In a historic blow to workers’
rights, and working class solidarity in Hawaii, the members of the
Hawaii State Teachers Association (HSTA) have been coerced into voting
to relinquish basic rights to gain a needed pay raise. The contract
they agreed to provides for 4% raises over each of the next two years,
with other supplements amounting to an 11% pay raise over two years.
The newly approved contract includes a mandatory random and reasonable
suspicion drug testing clause.
Over the last few years, teachers have
been deluged with red tape and paperwork, had arbitrary and rigid
“standards” overlaid on their class rooms, and generally
had their autonomy eroded. The streamlining of the educational process,
designed to create passive, unquestioning, but efficient workers to
meet the needs of the capitalist economy is now taking another step
forward with the moral paternalism of invasive random drug testing,
dictating what teachers may do in their free time.
By dividing workers with this vote,
effectively pitting them one against the other, the State has won
another victory against working class people, thus maintaining a weak,
scared, and divided working class incapable of challenging attacks
on them from above.
The moralistic cloaking of this attack
on labor in the garb of “protecting the children” must
be challenged openly and seen in historical context. Workers have
often faced such social control. Henry Ford created a “Sociological
Department” (later called the “Education Department”)
to scrutinize workers’ domestic lives so as to “Americanize”
immigrant workers. The idea was to alter home life to better adjust
workers to greater efficiency and instill a better attitude toward
factory work. “The Sociological Department investigated each
worker and interviewed his family, friends, and neighbors. If the
worker met specified requirements - ‘thrift, honesty, sobriety,
better housing, and better living generally’ - he received the
Five Dollar Day.” Otherwise, he did not receive the full wage,
and could be discharged after six months if sufficient moral progress
was not made according to Ford’s standards.*
The Union’s Failure to
Defend Workers as a Group
“On
Wednesday, HSTA President Roger Takabayashi was the only
member
of the union's board of directors to vote against sending
the contract
for ratification. Twenty-six members backed the
contract
and one abstained.”
(http://starbulletin.com/2007/04/24/news/story02.html)
This contract should not have been put
to the workers for a vote. Asking workers to choose between either
a raise, or retaining basic rights is like asking them to choose between
sawing off a limb or shooting themselves in the face, with a nice
raise for the face shooters. This move by the Union leadership was
dressed up as a “democratic” vote, but should be identified
as what it is: union collaboration with the state to impose more control
over workers’ lives. Presenting a dilemma, and calling it a
choice is a devils’ bargain, bourgeois democracy at its worst,
but far from an anomaly.
This contract is an effective tool to
drive a wedge between more “socially conservative” and
“socially liberal” employees. Sixty one percent of the
teachers who voted chose to ratify the contract. For some teachers,
while they did not like the idea of drug testing, they felt the raise
itself made the contract acceptable. For other teachers, the idea
of criminalizing any type of recreational drug use not sanctioned
by the state creates a better society: "I'm all for it,"
said math teacher John Furukawa. "As an educator, we need to
promote an example to which kids can follow." (http://www.thehawaiichannel.com/education/13210269/detail.html)
“Protecting the Children”
and “Setting an Example for the Kids”
To hear all the talk about protecting
the children, one would think there had been a recent rash of violent
attacks and or molestations on keikis by drug crazed teachers. Several
high profile cases of teachers and Department of Education employees
brought up on charges ranging from smoking a joint, to dealing ice,
cocaine, and ecstasy, are being used to justify a sweeping crack down
on teachers’ rights, and being sold as a moral crusade for the
kids. Following this logic, one might expect given the 3300 plus U.S.
troops killed in Iraq, the tens of thousands of maimed troops, and
the body count for Iraqis surpassing half a million (counting only
the post invasion phase of U.S. policy), some actions might be taken
to keep military recruiters away from kids, especially given the recent
national coverage of recruiters’ lies to kids about “not
getting shipped to Iraq” and promises of college funds many
will never see.
What kind of example are teachers setting
for children when they vote for a contract which divides workers into
morally fit or unfit categories based on lifestyle, regardless of
whether or not any problems have arisen in their work with children?
Are illegal drugs like marijuana connected to violent or abusive behavior
any more than legal drugs like antidepressants are? You can test for
marijuana use outside the classroom, but unless a teacher is actually
drunk inside the class room, no moral line has been crossed. A high
school teacher who has a martini at a jazz concert is fine, but if
that teacher takes a hit off a joint, and is randomly tested, he may
face termination or punishment and ostracism by other faculty and
community.
What about teachers who have problems
with harder substances like meth, ice, crack, cocaine, or heroin,
or who exhibit signs of severe alcoholism? The obvious answer is that
if a teacher exhibits warning signs or has endangered children, the
community or coworkers should approach the person and make sure they
can either clean up their act to the point of being an effective teacher,
or transfer out to a position not involved with kids, and as a last
resort, be told to leave. This requires actual human interaction among
equals who are genuinely concerned for the children’s and each
others’ safety and well being, not mandates by opportunist bureaucrats
who want to score political points by harassing and demonizing teachers
as a group so they appear to be “doing something” about
the problem.
What teachers are “teaching”
kids by ratifying this contract is that it’s ok to sacrifice
people who are not like you to arbitrary and idiotic authority and
punishment. They are saying very clearly that standing together as
a class against coercion by the powerful is a waste of time. They
are pounding one more nail into the coffin of class solidarity, now
merely a quaint outdated concept which has been replaced by “every
worker for him or her self”: “Well, if I don’t do
illegal substance x, I don’t see why someone who does shouldn’t
be fired or punished as a rule.”
When Unions Fail
Unions are sometimes the only thing
standing between workers and even more severe exploitation. Historically
they have sometimes helped workers in their struggles for basic rights
such as the eight hour day, and health and safety protections. But
unions have too often been incorporated by management as a tool to
mediate and lessen the effectiveness of workers’ demands. With
the HSTA, we see an example of a union selling out its workers, and
systematically opening them up to further attack. In cases like these,
if there is to be a defense of workers as a class against the encroachments
of grandstanding moralizers in the service of capital (consciously
or not), wildcat action will be necessary. But this requires a minimum
of class consciousness, the kind that led to the formations of unions
originally, and the kind that sparked direct actions even when unions
lagged behind or went against working class interests. What we see
with the recent vote is a lack of class solidarity and a willingness
to play by the rules laid down by the state in the service of capital.
The message sent is this: we'll keep pumping out obedient and cowed
workers who accept that their “rights” can be revoked
from above at any time.
Acting In Our Own Interests
A teachers’ union divided is vulnerable
to further erosions of such rights, and eventually to attacks on wages
and benefits when that becomes necessary, as it has become necessary
in countless school districts across the globe. When capitalism in
general faces crisis and declining profits, it unloads the burden
of that crisis onto the working class. Teachers are not only exposed
to random drug tests, but are already expected to pay for supplies
out of pocket, perform overtime work without pay, and to act as police,
reporting on fellow workers and students regarding immigration status,
drug use, and other issues.
Teachers themselves will need to take
the reins at some point, and stand up for each other, even if this
has to happen outside the normal union channels. They’ll need
to organize their own struggle without interference form parties,
vanguard groups, unions, or NGOs.
While today, the attack comes in the
guise of protecting the children from drug users, tomorrow it may
be “terrorists,” “political dissidents,” “illegal
immigrants,” or “communists.” Of course, all these
things have already happened, and are all further smokescreen issues
covering attacks on labor.
The anti-drug argument needs to be identified
for what it truly is: an attack on the working class in an effort
to divide workers over social behavior, just as race and political
affiliation have been used in the past. A failure to unite and fight
back now will lead to further erosions of self management of our own
lives.
*“Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanization in the
Ford Factory,
1914-1921.” Stephen Meyer. Journal of Social History, Vol. 14,
No. 1. (Autumn, 1980), 70.
Angry Teacher May 2007
Further Reading:
Class
Struggle Beyond Unionism