Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Twin Cities Daily Planet
Collective bargaining is under attack from right-wing, anti-union
politicians. But union members are fighting back - pushing new
boundaries in what unions do and challenging the notion of "management
prerogatives." The Saint Paul Federation of Teachers’ recent contract
campaign is an impressive example of this new direction in collective
bargaining.
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| GM Strike 1946 Photo permission from Grand Rapids History and Special Collections (GRHSCD), Archives, Grand Rapids Public Library, Grand Rapids, Michigan. |
Recent experiences suggest that the generations-old practice of
collective bargaining as the normal, if not dominant, method of
negotiating the terms of unionized employment is losing its legitimacy.
Notoriously, upon taking office in January 2010, Wisconsin’s Governor
Walker introduced a bill to strip public employees of their collective
bargaining rights. Despite a massive upheaval and a series of electoral
and legal challenges, Act 10 is now the law of the Badger State. And
last year in Seattle, when 30,000 workers, represented by the
International Association of Machinists, rejected Boeing’s insistence on
a restructuring of their pensions and an unprecedented eight year
extension, Boeing blackmailed them into a revote by threatening to move
their work to another state. Management’s demand just squeaked by in the
second vote. In Chattanooga last month, when Volkswagen management
announced it would remain neutral in the face of a United Auto Workers’
organizing drive, Republican office-holders launched their own
anti-union campaign, threatening that state financial support for the
plant would be withheld if the workers unionized. The vote for a union
narrowly failed.
While these pressures for change have come from anti-worker forces,
some workers and unions are also putting forward new issues, practices,
and strategies which represent another vector in the transformation of
collective bargaining. Led by professionals, such as nurses and
teachers, these unions have challenged their managers’ efforts to
control their conditions of employment. In so doing, they have
questioned the sanctity of what labor relations experts call “management
prerogatives.”
The Saint Paul Federation of Teachers’ recent contract campaign is an
impressive example of this new vector. As SPFT Local 59 began to prepare
their campaign a year before the contract’s expiration, they organized
internally by creating a “Contract Action Team” to survey rank-and-file
teachers and encourage them to attend bargaining sessions. Externally,
SPFT 59 brought parents, community members, and teachers together at
house parties, book discussions and focus groups. Union officers and
staff held listening sessions to hear the range of ideas generated by
this multi-part process. The union then produced a detailed pamphlet,
The Schools St. Paul Children Deserve, which was unveiled at a public
meeting where the Union pledged to bring the primary recommendations of
both teachers and community members to the negotiating table. They also
invited parents and community members to witness bargaining sessions
and, on occasion, to speak on specific issues. SPFT 59’s reliance on
rank-and-file teachers, parents, and community members expressed a new
approach to the very process of collective bargaining.
The recommendations in The Schools St. Paul Children Deserve similarly
pushed the boundaries of traditional collective bargaining. The union
distilled, structured, and articulated the concerns they collected into
key themes:
- Educating the Whole Child, via the addition of nurses, counselors, social workers and librarians to the district’s workforce;
- Family Engagement, via the creation of more time for communications with parents, including the extension of the home visit program and the restructuring of parent-teacher conferences;
- Smaller Classes, particularly for schools with a higher proportion of disadvantaged students;
- Teaching, Not Testing, re-allocating time from test-prep and test-taking with pedagogy teachers would have more freedom to shape;
- Culturally Relevant Education, which emphasizes the recruitment and retention of more teachers of color, on the one hand, and the development of curricula which engages the district’s diverse student population;
- High-Quality Professional Development, which supports Educational Assistants on the path to gaining licensure and adds support for new teachers and peer-to-peer mentorship; and
- Access to Preschool, which expands access to high quality early childhood education.
SPFT 59 justified placing these issues on the negotiating table on two
grounds: 1) These issues are central to the working conditions within
which teachers do their jobs; and 2) Given their personal values and
their professional education, teachers are the logical point people for
the advancement of the interests of students, parents, and the
community.
While no one on either side of the negotiating table denied for a
moment that these issues would cost substantial money to address, it is
important to note that the union had not placed a formal demand for
wages and benefits on the table. SPFT 59’s leadership was quite explicit
that teachers’ compensation would be the last issue they would address.
This really was a new approach to collective bargaining.
Formal collective bargaining is a relatively recent development in U.S.
labor relations, dating from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935
(upheld by the Supreme Court in 1937). This Great Depression/New Deal
measure, called “Labor’s Magna Carta” by some, established key ground
rules:
- government oversight via the National Labor Relations Board and the federal courts;
- an expectation of relatively decentralized bargaining, with much left to the negotiations of employers and unions; and
- exclusive representation, in which only one union has the legal authority to represent a group of workers.
The law specifically excluded farm workers, domestic workers, and all
levels of public employees. Individual states have adjusted some of
these ground rules, and in 1961, President Kennedy issued an executive
order granting federal employees a “limited right to collective
bargaining.”
Seven-plus decades of collective bargaining practices have established a
set of behaviors as “normal,” “conventional,” or “typical.” These
include: the grounds on which bargaining units are determined, such as
the exclusion of foremen from membership in the same union as the women
and men they supervise on the job; a machinery for the resolution of
disputes and discipline, including grievance procedures, mediation,
arbitration, and the right to strike; ground rules for unions’ use of
the strike and management’s use of the lock-out; and the scope of
bargaining itself and the claim of management rights. While none of
these practices is dictated by the law, there are labor lawyers,
management consultants, scholars, and journalists who talk about them as
if they are non-negotiable.
It is the claim of management “prerogatives” which is being most
energetically contested by the new union strategy manifested by the
Saint Paul Federation of Teachers. The hiring of librarians, nurses,
social workers, and counselors has always been the purview of
administrators. So, too, have been class size and requiring students to
take standardized tests; the expansion of pre-K programs has been a
matter for the School Board itself. But the union was determined to
bring these issues to the negotiating table with the intent of making
them part of the collective bargaining agreement, the educators’ very
contract. As Nick Faber, an elementary science specialist and SPFT
secretary, explained in an October 2013 article in Labor Notes: “That’s
how union teachers in St. Paul feel about our contract: it’s the most
important legal document – and social justice document – for ensuring a
quality education for our students.”
The notion of “management prerogatives” did not gain traction until the
U.S. collective bargaining system was more than a decade old. The
mid-to-late 1930s power struggle between corporate management and the
new industrial unions of the CIO lurched back and forth, pushed to and
fro by slowdowns, sitdown strikes, and mass picket lines, from one side,
and company thugs, militia, and national guardsmen, from the other.
Government intervention during World War II led unions to trade the
right to strike for institutional security, while offering employers
guaranteed profits in exchange for allowing the government to impose
price controls.
When the war ended, the struggle for control over workplaces began
anew. In 1945-1946, 4.6 million workers struck nationwide. The battle
between General Motors and the United Auto Workers took center stage.
Under Walter Reuther’s leadership, the UAW demanded not only a 30% raise
in wages but also that GM not pass that wage increase along to the
public by raising prices on its cars. As the strike wore on month after
month, the union, amid much public fanfare, called for GM to “open the
books” and reveal just how much money it was making and how much it
could afford to pay its workers. GM’s executives C.E. Wilson and Alfred
Sloan responded with a forceful defense of their “right to manage” based
on their and their stockholders’ property rights, their ownership of
capital. After five months, GM offered Reuther the compromise of a 15%
raise with no concession on management’s right to set prices. Although
many strikers expressed their willingness to hold on longer, the UAW
leadership encouraged the acceptance of the offer, and the strike ended.
With the benefit of hindsight – that is, from the vantage point of our
own moment – we can see the consequences of the union decisions of those
fateful years. GM would raise its prices along with many other U.S.
corporations, and by the end of 1946 inflation would eat up the UAW
strikers’ raises and those which had by won by workers in other
industries. Two years later, the UAW negotiated a contract with GM which
specifically ceded claims to consultation on workplace technological
change in exchange for productivity-based wage increases and job
security. Not only had the UAW significantly weakened its power at the
bargaining table but it had also yielded its presence in the workplace.
Given the UAW’s pace-setting role for the U.S. labor movement in the
late 1940s-early 1950s, this compromise set a pattern which would shape
collective bargaining agreements throughout the United States.
Throughout the private sector the line demarcating unions’ authority
became circumscribed by the notion of management prerogatives.
When significant numbers of public sector workers began to organize in
the later 1960s and early 1970s, the government officials, lawyers,
judges, scholars, labor relations experts, and even the leaders of the
new unions who would shape public sector unions and labor practices
would take for granted the ground rules that had taken shape in the
private sector workplaces of the post-WWII years. But there is no
capital in the public sector, and if there is any property in the public
sector, it belongs to taxpayers and citizens. But public sector labor
relations emerged with a respect for the concept of management
prerogatives which had been developed in the private sector, in the
world of property, the world of capital.
The boundary against which SPFT 59 (elaborated here) and several
creative teachers’ and nurses’ unions have been struggling has no legal
or principled right to exist. The expertise is held by the workers
themselves, and it is this expertise which should prevail in breaking
that boundary. Teachers themselves and the parents whose children they
teach know best how children can succeed in challenging, and creative,
school settings. One can credibly argue that the managers of non-profit
hospitals and other institutions have no reasonable grounds on which to
challenge nurses’ and other healthcare workers’ efforts to bargain about
patient staffing, the delivery of care, and other workplace issues
about which they truly know little. As these teachers and nurses and
other creative unionized workers stand up for their students’,
patients’, and constituents’ needs, it is no wonder that they find our
long-standing system of collective bargaining to be in need of
substantial transformation.
SPFT 59, without a strike, won many of their demands: caps on class
size which take into account the socio-economic status of students;
reduced time for testing and more time for teaching; support for
Education Assistants to become teachers, for new teachers to receive
mentoring from experienced teachers, and for increased peer mentoring
for all teachers; a restructuring of parent-teacher conferences;
extension of the union-initiated home visit program. They also gained
wage increases for all Saint Paul teachers. The union also won
commitments from the administration and the School Board to hire 42
additional librarians, nurses, counselors, and social workers, and to
expand funding for the pre-K program. These latter items were not
included in the contract per se, but they are certainly the outcome of a
collective bargaining process.
It is possible that these new vectors, these new approaches to
collective bargaining, will lead other workers and their organizations,
in the private as well as the public sector, to question the seemingly
sacrosanct shibboleth notion of management prerogatives. These new
tactics and new visions will prove crucial in reshaping a labor movement
committed to advancing all working peoples’ interests in the decades
ahead.
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