Labor Unions for Professionals
There are a lot of younger, new teachers who are NOT part of the BTU, which is apparently causing some concern for the organization. While I am personally not a fan of unions, I wonder why we have a union exactly in this day and age. But that is not the point I wish to make. Instead I will be focusing on the idea of our desire to be treated as white collar professionals while still adhering to a blue collar labor union’s guidelines. If unions have historically been for those persons employed in a physical labor profession, why are there teachers unions? By many we are considered glorified babysitters and others we are the keys to the future. Either way we are seen, we frequently want to be considered in a professional capacity. After all, those of us in these alternative certification programs all went to college and did well in a field outside of education. We excel at traits, such as communication and inner strength and perseverance that have been proven as character traits of successful educators in urban and rural environments. Had we chosen another path after college we would have been negotiating our own salaries and benefits with the Human Resources staff in a “professional” environment – whether that be business, industry, academia, etc. Those personal would have worked with our managers/supervisors to place us appropriately in an allowed range of pay and benefits. We would have been competing in a business model for our jobs and our returns on those jobs. Our job security would have only been as strong as our performance and progress. Instead we chose for whatever personal reasons we all have to enter the classroom in Baltimore City. We still have those same in demand character traits and high quality education, but instead of acting as the professionals we would have been outside the classroom, we hold ourselves back by being considered a labor commodity.
I know I am not a laborer, but a professional. Someday I will be represented as such.
2 comments:
I agree with the general sentiment of this point. Teachers want to be treated like professionals, so they should be able to represent themselves in a professional setting. I think one possible problem would be the large-scale quality of teaching as a business. There are central offices for teachers, but there are thousands of teachers. It's a little different from law firms and doctor's offices that are less centralized. Schools are not in control of how much to pay teachers, and not all teachers are treated well all the time. I think unions still have some merit when teachers are not being heard.
The reason teachers have unions is because principals, generally, are so bad. This is even moreso the case in urban districts. Compare managers in the private sector-- their training, their behavior, their competency, etc--to those who manage others in education and you'll know why teachers feel they need unions.
Depoliticize public education (highly unlikely) and significantly improve managers in the field and we will no longer feel as though we need a union.
Unions aren't only about pay and benefits...they are also advocates for sanity in management. While I don't think most do a good job of that, it's still one of their purposes.
Post a Comment