A teacher’s union is no obstacle to the removal of the tiny minority of poor teachers.
Fact.
Methods and protocols exist to remove them; administration’s inability/unwillingness to instigate those protocols are the trouble. You want better teachers?
Get better administrators.
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I’ll try, but I’m supposed to be doing something else right now.
What I am trying to say is that if you are fighting for rights, you need to fight for all rights, not just the rights of people like you.
I have heard people say that if we fight for the white male working classes then other groups would also benefit from it. If that is true we should be fighting for black LGBTQ women as white cis men will also benefit. If it is not then we should be fighting for everyone, not just white men.
Unfortunately this isn’t the message that some groups want to hear.
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Unions have often done both. Not all of them, but many unions are very interested in their history and how unions have shaped American and world history. Better jobs doesn’t mean that you have to ignore the larger picture. The machinists have actively worked with archivists to create a lasting legacy for both union members and scholars to better understand their history and hence, their present:
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Also, see my link to the southern labor archives above…
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This has been something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while, actually. Are unions still capable of representing American workers in a way that benefits them in the here and now considering the rapidly changing labor market? Certainly, people who work in fields that are still pretty heavily unionized enjoy better benefits and pay (although they’ve still suffered from stagnant wages, etc), but given that the number of union members in private industry is way down (in part because of the runaway factory phenomenon, which has a long history, first to the south, then out of the country), is the old style of union organizing effectual anymore. It seems like the service workers unions have been pretty active, trying to organize fast food workers (who are now overwhelmingly middle aged bread winners instead of HS kids). If we take Eben Moglen seriously, that the backbone of the economy has moved from steel to information, what does that mean for what we imagine as the blue collar laborer, who has been shifted into service work of one kind or another?
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Maybe old style unions with their old style methods are still good for some industries. Maybe other industries workers need something else? I dont pretend to have the answer.
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Me neither. I’m an (aspiring) academic, my husband a programmer, both “knowledge production” fields. Both tend to be fields where people don’t imagine themselves as having a “collective” interests that they can organize around (though there are certainly some academic unions out there, just not in my state, because it’s a right to work state), but I think there can be. Whether or not a traditional style union (meaning the post-30s AFL-CIO type union) would work for either field (especially my husband’s) is anyone’s guess. But I do think that there are collective interests at stake that can be employed for collective action. What that would be, I honestly don’t know.
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I think that personal experience has a lot to do with it.
Sure. I know lots of people who’ve had personal horror stories when dealing with the public education system (and plenty with great stories, too).
I do think that by working to make the public education system better, including giving teachers better pay/benefits, and not firing teachers who “cost too much” (this happened to my aunt, who had something like 20 years of experience, got a masters, and soon found herself out of a job and scrambling to find some work, and of course no one would hire her, because she had a masters - despite the rhetoric that people with advanced degrees are needed in public schools), the quality of teacher would rise. The administration grinds people down and the lack of pay makes talented people want to find better positions (such as in private schools). It’s not surprise that teachers are demoralized and don’t give a shit about the kids in their charge, because often, the public they serve is openly hostile to them and because they are micromanaged by administrators who have never been in a classroom and also don’t actually care about the kids in their charge. The entire mindset of “teaching to the tests” hasn’t helped.
The problem of public education is a complicated one that can’t just be chalked up to “bad teachers.” We’re all kind of responsible here.
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I think software development can easily support unionization. Academia is too stratified and weird, and consulting, publishing, etc only complicates things. I will say that grad students and adjuncts need to be treated better, but benefits have to come from somewhere and this may be seen as a zero sum game.
Academia is better organized than software development. Just not here (right to work state). The adjunct problem is real and many grad students are going to come to depend on adjuncting jobs or on lecturing positions, which are also less well paid.
There was an attempt to organize at my college by adjuncts/grad students years ago (late 90s/early 2000s, I think it was). I’ll give you one guess as to what happened to that. I do think that adjuncts and grad students have shared interests that we can coalesce around, though.
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If you mean adjuncts and grad students specifically should organize, I could definitely get behind that.
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Sure, we should. If that happened where I am, you’d have a whole lot of adjuncts and grad students out on their asses, though.
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That’s what I was afraid of. If I were to have asked for health insurance, I would have been out on my ass.
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Indeed. Part of the problem is that we have too many PhDs and not enough tenure track positions. The idea is that adjuncts should be grateful for the scraps they get, because they’ve obviously wasted their life in pursuing a life of useless knowledge production. If they were really smart, they’d have gotten phds in a STEM field, where there are jobs inside and outside academia. Who needs history or sociology or literature? Those are luxuries that no one cares about anymore. We are a “future thinking, technologically ground society” so who needs a proper study of the past, other than some pamper elites? /s
Yeah. Sorry… rant over! 
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I could rant forever on this topic. Maybe I will, but not now.
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We could always start a new thread? I think we did on this very topic a while ago (a couple of years, maybe?) to bitch about this very issue. Feel free, I and the other academic mutants will happily weight in!
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FWIW, the Adjuncts at the school I work for unionized.
And Harvard’s Grad students have voted on Unionizing- though the votes are still being counted, as I understand it. With Higher Ed costs going through the roof, I can’t blame those in less powerful bargaining positions for wondering where their cut of that pie is going…
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Heard this elsewhere as well. What I dont get is why anyone sane would want to be part of that system.
Given that lots of people dont have the aptitude for STEM studies (myself included) there is actually still some logic here. There is no guarantee that anyone can get the job they want after all.
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Sure. I hope that the grad students at harvard successfully organize. I’d like to think that their status at the top of the academic heap would trickle down to the rest of us, but I’m highly skeptical of that, given the realities that they are taking the majority of tenure track jobs. Students at the ivies and big, highly respected institutions are far more insulated from the realities of academia that the rest of us are familiar with.
And once again, I live in a right to work state. My ability to be represented by a union that has any effective sway is very small. I can certainly join one of the various nation-wide academic unions, but that means little in a right to work state. Doesn’t mean I don’t want people in other places to organize and I’m glad that they are.
