{"id":1631,"date":"2014-08-27T12:29:13","date_gmt":"2014-08-27T16:29:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1631"},"modified":"2014-08-27T12:31:13","modified_gmt":"2014-08-27T16:31:13","slug":"this-labor-day-i-want-a-union","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1631","title":{"rendered":"This Labor Day, I Want a Union"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been working this past year on an effort to encourage people to say the words \u201clabor union\u201d (without epithet) at their place of worship the weekend before Labor Day.\u00a0 My favorite encounter came this summer.\u00a0 I was at a worker justice rally in downtown Raleigh one Monday, handing out snappy fliers with a picture of an apple pie.\u00a0 The flier read \u201cLabor Day is as American as apple pie.\u00a0 So are labor unions!\u201d\u00a0 I spotted a labor trailblazer in a group of people, so I waited politely for my turn to talk to him.\u00a0 I flashed my smile and pulled out a flier, with flourish.\u00a0 He looked at it and said, without a blink, \u201cDo you have a union?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cNo,\u201d I answered back.\u00a0 \u201cWhy not?\u201d he asked.\u00a0 Huh.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"norma-rae-union\"<\/a>I am an educator, and I was raised by a public school teacher.\u00a0 When I first saw the movie \u201cNorma Rae,\u201d I knew who Sally Field reminded me of.\u00a0 The workplace was different, but the moxie was familiar.\u00a0 First, I need to tell you a bit about my mother.\u00a0 I grew up in West Texas, and my dad is a Methodist minister.\u00a0 We moved seven times before I turned twelve, because that\u2019s the way the pastorate works in the Methodist church.\u00a0 My mom is 4\u2019 9\u201d and weighed about 100 pounds wet.\u00a0 She followed my dad for his work, and she had to start over repeatedly.\u00a0 She had to clamber up from the bottom of the isolated systems that were public school districts in Texas at that time.\u00a0 (I trust things have changed since then . . .)\u00a0 These systems were often uniquely absurdist, overseen by coaches (all men) who may or may not have been gifted by God for administration.\u00a0 I say \u201cuniquely\u201d absurdist because each school system, whether overseen by a gifted or inept administrator, had people lower in the system trying to curry favor and aver disfavor from the particular man in charge in our \u201cright to hire and fire state.\u201d\u00a0 When the pater familias <\/i>has free rein, the people below him have to figure out the explicit or opaque rules of the particular game.\u00a0 My mom had to figure out how to secure and keep her job, again and again and again, under a new set of rules in a new context, while teaching whatever the school system had need for at the time.\u00a0 She is a genius, and she has the pluck of Crystal Lee Sutton (the real Norma Rae) so she was somehow able still to love teaching junior and senior high for three decades and also truly to befriend, love, support, and encourage the teachers around her.\u00a0 (Her colleagues still tell me stories of such when I go home.)\u00a0 But my mom always wanted and needed a teachers\u2019 union.<\/span><\/p>\n

My mom\u2019s bosses are all retired or dead now (may they rest in peace) but my own bosses are quite living.\u00a0 And I have been reticent to link my volunteer efforts for labor justice to my own calling as a teacher.\u00a0 I have a new big boss, and she actually seems truly wonderful.\u00a0 But I need a labor union just as much as my mom did.\u00a0 Universities are as pressurized by funding stresses and small fiefdoms as any other institution or corporation in the United States today.\u00a0 Faculty members who kowtow to the favored local or national magnates are encouraged, or at least not discouraged.\u00a0 I\u2019ve learned through subtle and sometimes overt cues in my fifteen years of teaching that using catch phrases either that support the magnate\u2019s pocketbook or stay sufficiently theoretical to remain above any particularly moneyed fray are two ways to get ahead or at least stay afloat.\u00a0 I\u2019ve found that curious and gifted people around me spend too much of their intellect and energy just treading water.<\/span><\/p>\n

What I need in my workplace is not a media-savvy movement, with a snazzy name and a recognizable visage attached.\u00a0 And, what I need is not a patronizing boycott, with people spending their money only at institutions or business that have benevolent leaders who seem, when possible, to treat us workers as human beings.\u00a0 What I need is a union.\u00a0 I need a working coalition of educators who support one another to pursue our gifts of teaching, writing and research with dignity and the freedom to write without fear of reprisal.\u00a0 I need the power of collective bargaining, so we see one another as co-workers and not competitors.\u00a0 And I need the tools to organize, so we can work together and secure the best working place for our students and ourselves.\u00a0 So, this Labor Day weekend, I am praying to God for the courage to say I want a union.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been working this past year on an effort to encourage people to say the words \u201clabor union\u201d (without epithet) at their place of worship the weekend before Labor Day.\u00a0 My favorite encounter came this summer.\u00a0 I was at a worker justice rally in downtown Raleigh one Monday, handing out snappy fliers with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,10,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church","category-ethics","category-organizing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7EotM-qj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1631"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1635,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1631\/revisions\/1635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}