“People, Not Profits”: The Professional Organizations We Need

This article uses a scrapbook design to narrate the authors’ experiences protesting the use of high-stakes performance assessments in teacher preparation programs by engaging in demonstrations during—and proposing policy at—the annual conventions of a large national teachers’ organization. These narrations are used to raise questions about how professional education organizations define advocacy at a time when neoliberal education reforms limit educators’ capacity to carry out our collective responsibilities to marginalized and vulnerable youth. The authors suggest that in the current political climate that has dehumanized youth, demoralized their teachers, and disempowered teacher educators, educators need professional organizations that explicitly name injustices associated with the reductive curricula and for-profit tests that are hindering local teachers’ and teacher educators’ responsiveness to learners and engagement with democratic processes. In response to these injustices, the authors argue that teachers’ professional organizations must do far more to work boldly both against the de-professionalization of educators and toward a re-professionalization of educators that centers rather than marginalizes advocacy and activism

Transnational solidarity or conflict? Trade unions and neo-liberal restructuring in Europe.

It is frequently argued that European trade unions have been co-opted into the neo-liberal restructuring of the European social relations of production. The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, it will be assessed whether this allegation is actually justified. Second, the paper will review concrete examples of trade union cooperation opposed to neo-liberal restructuring on the one hand, as well as outline several areas of tensions within the European labour movement, which undermine potential transnational solidarity on the other. It will be argued that while trade unions are not automatically progressive actors vis-à-vis neo-liberal restructuring, they have the potential to play an important role in a wider resistance movement

Fighting for public water: the first successful European Citizens’ Initiative, “Water and Sanitation are a Human Right”

Between May 2012 and September 2013 the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) ‘Water and Sanitation are a Human Right’ successfully collected close to 1.9 million signatures across the European Union (EU), forcing the Commission into an official position on the role of water in the EU and wider world. Based on a historical materialist approach to social movement struggles, the purpose of this article is threefold. First it will analyse the reasons for why the ECI, initiated and co-ordinated by the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU), was so successful. Second, the article will assess the impact of the ECI on EU policy-making. Finally, the article will reflect on the wider lessons to be learned for the struggle against neo-liberal restructuring. It will be argued that a combined focus on the commons as well as new forms of participatory democracy may provide the basis for a broader transformative project