Before the Chalk Dust Settles: Building on the 2018 Teachers\u27 Mobilizatio

Sneiderman, Marilyn

English

Eastern Illinois University

Journal of Collective Bargaining in the AcademyVolume 0 National Center Proceedings 2019 Article 18April 2019Panel: We Need More Chairs! Expanding Seats atHigher Education Bargaining Tables and For OurBroader Communities: Bargaining for theCommon Good in Higher EducationMarilyn SneidermanRutgers UniversityFollow this and additional works at: https://thekeep.eiu.edu/jcbaPart of the Collective Bargaining Commons, and the Higher Education CommonsThis Proceedings Material is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at The Keep. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal ofCollective Bargaining in the Academy by an authorized editor of The Keep. For more information, please contact tabruns@eiu.edu.Recommended CitationSneiderman, Marilyn (2019) "Panel: We Need More Chairs! Expanding Seats at Higher Education Bargaining Tables and For OurBroader Communities: Bargaining for the Common Good in Higher Education," Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy: Vol. 0 ,Article 18.Available at: https://thekeep.eiu.edu/jcba/vol0/iss14/18Before the Chalk Dust Settles: Building on the 2018 Teachers’ Mobilizationhttps://prospect.org/article/chalk-dust-settles-building-on-2018-teachers’-mobilization[3/26/2019 9:07:22 AM]AP Photo/Sue OgrockiMarchers cheer as they cross the finish line at the Oklahoma State Capitol after marching 110 miles from Tulsa, as protests continue over school fundingWhy are we walking?” asked Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association. “Thereare 700,000 reasons why: our students. And they deserve better. … They see broken chairs in class,outdated textbooks that are duct taped together, and class sizes that have ballooned.”MAURICE BP-WEEKS, STEPHEN LERNER, JOSEPH A. MCCARTIN, & MARILYN SNEIDERMAN APRIL 24, 2018Before the Chalk Dust Settles: Building on the 2018 Teachers’MobilizationBy bargaining for and with the larger community, teachers are reinventing collective bargaining.“Archive1Sneiderman: Panel: We Need More Chairs! Expanding Seats at Higher Education BPublished by The Keep, 2019Before the Chalk Dust Settles: Building on the 2018 Teachers’ Mobilizationhttps://prospect.org/article/chalk-dust-settles-building-on-2018-teachers’-mobilization[3/26/2019 9:07:22 AM]While labor’s overall circumstances are certainly dire, we’re at an exciting time of renewed energy in thelabor movement. Leading the way this time around are the teachers of West Virginia and Oklahoma (withteachers in Kentucky and Arizona not far behind). All of these states, like most of the country, have seensystematic defunding of public services, and nowhere is that pain felt more than in the classroom. Schoolfunding has been shown to improve the outcomes not only for individual students but also for the overallcommunity. If we truly want a strong economy where everyone (most especially black and brown students)can thrive, funding public education is the way to get there. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this latest round of teacher labor power is that their demands are broadand inclusive. Even though the teachers who have gone on strike or are considering it are paid well below theaverage and have terrible benefits, they have put the focus of their demands on their students’ needs, onimproving classroom quality and increasing classroom resources. In doing so they made clear that winning araise for themselves would be insufficient—they have demanded a significant investment in children as wellas a win on the “bread and butter” issues. This type of focus helps defeat the false narrative that teachers arejust greedy individuals who don’t care about children. One of the ways in which the teachers have accomplished this is by focusing their energy on corporate-controlled politicians and powerful financial entities whose austerity agendas those politicians haveadvanced at the expense of public education. By “going up the food chain,” these mass teacher mobilizationshave not only avoided pitting themselves against parents, taxpayers, and members of the community whoshould be their natural allies. They have also helped lay the basis for a broad convergence of allies withcommon aims.  These mobilizations have thus effectively “flipped the script” that has predominated for more than ageneration in our political discourse, a script in which teachers’ unions and their demands were relentlesslyscapegoated for everything that ailed public education. By taking to the streets and their state capitals,teachers have demonstrated that there is no force more capable of freeing our schools from the stranglinggrip of austerity politics than organized teachers standing shoulder to shoulder with their allies.   The mobilizations that recently erupted in a seemingly spontaneous fashion in the “right-to-work” states ofWest Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona aren’t the first such labor actions to have widened the scopeof their demands beyond their own bread-and-butter concerns. They are, in fact, similar in vision, language,and tactics to a series of local experiments that have been undertaken by teachers’ unions and their allies inunion-friendlier cities such as Chicago, St. Paul, and Seattle since 2012—experiments that have adopted theterm “Bargaining for the Common Good.”   Since the Chicago teachers’ strike of 2012, teachers and other public employees in these and a handful of2Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy, Vol. 0, Iss. 14 [2019], Art. 18https://thekeep.eiu.edu/jcba/vol0/iss14/18Before the Chalk Dust Settles: Building on the 2018 Teachers’ Mobilizationhttps://prospect.org/article/chalk-dust-settles-building-on-2018-teachers’-mobilization[3/26/2019 9:07:22 AM]other cities have embraced Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG) in a deliberate effort to challenge theforces that have been making public schools and the entire public sector “broke on purpose,” as Chicagoteachers put it.   Campaigns adopting this approach have been seeking to expand and redefine the participants, processes,and purposes of collective bargaining. They have brought such community allies as parents’ groups and racialjustice partners into the shaping of bargaining demands from the outset, and demanded that these allies bepresent during negotiations. They have introduced greater militancy into the bargaining process by stagingactions that help illuminate the cozy relationships between the financial interests and political leaders thathave led to austerity budgets and the underfunding of public services.   Perhaps most importantly, they have redefined the aims of collective bargaining, recognizing the degree towhich financialization, the slashing of taxes on the rich, privatization, and deepening inequality threaten bothpublic services and the health of the communities that depend on them. BCG campaigns have recognized thatthe real power to determine the public agenda is not held by the school boards or mayoral offices they havetraditionally negotiated with, but rather by the financial interests that consistently dictate the priorities ofthose who hold these offices.  On the surface the settings that have witnessed the recent mass mobilizations of teachers seem enormouslydifferent from the locations where BCG campaigns have made the most progress. BCG arose in cities whereunions retain a significant presence and where collective bargaining rights are protected by law. The recentteacher mobilizations, by contrast, erupted in “right-to-work” states where unions have little presence andcollective bargaining rights are virtually nonexistent. Whereas the BCG campaigns gained traction in diversecities where they have highlighted how communities of color have been victimized by the defunding of thepublic sector, the recent teacher mobilizations have erupted in heavily white and rural Kentucky and WestVirginia, which rank 45th and 50th, respectively, among the nation’s most racially diverse states. And,whereas successful BCG campaigns were launched only after a year or more of careful planning by theirarchitects, the teacher mobilizations of the past month seemed to erupt almost spontaneously after intensegrassroots organizing, much of which took place in a matter of weeks on social media.  Yet despite all of the differences in origin and initial orientation, both the BCG campaigns and therecent teacher mass strikes mobilizations have naturally gravitated toward the same analysis andconclusions.They have come to see the crisis in public education as symptomatic of deep distortions in oureconomy and political priorities; they have grasped that the plight of teachers and their schools is inextricablytied to the fate of the communities they serve; and teachers in all of these settings have concluded that theyneeded to fight on behalf of those communities as much as for themselves. That’s what Chicago teachers didin demanding “Schools Chicago’s Children Deserve,” and what West Virginia teachers did in refusing to end3Sneiderman: Panel: We Need More Chairs! Expanding Seats at Higher Education BPublished by The Keep, 2019Before the Chalk Dust Settles: Building on the 2018 Teachers’ Mobilizationhttps://prospect.org/article/chalk-dust-settles-building-on-2018-teachers’-mobilization[3/26/2019 9:07:22 AM]their walkout until all state employees received the same raise they had won for themselves, and whatOklahoma teachers did when they demanded levies on the state’s enormously wealthy and notoriously tax-dodging oil and gas industry.  The extent to which teachers in Seattle and St. Paul, Logan County, West Virginia, and Logan County,Oklahoma, have begun converging around the same logic should alert us that something important is afoot.Historically, breakthroughs for worker organization in this country have tended to occur when planning,analysis, and conditions suddenly align in ways that could not have been foreseen among otherwise disparateand diverse workers whose common experiences are teaching them similar lessons.  Could this be such a moment? Although there is good reason to fear for the future of the U.S. labor movement, weakened and besetas it is by hostile legal, political, and economic forces, there is also reason to believe that these veryconditions might provide the spark for a revival of worker organization. For 40 years, financialization,deregulation, neo-liberal globalization, privatization, and the reorganization of worker-employer relationshave gradually undermined private-sector collective bargaining and confined bargaining in the public sectorto the narrow ground of wages and benefits, all too often pitting beleaguered taxpayers against unions. Theimpact of these dynamics has been especially pernicious in communities of color. We have now reached a point where collective bargaining has become so broken that requires workers toreimagine it as a tool to address the larger forces that are promoting surging inequality, extracting wealthfrom communities of color, and accelerating the erosion of any semblance of democratic control over theforces that are governing their lives.  Whether by flooding into statehouses in Frankfort, Tulsa, or Charleston to demand adequate school fundingthrough increased corporate taxes, or by occupying the Bank of America in Chicago to demand that itrenegotiate the toxic interest rate swaps it foisted on the Chicago Public Schools, teachers have begun toreinvent bargaining in ways that correspond to kind of economy we now face. Just as developments in privatesector collective bargaining in the post-World War II era provided a model for the introduction of collectivebargaining into the public sector, the reinvention of collective bargaining by public sector workers inresponse to the crisis they have faced in recent years might serve as a model for the reinvention of collectivebargaining in the private sector in the years ahead.   No lasting breakthrough will be possible without careful planning, hard work, and, ultimately, greatercoordination. A crucial piece of this work must be research and power mapping that can help teachers andothers connect the dots, to identify the common culprits who are driving the austerity agenda. In every state4Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy, Vol. 0, Iss. 14 [2019], Art. 18https://thekeep.eiu.edu/jcba/vol0/iss14/18Before the Chalk Dust Settles: Building on the 2018 Teachers’ Mobilizationhttps://prospect.org/article/chalk-dust-settles-building-on-2018-teachers’-mobilization[3/26/2019 9:07:22 AM]we should ask ourselves some key questions: Who are the main power players? What common targets existacross different types of campaigns? What banks or corporations are taking money out of the public budgetand how do we band together to get that money back? A number of organizations that investigate andprovide answers to such questions have emerged in recent years, among them Little Sis, a grassrootsresearch wiki that consolidates information on corporate power and its influence overgovernment; Hedgeclippers, which documents the harmful impact of hedge funds and private equity onpublic services; and the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE), which specializes in analyzing theracialized impact of financialization. Research conducted by groups like these could help provide theunderpinnings for an increasingly coordinated national movement. Whether a national movement does emerge will depend heavily on the vision and commitment of the nation’sunions in this crucial hour. Organized labor has never been able to predict or trigger the developments thathave led to its revival and reinvention over the course of two centuries. Like all movements of the lesspowerful, it has had to be opportunistic, acting boldly at the right time by using the best ideas, models, andlanguage at its disposal to build new forms of power for those who lack it. But it has had to be decisive whenthese windows of opportunity have opened, for they have never stayed open for long. Confronted as they areby powerful enemies, unions must seize the opportunities that these recent teachers’ mobilizations and thepioneering work of recent Bargaining for the Common Good campaigns have presented to them.You may also likeJanus’s Progeny? A Supreme Court Threat to Majority Rule LoomsWILLIAM A. HERBERT & JOSEPH A. MCCARTINTwo cases the Court is considering taking could undermine collective bargaining—and democracy as weknow it. The Charter School Movement Washes Out in CaliforniaRACHEL M. COHENA Los Angeles school board race reveals the waning power of charter school supporters.Can the Courts Strike Down Right-to-Work?SHAUN RICHMANAfter decades of anti-worker rulings, unions are now challenging Taft-Hartley on free speech and otherconstitutional grounds.5Sneiderman: Panel: We Need More Chairs! Expanding Seats at Higher Education BPublished by The Keep, 2019Before the Chalk Dust Settles: Building on the 2018 Teachers’ Mobilizationhttps://prospect.org/article/chalk-dust-settles-building-on-2018-teachers’-mobilization[3/26/2019 9:07:22 AM]About the AuthorMaurice BP-Weeks is Co-Executive Director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy; Marilyn Sneiderman is Executive Director of theCenter for Innovation in Worker Organization at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations; Stephen Lerner is a fellow atGeorgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, which is directed by Joseph A. McCartin.ARTICLES BY MAURICE BP-WEEKS, STEPHEN LERNER, JOSEPH A. MCCARTIN, & MARILYN SNEIDERMANRSS FEED OF ARTICLES BY MAURICE BP-WEEKS, STEPHEN LERNER, JOSEPH A. MCCARTIN, & MARILYN SNEIDERMANAboutContact UsJobs & InternshipsAdvertisePrivacy PolicySubmissionsTAP Current IssueMastheadDonateArchiveReprintsRenewSubscribeMagazineAbout UsSubscribeHelp support our non-profit journalismOne year of our print magazine for $19.95One year of our digital magazine for $9.95a combined print/digital subscription for $24.95Order NowNewsletters6Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy, Vol. 0, Iss. 14 [2019], Art. 18https://thekeep.eiu.edu/jcba/vol0/iss14/18Before the Chalk Dust Settles: Building on the 2018 Teachers’ Mobilizationhttps://prospect.org/article/chalk-dust-settles-building-on-2018-teachers’-mobilization[3/26/2019 9:07:22 AM]   On TAP with Robert Kuttner and Harold MeyersonSign Up7Sneiderman: Panel: We Need More Chairs! Expanding Seats at Higher Education BPublished by The Keep, 2019

Panel: We Need More Chairs! Expanding Seats at Higher Education Bargaining Tables and For Our Broader Communities: Bargaining for the Common Good in Higher Education

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Panel: We Need More Chairs! Expanding Seats at Higher Education Bargaining Tables and For Our Broader Communities: Bargaining for the Common Good in Higher Education

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