Last week,
Valarie Strauss (Answer Sheet) interviewed American Federation of
Teachers (AFT) boss Randi Weingarten about why she went to Philadelphia and got
arrested. Weingarten correctly noted that the people of Philadelphia, who had
asked for a one-year moratorium on school closures, have been repeatedly
ignored by the mayor. She also correctly pointed out that the push to close the
schools is largely the initiative of the mayor, the city’s School Reform
Commission (SRC) and an outside consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
“When the powers that be ignore you, and dismiss you,” she told Strauss, “then
you have no other choice than to resort to civil disobedience to confront an
immoral act.”
The problem
is that there is nothing immoral about it. While the majority of schools to be
closed are in low income communities of color, the motivation to close them is
not wicked, sinful, nor is the goal to harm poor black kids. Rather, the
proponents are capitalists exploiting an essentially legal method to crush the
Philadelphia teachers union and transfer public K-12 tax dollars to private charters
and online schools. Calling it an immoral act merely obfuscates the financial
motives (and legal methods) behind it, undermining teachers’, parents’ and
students’ ability to successfully resist it.
Another
problem is that a single arrest at one high profile public meeting is essentially
just a publicity stunt. It is not an organized or effective strategy for
reversing a large-scale public giveaway to private business.
One
justification for the closures is the school district’s perennial budget
problems. Yet the district voted to spend $1.4 million to hire BCG, according
to Workers World. BCG Partner Sanjeev Midha is a
trustee for KIPP Philadelphia (an online charter school) and BCG members serve on numerous other
KIPP boards, as well.
Not surprisingly, BCG promotes online education and stands to profit handsomely
from the closures by offering online courses to students displaced by the
closures.
Other BCG
alumni include Mitt Romney, Benjamin Netanyahu, hedge fund manager John
Paulson, and GE CEO Jeff Immelt, as well as hedge fund manager and Democrats
for Education Reform[er] Whitney Tilson—all cheerleaders for charter schools
and teachers’ union-busting. SRC members include Feather Houstoun, a former
president of the William Penn Foundation (which donated additional money to
hire BCG) and Pedro Ramos, who currently sits on the board of the United Way
(which also coughed up funds to hire BCG).
Union-Sanctioned Union-Busting
If the
school closures go through, the district will lose dozens union jobs.
According, to National Educators Association president Dennis Van Roekel, the NEA, alone, has lost 150,000
unionized teaching jobs over the last three years. The AFT has lost thousands, more.
If Weingarten wants to save her own job (and her more than $600,000 per year
income) she needs to
maintain membership levels, not let them shrink further. However, to do this
requires mobilizing Philadelphia’s teachers, who are affiliated with the AFT,
to do far more than protest at school board meetings. They need to engage in
concerted and ongoing job actions and
civil disobedience, something neither Weingarten nor any other major union
leader wants to do.
The paradox
is that while union bosses depend on their members’ dues to pay their salaries,
they depend on the good graces of the ruling elite to exist in the first place,
graces that have been granted to them in exchange for keeping the system
running smoothly. The quid pro quo is
that if they keep their members quiescent and on the job, the unions are
tolerated and minor concessions are sometimes granted them. The bosses will
even tolerate the occasional angry rant, arrest or otherwise uncivilized act by
union leaders if it helps them to keep the rabble in line. Consequently, union
leaders have been relying more and more on legal and political action than on
strikes and other job actions, a strategy that has, at best, merely kept the
decline in union membership from occurring any faster than it has. An
occasional high profile arrest, while doing nothing to improve teachers’ job
security, working conditions or compensation, does help boost union bosses’
street credibility by making them look like tough, self-sacrificing fighters,
rather than parasites.
In order to keep members in line (and maintain the good graces of the ruling
elite), union leaders need to convince the rank and file that alternatives to
strikes and other job actions will be effective. In the case of the Wisconsin
state house occupation, the unions argued that they could best reverse their
state’s union-busting legislation at the ballot box and convinced everyone to
go home.
In the case
of Philadelphia’s school closings, Weingarten has similarly distorted the
issue, ignoring the impact on job security and collective bargaining power and
focusing on political corruption. She described events in Philadelphia as a
strong “statement” that the mayor, governor and SRC are not on the side of the
people. In other words, the school closures are an attack on democracy (an
immoral act?)—a politically popular concept that is likely to appeal to
community members’ sense of patriotism, but not one that is likely to save
teachers’ jobs or stop the closures. Indeed, if the problem is merely the product
of bad politics, as she has implied, then the solution is supposedly to fight
back in the political arena, thus squelching any movement for workplace actions.
