Ginger Wheeler is a freelance writer from Glen Ellyn, Illinois, whose work has appeared regularly in The Illinois School Board Journal.
A wealthy suburban businessman, who pulls down a seven-figure salary, rants about the pay teachers and administrators earn (about $87,000 average) from his school district's large suburban public high school. He doesn't think the property taxes on his $3 million home are fair. He blames the union.
A blogger ridicules union members who stuck out a year-long strike as a bunch of fools who ended up worse off than they would have been had they just settled on management's first offer. His father was a life-long auto workers union member who toiled as a union rep to salvage jobs at Delphi/GM.
The Chicago Tribune, a publisher whose writers are not unionized, laments that freelance joke writers siphon work, for pennies on the dollar, from unionized writers employed by late-night comics. Even so, the freelancers can't support themselves on the $75-$100 per joke the shows pay as they try to "get their foot in the door." Ironically the newspaper employs the same practice with its freelance writers.
These and many other anecdotes illustrate the schizophrenic view people have of the role unions play in our society: we love to hate 'em … but why?
Why do we love to hate unions when unions are universally acknowledged to have created a middle class that's been the backbone of American democracy and a structural support in American dominance and mutual success in the world for the past 70 years?
Why do we love to hate unions when union members use union wages to buy boats, cars, houses, groceries and items manufacturers sell and profit from, to keep the nation's economy chugging along?
Why do we love to hate unions when we ourselves might have benefited from a union parent whose salary helped us get through school and "make something of ourselves," paid for our healthcare growing up, and made sure our folks had a pension when they retired so they didn't have to move in with us?
Some even make the case that the current economic collapse is due in a large way to the decline of unions over the past 40 years, reasoning that people just can't make enough money in a "free market" economy to keep that free market going.
Teachers' unions are especially good targets for anti-union rhetoric. But the success of teachers' unions (as all unions) was hard-fought and won through decades and centuries of struggle and baby-step victories, in the courts and in people's hearts.
Early teacher activity
According to We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America by Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, teaching became the profession of choice for substantial numbers of women as early as the 1830s. But once they married or started a family, female teachers were expected to leave the profession. And, their salaries were a third of the salaries of their male counterparts.
Teacher unions or clubs, forming as early as the mid-1840s, eventually overcame some of the discriminatory practices that female teachers endured. And, as with so much other union activity, Chicago was a hotbed of labor organization.
"In 1897, Catherine Goggin, leader among the elementary school teachers of Chicago, took 300 teachers with her out of (what was then called ‘The Teachers Club') to organize the Chicago Teachers Federation, and within a year, 2,500 teachers had joined," Wertheimer wrote.
The Chicago Teachers Federation joined with the American Federation of Labor in 1902, but the action enflamed Chicago political leaders. After a lengthy court battle, the Illinois Supreme Court gave the board of education the "absolute right to decline to employ or re-employ an applicant for any reason whatever or for no reason at all," dampening severely union activities for teachers for close to two decades.
It took another 15 years for teachers to overturn this ruling and secure the right to form a labor union and affiliate with the AFL. This was the birth of the Illinois Federation of Teachers in 1935, according to Bob Breving, assistant director for DePaul University's Labor Education Center.
"In the '30s there were large demonstrations up and down LaSalle Street because teachers were paid in scrip," he said, noting the history of teachers in Illinois is complex, convoluted and contentious.
In the meantime, the Illinois Education Association (IEA) was also forming, beginning in 1853, and claims one of its achievements was starting the State Normal School (later to become Illinois State University) for the "formal training of teachers," according to the IEA website history.
Werthheimer noted that while Chicago and Illinois teachers were making strides, female teachers in Massachusetts were fired as late as 1916 for failing to follow these 10 rules:
Growth and decline
Indeed, unions enjoyed steady growth in the first part of the 20th century, peaking in 1954 when union members made up 34 percent of the American labor force, according to Michael Goldfield in The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States.
However, Goldfield noted that across the world, "U.S. trade unions are the only ones to have suffered a continuous decline in union density over the last three decades" and "are largely estranged among their natural allies among oppressed minorities, in the women's movement, and among more radical, left-wing elements in the population."
Unions have suffered declines, especially among blue collar workers, despite the impressive gains union organizations can trumpet, including equal opportunity legislation, pension plan regulation, the formation of OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Act), statutes against age discrimination and improvements in the minimum wage, to name just a few.
In contrast, unions have taken it on the chin for allowing company concessions, loss of national political influence, failures in new organizing and allowing employer-led union busting activities, according to Goldfield. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for the unions.
But while union membership declines among blue collar workers have been well documented, the professional and public sector classes — especially teachers — have not suffered the same fate. The growth of the IFT and the IEA has been steady, with only minor speed bumps along the way, such as the loss of 5,000 to 6,000 members in Chicago over the past few years due to the charter school movement, said Breving.
Also, laws allow the historic "teacher" unions to recruit members who are public sector employees such as teacher's aides, bus drivers, clerical workers and others where private sector recruiting is hampered by tough regulations and restrictions to recruiting efforts. Basically anyone who attempts to start union activity in the private sector can be summarily fired, and it could take seven or eight years for that firing decision to be adjudicated, Breving said.
The strength of the teacher unions is evident. Earlier this year in Illinois, more than 2,000 teachers turned out to protest Governor Pat Quinn's attempt to balance the budget by increasing the contribution teachers and state workers would make to the pension program in Illinois. That's showing strength in numbers. And the courts also recently recognized that charter school employees could be considered public sector employees, thus able to bargain collectively.
Private school teachers and employees are not in the public sector and therefore are governed by the National Labor Relations Board, like other private sector employees. Because many private school teachers are affiliated with religious organizations, they cannot be unionized, according to the NLRB. Breving reported that, according to the Supreme Court, in the private sector if a teacher chooses a textbook, then they are acting in a management capacity and therefore cannot be unionized. This excludes private university employees from the right to organize.
More than 90 percent of Illinois' public school teachers are unionized. The two Illinois teacher unions boast around a quarter million members: 133,000 for the Illinois Education Association, and around 95,000 for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, of which approximately 32,000 are members of Local Unit 1 (Chicago Teachers' Union). Many teachers belong to more than one union.
Even so, Lisa Uphoff, an IFT field service director and downstate union organizer, said that often when she comes into a school, the first thing she encounters is "Ick, ick, ick … let's fight a union at any cost.
"I think that a lot of what people know about unions is based on what they grew up hearing or what they read in the paper," she added, "and there's a lot of negativity that comes along with it."
Despite that negative connotation, Uphoff said in all her dealings with teachers and school boards over the past seven years, it's been 98 percent positive. "I believe school boards and employees have much more in common than they have differences. We want to provide for the kids, (help them) feel safe, get a good education. I think if people do their best to sit down and communicate their wants and needs, they can achieve really great things, and if they do, it's the students who will gain from that."
Labor and class struggles
In his 1991 book, Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on It's Back, noted Chicago labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan stated: "A union movement in America will always be a scandal. The rank and file sit in front of the TV, corrupt, stupefied, like the rest of the country. Except they know that the rest of the country is gunning for them: for their cars, their RVs, their Chicago Bear tickets, their big, high-wage, high-pension jobs. After all, this is America and there should be no ‘working class,' with people making $40,000 or $50,000 a year. There should just be one big indeterminate middle class, like in Les Miserables."
Trying to make sense of why unions, union members and unionization has such a split personality in America, both Goldfield and Geoghegan point to the "individualism" of Americans as a reason why the union movement has declined in the U.S. and why "labor" has a bad name.
Americans never experienced feudalism or spent centuries trying to throw off the yoke of inherited monarchies as much of the rest of the world. When industrialism was just getting going, the U.S. experienced waves of foreign immigration: people who would take the dirty, tough jobs and not complain. The rest of us went west toward manifest destiny looking for a way to capitalize from capitalist society.
Also, explosive issues of class and racism, not to mention laws and the legal process, made unionizing difficult.
By 1920, the labor movement was all but dead. But with the Great Depression and the recovery led by FDR, the union movement regenerated. Goeghegan noted that people were angry with the country's business and political leaders. The culture changed and the laws changed … quickly. And the culture changed even more to support the new laws, so that union organizing took off and had its "golden years" in the 1930s and 1940s.
Labor history is peppered with notable names: John L. Lewis and the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations); George Meany, who oversaw the merger of the AFL and CIO; Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters. And before that, Samuel Gompers, Eugene Debs and the Pullman strike, the Haymarket riots, Mother Jones and the coal miners led movements that few people today know much about.
But, it was only up to and just after World War II that union membership was seen as patriotic and positive. Returning veterans were war heroes and deserved to live in a nice house, go to college, earn a decent wage, and enjoy recreation time during evenings and weekends. Unions were able to see it happen.
Union membership thrived and the movement became known as "Big Labor." Union bosses became all-powerful. Unions themselves became corrupted by their own power. Republicans swept into office in the late 1940s, ostensibly to undo the New Deal, to check the power of Big Labor and the Democratic Party.
Then the Taft-Hartley Act was passed, limiting what labor unions could do to organize and protest working conditions, and authorizing stiff fines when rules were broken. Geoghegan maintains that Taft-Hartley led to the decline of the labor movement by the end of the 1960s.
Back in the '20s, Geoghegan said, workers voted for Herbert Hoover. In the '80's, he said, they voted for Ronald Reagan. Uncannily, nearly 20 years ago, Geoghegan wrote: "If there ever is another depression, people will turn on political and business leaders and say, ‘You sons of *itches.'"
In his book, Geoghegan ponders the idea that if it happened again, would we again pass laws to make it easier for labor to organize like we did in the 1930s leading to the hey-day of the 1950s for unions. Does that sound like the Employee Free Choice Act?
Not taught, not learned
Some maintain union membership has declined because it's not taught in schools. Indeed, Uphoff said that in 11 years of teaching social studies, prior to being hired by the IFT, she spent little or no time on it herself.
In "Labor Takes a Seat in the Classroom" for In These Times magazine, editor Adam Doster wrote: "Organized labor is rarely discussed in primary or secondary schools, and that is one reason the public is not adequately informed about the role unions have played in American life. A 2001 study by Hart Research found that 54 percent of respondents said they knew little to nothing about unions. Of those who had some knowledge, 37 percent gained it from personal experience, 26 percent from people in unions and 25 percent from the media."
Doster noted that the survey didn't ask people whether they had learned of labor unions in school.
Doster went on to note that ironically, even though a "2004 Zogby poll found that 63 percent of Americans approve of unions, deeming them helpful to workers, employers and the economy at large, union membership continues to decline, falling to 12 percent of the 2006 working population."
The public approval of unions could explain why unionization remains strong in the public sector: elected boards … such as school boards … are susceptible to the wrath of the public where private board counterparts are immune to that fate and only answer to the court system, a slow, unwieldy and expensive process.
Doster documents several organizations that encourage teaching of labor issues in the classroom. One is the American Labor Studies Center (ALSC), based in upstate New York and headed by Paul F. Cole, a former social studies teacher. The ALSC has even created its own curriculum on unions.
Among the different lessons described on the ALSC website is "Hardballs and Handshakes," which "uses professional baseball as a case study to understand the power of bargaining" and was created in partnership with National Baseball Hall of Fame. Other units include "Florence Kelley and the Illinois Sweatshop Law" and "Labor History in the United States."
The California Federation of Teachers is another union that has created its own curriculum: a 10-part video series, "Golden Lands, Working Hands," to familiarize California students with that state's labor history.
And in Illinois, DePaul University's Labor Education Center has offered "The Regina V. Polk High School Union Program" for the past 12 years. This three-day, hands-on experiential learning course seeks to educate high school students about labor issues, offers them the opportunity to participate in a mock collective bargaining session, and then provides a tour of Chicago's Pullman district, lead by Bob Breving, whose long career includes 38 years as an IFT union rep and 22 years teaching at DePaul.
Breving also is working on a video for the IFT to document that organization's struggle to win collective bargaining rights in Illinois, a process that involved strikes, protests, and even jail time for teachers who bucked the establishment during the turbulent 1960s.
Indeed labor educators have formed their own association to try to alleviate the concerns of Doster and others. The United Association for Labor Education is a new, united organization of labor educators that promises progress, growth and hope for the labor movement.
New books also have emerged that document the decline of the American worker, though many have yet to find their way onto library shelves, including State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America) by Nelson Lichtenstein and Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.
"In recent years, a disconcerting disconnect has emerged with corporate profits soaring while workers' wages stagnated," Greenhouse wrote. His book begins with an array of alarming statistics about the state of American workers' earnings and benefits in the past five years. He concludes: "The statistical evidence for this squeeze is as compelling as it is disturbing."
And while teachers enjoy the working rules negotiated and protected by their unions, the criticism teachers' unions face is scathing. Numerous websites are dedicated to calling out alleged union wrongdoing related to tenure, blocking progress in education, covering up for "bad" teachers, wasteful spending, alliances with supposedly unsavory organizations such as ACORN (much maligned by Fox News), and excesses of teachers' pay and pension abuse. Teacher's individual salaries are now published on the Internet for all to see.
The other side
But many union veterans have seen the other side. "Teachers need protection," said Terry Knapp, who retired from teaching biology after a 38-year career and became a union activist. Knapp is a member of both the IEA and the IFT, where he served eight years as board vice-president and president of the Peoria teacher's union.
Knapp's union activities began after he was fired for speaking to a school board member about filing a grievance over repayment of a $34 parking bill. The parking tab ended up costing his district employer close to $1 million after legal fees, fines and back pay. And, Knapp regained his job in the end.
Since then, Knapp learned how to be a union activist. He has bargained contracts and counseled "victims" of school districts' whims and caprices.
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely," Knapp said. "The ordinary person thinks they get absolute power. For these people, when a person questions them, they just can't stand it. That's why we have a contract.
"Seventy-five percent of superintendents and school board members have not read the contract. The first thing a new superintendent or school board member should do is read the contract. The contract runs the building. And, they signed it," Knapp added.
Knapp, whose Peoria connections include employees of Caterpillar Inc. where workers are now hired on a two-tiered system and pay maxes out at just under $15 per hour, laments the state of union membership today.
"People don't get it today," Knapp said. "Probably some unions (like those at General Motors) went too far, with health benefits and everything, and sometimes a union will bring a company to its knees and everyone loses. You've got to find common ground."
For school districts, profit and loss is not the same issue as it is for Caterpillar and GM. Schools are not like businesses in that sense. But taxpayers are not a bottomless well, especially with the economy in 2009.
Knapp's favorite T-shirt sums it up. It quotes Albert Einstein, a charter member of AFT 522 in 1938, when asked why he supports the union: "I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary, for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and, also, generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field."
Where, more than schools, would you find intellectual workers?
Resources
Adam Doster, "Labor Takes a Seat in the Classroom," In These Times, September 3, 2007
Michael Goldfield, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States, University of Chicago Press, 1987
Thomas Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on It's Back, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York
Steven Greenhouse, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, Anchor Books, a division of Random House, 2008-09
Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America), Princeton University Press, 2002
Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America, Pantheon Books, 1977
Web resources
American Labor Studies Center, http://www.labor-studies.org/hardballandhandshakes.php
United Association for Labor Education, www.uale.org