How you spell relief? I spell it SB5. Finally the tide has turned in the corporate anti-labor assault on public sector unions.
If there were teacher unions in any state that didn't deserve SB5 it was those of Ohio. Ohio is the home of the Toledo Plan, the ground breaking Peer Assistance and Review System (PARS) which has been a national model of teacher taking control of professionalism for decades. According to new research, deployment of a PARS system leads to more collaborative labor management relations.
Another example: The Dayton local was recently highlighted in NEA Today for using the grievance procedure to acquire textbooks for special needs students.
But I discovered the most significant example of the progressive work of Ohio's teacher unions in Denver, at the US Department of Education's Labor Management Conference. At a reception, I spent considerable time talking with several representatives of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, a federal agency charged with improving relations between labor and management. At one point I was talking with an FMCS mediator from Ohio, who turned to a colleague and asked, "What percentage of teacher negotiations we do in Ohio do you think are interest based?" The colleague thought about it for a moment, and replied, "Eighty percent."
Eighty percent. As a VT-NEA local leader, I've been working to encourage the use of interest based bargaining (IBB) in two Vermont supervisory unions, a state where the labor-management relations often have an adversarial character because they rely on distributive tools. We are just taking our first baby steps to achieve what has been achieved in Ohio. And Ohio, where FMCS deploys this tool 80% of the time, which has been using contemporary conflict management tools for decades, where unions join with their communities to create great student results, experiences SB5. I was shocked, saddened and angered.
Ohio's unions did not deserve this assault. They were punished for doing some of the most progressive, collaborative and innovative work in the country. I am incredibly relieved that the citizens of Ohio recognized the treasure they have in these great civic institutions, public sector unions, by not just repealing SB5, but repudiating their governor by an almost two to one margin.
Working people have to stop fighting against each other and start fighting for each other. Peering through the lens of the Occupy movement, it’s obvious that the people I sit with in the negotiations room here in Vermont, both board and teachers, are part of the 99%. I seriously doubt anyone in the room has an annual income in excess of $516,000. When we distract ourselves with labor-management fratricide, we work for our oppressors, for truly we have far more in common with each other than with David Koch, Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family, or Bill Gates. Solidarity means not just circling the union wagons, but identifying with and actively promoting the legitimate aspirations of our communities.
The adversarial culture that persists in our negotiation process here in Vermont thwarts those aspirations and plays into the interests of the 1%. This culture is self inflicted. Both boards and teachers have choices about how they do business. If we make better choices, we can free political energy for the fight for social justice.
Let me emphasize, I do not believe that collective bargaining is itself inherently adversarial. Too many times, however, the parties choose to be adversarial. Collective bargaining is a fundamental public good. It is incumbent on participants to improve the process so that this public good can truly achieve its potential in terms of promoting great educational outcomes and social justice.
As a veteran negotiator, I can attest to the human costs of an exclusively adversarial process. In my supervisory union, which has gone to the brink of crisis build-up three consecutive times, teams of teachers put in excess of 2000 hours of time into a process which in the final analysis produces minimal new money and a few incremental changes in contract language. I am sure a similar commitment is made by the board team.
In addition, the board spends tens of thousands of dollars on a labor attorney, and both sides spend thousands more on private mediators and fact finders. All this time and treasure has the net effect of preserving a degraded status quo. Teachers experience gradual erosion of pay and working conditions; board and administration gain nothing in terms of the sort of flexibility that would enable them to manage for better student learning. Taxes rise to pay for this state of affairs. So do union dues.
But above and beyond the wasteful stalemate produced by the political theater of an adversarial negotiations culture, the true costs of systemic dysfunction occur when the poisonous dispositions of labor-management conflict filter down to schools and classrooms. Classrooms at their best are deeply collaborative learning environments; they need to be supported by collaborative processes at the building level, at the supervisory union level, ultimately at the state and federal level.
For example, teachers who do not trust their administrators cannot benefit from evaluation, no matter how well designed or intentioned. Collaboration at all levels is the foundation for improved teaching practice. And who are the victims of the status quo? Students.
How can we advance the cause of collaboration? Part of the answer lies in reform of the negotiation process.
There is a growing body of research and practice on labor-management collaboration. Contemporary conflict management techniques go back over thirty years. In addition to the positional or adversarial bargaining that dominates our landscape, it includes at least three other tools:
Interest based bargaining, which strives to create solutions by drilling down through the positions that animate traditional adversarial bargaining, to the underlying interests in order to create novel solutions which address the true aspirations of the participants.
Expanded scope bargaining, which strives to assimilate the expertise of the practitioner into the public policy process and uses the negotiation process as the gateway.
Continuous bargaining, in which parties take up problems as they arise, devise solutions, and roll them into the contract. This reduces the sheer quantity of items saved up for the formal negotiations process, and simplifies the task of reaching agreement. Problems do not fester.
This enhanced conflict management tool set provides means of effectively resolving a wider range of problems. We in Vermont suffer from the “rule of the tool”: when the only tool in your kit is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. But not every problem in teacher negotiations is a distributive problem, a problem of carving up a finite pie. Many problems of working conditions are not finite, and allow for a broad range of creative solutions. Using positional bargaining techniques on these problems drains the creativity out of the process, and denies our children the benefits of the best possible teaching.
Negotiations reform, however necessary, is not sufficient to drive progress. For that we need to look at the literature on ground breaking districts nationally, districts which have achieved deep and sustained collaborative relationships which have driven systemic change and education reform. One such study is Collaborative School Reform: Creating Partnerships To Improve School Systems From Within by Saul Rubinstein, and John McCarthy, which was published by Rutgers University in October, 2010. This ground breaking study looks at six districts which have achieved a deep and abiding collaborative labor-management relationship, from the giant Hillsborough (FL) school district, a famous Gates deep-dive district with over 200,000 students, to tiny Plattsburgh (NY), with less than 2000.
A salient feature of this study is the diversity of the districts that had reformed their labor-management relations. There were districts like Winston-Salem Forsythe (NC) from a southern right to work state, and the Green Dot Charter chain, as well as districts enjoying the benefits of strong pro-labor laws, like Plattsburgh (NY) and ABC Unified (CA).
What distinguishes these districts is the willingness of leaders to take a risk, and put the end goal of the enterprise first: great student learning. Students truly represent the aspirations of communities.
Here in Vermont it is time for bold and visionary leaders to sit together in order to remake our relationship. The way forward is by following the example of best practice nationally.
Specifically, we need to:
Be humble enough to step back from deeply ingrained habits of thought and practice, and use contemporary conflict management techniques.
Draw on the resources that exist nationally to help us solve our problems. In particular, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service is available at no cost to facilitate our moving forward.
Build policy expertise in labor management collaboration through study of the extant literature and through contact with successful models.
People need to start talking WITH each other about the possibilities for change rather than talking AT each other by positional/adversarial habit.
This is hard work, and will take time and resources. Those of us genuinely interested in benefitting students and communities should be taking on the tough problems rather than persisting in behavior which only serves the interests of the 1% who would squeeze our communities dry.
Media professionals often use the term messaging to indicate a small number of talking points that are repeated incessantly. I call this propaganda. To the so-called media professional staying “on message” is a virtue. Joseph Goebbels said, “The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right.” Messaging falls squarely within this tradition. Goebbels was the first master of old media. Old media is about control, and about one way communication, which, when you think about it, really isn’t communication at all.
Communication is dialogue. When a union is truly communicating with its constituency, the democratically engaged members are simultaneously the recipients and the shapers of the message. Democratic engagement is the antithesis of control.
Web 2.0 technologies break down the control exercised by the petty propagandists of American media. Social media, blogs and wikis are among the technologies that allow the people to talk back. These technologies represent a threat to old-media professionals.
What if a member rode off the rails? What if he or she went off message? What would happen to the monolithic talking points that the union hammers at relentlessly? What if it was revealed that there was diversity of opinion within the organization on a topic? What if, god forbid, the dissenting point of view became….popular within the organization?
The answer is simple – we would have to do business differently. And that would mean professional staff would have to do business differently. So it’s easier to control the message, because doing business differently is a threat to those who are the masters of yesterday’s world (and are well compensated for their trouble....)
In the battle between control and democratic engagement, the ongoing ascendance of the forces of control weakens the union. The only way forward is through democratic engagement. Messaging – propaganda – fatally weakens engagement. Could it destroy our union?
And to think I finance messaging with my dues dollars….
