Business Unionism: A Smedley Butler "Racket?"

Brian Walsh served as vice president of VT-NEA.  He is a graduate student at the Labor Center of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is currently teaching high school and interning at the Vermont Workers Center.   These are his workshop remarks at The People's Convention in Burlington VT today.

I was asked to provide a little historical analysis, and I started thinking about Smedley Butler.  He was a marine, I guess a good one - he killed some people, got a bunch of medals and became a general.  But after he retired he wrote a little book called War Is A Racket.  According to Butler, a “racket” is “something that is not what it seems to be, … conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the very many.”  By that definition, I think a pretty good argument can be made that most unions today, including public sector unions, are “rackets” too.  

That’s harsh, but Butler’s definition begins by saying a “racket” is something that is “not what it seems ….”  Unions were created to protect workers’ rights, including the right to a decent living, at their workplace and beyond.  Unfortunately, most unions today, are doing a poor job at protecting anyone’s rights, except perhaps the “right” of employers, be they public or private sector, to squeeze and oppress their employees.  There’s a war on against labor, and labor is losing.

Although the NLRA, better known as the “Wagner Act,” guaranteed unions legal recognition, it’s purpose was to maintain “labor peace.”  In other words, the law made labor part of the system in order to ensure that that system kept working.  Although some unions, mostly CIO, remained militant into World War II and beyond, laws such as 1947’s Taft-Hartley Act, and agreements like UAW’s 1950 GM contract, the infamous “Treaty of Detroit,” insured labor would not regain the offensive.  Thus in retreat, the business-union model, where union members are “serviced” by staff, was created.  In return for concessionary contracts, unions, and their officials were granted relative autonomy. 

That’s where the second part of Butler’s definition - “[benefiting] the very few at the expense of the very many” - applies.  In case you haven’t noticed, working for a union can be profitable - salaries are often 50 to 100 percent higher than those of members paying those salaries.  I’m not saying that union staff don’t deserve their pay, but I do think they have the duty to help members fight for their human rights, not encourage them to accept ruling class paradigms about everyone needing to “tighten their belts;” but then, unions would have to change the ways they do business.  They would have to abandon their stale business unionism, and empower, encourage and equip their members to fight and win. 

I know there are some union leaders and staff willing to help their members do what is necessary.  Unfortunately, those people are in the minority; the system demands “labor peace,” and it is difficult to convince people bringing home six-figure paychecks and Cadillac benefits to jeopardize their jobs by helping members fight the war they need to win.  And there, as Hamlet famously stated, lies “the rub.” 

Since too many union officials prioritize the status quo - which benefits their individual interests over workers’ collective rights - it is up to members to change union priorities.  However, too often members are unequipped or unready to take the actions needed to move their unions forward.  Therefore, as scholar and social activist Staughton Lynd explained in his concise work Solidarity Unionism: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below, small, informal groups of workers, and their supporters, whom he called “parallel unionism,” are needed to push those unions. 

That’s what  happened in Chicago, as the “parallel union” - CORE - became the driving force behind the transformation of the Chicago Teacher’s Union - formerly a status quo-loving AFT local - into an organization willing to fight the neoliberal takeover of the Chicago Public Schools.  Obviously, it will not be an easy fight; Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the corporations seeking to privatize public schools are well-financed and powerful. 

CORE’s vision - protecting education as a human right and a public good - will need to be broad enough to attract sufficient class and community support needed for success.  Although odds are against Chicago’s teachers, the path they’ve chosen is the only one that can win; “business as usual” unionism is clearly destined to lose in our life-and-death struggle against the neoliberal takeover of our public good.

My Core Principles

I have two principles which drive my actions in the political/policy sphere: citizen voice and democratic engagement.  It is very useful to have principles which inform decision making, if for no other reason than that the existence of principles tends to confuse bad actors, who tend to be un-principled.  They don’t understand what makes you tick.

Principles also provide a filter to evaluate policy.  When examining education or union policy, I have a two part test: 1) Does this empower teacher voice?  2) Does this enhance democratic engagement of teachers and other stakeholders such as parents and students?  If something can pass this test I’m all ears.  If not, it’s time for push back.

The development of voice means helping others grow a capacity for advocacy and activism.  This can mean learning to speak in public, to write for publication, to make phone calls, to knock on doors – the nuts and bolts take many forms. 

Democratic engagement looks like people simply taking interest, acting with passion and commitment about the issues which affect their lives.  Cynicism and disengagement, the sense that nothing can be done, that bad policy is inevitable and must be suffered silently, is a path to totalitarianism.

The beauty of this approach is that it is relatively content neutral.  I don’t worry so much about what your voice advocates because it is more important that you are engaged.  Engagement is critical to great public policy because it brings information to the table.  Decisions based on incomplete or degraded information tend to have negative consequences.

Of course if you advocate a Grover Norquist style drown-the-government nihilism you don’t have a place at the table because you are trying to burn it.  You are a vandal.

While I am a denizen of the political left, I appreciate real old-fashioned conservatives, the ones who advocate for great policy from the perspective of individual freedom, personal responsibility and sound fiscal management.  I share those values too – I just have different beliefs about how they should play out.  There is common ground.

The cacophony of a democratically engaged citizenry is messy and inconvenient.  Sort of like a Vermont town meeting.  Too bad.  Get over it.  Great public policy requires the participation of the public.  As it says in The Declaration of Independence:

“….Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….” 

What principles guide your actions?

Twelve Leadership Takeaways from Representative Assembly

Experiences at the 2012 NEA Representative Assembly left me with a lot to think about.  As I began to reflect on lessons learned from working on 3 different New Business Items (4, 5, and 82), I discovered a growing list.  Here are twelve takeaways from the experience:

Hmmm - can you imagine this being issued in 2012?

1. Use the “we” voice.  Leading in an organization means you are no longer on your own.  “We” is both more accurate and more powerful.  Thank you Mary McDonald for the reminder!
2. Have metrics for success.  That way you win no matter what.  You have to have a metric to measure success if your initiative happens, and you have to have a metric for success if your initiative doesn’t happen.  The latter was certainly the case for NBI #4.  But this happened by default – being intentional about it takes it to the next level.  Planning for success is valuable both in leadership and teaching.
3. Conviction matters.  Genuinely caring about the organization and outcomes trumps a lot of bad stuff.  Conviction confuses the self-interested.  They don’t understand your motivations.
4. Relationship means knowing what people are good at.  Jo Anderson of the US Department of Education told me, “Relationship is everything.”  I never truly understood what this meant until this RA.  Knowing the strengths of others, and understanding how they operate, is critical to trust.
5. Teamwork, teamwork, teamwork.  As a rural leader, I’m used to being chief cook and bottle washer.  As a team coalesced around NBI #4 in the TURN caucus and around NBI #82 more generally, I was amazed to watch high capacity leaders quickly deploy their strengths and figure out their roles on the fly.  It was a real eye opener.
6. Break off pieces of a problem.  Doing something specific and actionable is better than doing something diffuse and rhetorical.  This is the theory and practice of being bold.  Actually saying something inspires meaningful debate, which is a fundamental political good.
7. Avoid factionalism.  Rural vs. Urban, NEA vs. AFT.  Sometimes one has to let go of little things in order to get at the big issues.  Factions are about power.  The antidote to factionalism is inclusiveness.  When people actually talk to each other, we discover other folks care as much as we do, and don’t have horns and a tail.
8.  People don’t like being forced to do things.  They don’t even like the smell of it.  All the pro-NBI #4 speakers tried to be clear that this would not force anybody to do anything.  The anti-NBI #4 speakers painted it as a top-down initiative that would compel people to do things they might not want to do.  That rhetoric swayed the assembly.  We’re going to need to think about the implications very carefully in the future.
9. Language matters.  With 5000 wordsmiths in the room you have to get the language right.  Leveraging the talents of some of those wordsmiths is a valuable thing to do.
10. Power and position are just platforms to get things done. It is a terrible mistake to value these things for their own sake.  Using power and position to strengthen the organization is correct; using these things for self-aggrandizement diminishes everyone.
11. Developing leadership capacity means having experiences.  Nobody can tell you how to do leadership work.  You have to thrust yourself into the maelstrom.  As the old adage says, “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you really want.”  This is an example of #2 above, succeeding either way.  Nobody can teach you how to speak in front of 9000 people, how to file a New Business Item for optimal effect, or how to lobby Congress.  You just have to do it and take your lumps.  If you value engagement as a fundamental good, you have to encourage others to have these experiences as well – whether or not you agree with them.
12. Reflection is as valuable in leadership as it is in teaching.  I’m a National Board Certified Teacher.  It doesn’t mean I’m better than you; it just means I’ve enhanced my capacity for reflection and improvement.  Reflection is priceless for improving classroom practice.  It is equally valuable in leadership.

So here’s hoping I don’t repeat too many mistakes, and that my future mistakes are novel and exciting….

What are your leadership takeaways from RA?

Reflections on Teacher Leadership

At the 2011 National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) conference I had the privilege of serving on a panel with Patrick Ledesma, Nancy Flanagan, and Jenay Leach.  The topic under discussion was how teachers can influence policy.  Amy Dominello blogged about our panel on "SmartBlog on Leadership" and her post was picked up by Accomplished Teacher SmartBrief.  What follows are edited excerpts from the prepared text of my remarks, which I stand by a year later:

The role of teacher leader is fraught with challenges.  In my union work, it became apparent to me that there are at least two different mutually exclusive definitions.  First, is the definition some superintendents have: a teacher leader is a sort of non-commissioned officer in the chain of command of a district, with a role of carrying out policies determined by higher-ups.  This traditional role includes roles like department chair, and service on district committees, the latter because in a top-down hierarchy administrators merely use committees for cover, so they can lend a sort of pretend legitimacy to their decisions.

The second definition is exciting and cutting edge: teachers having an actual voice in making local, state or national policy.  This idea might seem self evident to those of us who are practitioners, but in reality it is quite alien to the policy process in many places.

The traditional venue for this role, and the one in which I cut my teeth, is the union.  Negotiating and administering a collective bargaining agreement gives one a voice in local policy.  Joining with others in state and national organizations which lobby for wider policy and legislation creates a collective voice.  In the current environment, with public sector unions under serious and sustained attack, union activism is fluid and challenging.

One thing which school districts and unions share is that they are hierarchical organizations.  The bureaucrats who live farther up the hierarchical food chain have a significant advantage when it comes to policy: they can spend all their time working on it.  Those of us with classrooms live with the joy and challenge that the best hours of our day are spent with students.  Any time or thought that we have for policy or politics comes out of our hides or out of the hides of our families and relationships.  I can say this from personal experience – my union work is unpaid.  Each cycle of negotiations comes at a personal cost of 200-300 hours of my personal, unpaid time.  That doesn’t count grievances, trainings, rep and executive council meetings, Regional Bargaining Councils (I have 3 to attend), meetings with the superintendent, or, now, my work on the VT-NEA Board of directors, which requires a Saturday each month.

I’m not saying this so that anybody feels sorry for me – I love the challenge of this work.  But it does give me a clear eyed view of the very real impediments to the development of effective teacher leadership in the best sense.  People go into teaching because they want to work with kids.  This we all know is an all -consuming passion.  On top of this teachers, legitimately, need to tend to families and relationships.  We are human, and we cannot sustain ourselves without love from friends and family.

When I challenge a colleague to step up to a leadership role in our local, I do this with trepidation because no one knows better than me the human cost of what I am asking them to do.  On the other hand no one knows better than me the absolute necessity of accomplished practitioners taking a role in the governance of the educational enterprise.  As a leader, I am stuck between human empathy for my colleagues, and the enormous peril of my own empathy.

And this brings me to another thing that I learned:  the three meanings of leadership.  So far I’ve spoken in detail of just one: the ability to influence followers, the rank and file of an organization.  Influencing their behavior, inspiring them to try some little bit of activism – this is encapsulated by the term organizing.  I think this is what most people think of when they consider the word leadership.  But there are two other equally important aspects of leadership: influencing peer leaders, and influencing those leaders above you in the hierarchy of an organization or government.  These two aspects require different skill sets than organizing

Influencing peer leaders is the sort of thing I’ve done on the VT-NEA board, in regional bargaining councils, and in our discussions on the Teacher Leader Network Forum.  It was the bulk of the work in our debates on the New Business Items and resolutions at NEA Representative Assembly.  In a friendly environment like this it is about developing consensus around the best course of action, and it involves building relationships, and ability to be persuasive.

It takes place in adversarial contexts as well, such as negotiations and grievance hearings.  Insofar as a local president is the peer of the superintendent, there is an art here of refusal, of parrying, and of persuasion, each of which one deploys according to the problem.

Finally there is influencing top level leaders in an organization, those “above you” so to speak.  While a premium is placed on the “elevator speech”, I think top leaders are bombarded with these and probably have filters.  My own approach is two fold.  First I like to identify the people who advise the leader in question and seek to influence those people.  Second, I like to identify those places I agree with the approach and send a positive message, in part by working for and actively supporting initiatives.

This second point is very important in my estimation.  In the present environment, the messages tend to be negative – opposed to what various policy makers are doing.  I believe however, that the policy landscape is subtler than that, and that people need to hear what they are doing right as well as what they are doing wrong.  Without positive feedback when they get it right, policy makers are flying on instruments.

As a Teaching Ambassador Fellow, and a Bernie Sanders style socialist, it was a challenge for me to find a point of contact with the Department where I could support their efforts with freedom and integrity.    Yet I did find one:  The Department under the current administration works to build the capacity of teachers to lead in the best sense of the word.  An example of concrete action that support teachers as real leaders was the Denver Labor-Management Conference, a high profile event designed to help teachers and their unions deal creatively and pro-actively with the current political and policy environment.  Unfortunately this event was over-shadowed by events in Wisconsin.

I would be the last to say that  efforts of this sort are perfect, or that the outcomes are satisfactory to all parties.  But I take it as evidence of positive disposition towards teacher leaders, and a willingness to build the capacity of teachers to participate in the policy conversation.  Encouraging engagement is in the spirit of democracy and helps to overcome the very real impediments to teacher engagement that I outlined earlier.

In my work, I’ve done my best to encourage the Department to build the capacity of teacher leaders and unions.  I think many people want immediate results, an impatience which is the result of the uncertainty of the political cycle.  Taking a longer view, an empowered and policy savvy teaching profession is the best route to better education policy, because policy will be rooted in the wisdom that is the product of actual practice.

That said, I tend to be shocked and saddened by the dearth of our most accomplished teachers in union leadership.  I was shocked at the antipathy of NEA delegates to NBCTs at the recent NEA Representative Assembly in Chicago.  I was saddened that of 124 NBCTs in the State of Vermont, only three of us were at VT-NEA Representative Assembly in March.  Taken together, these indicate to me that most union members have not experienced NBCTs as people who use their achievement as a tool to help others.  I find this very disappointing.

Those of us who are high achieving and have excess capacity have an obligation to our colleagues as well as to our students and families to lighten their burden.  At the same time, the rank and file of the profession needs to see that policy and engagement is simply far too critical to be left to “the other.”  Federal, state and local policies that encourage all varieties of genuine practitioner leadership and engagement are in the long term best interest of our profession, of grounded education policy, and, ultimately, fantastic student learning.

Rights: Use'm or Lose'm

It is one thing to have rights, another to have a mechanism for exercising those rights, and yet a third to actually exercise them.

On the first and second points, there is an active national effort to destroy our limited rights to "petition the Government for a redress of grievances" (expressed in the first amendment) and due process (as in the fourteenth amendment aka just and sufficient cause.)  We as teachers typically exercise those rights through our unions and through an orderly grievance process spelled out in collective bargaining agreements, rather than avail ourselves of remedies available through the legal system. 

Yes, as teachers and public employees we labor under restrictions that do not apply to the general public, but historically we have had certain rights and protections pertaining to our chosen profession.  State by state, those rights and protections are being systematically stripped away, a death by a thousand cuts.

Both the rights (expressed through collective bargaining) and the mechanism for expressing those rights (a system of grievances and arbitration which sits outside the court system) are being abrogated.  My view is that this allows deferred compensation such as pensions to be treated as a piggy bank by unscrupulous politicians.  The disempowerment of workers facilitates our rightward lurch towards a capitalist/fascist dystopia.

On the third point, for those of us who have not yet experienced the cataclysm which is North Carolina, Wisconsin or Michigan, rights mean nothing whatsoever if they are not actively enforced.  Every act of meek submission to authority is another nail in the coffin of teacher voice.

Too many of us view teaching as apolitical, on the excuse that conflict will hurt our students.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  As government employees OUR JOBS ARE POLITICAL!  That is reality.  It goes against our natures, as the sort of human beings who enter a service profession, to embrace conflict.

The bottom line is that the conflict has embraced us.

It is not our fault.  It becomes our fault if we don't push back by whatever means are at our disposal.  Yes, some of those means are political.  The venues can be corrupt and scary.  Activism and leadership require courage - the courage to live with the consequences of your inevitable mistakes.

Those who would destroy our profession, "destroy the village to save the village," fail to realize that every act of disempowerment promulgated against educators, students, and citizens is a distraction from our core mission and a disruption of school culture and community.  Culture and community are critical to a successful education system. 

I don't believe we should be blaming teachers by complaining about their passivity.  This is a symptom of an increasingly dysfunctional and totalitarian political culture.  Rather, we should acknowledge the harsh realities of citizenship and government employment, and as compassionate leaders help nurture engagement.