Choose Your Label ... Worker or Professional?

At a recent Delegates Assembly meeting, United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten opened by announcing that the UFT (the American Federation of Teachers affiliate representing New York City’s public school teachers) was an 'organization of professionals.' Her words stuck in my ear.

The AFT's logo contains the slogan, "A Union of Professionals."

While teachers are committed to quality education and classes, the label of professional requires some serious discussion and clarifying. As teachers, we aim to sharpen our skills to deliver the best and most engaging content and to connect with the real lives of our students. All of this is a daunting and wonderful task.

The term professional is often used to describe someone who delivers a high level of service in their work. One of Webster’s definitions of professional is, “Having great skill or experience in a particular field or activity.” When many teachers speak of professionals, I believe this is the meaning they refer to. Teachers draw on experience and training to look after their students' individual needs. Responding appropriately to students' development also requires conscience, independence, and a free exercise of judgement on their part.

The title of professional is also generally used by employers to redefine workers, and often to cloud their roles. It is used to isolate them from their fellow workers and draw them closer to management. It is also used when management upgrades a job title in name only, just to give the worker a sense that he is doing something really special. This is clearly what is happening with the UFT's perennial proposal for a 'career ladder.'

PROFESSIONALISM VS. MILITANCE

In a report entitled "Where We Stand: Teacher Quality," the AFT leadership puts forth a number of recommendations for raising teachers' status as professionals. These include tougher entry requirements and union involvement in hiring. For the lucky souls that clear the inital hurdles there will be further weeding out. "The widespread adoption of joint union-administration-directed peer intervention programs to help weak teachers gain the skills they need or, if that is not possible, to counsel them into other lines of work, would do a great deal to raise the status of the profession" (my emphasis).

Unfortunately, in arguing that teachers' status is tied to "teacher quality" the AFT is simply mirroring the claims of corporate America and its teacher-bashing think tanks and media. It is part of a broad agenda that is making the conditions of teaching and learning worse under command-style "school reform" and mandates for remote monitoring and management. It is causing large numbers of teachers to flee for their sanity. It does not raise the status of anyone working in the schools.

The term professionalism is used to answer the demands by teachers for better pay, health coverage, working conditions, and other benefits. It is argued by management that professionals don’t complain, they make the best of any situation. They don’t fight over conditions of work, because they are really concerned about the service they must deliver. Teachers should not consider striking, because that would be selfish and hurt the ones they serve.

“Professionals,” in the employers or management’s perspective, would fit better into a merit system, rather than an equitable labor contract. All these arguments and many more are used to weaken the position of working people, to pit workers against each other and to crush any developing militancy.

SUPPORT LABOR NOTES

BECOME A MONTHLY DONOR

Give $10 a month or more and get our "Fight the Boss, Build the Union" T-shirt.

UFT leaders and others have moved toward collaboration with employers. There is much posturing—but more compromise—on conditions and class size, working through contract deadlines, following the drive for more testing of students and teachers, and a strategy of self-regulating professionalism in opposition to collective labor struggle.

UNIONS VS. PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS

The rights and security that teachers currently have they owe to the labor struggles of the past. They were not bestowed on them because they identified themselves as professionals. In fact, an obstacle to teachers' gaining status and dignity was having associations that were dominated by school administrators who called for teachers to be more professional and less unionist. The demand for professionalism has been part of the drive toward greater centralization of control of the school system, and away from community participation and stronger unions.

In Marjorie Murphy's Blackboard Unions: The AFT & the NEA 1900-1980, she explains how teachers unions in Chicago and other cities had to break away from the control of school administrators. "The women (teachers) proposed their own vision of education that was based on experience in the classroom as opposed to university credit; they thought that knowing the community was more important than satisfying the top administrative personnel."

Today, as in the past, unions are essential forms of organization that must represent the interests of working people. When a union places undue emphasis on the professionalism of teachers, it is getting away from the class position of teachers as workers, undermining the militancy of its members, and separating their members from their communities. Historically, professionalism has been used to divide us from other education workers (paraprofessionals, secretaries, counselors, vocational educators) and all of labor, when, in fact, we are all in the same boat.

When times are good and contracts carry pay and benefit increases, a level of complacency and bribery clouds the real relationships. When times are hard, and lay-offs and givebacks are the order of the day, the real nature of the teacher/worker position is more clearly disclosed. Don’t be fooled—we are workers, just like coal miners, transport workers and nurses.

As working people, it is in our interests to join together with others to confront what is going on. The workers and unions of New York City should join together against budget cuts to jobs and services. A united class of workers could close down New York for a day or two to send a message. We don’t need to sacrifice because they tell us that we are “professionals.”

While it is absolutely true that teachers strive for excellence, the service of providing education not only requires training, skill and knowledge, it is our daily labor. It is a common struggle of teachers to do a difficult job. The job is improved by our collective camraderie and sharing, our unity.

We need to join forces with communities and other working people. Respect for teachers, improved conditions,and the highest quality education will come when we are organized to fight for and demand it.

This article originally appeared on the website of the Independent Community of Educators, a reform group with New York’s United Federation of Teachers. To see the full version, go to www.ice-uft.org.