by Kenneth A. Megill
For fifty years I have supported and worked for collective bargaining for educators in Florida. I still believe in organizing for collective power. However, I no longer think industrial-style bargaining is the most effective way to exercise it.
The ways information is transmitted and knowledge is accessed are changing fundamentally. The nature of education is changing along with them. How people learn is no longer determined by how old they are, or what institution they attend. Fourth-graders learn to code. College students learn to read and write. Workers go online to learn new skills. Everyone needs to learn to think critically.
Florida school districts, colleges, and universities are organized and managed like industrial corporations, and adopted an industrial model of unionism to match. Florida imported collective bargaining from the private sector with added provisions to ensure that unions remain weak. As a result, a minority of educators covered by collective bargaining are members of the organizations that represent them, but these organizations are required to provide full services to members and non-members alike.
The hopes we had in the 1970s never materialized under this structure. Educators wanted more control over their day-to-day working conditions, but collective bargaining became just another tool to disempower individuals and maintain centralized control. The Boards, Commissions, Departments and the plethora of middle managers that control and govern the work of educators are dinosaurs.
The new technologies that are transforming how we work, learn, consume and communicate are not going away. The future management of education will look less like a 1910 auto factory and more like Uber or Airbnb. Our model of unionism should reflect this new reality – and ensure that educators maintain and grow their collective power amid these changes, rather than watch it erode.
Although most full-time educators in Florida are employed by institutions governed by school boards and various state boards that have collective bargaining agreements, education is increasingly being provided outside these structures. None of the nearly 40,000 educators in Florida’s K-12 private schools are organized. Nor are most of the state’s 14,000-and-counting charter-school teachers. In higher education, more and more educators are “contingent” faculty and not covered by collective agreements. Educators in the burgeoning health industry, as well as university agricultural extension agents and faculty and law faculty are not covered by existing collective bargaining agreements.
Each year, new virtual schools, colleges and universities emerge. New models of education loom on the horizon, such as course choice, microschools and education savings accounts.
A 21st-century educators’ organization should embrace these customized learning options for students, while empowering individual educators to make the most of these new approaches. It should enable bottom-up innovation and peer-to-peer collaboration. That requires flexibility that cannot be achieved under traditional, highly centralized collective-bargaining regimes.
I do not arrive at this position lightly. I have been a progressive political activist for over fifty years. I was hired in 1966 by the University of Florida to teach in its philosophy department. I became a leader in the anti-war and civil rights movements, and began working with my colleagues to organize a strong faculty union. At the time, public employee collective bargaining was against the law in Florida, but we were determined to change that because we believed educators should have the power to control the institutions where we worked. We saw industrial collective bargaining as a way to get that power.
My political activism led the late state Sen. Tom Slade to call for my firing. Soon after receiving an outstanding professor award from UF’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the state’s political power structure began moving aggressively to get rid of me. After a prolonged legal and political struggle, the state Board of Regents ignored the recommendations of the UF Philosophy Department, the College of Arts and Sciences and an independent hearing examiner that I be granted tenure, and fired me in 1972. But as my friend and colleague Sam Andrews told me, “the faculty didn’t fire you,” so I stayed to help build our union.
In 1976, the United Faculty of Florida won the right to collectively bargain for over 6,000 State University System faculty and professional employees. We were the first public employee union to file for representation under Florida’s collective bargaining law. After a year of bitter negotiations, we achieved the first higher education collective bargaining agreement in a “right-to-work” state. Today UFF is the collective bargaining representative for 30,000 faculty and professional employees.
I am extremely proud of what we accomplished in those days, but that was then and this is now.
Today’s education unions are conservative in that they operate to preserve the status quo. Embracing a more progressive model of unionism will be difficult for education unions. But if they fail to adapt, they’re going to find themselves in the same death spirals as daily newspapers, taxi cab companies, and America’s private-sector trade unions.
Opponents of teachers unions are wrong to claim they are losing members because they have outlived their usefulness. Empirical evidence is clear that employees benefit from collective representation. The question is whether today’s unions can preserve those benefits while enabling the flexibility, autonomy and entrepreneurialism educators will need as we transition from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age.
In this new age, educators are knowledge workers who mold and shape other knowledge workers. Organizations representing educators as knowledge workers need to:
- Embrace individual empowerment and full school choice. Education should support the wise choices of parents, students, communities, and educators, and not centrally-controlled bureaucracies.
- Represent individual educators regardless of where they work. There are several models in the United States for educators to emulate, including the actors and writer guilds, the freelancers union, and the professional consultants association. These organizations provide professional development, retirement, insurance, job placement, political advocacy and other support services. Organizations such as the NRA and AARP are advocacy and service membership organizations that are effective in the political arena.
- Foster and support communities of practice to enable greater collaboration. As knowledge workers, educators share common bodies of knowledge. Communities of educational practitioners are where research and professional development occur, and should be supported and led, in part, by educator organizations. Communities of practice can play a major role in establishing and enforcing professional standards, licensing and certification for educators.
- Support and enable more flexible work environments for educators. Educator organizations should not require that their members only work for certain institutions. Educator organizations should help educators contract with a diverse set of employers, including district schools, private schools, charter schools, home school cooperatives and individual families. Educator organizations built for individual educators rather than institutions can ensure appropriate salaries and benefits, and then contract with providers for these educators’ services.
- Provide mediation services to resolves disputes between and among individual educators and educational providers. The rigidity of collective bargaining agreements often works against win-win resolutions to disagreements. Mediation services are less rigid and make win-win solutions more achievable.
Despite decades of failure to achieve power for educators, I still think educator organizations, including those that are currently certified bargaining agents, have time to get it right. They need to let go of the past and focus on empowering individual educators, instead of protecting ineffective institutions and the politicians and bureaucrats who run them.
Educators need a new, more progressive unionism for the knowledge age. It can be done.
