Your example of the state of the American union movement does not help clarify the issue for me. That the American union movement is among the weakest in the Western world is, I would think, a virtually self-evident fact. But our capacity and our strategy to change that state of weakness depends upon one's analysis of why it is so. Is it simply a failure of "correct political ideas" or of "political will" among American trade union leaders, as those on the hard, sectarian left have always maintained? Not in my book. Rather, it is rooted in a very particular set of historical circumstances, ranging from the nature of a largely immigrant working class further rent by divisions of race to the difficulties of establishing a labor or social democratic party in a political system defined by two 'weak' parties, a federal system of government and a system of the separation of powers at the national level of that government. "Optimism of the will" concerning the future of American unionism without some "pessimism of intelligence" concerning how it ended up where it is, will not get us all that far. (I am including at the end of this post a brief and very schematic piece I wrote for the DSA's _Democratic Left_ which touches upon some elements of what I consider to be a thoughtful strategy in terms of addressing the 'new economy'.)
I don't want to sound dismissive, for I do think that grad student unionization is a positive development, but I am also convinced that it is not the center of the revitalization of American labor -- at its best, it offers a lot of ideas and energy for the union movement in higher education. Good work, yes, but let's not overestimate its importance.
Here is the piece for the DSA journal:
In the last few decades of the twentieth century, dramatic and far-reaching changes in the global economy laid down radical and fundamental challenges to the trade union movements in the United States and the rest of the Western world. These movements had developed into significant political and economic forces in the context of an ascendant industrial capitalism, and were largely organized in response to it, in the form of industrial unions. As a post-industrial knowledge economy, marked by unprecedented global integration, began to replace that industrial order, and as an aggressive politics of laissez-faire market rule seized upon those changes to become hegemonic throughout the world, this industrial form of unionism has shown itself to be increasingly maladroit at waging successful struggles to advance the interests of working people. Indeed, if we are honest with ourselves, we must concede that trade union movements, here in the United States and in most of the Western world, have seen their membership stagnate or significantly shrink, and have been restricted to fighting defensive and rearguard actions, attempting to limit the size of their losses.
There is much to be done to revitalize and renew the trade union movement in the United States, and the ‘New Visions' Sweeney leadership of the AFL-CIO has taken important steps forward in its focus on new organizing and reinvigorated political action. Yet when we consider the problems facing trade unionism on a global scale, and the extent to which they have been visited on all manner of national trade union movements, it becomes evident that more organizing and more effective political action will not, by themselves, reverse the declining fortunes of American trade unionism. The historic task confronting American labor is much far reaching: the development of new post-industrial, knowledge economy forms of trade unionism. As highly centralized and bureaucratic modes of industrial organization give way to more decentralized and ‘flexible' economies, as the demand for educated labor increases and as questions of the control of knowledge and skill become increasingly prominent, as the decline of mass production highlights issues of the quality of labor and service, as capital becomes increasingly mobile on a global scale, forcing more mobility and contingent work in labor, and as the relationship between intellectual labor and an embattled public world becomes evermore central and important to the future of democratic politics, the union movement is confronted with challenges that can not be addresses within the framework of industrial unionism. Trade unions will have to renew themselves to address these challenges; the alternative is a continuing decline into certain marginality and irrelevancy.
This is a rather complex task, one I can only sketch out in the most general way here. It is complex first because — contrary to the conventional wisdom in many parts of the left which relate to the labor movement, as represented by the journal Labor Notes — it involves a rethinking and reshaping of the very institutional forms of unionism, and not just advocacy of a better, purer form of existing unionism, as if more militancy, more democracy, more organizing or more social and class consciousness are all unions need. It is so secondly because knowledge economy unionism will not take one universal form: the changing nature and growing diversity of the global and American economies demands that there be a multiplicity of forms, each rooted in its rather specific setting and context. A uniform model of post-industrial, knowledge economy unionism simply will not emerge in the same ways that industrial unionism took shape in the 1930s. And it is so lastly because the forms of post-industrial, knowledge economy unionism will not be born out of the flowering of a single principle, such as the organization of all workers in one industry, but will involve the combination of a number of different elements, combining distinct approaches to issues such as the control of knowledge and skill, the quality of work and the role of intellectual labor.
As this account necessarily operates at a high level of generality, an illustration from the case of American teacher unionism may make the import of these contentions clearer. Like other public sector unions that have emerged since the 1960s, teacher unions modeled themselves after progressive industrial unions such as the UAW, and were initially very successful in pursuing that model, organizing the great majority of the teaching workforce and winning substantial salary and working condition improvements for it. But in the last decades, these gains have slowed to a trickle, and conservative anti-union forces have mounted a frontal assault on public education itself with a combination of underfunding and privatization initiatives such as vouchers. Teacher unionism has reached a particularly critical juncture, and the blind pursuit of the industrial union model will not serve it — and public education — well.
Efforts to renew American teacher unionism should not start with abstract political notions drawn from outside of the world of teaching, such as social justice unionism, but, I contend, from the very social practices, the very discourses, through which teachers understand and practice together their work. Four distinct discourses are central for teachers: the discourse of professionalism (teacher as professional and teaching as a profession), the discourse of labor (teacher as artisan and teaching as a craft), the discourse of vocation (teacher as democratic public intellectual and teaching as a calling), and the discourse of nurturance (teacher as parent and teaching as a loving and caring activity). It is through these discourses that educators express their collective aspirations for teaching. Let us look at them briefly in turn.
In an era when the ‘factory' model of public education which arose with the industrial order has proven increasingly dysfunctional, it has become necessary to break with its notions of facsimile schools run by central bureaucracies and staffed by assembly line educators. The discourse of professionalism, with its emphasis on the professional knowledge and expertise of the teacher, provides an essential means for transcending the notion that the teacher is a de-skilled laborer who simply performs rote, mechanical tasks designed by outside ‘experts.' In professional language and practice, teachers are understood to be ‘reflective practitioners,' actively shaping pedagogical practice through critical consideration of what works. To this end, they need — and teacher unions must advocate for — time and space for their professional development, and professional autonomy in their pedagogical practice. This must be combined with standards of professional teaching excellence, such as those developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, a project for identifying and certifying excellence in teaching supported by both national teacher unions.
While the discourse of professionalism clearly conflicts with the industrial union view of a homogeneous teaching workforce consisting of de-skilled, interchangeable parts, it is not inconsistent with unionism per se. The tradition of craft unionism, with its notion of the worker as artisan and its stress on craft skill and quality, provides the basis for an alternative model of teacher unionism. This tradition allows us to conceptualize teaching as a craft, a complex set of skills that one learns gradually over time by practicing them with the guidance of experienced, accomplished mentors. In this context, it is possible to rethink in dramatic ways the inefficacious models of teacher education which are now dominant in the academy, models which do so little to prepare their students for actual teaching. In their stead, apprenticeship models of teacher education, based on practice teaching in actual classrooms in real schools, can be developed, drawing heavily on the precedent of teacher union mentor programs. Moreover, unlike the individualist frameworks in which teacher professionalism is most often presented, craft unionism insists upon grounding the artisan's craft in the organized community of those who practice it. In ground-breaking ‘peer review and evaluation' programs, different teacher union locals across the country have shown how this communitarian inheritance can be put into practice; these programs break sharply with established and poorly working hierarchical patterns of industrial management supervision, and place responsibility for ensuring the quality of teaching upon the community of organized teachers. As the battle over the future of public education proceeds, the craft union combination of a focus on craft quality with the struggle for better wages and working conditions will prove particularly felicitous.
While teacher unions must retain an unapologetic emphasis on the remuneration of their members for their work, they must also recognize that few of their members choose to teach solely to earn a living. Many teachers enter the field out of a sense of a calling to public service, a vocation to realize the full democratic potential of public education. The identification of teacher unions with this calling goes back to one of its first members, the democratic socialist John Dewey. In the pursuit of this vocation, teachers function as democratic public intellectuals, making the vital connection between education of the young and the future of our public life, our common good. In an era of the decline of our public square, this discourse assumes growing importance.
In the last discourse of nurturance, of teaching as a loving and caring activity, one finds an emphasis upon the familial quality of the particular teacher-student relationships. In opposition to the culture of bureaucratic anonymity generated by the sheer numbers of large, factory model schools, the discourse of nurturance focuses on an ‘ethic of care' for students. Its living metaphor of classroom as family resonates strongly with dedicated teachers of poor and working class students, especially teachers of color serving their own communities, and it speaks strongly to the cultural world built by elementary school teachers, still predominantly female. The small school movement and the move to reduce class size, both supported by teacher unions, embody practical initiatives to create the conditions for supporting such relationships.
Notwithstanding their general progressive thrust, each of these four discourses can, when used in isolation, be employed in regressive ways. For example, professional discourse has often had anti-union undertones, and adopted paternalist attitudes to the lay population which receives the services of the professional. But in combination, these discourses provide each other with the means to protect against such developments, and the basis for a renewed teacher unionism.
In moving toward this post-industrial, knowledge form of teacher unionism, the institutional forms of teacher unionism will have to be reworked. No less a foundation than the collective bargaining agreement, developed in a format taken lock, stock and barrel from industrial unionism, will have to be fundamentally redrawn. In its classical form, the contract laid out in exacting detail the unvarying form schools must take, as part of prescriptions originally designed to protect teachers from arbitrary management; as a consequence, one finds formulas, such as the demand that teachers teach x periods of y length in every given school day, which unduly restrict the development of educational innovation and diversity. It is now necessary to develop streamlined teacher contracts that allow schools to democratically develop their own distinctive educational philosophy and program, restricted only by general parameters such as a total workload. The school unit will become more and more central within teacher union life.
The array of post-industrial, education economy challenges now facing teacher unions, as the challenges facing the trade union movement in general, are many and complex. The most forward thinking of union activists and leaders are grappling with the type of ideas and programs discussed above in our efforts to ‘reinvent' a form of unionism which will once again successfully pursue the interests of working people.
Dennis wrote: << Because you're *changing* the structures of representation, deepening them, broadening them, making them more responsive to the represented. Unions in the US are dreadfully toothless, apolitical, and legislatively ineffective compared to our brothers and sisters in Canada, the EU and elsewhere, where labor has its own parties, a massive civic infrastructure, etc. To get from here to there will require an internal revolution, the kind which has been happening at Ground Zero of the grad union movement for some time.
Unlike some of the comrades, I don't blame the union leadership for this state of affairs; most union officials I've dealt with are honest, hardworking folks, who have their hands full just keeping the ship afloat and trying to fend off rabid Rightwing legislation and privatization. It's really a question of creating social movement unions which reach out into the community as much as they reach into the workplace -- the simple insight that the best defense is a good offense.
- -- Dennis >>
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --