I’m sharing this mini-lecture from 2018 because it illustrates a key point about membership, union unity, and divisiveness: One of the things you won’t realize till you teach in a building with veteran educators is how important unions are.  Covering education history in a few weeks, one might lose this key point.

Not to get chirpy, but there exists an anti-union movement that has been prominent for decades, but has been openly working to erode union protections for a few decades now.  (2008’s budget crisis precipitated by lack of oversight over subprime loans impacted everyone heavily at the time and led to huge cuts in budgets; Wall Street also used this as a chance to push charter schools, vouchers, “school choice” (ironically title if ever there was one) and attacks on tenure and whether employees had to pay union dues).

We’ll get into this more in the course, but it’s important to realize that nothing one assumes came from nowhere.  The weekend?  A creation.  Teenagers?  A contingent creation. . . one could look up the history and examine the conditions–ones that didn’t have to play out as they did, but happened to play out in a certain manner–that led to it.

Avoid assumptions.  Avoid thinking something is necessary when it’s contingent.

In future weeks, we’ll look at the Janus decision.  I guess I’d just have everyone consider that there are interests being served by unions and also interests opposing those which would be served by unions not existing.  I know that I appreciate the union protections and services.  I also know an un-unionized teacher who works in a Coney Island in charter schools: She gets docked pay if she is caught deviating from a written script when teaching their math lessons!

Here’s a graphic I found from Iowa:

–After this was written, notice the impact of the Janus decision.  The hope is that, professionally, you’ll realize you “stand on the shoulders of giants” and recognize their struggles.