This Moment: Labor Day

Our collective is taking this moment to reflect as individuals on how we see the struggle against Trump's massive assault unfolding. Like most of our readers, four collective members are working, and the start of the school year diminishes their time for reading, writing, and thinking about education beyond their jobs.

At the same time, as a group we are considering options to expand our "greenhouse," creating different spaces for conversation, and inviting others to join us in our project. Proposals we are considering include Zoom discussions as well as having guest authors. On the table as well is considering how to revise The Future of Our Schools to take into account what has occurred since the first edition: Trump1 and Trump2, and resistance that emerged to it; changes to education under COVID; alteration of teaching with unregulated technology; the new neoliberal project; and what's occurring with both political parties.

This Labor Day let's remind ourselves and others that our work in education counts. Teaching has a higher density of union membership than any other occupation. We work in communities that have elected school boards, arguably the last and strongest bastion of democracy. We have ideas about what our students should learn and how. We are responsible for educating the next generation, which makes us dangerous to tyrants and the powerful elites that aim to control the society. In a nutshell, we have enormous, mostly unrealized power. At the same time, as a group, we are disbursed geographically; diverse in our political beliefs and social class origins. Our work is under attack like never before, on multiple fronts.

While no one can predict the future, I think we are in for worse, and yet what we've witnessed and done can also make us wiser and stronger than we've been to this point. Fighting is a necessary but insufficient condition to win this battle: We have to fight smart, learning as we organize, applying and sharing our knowledge. I hope the ideas I've proposed in our substack thus far have helped readers face this moment, feel less fearful, more centered, more clearheaded.

Here's to a Labor Day that recalls struggles we've lost, honors what we and the generations that preceded us accomplished, and encourages us to create the world working people deserve.

Solidarity!

Lois Weiner

Chloe: A Reminder

On Thursday, August 28, I marched with members of my teacher union, the Washington Teachers Union, in a labor march to start off the solidarity season in Washington, DC. Some signs included, "Hands off DC," "Immigrants are welcome here," "Que se vaya Trump, ya!," "Solidarity for good," "Tax the rich," and "It's better in a union." We marched because the labor movement is integral to fighting the occupation of cities, the deportation of immigrants, the loss of human rights, and the oligarchic fascist capitalism that has taken hold of the United States. These are extremely depressing, nauseating times in which innocent children and their families are dying every day in the genocide in Gaza enabled by US tax dollars that are also being used to disappear hard-working immigrants, to incarcerate young people of color, and to take rights away from women and LGBTQ+ people. Yet marching with other people, including fellow teachers and school staff, who understand their role and the role of labor in solidarity movements, brought me hope. We are louder and stronger together, and we know how to keep each other safe. I am also optimistic thanks to the amazing organizing that is happening in school communities. There are know your rights trainings, walking school buses, safe passages, community centers for youth; communities coming together to protect the most vulnerable. Historically, schools and unions have been sites of resistance, and they continue to be so today. While I still feel depressed and anxious most of the time, the march was a reminder of the power of education and labor to unite large groups of people to bring about hope, creativity, and change.

Leah: The Possibility of Workers

Labor day, the holiday marking the start of the school year. Well into my tenure as a teacher that’s about all I thought of it. Co-founding Newark Education Workers Caucus in 2012 and co-leading it for the next four years changed that. Locating myself as a worker on the socioeconomic spectrum shifted my relationality to my work. Through political education and organizing, I learned how the neoliberal project was repurposing the factory model of public education–for profit. School systems became markets and families customers. Unfunded mandates called for us, teachers, to speed up our work on the assembly line of children moving through our classrooms. Fast forward to becoming a teacher educator, the future jobs of my student teachers are threatened by GenAI. Will educator preparation programs bend to the political economic winds, much like AFT, and ring their own death knell by welcoming the wolf in? Only time will tell.

And during this time, we can't stop organizing. We can't stop pushing. The workers are the people, the proletariat, the masses. We must continue to call for an end to genocide in Gaza, Sudan; anywhere on this planet where humanitarian crises are taking place, these must end. We must pick up alternative practices for how we relate to each other and to the land. I have found myself working in the field of environmental justice as a policy analyst. And though I’m not unionized, I advocate for those who are (and aren’t) who work in the transportation and maritime industries–the seafarers, longshoremen, truck drivers, and rail workers. I work on legislation for clean energy and clean air, for Climate Justice. It may seem like a jump from education, but it's really not because all aspects of life are atrophied by the touch of capitalism, by the greed and the dehumanization. As workers, we can stand to learn from and with each other so that we may better see the intersections of our work experiences, like I’m learning from the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE), a rank-and-file run union that makes clear “it’s the members who run our union — in a democratic and collective manner. The members set the policies of the national union and make all of the decisions of importance that affect their own local unions.” Members come from all different sectors, not just those listed in the name. We truly do need this, “The Union for Everyone.”

Keith: On Labor Day, We Must Look in the Mirror

According to Nation Center of Education Statistics (2016) and WeAreTeachers.com, 70% of our nation’s educators are unionized, and according to polling by EdWeek, in October 2024, 50% of educators planned on voting for Kamala Harris and /Tim Walz, while 39% planned for voting for Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. After both candidates shared their vision for the country, I find it appalling that nearly 40% of our nation’s education professionals opted for what we are experiencing now. The military takeovers of primarily minority cities, the re-erecting of Confederate statues and renaming of military bases after Confederate generals, the gutting of the Department of Education, the defunding of the Center for Disease Control and National Institute of Health, and the forced deportation of immigrants (both “illegal” and legal) are Trump initiatives a sizable minority of educators approved of. And while it was shocking that 29% of educators voted for Trump in 2016, that 13% more educators decided they wanted to Make America Great Again again demands that we take a sobering look inwards in order for unionism within education to mean anything beyond personal self-interest.

As a Black male history teacher and adjunct professor of political science in Camden, NJ, I witnessed firsthand students crying on November 6th (2024) when it became clear a known racist, sex offender, and convicted felon with fascist proclivities would be taking the reins of the country once again. Children expressed concern about whether they’d have money to go to college, whether their siblings would have school lunches, and yes, if their family members or loved ones would be snatched from them and taken away as Immigration and Customs Enforcement quickly began patrolling Camden’s streets. And again, a significant portion of our educator colleagues chose this reality despite the endorsements of Kamala Harris from the AFT and NEA. The ascension of Trump 2.0 and the support of 40% of our nation’s educators makes clear we must be forthright about the role race and racism played in the re-election of Trump, even among those in public education - a field still dominated numerically by white women and white men.

With a clear choice was between two candidates and their two disparate visions of a future America, that so many of our colleagues still chose Donald Trump indicates that this Labor Day, we need to be honest about why so many within our body were willing to disregard all we knew about Trump and voted for him anyway and, in so doing, put our profession at risk, as well as our children’s futures. Certainly, neoliberalism is an enormous problem that has plagued every facet of our world for fifty years and counting. And yes, artificial intelligence presents a looming danger within education and for the occupational opportunities of future jobseekers. But it seems to me, those matters significant as they are, pale in comparison to the centuries-old white supremacy problem that America has yet to come to grips with or correct, and is also rearing its ugly head within our profession.

This Labor Day, I am imploring union leaders and education practitioners to do some deep and meaningful soul-searching of ourselves individually and our unions collectively. We have to do the work of asking ourselves and others some tough questions that elicit self-reflection as well as critique and, from there, commit to do better by our students and our profession. We cannot afford to put our heads in the sand and act as if we do not have a serious race problem within our educator ranks. If Labor Day is a time to honor organized labor as well as the sacrifices made and the gains hard-earned, it risks being merely symbolic if we cannot be forthright in assessing how far we have to go to embody the ideals of unions and unionism.

This Labor Day should be a start of us demanding we do, and be, better.

Erin: A Labor Day to Remember/Recover

In my job as a higher ed worker in Oklahoma, one of my responsibilities is to create spaces for teachers/prospective teachers to deepen their pedagogical knowledge by reflecting on who they are and how they came to be in my “teacher research” class. As part of that work, I try to create opportunities for them to understand their own intellectual genealogies and make connections to the traditions of knowledge that shape how we know how to do our work and our dreams for that work. Many of the teachers in my classes come from families of teachers. Mothers and aunties who were proud union members and instilled the importance of the union and the profession in their relatives. Some others seek to transform education for children and youth in their communities — first generation Indigenous teachers or descendants of Freedmen who follow in the footsteps of relatives who persisted, survived, and resisted boarding school assimilation or school segregation.

On the day that I wrote this, I called and texted my relatives to learn more about the knowledge traditions of workers in my own family and in the place I was born and raised, Chicago. My Grandpa Henry, a machinist who helped to raise me, worked for Phoenix Closures, a factory that produced lids for glass jars. As my mom recounted to me, he was on strike more than once in the 1960s and 70s and eventually laid off as manufacturing plants shuttered in the city. I knew most of these things already, but I sought dates and other details to help me make sense of his life within the schema of what I now know through studying labor history. I regret not asking my Grandpa Henry more about his experience in his union and on strike before he passed in 2005, when I was a college senior and just starting to study the world outside the worldview created during my formative teenage years in Chicagoland suburbia.

In 2007, I lived in my Grandpa’s bungalow house in Central Stickney, purchased on his factory wage. At the time I lived there, the neighborhood had changed quite a lot after my parents’ generation — 2nd or 3rd gen Polish American immigrants — moved out of the city to the sprawling burbs, replaced by predominantly Mexican American 2nd gen immigrants moving out of entryway neighborhoods like Little Village to buy single family homes, joining more recent first gen Polish immigrants and the white working class folks who remained. My mother grew up in a neighborhood just doors down from so many aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends who would gather in my grandparents’ basement to party and to help each other in life. That sense of community and place was very much present in the neighborhood when I lived there as an adult, but not necessarily in the sub-division neighborhoods where my parents’ generation moved to — winding mazes of streets where people could really only walk for exercise instead of to go to a shop or cafè or bar, ADT security signs in the front yards, and awash in strip malls and big box stores. My dad spent, sometimes, 4 hours per day for a decade commuting to work along expressways constructed strategically through predominantly Black and Latine working class neighborhoods for the pleasure of living in the southwest burbs.

Labor Day seems like a good day to consider what knowledge was lost in that white flight era that shaped my childhood, that shaped suburbanization, standardization, and professionalization of white, formerly working class families like mine, and to reflect on how to recover that knowledge.

As I traveled down this rabbit hole, I was reminded that some of the most organized and militant unions in Chicago were those of predominantly women garment workers in the early 20th century. Based on one record I found, I learned that my Grandpa Henry may have possibly been unionized under the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Association, which became in 1976 the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers of America, which organized various manufacturing shops in Chicago. The ACWA was formed in 1914 by immigrant socialists who embraced social justice unionism. One of the larger unions in Chicago at the time, I learned that after it became the ACTWA, the union organized in solidarity with the South African anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s. Today, alongside other garment workers’ unions, it’s part of the longer history of Workers United, affiliated with the SEIU, and, as it states, follows in the footsteps of its predecessors’ “relentless pursuit of social and economic justice”.

Later this week, I look forward to sharing what I learned about how AI is reshaping our working conditions in higher and K12 education in ways that we need to attend to now. Much like the ACWA’s “social unionism”, I consider how our responsibility to organize our workplaces is part of our responsibility to create (or refuse) the society produced by our work. Teacher-Worker-Research.

Solidarity forever!