from the business unionism that has dominated for the past
few decades, it has a long tradition in the U.S.--particularly in the
history of teachers unions.
The early teachers union movement had strong links to the women's
suffrage movement, simply because with a female-dominated workforce,
there was no way to talk about teacher rights without talking about
women's rights.
Tenure, for example, was understood by early teacher unionists to be a
women's rights issue. Without tenure and unions, women were routinely
fired for being married or becoming pregnant. Lest the unmarried and
childless women think they might be spared, one could also get fired for
wearing pants or being out too late in the evening.
(This was not just a 19th century occurrence. My grandmother, a home
economics teacher in Texas, lost her job when she got married. This was
not extraordinary, but routine.)
Furthermore, as early unionists argued, the pay inequity between men
and women was immense. "In 1850, four-fifths of New York's 11,000
teachers were women," historian Dana Goldstein notes, "yet two-thirds of
the state's $800,000 in teacher salaries was paid to men."
This discrepancy was the subject of one of Susan B. Anthony's first
speeches--made at the 1853 annual meeting of the New York State
Teachers' Association--after which she became a full-time activist for
women's rights.
Likewise, Margaret Haley, an early teacher unionist in Chicago known
as the "lady labor slugger," saw the fight for suffrage as crucial to
the ability of female teachers to fight for their rights. Haley also
provided one of the earliest and clearest articulations of social
justice unionism, arguing for the importance of contractual provisions
to protect both teachers and students rights.
In her book
Blackboard Unions, Marjorie Murphy quotes Haley's argument that the freeing of the child or the student:
can only be secured by the freeing of the teacher...to the teacher it
means freedom from care and worry for the material needs of the present
and the future--in other words, adequate salary and old-age pensions,
freedom to teach the child as an individual and not to deal with
children en masse. In other words, fewer children for each teacher. Last
but not least, the teacher must have recognition in the educational
system as an educator. The tendency is to relegate her to the position
of a factory hand, or a taker of orders from above.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
HALEY'S WORDS continue to resonate today for a new generation of
radical unionists--particularly in schools, hospitals and other
public-sector workplaces where neoliberal restructuring has increasingly
made it clear that attacks on working condition are attacks on the
living conditions of the working class as whole.
This ultimately is the central argument of social justice unionism:
To be successful, union struggles must move beyond the narrow
constraints of individual workplaces to make links with social movements
and fight for our interests as a class.
Social movement unionism," argues Weiner, "requires stretching the
union's definition of 'what counts' for members...We shouldn't
counterpose union work to other political activity. Instead, we need to
find ways for members to bring their activism
into the union, encouraging them to use the union as a vehicle for social justice work."
Weiner's point here is important in light of frequent debates about
the relationship between school-based or workplace issues and "social
justice" issues. In fact, the two are inextricably intertwined: to win
changes at the school or shop level in the era of neoliberal austerity
requires alliances and solidarity that extend beyond the individual
school or workplace.
At the same time, we need to recognize the fact that, ultimately, the
greatest power we have to win social justice is through our collective
power as workers--in short, our ability to withhold our labor and shut
down the system.
That is why Weiner also argues that "a social movement union not only
endorses social justice outside of the school, it also exists as a
social movement itself."
Weiner prefers the term "social movement unionism" because it
emphasizes the fact that this type of unionism is not limited to social
justice demands, but instead understands that internal union
democracy--the organization of the union as a social movement--is
likewise crucial.
Unions that advocate for social justice positions in the abstract
while, in practice, suppressing dissent and adopting the organizing
model of top-down service unionism are not the solution. Democracy is
essential--not only because it is a principle to be defended, but also
because without it, genuine rank-and-file movements are impossible.
A union that fails to foster genuine rank-and-file leadership on the
shop floor will inevitably fail to mobilize the kind of rank-and-file
militancy and organization that is crucial to winning demands and
fighting for social justice.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SOCIALISTS WHO see the self-organized struggle of the working class
as the only means by which genuine liberation and democracy can be
achieved have often used the term "class struggle unionism" to highlight
the means by which demands for social justice can be achieved. From
this standpoint, no amount of lobbying, advertising or moralizing will
ever achieve social justice--it is only through rank-and-file-led class
struggle that such goals can be achieved.
Activists around the country have looked to the Chicago Teachers
Union (CTU) for inspiration as the union that has come closest to this
model of social justice unionism in recent history--despite many ongoing
debates in the CTU.
At the time of the 2012 strike, there was a clear sense that the
union was fighting for more than just legally negotiable contractual
provisions, but instead, for the "schools Chicago's children deserve."
At the height of the strike, when people had the greatest sense of their
own power, they insisted on the need to fight not only for raises, but
also for air conditioners and against what CTU President Karen Lewis
called a system of "education apartheid."
The CTU leadership came from the Caucus of Rank and File Educators
(CORE), which from its inception built alliances with parents and
community leaders in the fight to stop school closings. Karen Lewis
summarized the success of CORE in a Jacobin article:
Only one [caucus] talked about the need to include our natural allies in
the struggle against educational apartheid and the takeover of
Chicago's public schools by the city's ruling class; only one had been
organizing alongside those allies for years; and only one had begun
laying the groundwork for the strike that would come in September 2012.
That caucus was CORE.
This practice of social justice unionism was the reason why the 2012
CTU strike received such immense support among parents and other members
of the community--particularly among African-Americans and Latinos.
The flip side of this lesson is the devastating impact of a failure
to understand the necessity of taking up social justice issues and the
struggle against racism, sexism and oppression.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the 1968 teachers strike in New York
City, which saw the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) pitted against
advocates of community control in the African American community of
Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a debacle that led to a decades-long term rift
between the UFT and the communities in which its members worked.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE U.S. labor movement must take up the question of racism. It is no
coincidence that the South, the region with the greatest legacy of our
country's racist history, also has the lowest unionization rates.
This has been all the more important since the emergence of the Black
Lives Matter movement in the wake of the resistance in Ferguson--and,
more recently, Baltimore, which has posed new questions in the labor
movement about the relationship between social justice issues and
unionism.
Demanding justice for Mike Brown, for example, is also a class issue
and a union issue. Mike Brown was a public high school graduate--from a
school so underfunded that the entire graduating class had to share two
graduation robes. His mother Lesley McSpadden is a member of the United
Food and Commercial Workers union.
The fight against racism is not external to the trade union movement,
but is very much at its center. When tragedy strikes one of us, it is
felt by all of us," declared UFCW President Joe Hansen. "We stand in
solidarity with our sister Lesley McSpadden and join her calls for a
fair investigation and justice under the law." A revitalized labor
movement should echo Hansen's words and push for them to be translated
into action.
The same principles hold true in New York City: In the most segregated school system in the country, racism
is
a school-based issue. This was made all the more apparent when a small
group of teachers wore NYPD T-shirts to show their solidarity with the
police, rather than Eric Garner, after his murder at the hands of the
NYPD.
While some teacher union members used the argument of "due process"
for the police officer who killed Garner to justify their pro-NYPD
stance, it's important to be clear that the only people who were denied
due process were Eric Garner, a public school parent and an unarmed man,
and his wife and children, all of them former and current public school
students.
It is worth noting that of 179 fatalities involving the NYPD in 15
years, there have been only three indictments. To invoke due process or
union solidarity with the police in this context is to leave the police
to remain above the law--while inevitably alienating the Black and Brown
communities our schools serve. It is to oppose the movement's slogan
that "Black lives matter."
It's also worth noting that "union solidarity" rarely goes both ways
when it comes to the NYPD. Indeed, in the event of a teachers' strike,
it is the police who will be called in as strikebreakers to enforce the
anti-labor Taylor laws that make it illegal for public-sector unions to
strike in New York.
No matter what the individual political opinions of officers or their
connections to members of other unions, as a force, the police serve
the 1 Percent to maintain a system that is racist to the core and
inherently at odds with the interest of the working class.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
REAL LABOR solidarity means standing with working people--union and
nonunion--who are fighting for social justice. Such solidarity is not
simply a question of political calculation, but a recognition of our
shared interest in opposing exploitation and oppression.
In this regard, International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)
Local 10 in Oakland led the way on May Day by shutting down the Port of
Oakland in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
As educators in North Carolina's Organize 2020 explained in a statement endorsing #BlackLivesMatter:
We believe deeply that the lives of all people matter. As teachers, our
lives are constructed around this fact. Shouting loudly that Black Lives
Matter does not negate our commitment to ALL of our students. In fact,
we believe that challenging all of our students and colleagues to
recognize the innate value of Black lives will help them grow, and that
the quality of life for all who live in our communities will improve
when we value the lives of everyone. Since so many of our Black students
struggle to trust that our society values them, we must go out of our
way to affirm that their lives, specifically, matter...
Historically, when Black people have fought for a more democratic
society, the lives of all people have improved. Each time a barrier to
Black people's potential has been erected, our whole society has
suffered. Organize 2020 stands with those who proclaim that Black Lives
Matter, and we commit our work in the classroom and the community to
making this slogan a reality.
Putting the fight for racial justice at the center of the fight for
educational equity is particularly important when those who seek to
destroy public education drape their attacks in the mantle of civil
rights. To expose their hypocrisy, it is essential to take up issues of
racial justice.
As Weiner writes:
[The] failure [of teachers unions] to see beyond "bread and
butter"--in particular, their unwillingness to put race and racism on
the table as legitimate concerns of parents and students--has made them
vulnerable to neoliberalism's audacious and effective usurpation of the
rhetoric of equal educational opportunity historically associated with
progressive movements.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
FOR ANYONE committed to the fight for public education or to
reforming our unions so that they can be genuine defenders of workers'
rights, the fight against racism and all forms of oppression is central.
This is an essential principle of social-justice, social-movement and
class-struggle unionism. It is at the heart of the old labor slogan that
"An injury to one is an injury to all."
When the labor movement has been at its strongest, it has learned
these lessons, showing in practice what genuine solidarity looks like:
from the IWW textile workers strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, that
involved workers from 25 different nationalities, speaking 45 different
languages, to the massive strikes of the 1930s that were able to
organize so-called unskilled factory workers and win the support of the
unemployed.
Most recently, it was evidenced in the CTU strike of 2012, which has
led to a growing network of teacher unionists committed to social
justice unionism as a means of reforming their own unions and fighting
for educational equity.
If the labor movement hopes to emerge from its current death spiral,
it must build on this history, learn its lessons and rebuild the kind of
solidarity and alliances that are essential to its survival. Anything
else is suicidal.
To achieve this aim, unions need to be rebuilt from the bottom up--or
built anew--in every workplace, in every school, on every shop floor.
But they must also reach beyond the confines of individual workplaces to
unite with social movements in the fight for social justice for all
working people. This struggle has never been more urgent.
