AFA DIALOGUE

The AFA Dialogue has been created to air concerns of all faculty. The AFA Update is the factual voice of AFA, while the AFA Dialogue encourages conversation and publishes personal opinions about workplace issues and political concerns. We invite any faculty member to submit letters, articles, or opinion pieces. The opinions contained herein are solely those of the writer, and AFA neither condones nor condemns these opinions. AFA reserves editorial prerogatives.

Submit comments, letters, and/or articles via email to afa@santarosa.edu or via fax to (707) 524-1762.

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Don’t mourn. Organize

After the events of last November 8, the looming threat to fair share service fees for public sector unions may be well down your personal list of major concerns. The new President’s immigration policy, for example, presents an immediate and dire threat to the welfare of many of our students; and then there’s climate change, health care, and on and on—the list of alarming prospects is long.

But please bear with me as I tell the story of how the Supreme Court case of Friedrichs v. the California Teachers Association came to be heard, and I think you’ll find that the light it sheds on the politics of unions—and of union-busting—illuminates threads of interest and ideology running through that long list.¹ Seeing these patterns can help us to see the need for an organized, collective response, and also help us start to map such a response.

In order for us to stand up for healthy and vital public institutions, to defend a strong commitment to the public good, and to promote a vision of public education as the foundation of a democratic civilization, we must learn first who our antagonists are, and what values and interests they are bringing to this fight.

Friedrichs vs. CTA: not defending free speech but undermining unions

Southern-California elementary teacher Rebecca Friedrichs’s suit against the CTA nominally concerned her First Amendment free speech rights; she claimed that her fair share fees represented compulsory support of speech she disagreed with. The innovation developed by Friedrichs’s lawyers at the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), who sought her out and initiated the case themselves, is their claim that union positions on wages, benefits, and working conditions were themselves intrinsically political, since they concern issues of public revenue and policy.

In fact, Friedrichs’s individual free speech rights are plainly in robust condition. Since the CIR began representing her, Friedrichs has freely and publicly attacked the CTA, teacher tenure, and the entire edifice of public education as it currently stands; some of this speech has been published on the website of the CIR itself.² Indeed, in her speech on these matters Friedrichs makes it clear that her real complaint is with the very existence of unions, which she believes to be the ruination of education.³ In publishing Friedrichs’s views on this topic, the CIR implies, accurately, that its real reason for reaching out to her was to find a pretext for eliminating fair share fees, and so undermining the ability of unions to negotiate on behalf of their members. Their goal is not to protect free speech, but to abolish public sector unions.

Rather than engaging in a principled debate over the value of unions, however, I want to suggest that such a debate is a distraction from the real dispute, which is not a matter of principle, but of interests. Instead, I want to raise a question whose usefulness and surprisingly frequent relevance I have been taught to appreciate by my service on the AFA negotiating team. The question is: whose interests would be served by abolishing teachers’ unions?

Betsy DeVos, “School Choice,” and the Ideology of Privatization

Consider the following. One of the wealthy right-wing Republican donors who funds the CIR is Dick DeVos, son of Richard DeVos, the billionaire founder of Amway. Dick is also the husband of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education. The CIR is also funded by an array of front organizations created by the brothers Charles and David Koch, and the DeVos family in turn also gives money to these, too. Dick and Betsy DeVos have long been major players in the Michigan Republican Party. One of Dick’s more notable achievements was helping pass a “right-to-work” law in Michigan in 2012. Such laws, more accurately termed “loss-of-the-right-to-unionize” laws, cripple unions’ abilities to represent workers. Dick and Betsy DeVos have also funded and promoted the “School Choice” movement, which claims that it will reform public education by infusing it with private sector values of competition and efficiency. But the language of “privatization” is misleading: “School Choice” doesn’t actually involve starting up private schools to compete with publicly funded schools; it involves seizing public revenue that used to flow to public schools, and directing that public revenue into the private pockets of investors who’ve opened charter or other alternative schools.⁴

Getting rid of teachers’ unions amounts to a clean sweep for such investors: first, because it removes the main center of organized political resistance to privatization; and second, because without a union it becomes a snap to cut wages and benefits on the newly de-unionized work force, who, moreover, are no longer empowered to resist further cuts in spending on students.⁵

Assuming a stable stream of public revenue, such cuts translate directly into higher profits for investors. It's not hard to predict the educational harm such "reform" does to students.⁶ But here’s the key point: removing the main center of organized political resistance doesn’t just help these people "reform" public tax dollars into private profit, at the expense of teachers and students both. It helps them achieve every other item on their long list of ideological goals, insofar as public sector unions have traditionally embraced and promoted opposing goals.

Democracy vs. Oligarchy

Where public sector unions express an organized commitment to a strong public sector, and a devotion to the public good, the DeVoses of the world want to shut down the public sector altogether, believing that the public good is adequately addressed by removing all obstacles to the accumulation of private wealth. Where public teachers’ unions stand for a robustly democratic understanding of opportunity, and support educational and economic policies promoting social and economic mobility, the DeVoses of the world hold that competitive striving in the marketplace is the only true pathway to opportunity, and they are moving successfully to fix that competition in their favor, and so entrench themselves at the top of an increasingly unequal society. The predictable educational failings of most “privatized” schools in this respect look more like a feature than a bug; to paraphrase Mitt Romney, students under this system get precisely as much educational opportunity as they can afford. And where public sector unions have helped lead the nation in valuing and protecting workplace diversity that reflects the reality of our nation, the DeVoses of the world are spending millions to push voter suppression laws, to license discrimination against gays (Dick and Betsy DeVos have been especially generous in funding anti-LGBTQ initiatives in various states), and otherwise build a world defined by unequal justice under the law. The DeVoses may style themselves devout Christian believers, but belief be damned; their interest is in a reactionary oligarchy. And in Donald Trump they think they’ve found their man.⁷

Trump’s new Secretary of Education has never spent a day teaching students. She has never even served on a school board. But Betsy DeVos has raised lots of money for the Republican party, and played a leading role in the “School Choice” movement. She and Dick, the Koch brothers, Trump—these are the sorts of individuals whose interest in abolishing public-sector unions the Center for Individual Rights is promoting. And, however bitterly ironic it is to admit, this collective of "individuals," ladies and gentlemen, is organized to the hilt. The CIR, the network of Koch-funded organizations, and a legion of right-wing think tanks and advocacy groups are the fruit of their efforts to organize. Interested in selling enough fossil fuels to melt the Greenland ice sheet down to grass and dirt? Interested in stripping elderly Americans of Medicare and Social Security in order to give billionaires a gigantic tax cut? Getting rid of organized centers of principled opposition is going to make these and a long list of other goals dear to the pinched, hard, and grasping hearts of these would-be oligarchs a whole lot easier. Their active hostility to public sector unions, as expressed in the Friedrichs case and elsewhere, shows just how important such a center they view our unions to be.

So, what can we do? We can organize ourselves; we’d better organize ourselves. The idea is simple enough. Doing it is a lot of work. If you’re looking for a place to start, your faculty union is a good place. If you’re not already a member, join. Pay your dues. Attend a union meeting. Speak your piece, and hear what others have to say. Write a Dialogue piece. Run for an office in the union leadership. Help AFA raise the level of its game, as we must, for example, by supporting and collaborating with faculty colleagues, others in the SRJC community, and fellow American citizens. We need to organize, we need to act, we need to defend and to promote our shared vision of a decent and genuinely free society. The difference between that vision and the bleak, anti-democratic vision animating Friedrichs vs. CTA matters enormously. Let’s recognize that difference for what it is, understand it, get organized, and go to work.