Company Towns Are Still with Us
On a May morning in 1920, a train pulled into town on the Kentucky–West Virginia border. Its passengers included a small army of armed private security guards, who had been dispatched to evict the families of striking workers at a nearby coal mine. Meeting them at the station were the local police chief—a Hatfield of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud—and several out-of-work miners with guns.
The private dicks and the local militia produced competing court orders. The street erupted in gunfire. When the smoke cleared, ten men lay dead—including two striking miners, the town mayor, and seven of the hired guns.
The striking miners had worked for the Stone Mountain Coal Company, in mines located outside the city limits of Matewan. There, they rented homes that were owned by their employer, shopped at a general store that was owned by their employer, and paid in a company-generated form of “cash” that could only be spent at that company store. When they joined a United Mine Workers organizing drive and struck for better pay, they were fired and blacklisted.
Without a union, a workplace can be a dictatorship. But what if your boss is also your landlord, your grocer, your bank, and your local police? That kind of 24/7 employer domination used to be a common practice before the labor movement and the New Deal order brought it to an end.
Today, however, the corporate assault on unions is leading to the return of the company town. These new company towns are dominated by one large business that owes no obligation to aid in the town’s well-being—quite the contrary, in fact. As was clear in this past summer’s failed UAW organizing drive at the Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, the ever-present threat that factory relocation poses to a one-company town bends the local power structure to the company’s will. That’s why so many of the newer large factories—like the auto and aerospace plants that have sprung up across the South in recent decades—are located in remote rural areas. That’s also one reason why organizing campaigns in those locales face very steep odds.
ALTHOUGH NEW ENGLAND clothing manufacturers experimented with company housing in the early 1800s, company towns really came into their own during the industrial revolution that followed the U.S. Civil War. They were common in industries where the work was necessarily physically remote, like coal mining and logging. The company simply owned all of the surrounding land and built cheap housing to rent to the workers they recruited. In new industries like steel production, factories were built in areas where land was cheap, and the companies bought lots of it. By constructing housing on the extra land, the companies found a great way to extract extra profit from their worker-tenants. Besides, a privately owned town enabled companies to keep union organizers away and to spy on potential union activity.
Some of the most infamous and bloody labor battles of the 19th century, like the Homestead strike and the Ludlow Massacre, were sparked by the violent eviction of striking workers from their company-owned housing.
Life was even more miserable for workers where the company-store system prevailed. Employers would own and operate a general store to sell the basic necessities to workers, with as much as a 20 percent markup. An 1881 Pennsylvania state investigation into union-buster and future-walking-head-wound Henry Clay Frick’s Coke Company found that the company cleared $160,000 in annual profit from its company store (that would be about $3.5 million today).
Some employers paid their employees in “company scrip,” a kind of I.O.U. that could only be exchanged for goods at the company store. A worker who was lucky enough to get paid in cash could be fired if he or she were caught bargain-hunting at an independent store in a neighboring town. And payday was often so meager and delayed that a worker might have to buy on credit, resulting in the kind of merry-go-round of debt and reduced-pay envelopes that is disturbingly similar to the practices of today’s “payday loans” predators. It’s not for nothing that the refrain of the classic song “Sixteen Tons” goes, “I owe my soul to the company store.”
The rise of unions and the New Deal order didn’t put an end to company towns per se, but companies that gave in to union recognition found less reason to own worker housing. However, companies that remained non-union—particularly in the South—continued to act as landlord, thereby instilling in their workers an additional layer of fear and oppression to keep unions out. Lane Windham’s excellent new book, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970’s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide, mentions—almost in passing—that one Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union organizing target, the textile giant Cannon Mills, continued to run a company town into the 1980s. When the company was purchased in a leveraged buy-out in 1982, the new owners quickly decided to sell the 2,000 houses it owned, giving workers 90 days to buy their homes or get out. The town—Kannapolis, North Carolina—finally incorporated and began electing its own city government after three-quarters of a century as a virtual dictatorship.
But Kannapolis’s conversion from a company town to a proper municipality only happened because an ailing firm in a globally competitive industry needed to sell off non-essential assets, and saw little need to be financially tethered to a community. The plant closed its doors for good in 2003, causing the largest mass layoff in North Carolina history.
Not all company towns were ramshackle developments. Some wealthy industrialists developed model company towns in misguided attempts at philanthropic social engineering.
George Pullman made a fortune building and leasing luxury sleeping cars to railroad companies. Pullman’s belief that the public would pay extra money for better-quality rail travel proved correct, and the Pullman Palace Car Company quickly had a monopoly in a market of its own invention. Pullman’s pressing need for new factories to meet consumer demand coincided with his growing paternalistic concern about poverty, disease, and alcoholism in the country’s industrial cities.
The town of Pullman was built on an area south of Chicago, near the Indiana border, adjacent to the Calumet River and the Illinois Central Railroad line. The company already owned some land there, and purchased more to begin construction in 1880. The housing that Pullman built was of much higher quality than what was typically found in working-class neighborhoods in industrial cities. There was green space and tree-lined streets. In the town center, he built a handsome and well-stocked library, a luxury hotel with the town’s only licensed bar, and a grand theater to feature “only such [plays] as he could invite his family to enjoy with utmost propriety.” Casting a shadow over the town was the towering steeple of the massive Greenwood church.
There was no requirement that Pullman’s factory workers reside in his town, and many commuted from Chicago and neighboring villages. But 12,600 Pullman employees did choose to live in his city by 1893. Some were supervisors and social climbers. Many more were young workers who wanted to raise their families in a new, clean environment. By the mid-1880s, the town was gaining a reputation as “the world’s healthiest city” for its low death rate.
Pullman’s undoing was his tendency to run his town like his business. As with his sleeping cars, he owned all the property and leased them to residents. His one giant church was too expensive for most congregations to afford its rent, and his ill-conceived attempt to convince all of the local denominations to merge into one generic mega-church failed. His library charged a membership fee to foster his notion of personal responsibility. Workers avoided the hotel bar and the watchful eye of “off-duty” supervisors, limiting their public carousing to a neighboring village colloquially known as “bum town.”
Pullman’s business sense led him to make a confounding choice for a civic father who was trying to instill middle-class values in his city: The housing, too, was for rent only. His aim was to ensure that housing remained in good repair and attractive, and he charged higher rents to maintain them. Here, Pullman applied his usual belief that the public would pay more for higher quality, ignoring the fact that this particular public—his employees—had little choice when his was the only housing in town.
The Panic of 1893, and the severe economic downturn that followed, presented Pullman with a dilemma. His business slowed to a near halt. Any capitalist who did not also feel responsible for running a city would simply have laid off all but a skeleton crew of workers. In a more traditional company town, the laid-off workers would have been violently evicted by Pinkertons or the local police. The Pullman company reduced its workers’ hours but kept everyone employed on a reduced payroll. Crucially, however, the Pullman Land Trust did not reduce rents, plunging the town’s residents into financial crisis. Many workers fell behind on their rent. Their debt to Pullman had the effect of restricting their freedom to quit. It provoked a strike at the factory.
The strike was soon joined by a nationwide boycott backed by the new American Railway Union (ARU), which was led by Eugene V. Debs. Rail transportation around the country ground to a stop as members of the new industrial union refused to move trains that carried Pullman sleeping cars. The strike was violently crushed by the National Guard and its leaders were jailed. (Debs later said of the experience, “in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed.” He emerged from jail a few years later as America’s most prominent socialist leader, calling the strike his “first practical lesson in Socialism.”)
George Pullman died in 1897, resentful of his reputation as a tyrant and of his model town’s ignominy.
Just a few years later, another bored plutocrat decided to build a model company town of his own. Friends cautioned Milton Hershey that Pullman had been a disaster for its owner. Warned that the town’s residents wouldn’t have elected George Pullman dogcatcher, Hershey responded, “I don’t like dogs that much.”
Hershey made his first fortune in caramel, and sold his confectionary for the unprecedented (for caramel, anyway) sum of $1 million in 1900. Although he retained rights to a small chocolate subsidiary, it was more of a local novelty. Prior to the advent of milk chocolate, the sweet was a luxurious treat for the wealthy that would not keep for long journeys by rail to allow for mass production and distribution
Then, like Pullman, Hershey became interested in solving the problems of modern industrial life. He founded the Hershey Chocolate Company to support his town—not vice versa. Hershey worked on a formula for milk chocolate that could be mass-produced, to provide his town with a sustainable industry.
Breaking ground in 1903, the town was located near its own source of dairy farms for his chocolate business. At the center of town was a 150-acre park, featuring a band shell, golf course, and zoo. After ten years, Hershey’s amusement park was receiving 100,000 visitors a year, making tourism a crucial second economic base for the model company town. Hershey built banks, department stores, and public schools. Unlike Pullman, homeownership was a key part of Hershey’s vision and business model.
In a case of history repeating itself, Hershey was rocked by a Congress of Industrial Organizations sit-down strike during the Great Depression. In 1937, 600 workers took control of the factory for five days. Their sit-down was broken up by scabs and angry local farmers who had watched 800,000 pounds of milk spoil each day. They broke into the factory, battering and forcibly removing the strikers.
Thanks to the New Deal order, which saw an activist federal government defending the rights of workers, however, a permanent union presence was eventually established at Hershey (although the company finagled to have its favored representative, a more conservative AFL union, win a collective-bargaining agreement).
The town of Hershey, though by no means the utopia that Milton Hershey envisioned, exists today as a modestly successful tourist trap. The theme park and the still-operating chocolate factory continue to serve as a job base for locals.
COMPANY TOWNS ARE STILL with us. In the 21st century, company towns operate less like Pullman and more like Kannapolis during the years between Cannon Mills’s sale of its company housing and the final closure of the mill. The companies no longer are their employees’ landlord, but because they’re the only major employer for miles around, they still wield extraordinary power.
This past August’s NLRB election defeat for Canton, Mississippi’s Nissan workers, who sought to be represented by the United Automobile Workers (UAW), should put unions on notice that company towns are not some relic from our sepia-toned past, but an essential feature of 21st-century manufacturing employment in the United States.
In 2003, Nissan, a French-owned multinational carmaker now valued at $41 billion, located its sole American auto assembly plant in the tiny town of Canton. The factory employs around 6,500 workers, while the town is home to roughly 13,000 residents.
In the run-up to the union election, Nissan did what almost every employer does. It didn’t threaten to fire union activists, because that would be too obviously illegal. Instead, management merely predicted that the invisible hand of the market would force it to shut down a newly unionized factory and ship all of the jobs out of town. Thusly terrorized, the entire political establishment of Canton, its churches, and the workers’ own neighbors amplified this threatening message to potential UAW supporters.
The company inundated the local airwaves with television ads in which a local pastor compared the ostensibly horrific period before Nissan arrived—when residents were “fluctuating back and forth looking for jobs”—with the good news that Nissan employees can “come through the door knowing the lights are on, the water is running.”
It actually makes sound business sense for multiple competing businesses in the same industry to be located in close physical proximity to each other. There are economies of scale that can be achieved through shared distribution channels, a major airport, a shared community of professional engineering talent, an education system designed to build the bench, and an ecosystem of parts suppliers and other complementary businesses.
It just doesn’t make business sense if you’re trying to operate on a union-free basis. The fact that Chrysler, GM, and Ford workers were friends and neighbors in Detroit and its suburbs helped organizers foster a culture of solidarity that was essential to organizing the auto industry in the 1930s and 1940s. The fact that few new auto factories, foreign or domestic, have been built anywhere near Detroit—or anywhere near each other—for more than half a century is not an accident. It’s not the result of “free trade,” of the tax-cutting “savvy” of Southern politicians, or of some inherent deficiency of the so-called Rust Belt.
It’s the product of a bloody-minded determination by “job creators” to avoid the conditions under which unions are even possible. From the overuse of “independent contractors” to sub-contracting and outsourcing, to locating new factories in small and remote geographies, corporations in America strategically structure their business to avoid the reach of NLRB-certified, enterprise-based collective bargaining.
These business practices make it clear that employers will continue to evade and sabotage any system of labor rights that is tied to individual workplaces, rather than one that applies to entire industries. We will need new labor laws and new models of worker representation to democratize our communities.
[This article originally appeared at the American Prospect.]
The Two-Tier Provision in the Chicago Teachers Union’s Tentative Agreement, Explained
The tentative agreement that the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) struck with district management less than an hour before a midnight October 10 strike deadline has been hailed by many as a victory. Facing another round of concessionary demands, the union managed to extract $88 million from the mayor’s corporate slush fund to restore some badly needed funding to the school system. The union also managed to win an increase in compensation.
But the way that the compensation is structured—with current teachers keeping their current 7 percent pension “pickup,” and new hires receiving a salary increase in lieu of a pension contribution—has some critics decrying the deal as a solidarity-killing, two-tier contract. A pickup is the percentage of a worker’s pay that an employer puts directly into a pension fund.
The CTU’s House of Delegates meets Wednesday to deliberate over the tentative agreement and vote on whether to send it to the entire membership for ratification. If the deal is rejected, there is no guarantee that management will agree to more of the union’s demands—or even return to the table.
Two-tier contracts are an emotional subject in the labor movement. Beginning in the 1980s, employers used threats of off-shoring and sub-contracting, as well as their legal “right” to permanently replace striking union members, to force a wave of wage and benefit givebacks across many unionized industries. In order to make these cuts more palatable to the members who would have to vote on their ratification, unions negotiated agreements where current workers preserved most of their pay and benefits while future hires would bear the brunt of the cuts.
There are many epithets for this sort of thing, but the most common may be selling out the unborn. These ticking time bombs blow up years later, as the “new” hires become a larger portion of the bargaining unit and resent their veteran colleagues both for their more generous compensation packages and for the fact that the older workers signed away their younger colleagues’ right to enjoy the same. As the veterans become a minority in the workplace, there is an obvious financial incentive for supervisors to push them out through aggressive discipline. In such a situation, worker unity in future rounds of bargaining is hard to achieve.
To be clear, not all “two-tiers” are alike. The powerful New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council accepted a two-tier wage structure after surviving a 27-day strike in 1985. But the tiers only impacted workers during their first year of employment. By year two, all workers were earning the same pay rate. And, decades later, ending the tiered pay scale remained a union bargaining priority.
The United Automobile Workers (UAW) accepted a two-tier pay scale at Chrysler when the company went bankrupt in 2009. It was so severe that new hires earned only half the hourly wage of veteran employees. When members voted down a 2015 successor agreement that did not go far enough in reversing the double standard, the UAW was able to renegotiate a deal that brings newer workers closer to the traditional pay scale over the course of seven years.
The CTU’s proposed “two-tier” is a bit more of a shell game than those concessions. The fight over Chicago’s 7 percent pension pickup has more to do with symbolism than anyone’s actual paycheck. Pension systems are complicated things that only accountants and union researchers fully understand. But basically, a pension fund needs a certain amount of money coming in every year in order to guarantee a livable retirement income for actual and projected retirees. Currently, the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund has set that target at 9 percent of every pension-eligible employee’s annual income.
Before the CTU won collective bargaining rights in the 1960s, teachers had most, if not all, of their pension contributions deducted directly from their paychecks. Over the years, the CTU was able to bargain for 7 of that 9 percent to be contributed directly into the pension fund, instead of paid as a salary increase and then immediately deducted as a personal pension contribution.
Obviously, the difference between putting 7 percent in pension contributions directly versus rolling it into salaries, and then immediately deducting it, makes no financial difference to the employer. But the 7 percent became a visible target for Gov. Bruce Rauner and Mayor Rahm Emanuel. It was money they could portray to the public and the press as “extra” compensation that teachers get that other workers don’t and demand that teachers give it up. (It should be noted that Chicago teachers aren’t eligible for Social Security, so their pensions are the only thing that stand between them and an old age spent subsisting on cat food.)
Under the tentative agreement the CTU is considering, the pay for new hires would increase by an additional 3.5 percent in two successive years. It’s not entirely clear how soon new hires would be responsible for paying the full pension contribution.
Teachers at charter schools also participate in the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund. Members of the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (Chicago ACTS) at the UNO Charter School Network (UCSN) are currently bargaining over the very same pension pickup, and have set a Wednesday strike deadline.
I was a part of the bargaining team that negotiated the first contract at UCSN in 2013. Because we had a significant amount of bargaining leverage in the wake of a very public insider dealing scandal, we realized that those negotiations were our best shot to get the charter network to pay more than the whole lot of nothing that it had been contributing to teachers’ pensions.
We were successful. That 7 percent was a part of an overall compensation package we were going to win anyway. But by directing the employer to put it towards the pension, we politicized a different figure: the network’s starting salaries. Because charters compete in the same labor market as the district to recruit new teachers, the salaries they can offer are key. If that 7 percent had simply been rolled into base pay, UCSN would be able to quote starting salaries that appear to be larger than what the district offers, but really aren’t, giving the union leverage to raise wages in future negotiations. Now that starting salaries at Chicago Public Schools will appear to be 7 percent larger—if CTU members ratify the deal—the salaries that UCSN offers will appear even less competitive.
As for ratification of their contract, CTU members have to decide how important the symbolism of that 7 percent is and what impact it will have on future rounds of negotiations. The shifting of that 7 percent from one column in a spreadsheet to another strikes me as a last minute ploy to give Rauner and Emanuel a face-saving narrative that allows them to say they didn’t suffer a humiliating defeat in this round of bargaining.
“This is not a perfect agreement,” said CTU president Karen Lewis. “But it is good for the kids. And good for the clinicians. And good for the teachers, and the paraprofessionals.”
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]
The Other Chicago Teachers’ Strike
As the countdown to the Chicago Teachers Union’s October 11 strike deadline approaches, another teachers’ union in Chicago has voted to authorize a strike as their own contract negotiations have dragged on over strikingly similar disagreements.
The teachers and staff at the fifteen-campus UNO Charter School Network (UCSN) have spent seven months bargaining for a successor to their groundbreaking first collective bargaining agreement. But talks with management have stalled. So this week, all but one of the 533 bargaining unit members participated in the strike vote, which delivered a 96 percent vote in favor of strike authorization.
The teachers want to limit class size, reverse layoffs of student support personnel, and win more say over the school-year calendar. USCN executives want to shift more pension and health-care costs onto the workers, consolidate the pay schedule, and limit support staff to a 1 percent raise.
“We sympathize with the CTU, we support the CTU,” says Erica Stewart, a spokesperson for the workers. “But this is our contract, and we’ve been bargaining on a separate track than the district.”
Yet UNO’s management’s giveback demands look a lot like what Chicago Public Schools is demanding of the CTU.
While there are many — particularly in corporate education reform circles — who see charter schools as non-union alternatives to school districts, the reality is that teachers at charter schools do not serve as a reserve pool of strikebreakers.
In Chicago, nearly a quarter of charter school teachers have voted their way into the union. The UCSN workers were the largest group of employees to organize when they joined the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (Chicago ACTS) in 2013. Chicago ACTS is Local 4343 of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the CTU’s sister local.
Having directed the AFT’s charter school organizing program from 2010 until 2015, I may be a bit biased. But union organizing in charter schools is a story of union solidarity that too often goes overlooked. Teachers choose to work in charter schools for a variety of reasons, but union avoidance is rarely one of them. And, while union activists have a lot of problems with the role that the charter industry plays in the privatization of education, workers in charters who stand up for their rights deserve support from the Left.
Too Big to Fail
That the UCSN faces a possible strike at the same time CPS prepares for a walkout would have been unbelievable in 2012, the time of the last major CTU strike. Then, CEO Juan Rangel crowed about the fifty thousand students who would continue to report to charter schools while the public schools were shuttered.
Rangel’s pre-strike provocation inspired Chicago ACTS to organize UCSN teachers. The CTU joined the effort and contributed significant staff resources and leadership attention to the project.
This was a huge challenge. UCSN was the largest network of charter schools in Chicago at the time, with ambitions to expand to new markets. It was a driving force in the industry lobby, the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, and Rangel had served as transition chief for Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel’s first one hundred days. Up to that point, Chicago ACTS had organized mostly small networks and independent schools.
Given the high degree of teacher turnover and the rapid expansion of the network, we knew we needed to pressure management to sign an organizing rights deal — an agreement not to fight our organizing efforts — if we were going to win a union for the teachers and staff.
Campaign researchers soon discovered that the same rapid expansion that made the network hard to organize was UNO’s financial Achilles heel. Virtually every year, the network had to float a new bond to Wall Street investors, each time using the newest school property — purchased with the last bond — as collateral for the new one. This meant that any increase in the charter’s network’s revenue went to service debt. Any pause in new growth or revenue would put immediate pressure on their bottom line.
In essence, a charter school is just a five-year contract to provide government services. So when charters apply for fifteen- or thirty-year bonds, they are charged extremely high interest rates. Across the board, charter school bonds are only rated one grade above “junk.” But Wall Street investors love them, because they are also classified as municipal bonds, which produce triple-tax-free income for investors. Banks carefully bundle these with safer bonds from actual public entities to produce higher yield, but supposedly safe, bond funds.
If all of this is starting to sound like The Big Short, that’s because the bankers who inflated and then popped the sub-prime mortgage bubble are repeating the same scam in the charter school industry. This should be a national scandal.
But the actual UNO scandal was a result of the organization’s culture of insider dealing and no-bid contracts. Ordinarily, that’s business as usual in Chicago. But in the aftermath of Rahm Emanuel’s controversial closure of fifty public schools, the question of how public education dollars were spent became highly politicized.
When Chicago Sun-Times investigative reporter Dan Mihalopoulos launched a series of UNO exposés in early 2013, the public was outraged by the cavalier and venal misuse of public funds. As Mihalopoulos began to connect the scandal to specific politicians, UNO started losing friends fast.
The day the Sun-Times ran a story on UNO’s fundraising for House speaker Mike Madigan — complete with an embarrassing picture of Madigan at an UNO charity golf event — two things happened: first, the governor set in motion the suspension of a special $98 million grant that was supposed to seed the network’s expansion, and leadership called AFT president Randi Weingarten to propose a neutrality agreement.
Thanks to that deal, the worker-led organizing committee signed up over 90 percent of the teachers and staff for a May Day union certification.
Broke on Purpose
Negotiating multiple contracts with different corporations in the same labor market has not been an easy evolution for teachers’ unions. Traditionally, staff representatives from state umbrella organizations negotiate contracts for local bargaining units. These staffers tend to seek the most expeditious deal possible, with little consideration of how it might affect other units in the area.
CTU leaders, on the other hand, recognized that if the largest and most politically influential charter school bargaining unit agreed to concessions on merit pay or pensions, then they would see those demands pop up at their bargaining table, just as CPS’s concessionary demands are showing up in the current UCSN negotiations. The point of organizing staff in charters is to make them and their unions stronger, not race to the bottom in terms of employment standards.
These conflicting approaches to bargaining strategy have produced no shortage of internal tensions.
The UNO workers did manage to win just-cause job protections, maternity leave, an extended summer break, a salary schedule that brought newer teachers closer to — and occasionally above — the CTU pay scale, and the same 7 percent pension contribution that district teachers enjoy in their first contract.
Coming out of that experience, Chicago ACTS asked the CTU to provide negotiators and organizers to coordinate the current contract campaign. It also now has a full-time union officer released from teaching duties to keep teacher voice central to strategy.
Chicago ACTS is now aiming to have all charter-school contracts share the same expiration date, according to Chicago ACTS president and former charter school teacher Chris Baehrend. “We’re trying to be much more deliberate about how we exercise our bargaining power,” he says. Forming an employer association for the purposes of bargaining common contract language and benefits could make sense to charter employers, if they actually desire stability.
Whether it makes sense to have the charter school units bargain (and possibly strike) at the same time as the district teachers or to try to leapfrog the CTU’s contract gains (or losses) by bargaining in the following year is still being debated within ChiACTS. It’s also one that the bosses have no small say over.
Since that first contract, UNO has evolved as well: after the scandal, CEO Juan Rangel became a convenient scapegoat for the organization’s regulatory problems. He was fined by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to reveal his insider deals, and his Twitter account indicates that he’s now hustling for astroturf education reform campaigns.
In 2014, the UNO Charter School Network also split from its parent organization — the Saul Alinsky–inspired United Neighborhood Organization. Their background explains why they had the savvy to sign a union neutrality deal when they did. UNO had floated the bonds that paid for the network’s expansion. They owned the real estate, charging UCSN nominal rent but hefty management fees. The whole financial structure was designed to be intermingled. The messy disentangling of UNO’s complicated finances has resulted in a charter school network that is as “broke on purpose” as Chicago Public Schools.
The union announced the lopsided results of their strike vote in favor of a walkoff on Thursday night. Local reports stated that this was the first strike in American charter school history, but these Chicago teachers actually would not be the first group of charter employees to go on strike. Teachers at a Philadelphia’s Khepera charter school engaged in a wildcat sick-out in 2011 after management basically refused to bargain a contract in good faith.
Although the Khepera teachers could have been fired under the Pennsylvania labor law they were considered to be under at the time, management instead capitulated and accepted the union’s last contract offer. When Khepera’s administration attempted to gut that contract in 2014, the teachers conducted a strike authorization vote under private sector labor law, and management once again immediately capitulated.
Also in 2014, teachers and staff at Detroit’s Cesar Chavez Academy voted to authorize “walk and work” informational picketing after a year and a half of frustrating negotiations with the Leona Group, LLC. There, management settled the contract the night before the first planned action.
As Karen Lewis said of her members, so is true of teachers at charters: “Our ability to withhold our labor is our power.”
The Chicago ACTS members are working under a contract extension that expires on October 9, but they will not be walking out with the CTU on Tuesday. Even if their elementary schools weren’t on a one-week autumn break, both parties are carefully watching what happens in the CTU negotiations. “I think that UNO is probably waiting to see what happens with the pension contributions in the CPS negotiations,” says Andy Crooks, a leader of the charter school network’s support staff. Instead, the bargaining team has set an October 19 strike deadline — which could be during the potential public teachers strike, if the CTU has not settled by then.
Regardless, if no contract settlement can be reached, Chicago ACTS will be holding a rally outside of UCSN’s corporate headquarters some time this week. If the CTU is on strike, there will be forty thousand union members able to join their colleagues’ picket line.
That is a visual that managers at non-union charter schools are likely dreading. Expect to see some of them pipe up in the press with moralizing about how charter schools were designed to be free from the kinds of collective bargaining disputes that are currently roiling UCSN, and for them to denounce the Chicago Teachers Union and Chicago ACTS.
The obvious truth is that they’re afraid. They’re afraid that the people who actually work in charter schools view unions as an important part of making these schools work. And they’re afraid that those workers have a powerful ally in the CTU when their bosses try to push them around.
[This post originally appeared in Jacobin.]
The Fight to Save UMass Labor Center Is a Fight for Worker Power
The Labor Center at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) at Amherst is in turmoil. Its director, Eve Weinbaum, says she was abruptly pushed out of the position. In an alarming e-mail to alumni, students and allies, she protested funding cuts to teaching assistants and part-time instructors and, more troublingly, threats to the “Labor Studies faculty’s autonomy to make programmatic decisions and to designate a Director.”
Founded in 1964, the Labor Center is one of about 30 labor centers around the country. Most are rooted in the extension programs of land grant public universities. In addition to its extension work—providing trainings for unions and worker centers—the Labor Center runs undergraduate and graduate degree programs in labor studies.
These days it is most renowned for its limited residency Union Leadership and Administration (ULA) program, in which union leaders, staff and rank-and-file activists meet for intense 10-day periods of instruction every summer and winter and can earn a graduate degree in three years if they keep up with readings and assignments from home (or in the field). As you might have guessed, I’m a proud alum of the program.
The response to Weinbaum’s letter produced nearly 500 letters of protest in a few days, according to organizers for a Save the Labor Center campaign. Local union leaders, heads of other labor centers, alumni and current students also expressed alarm about the situation in a prominent article in The Boston Globe. According to Jeff Schuhrke, another UMass alum and writer for In These Times, an organizing committee of at least 30 alumni is holding regular conference calls to plan the next steps of the campaign. The upheaval there has many worried about the future of labor education at public universities nationwide. Changes in the way education programs are funded are setting off a kind of labor center “Hunger Games,” where some programs grow while others die.
Austerity and the corporatization of higher education
The plight of the Labor Center is rooted in a very common problem: state divestment in public higher education. Public university systems that were once so adequately funded that they charged little-to-no in-state tuition to students have seen their state funding decline over a period of decades.
For a state as wealthy and as liberal as its reputation, Massachusetts’ divestment in its university system is particularly egregious. The state allocates some $508 million to UMass. That’s only 17 percent of the school’s $3 billion budget. And the legislature only increased state funding by 1 percent this June, which will lead to more increases in tuition and student fees.
The skyrocketing tuition and crippling student debt caused by this divestment have been well documented. What is a bit murkier is how it impacts the function of a university, as every academic discipline is forced to generate revenue. This is what critics refer to as the corporatization of higher education.
Science and engineering faculty must secure federal grants, philanthropic funding, corporate contracts and Congressional earmarks in order to gain tenure and get promoted. Those revenue sources fund an army of non-tenured research assistants, postdocs and research professors.
Law and business schools can turn to corporations and wealthy alumni for donations and endowed chairs to fund additional faculty lines. But the humanities and social sciences don’t have the same rich resources to draw upon. Their charge from administration is to drum up student enrollment, particularly for profitable master’s degree programs—hence, the pressure on the Labor Center to recruit more out-of-state students for its residential master’s program.
Labor centers are changing with the times
But not every labor center is struggling. Some, like the ones at Rutgers University and Cornell University, have deftly pursued program grants from unions and philanthropic organizations, allowing them to expand and create new institutes. Cornell’s Worker Institute is partnered with the AFL-CIO on a next generation leadership development program and convenes a workers research network, among other projects. Rutgers’ Center for Innovation in Worker Organization does leadership development work for alt-labor groups and is a key partner in Bargaining for the Common Good, among its other programs.
Bucking the state-funding trend, the City University of New York’s Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies has, according to its director, Gregory Mantsios, “received a commitment from the University to elevate the status of the Institute to a CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.” With this come more state funding and control over that money. It is the result, according to Murphy professor Stephanie Luce, of a sustained lobbying campaign by local labor leaders that labor should have a school with the same status as CUNY’s business school.
“It reflects that New York City, and the state, and CUNY have decided to invest in the labor school,” she said.
Luce, a former UMass labor professor, recently issued a report that showed that New York City has defied national trends and seen its union density increase to 25.5 percent. The NYC labor movement has both the power and the willingness to exercise it on behalf of labor education.
Another labor center that’s bucking the trend is the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University. A private Jesuit university, Georgetown didn’t even have a labor center until a few years ago. They had just two labor history professors, Michael Kazin and Joseph McCartin.
Georgetown president John DeGioia sought to create a labor center at the university in 2006. He was eventually connected to the Kalmanovitz Charitable Foundation (which, ironically, was carved out of the estate whose caretakers left a deep scar in the city of Milwaukee by shuttering the unionized Pabst brewery in the mid-1990s). An influential board member, who was steeped in the Catholic social justice tradition and whose children had attended Georgetown, wanted to steer a significant grant to a labor education program in the Washington, D.C. area.
McCartin agreed to head up the new labor center, bringing the influential labor strategist Stephen Lerner along as a fellow. The modestly-funded initiative (its annual budget rarely tops $700,000) served as the incubator for Bargaining for the Common Good—a union coalition effort that aligns bargaining demands with those of other members and with community demands around progressive taxation, affordable housing, youth incarceration and government transparency.
But, if you’re wondering why Kalmanovitz is an “initiative” and not an “institute,” the charitable organization provides rolling grants—not a bequest or an annuity—which leaves the Kalmanovitz Initiative as vulnerable to the fickle priorities of a charity as the public labor centers are to the indifference of state legislators.
The future of labor education at UMass and beyond
John A. Hird, dean of social and behavioral sciences at UMass, assures In These Times, “We have no intention of allowing the ULA program to stand on its own.”
He says the university is working with the Labor Center to increase residential enrollment in both the undergraduate and graduate programs, which have declined in recent years. He sees some promise in the planned “4+1” bachelor’s/master’s program for increasing labor studies enrollment. The program would allow undergraduate students to earn graduate credit in their junior and senior years and walk away with both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in just five years.
“Rest assured we are doing everything we can to further develop this jewel of a program,” Hird said about ULA.
While UMass is earnestly conducting a search for a new director of the Labor Center, Hird concedes that it is likely the position will go to an internal candidate, and not a new hire, due to the financial picture. Sources at the Labor Center say they hope their campaign might result in a commitment to hire a new tenure-track labor professor to direct the center, or, at a minimum, to win more input for Labor Center faculty and staff in the selection of its next director.
“This crisis is going to bring more attention to UMass and more of a commitment to fund it,” said Paul Mark, a Democratic state representative.
Mark was a shop steward and executive board member of his IBEW local when he was a classmate of mine at ULA. He notes that Massachusetts’ senate president is also an alum of UMass, and that the Democratic legislature is moving a plan to institute a graduated income tax in order to better fund education and transportation. You read that right, the state that Republicans love to malign as “Taxachusetts” has a constitutional flat tax. It will take two successive legislative sessions to vote on a progressive tax amendment before the matter can be put before the voters in 2018.
Mark also reports that he has sat in on strategy meetings this past weekend with Tom Juravich, who is serving as interim director of the Labor Center, and state AFL-CIO president Steven Tolman, among others, to brainstorm ways to direct more union funding and programming to the center. If the current crisis gets Massachusetts’ unions to realize that they cannot take for granted that the Labor Center will always be there, well, that is certainly a silver lining. Although, even this may not be enough. As the Kalmanovitz Initiative’s McCartin laments, “Even if you’re taking care of your labor constituents well, they don’t have the resources they once did to keep you funded.”
Many people I talked to note that the Boston area is thick with private colleges, including elite institutions like Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their many graduates have moved on to careers in politics. As a result, UMass doesn’t command quite the same alumni loyalty among legislators that many other state universities do. The other intrinsic challenge for UMass that supporters will note is its physical remoteness. Most of Massachusetts’ labor movement is based in Boston, in the eastern end of the state. The beautiful flagship UMass campus is located “in the sleepy west of the woody east” of Amherst.
I happen to think that remoteness is an asset.
Most of the surviving labor centers sprang up after World War II. They were founded in the spirit of labor-management partnership, a post-war consensus that emphasized mediation, arbitration and respectable political statesmanship. This is a framework that most employers abandoned long ago. But, to this day, most unions approach the labor centers as places for shop stewards and staff representatives to learn how to handle grievances or the finer points of collective bargaining.
What our movement needs from our labor centers is to be a place where leaders, staff and rank-and-file activists, from all kinds of different unions, can get the hell away from their offices and daily grievances and meet together in a retreat-like setting and study, read, discuss and debate—and maybe come up with some potential breakthrough strategies.
A model worth revisiting is the labor colleges of the 1920s. Brookwood Labor College in upstate New York was a bucolic retreat where thoughtful activists studied and debated the big strategic questions of the day. These included how to adapt craft union structure to mass industrial production and organize key sectors of the economy.
Brookwood made a substantial, if underappreciated, contribution to the strike wave that revived labor’s fortunes in the late 1930s. Our current economic order is marked by massive inequality that some call the New Gilded Age, and our current union structures are as ill matched as those were in the 1920s to the ways industry restructured to avoid our reach. Looking backwards to that time makes sense.
We need more spaces like the UMass Labor Center to regroup and reconsider our strategic choices, not fewer. Labor centers are worth fighting for.
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]