Posted by Ed at AFT

UPDATE:  Andy Rotherham responds.  I don't think it's an unreasonable response in that of course there are differences between the public and private sector.  I merely said they are oversold. And I think Rotherham should reconsider some of his specific arguments. For example, he writes that business mobility provides a healthy check on labor relations in the private sector. It doesn't. In fact, Change to Win (the labor federation that broke away from AFL-CIO last year) is focused almost entirely on service industries -- retail, healthcare and building services being prime examples.  AFT private sector organizing focuses on healthcare and early childhood education.  Offshoring has, at least for the moment, succeeded as an anti-union strategy, and now labor strategists look to organize work that can't so easily leave.  And as we become more of a service economy, the private and public sectors may begin to converge.  You see glimpses of it with privatized childcare/early childhood education starting to look more like the public sector and parts of public education (including higher education) taking on some private sector characteristics.

I also think that Rotherham understimates the extent to which the private sector operates in a system of politically determined rules.  On its best days, the UAW was able to choose the management of car companies and have a hand in writing legislation that governed how GM's corporate board operated.  Today, having a supportive White  House or state house is a key factor  in private sector unions' decisions about organizing and bargaining. (For examples from the Clinton White House see here and here.)

The same private interests that use the American Legislative Exchange Council and similar organizations to attack teacher unions are using them to attack social security, a higher minimum wage and private sector bargaining. Politics is inherent in the private sector labor-management relationship. Yes, it's different than in the public sector to the extent that business is less involved in the public sector fights, but in the ten years I've been working on education policy at AFT the business community has been increasingly present in the fray (and not always for ill, by the way). So yes, there are differences in the rules and the power dynamics, but you can overstate them.

And as for my concept of a broader fight being "romantic." Well, my wife likes that about me.  More to the point, the AFT achieved collective bargaining for teachers with a lot of help from Walter Reuther and the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO. Without strong private sector unions then, teachers and other school workers wouldn't have a voice on the job today.  Part of what makes the labor movement a movement is we don't forget that and we do what we can to help lift up workers' rights in the private sector, where they are under broad-ranging attack.

I was going to post today about TABOR and school finance, but I wanted to respond to questions Andy Rotherham asks about my take on labor-management relations in the big city.  For the uninitiated, this back-and-forth began when the New York City teachers' local, the UFT, raised the issue of not continuing to work when its contract expires in late 2007.  I accused Joe Williams of using one-sided management framing in writing "what do you make of job actions aimed at kids who desperately need every ounce of education we can give them?"  Rotherham suggests that I made an equally one-sided response. Yes. I did.

I thought the magnitude of Williams' rhetorical excess was best met head on. Williams blogs for an organization that provides union-avoidance training to charter school managers and opposes card check recognition for public sector workers.  I saw his post as another step in that process. My interest in responding wasn't to have a dialogue but to make that point very clear. I wanted to draw a distinction about someone who I thought was acting like the worst sort of management flack.  Williams has since written that this wasn’t quite what he meant to do, but it is what I and others read.  Simply put, until Williams’ employer changes its stripes on these issues, expect little quarter for them from me.

Rotherham also raises the question on whether I think labor positions are axiomatically correct. Not axiomatically. And there are times when my very wise counsel doesn't carry the day, either.  This isn't one of those times. It's very early in the negotiations process in New York City. And in the last round of bargaining, UFT members worked without a contract for three years. And it isn’t the first time something like that has happened in recent negotiations. Laying down the marker that this is an issue seems totally appropriate to me.  Given the nature of labor-management relations in New York, getting in management's face about it seems appropriate too.

Finally, Rotherham raises the question of whether I've blurred the distinction between public and private. I think this distinction can be oversold.  When similar management frames are applied to the autoworkers, for example, the story is that their greed is responsible for America's loss of competitiveness, and their pension cuts are necessary to restore that competitiveness. In this light, they are being selfish and anti-American, in the same way that teachers would be anti-child because they refuse to take a diminished standard of living for themselves and their children without a fight. In this framing, you don't hear that much about executive pay, or about the money shareholders pulled out of the company -- thus leaving the pension plan in peril.

And you can’t look at labor’s battles in the public sector as being isolated from our broader fight.  For example, one of the reasons labor reform that includes card check for public employees is an important issue not just for AFT but for the labor movement generally is that it helps generate momentum for card check reform in the private sector.