By David Greene

The AFT's logo contains the slogan, "A Union of Professionals." It makes me wonder. How is it that after years of the UFT/AFT calling teachers professionals our working conditions went from bad to worse? How come in spite of quiescently claiming professional status and devotion to 'higher standards' we became less appreciated and more degraded?

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, apart from others. This is clearly what is happening with the UFT's perennial proposal for a 'career ladder.'

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" (p. 9) (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.

Without labor organizing into strong unions, working people would be reduced to peonage and the limited benevolence of employers. Employers, whether in the public or private sector, have no interest in protecting their workers. Their interests are directly opposed to those of working people.

A look at history makes this clear as day. While labor unions came together over the struggle for wages, benefits and conditions of work, UFT leaders and others have moved toward collaboration with employers. There is lots of posturing, but more and 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.

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."

Margaret Haley, a sixth-grade teacher in Chicago's tough "Back of the Yards" district was an irrepressible early organizer who struggled against the NEA leadership for a union controlled by teachers. Her vision was not only for better salaries and better school funding. She believed a union should be involved in the struggle for more democractic schools and the type of education that had joy in it.

She told the NEA convention of 1904:

"Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today; one the industrial ideal dominating through the supremacy of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machines; the other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above all machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life ... Those two ideals can no more continue to exist in American life than our nation could have continued half slave and half free. If the school can not bring joy to the work of the world, then the joy must go out of its own life, and work in the school, as in the industrial field, will become drudgery." (Murphy, p. 58.)

When teachers and other workers organized and fought their employers for their rights and benefits, they were attacked, but they gained some measure of respect and a living. Before that, they suffered and did without. Without organization, workers (and teachers are workers), operate as lone individuals against their employers. Together, they can be a powerful force.

Today, as in the past, unions are essential forms of organization that must represent the interests of working people. When they fall down on this task, working people must confront this failure and reorganize in their own interests. 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 it members and separating their members from the communities. Historically, professionalism has been used to divide us from other education workers (paras, secretaries, counselors, vocational educators) and all of labor, but we are in the same boat, no matter what is said.

Teachers are workers, plain and simple. 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. Our billionaire Mayor has no idea what it’s like to be out on the street, or to have your bills pile up. He spent $50 million of his own money, just to buy his position. We should clearly understand that we are the workers and he is the employer. Our interests are not the same, no matter what platitudes he manages to mouth. A united class of workers in this city 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”. We need to organize! Our government will spend over $200 billion on the War in Iraq, but they are unable to preserve our jobs and services. Something is wrong with this picture!

While it is absolutely true, that teachers strive for excellence in the delivery of this most important service, we must understand our position as workers. 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.