Being a proud member of my Teacher's Union over the last 5 years, I have become increasingly surprised and even alarmed by the passionate hatred so many Americans seem to have for unions.
Even among many of my colleagues, I hear almost mouth foaming hatred for "the union." Yet, when I ask what the union has done to them, all I get is that the union requires people to pay dues. When I point out that they don't pay dues since they have elected NOT to be members, all I get is, "Well, they'd like me to have to pay dues."
When I ask them what the union does for them, they readily agree that the union does negotiate their contracts, and without the union, they wouldn't have gotten the pay increase that brought us within 5% of neighboring states, and the union fights for better learning situations like keeping class sizes below 32, and took on the writing portfolio horror that was turning all our students against writing, and, and, and ... BUT, they still hate the union.
Now, I'm using the union I know the most about to begin the discussion about this phenomenon, but I sincerely want to know. Why, when, and how did Unions become the great boogeyman in America?
I'm going to continue using the Teacher's Union as a tee-up discussion example because it's the union I know best, but I really would like to hear discussion on the broader anti-union, no the "I hate-unions!," populist movement among the working and middle classes and even among some progressives and liberals.
So, feel free to weigh in about the Teacher's Unions, but ALSO, I hope the discussion will go broader than just my discussion starter example to include the more generalized, anti-union sentiment in this country, today.
Continuing a bit more about the union I know best to get the ball rolling, the Teacher's Union, read any newspaper article about education, and the related comments, and you might come away thinking Teacher's Unions are the scourge, bain, and sole cause of the downfall of public education in America, today.
Everyone has a teacher they hated and they seem convinced that they "were only in place because of THE UNION," and don't you know that it's impossible to fire the hordes of horrible, but tenured teachers out there, because of THE UNION?
Huh? Teacher's contracts do have a due process procedure for firing a tenured teacher, but it is FAR from impossible. Take one of the favorite examples of how a high profile Superintendent is supposedly taking on The Union that is supposedly responsible for all the ills in one urban district - Washington, DC.
In the year and a half she's been on the job, Rhee has made more changes than most school leaders--even reform-minded ones--make in five years. She has shut 21 schools--15% of the city's total--and fired more than 100 workers from the district's famously bloated 900-person central bureaucracy. She has dismissed 270 teachers. And last spring she removed 36 principals, including the head of the elementary school her two daughters attend in an affluent northwest-D.C. neighborhood.
From Time
Okaaay. So, it's obviously NOT impossible to fire 6.75% of a district's staff in a year and a half, if an administrator wants to And, even this pretty controversial Superintendent who is not known for her interpersonal skills, or empathy, seems to have chosen to keep 93.25% of the teaching staff.
Hmmm. Having worked in Fortune 100 Companies for 20 years prior to going back to school for a 3rd degree to become a middle school teacher after 9/11, and with my last position in the private sector being a V.P. of Training and Quality for a division within G.E., I can safely say (and we had metrics out the wazoo along those lines in corporate America) that if you only have 6-7% of your staff under-performing at any given time, THAT'S damn good, division performance. AND, that's in private company situations where the pay, and presumably conditions, are much better than what an inner city teacher confronts every day.
So, what can we all learn from THIS situation about a troubled, urban school based on facts verses the boogeyman, Teacher's Union?
- Administrators can fire teachers, if they have a mind to.
- When those administrators want to, the % of deadwood, awful teachers is pretty darn small, and don't even try to tell me that 6.75% of teachers could possibly destroy the entire DC school system.
- The UNION didn't prevent even this small percentage of teachers from being fired.
What else is evident, here? 900 Central Office Staff?! That's 4000 teachers to 900 central staff. WTF? As a former GE Quality and Process VP, THAT's where I would be starting to look for not only money to put into process and output improvement, but also I would have begun intensive Quality Circle feedback groups among the teachers to learn what actually needed to be done to improve customer satisfaction and "production line results." 900 Central Staff to 4000 front-line workers, and the woman only got rid of 100!! I shudder to think what Jack Welsh would have done to me if I'd tried to blame a Union with that kind of management and process idiocy. AND, I'm thinking and talking corporate-management speak, as I speak this.
So, if "bad" teachers can be fired, and when they are it's too small a percentage to make a HUGE difference, then why do people think that the Teacher's Unions have led to the downfall of American public education by allegedly protecting hordes of awful teachers?
And, why do even some teachers in my own school, who know that our union spends a goodly portion of the little political clout it has fighting for real learning initiatives, hate The Union? Given even this little bit of reality based discussion about the union I'm most familiar with, I think I have presented some uber-management bonafides when it comes to looking at the DC bad organizational situation, and there just isn't a "The Union is at fault" scenario. As a private sector, professional Organizational/ Training/ Instructional Design and Quality Professional, I'd be targeting the management structure and instituting a bottom-up needs analysis to determine what the actually gap was between what if versus what needs to be from the customer and front-line employees (teachers) needs to be.
Where did all this anti-unionism come from? How did the Republicans SELL this all so well?
I remember boycotting grapes and lettuce as a child to support the Farm Workers Union. I remember my Mother putting back cheaper linens and clothes as she looked for the union label to keep American, Southern workers on-the-job AND it meant QUALITY. I remember the stories in OUR home about the Autoworkers strike and how that got my grandparents a living wage and a pension. I remember how the Unions fought for community colleges as extensions of the big state schools, so more working class kids could get that college education. I remember that we have child labor laws, and OSHA, and 40 hour weeks, and a minimum wage, and that some employers still offer health insurance ... because we had and have a Union Movement in this country. Was it Reagan with the Air Traffic Controllers or what?
So, tell me Kos community. Why, when and how did unions become a big boogeyman to the working and middle classes and even some progressives and liberals? Love to hear IT about Teacher's Unions, but I'd also like to hear more broadly about the anti-union sentiment in this country, in general.
Because frankly folks, I suspect that a very strange and awful thing started to happen when the working people of this country started to hate the Unions in this country, and they some how became like enemy number one of the people who work for a living. And, I want to understand WHY!