<HTML>There are some important strategic and political fault lines that have been laid bare by this debate, and I only wish that Justin would be more forthright in taking them up. Rather than taking up the specific issues I raise, we seem to always come back to the claim that I am misrepresenting the positions of Labor Notes/Solidarity. That is an interesting claim, in light of what I said, and how Justin represented it, in the last two posts in this thread. I wrote, in a one line parenthetical reference to Saturn, that: << [I do think, however, that it is an error to completely dismiss, as Labor Notes did, efforts such as Saturn.] >> This is how Justin translates my cryptic comment that the Saturn experience might just be a little bit more contradictory than allowed by the flat dismissal of _Labor Notes_: << He cites as his example of democratic worker-management relationships the Team Concept as practiced at Saturn. He is sorry that LN & Soli have fought this. I am glad that we have a concrete eaxmple on the table, and one I know something about. Saturn is (or was--they've trurned to the usual GM Master Contract, I think) a real archetype of everything that is wrong with labor-management cooperation, with a "coperation" scheme imposed on a fairly unresponsible subordinate union by the management, with the union basically directing the workers to figure out how to speed up and rationalize their own work. >> Now I don't think that Justin sets out to misrepresent in some deliberate way what I wrote, that he is seeking, in a conscious way, to attribute to me a position -- that Saturn was a paradigm of democratic worker-management relations -- that he knows I did not make. Rather, I think that his frame of reference, and the _Labor Notes_ frame of reference, for understanding these questions is so flat, so bifurcated and polarized, and so lacking in appreciation for the contradictions and contestations of this terrain, such that it can only conceive of two options -- total support or total opposition to Saturn. Thus, to suggest that something might be learned from the Saturn experience, that one might look at the vision of its founders -- a group which included social democratic, trade unionist UAW intellectuals like the Bluestones -- and examine the way in which they attempted to implement it, that one might look at both its succes! ! ses and its failures, its strengths and its flaws, is to become -- within this framework -- an unquestioning cheerleader for it. This is the type of framework one finds continually in the _Labor Notes_ text on the question, _Working Smart._ It is what one finds in _Against the Current_, with its denunciations of attempts to think through a "new unionism" which takes up questions of the quality of education. As for concrete examples on the table which he wants so badly, I have provided quite a few from education, and Justin has chosen to ignore every one -- (a) establishing committees with a majority of teachers the authority to make personnel decisions, such as hiring, transfer in, tenure, etc.; (b) establishing systems of peer evaluation, peer review and peer intervention as opposed to traditional supervisory relationships; (c) teacher controlled, school based professional development focusing on the acquisition and honing of teaching skills; (d) apprenticeship and mentoring relationships for novice teachers to learn the skills of the teaching draft; (e) capacity of teachers to establish school specific class schedules rather than being forced to fit into a factory model with invariable, identical classes of invariable, identical length, and a school run by bells; (f) teacher control of curriculum design and implementation. _La! ! bor Notes_/Solidarity activists in teacher unions and education oppose them all, portraying them as teachers taking on management functions -- an act of class betrayal to be avoided at all costs. And speaking of particulars, it would also be interesting to know if Justin agrees with the line taken by _Labor Notes_/Solidarity activists in teacher unions and education that there are no common interests between management and labor in public education, that labor has no responsibility to defend public education against privatization, or to work to ensure the quality of the education provided to poor and working class communities. He might even offer an opinion if he agrees with the book just published by one of the major education commentators to appear in _Against the Current_, Harry Brighouse, which argues for vouchers and a free market in education, rather than a public education system? Justin wrote:    <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">He cites as his example of democratic worker-management relationships the Team Concept as practiced at Saturn. He is sorry that LN & Soli have fought this. I am glad that we have a concrete eaxmple on the table, and one I know something about. Saturn is (or was--they've trurned to the usual GM Master Contract, I think) a real archetype of everything that is wrong with labor-management cooperation, with a "coperation" scheme imposed on a fairly unresponsible subordinate union by the management, with the union basically directing the workers to figure out how to speed up and rationalize their own work. </BLOCKQUOTE> 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 lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- </HTML>