Teacher Unionism in Changing Times: Is This the Real “New Unionism”?

This article provides a case study of union change in an environment in which radical school restructuring is taking place, and active strategies to weaken and marginalize organized teachers are being pursued by the state. The case study union is the National Union of Teachers in England. The article explores a number of different strategies open to teacher unions, utilizing a framework provided by Turner (2004). Drawing on data collected at a national level, and in three local authority areas, I argue that the National Union of Teachers’ response to the erosion of collective bargaining is best presented as an amalgam of strategies focused on workplace organizing, political campaigning, and coalition building. The data demonstrate considerable congruence between national and local strategies, although local data reveal considerable challenges in implementation and consequently considerable unevenness in local experiences.     

Charter School Attitudes and Practices in States with Diverse Public Sector Bargaining Laws

ABSTRACT

Virtually all state charter school legislation addresses teacher rights and working environment. Relationships with teacher unions are either specified in the law, or approval of the charter requires suitable provisions for employee hiring, firing, grievances, etc. Charter school evaluation almost without exception includes some references to these issues. This study uses an online survey to gather information gauging the effect of the ambient union environment on charter school practices and attitudes related to teacher rights and teacher participation in school administration and governance. In the first phase of a projected national study, three states were selected whose public sector collective bargaining environments are very different. Analysis of attitudes, practices, and demographics showed significant differences in views about teacher involvement in school governance, but little difference in views or practices concerning teacher unions in charter schools. Limited survey response resulted in collection methods which will be corrected in an anticipated national study. The online survey method of data collection is discussed. Implications for public policy and future charter school legislation are explored. Further studies should address variations in the impact of union involvement between public, private, and charter schools.     

Retaining public and political trust: teacher education in Scotland

This paper traces the key periods, players and events which have contributed to the shaping of the current landscape of teacher education in Scotland. Starting with the Wheatley Report and the formation of the General Teaching Council (Scotland) in the 1960s through to the most recent Donaldson Review of Teacher Education, we examine ebb and flow amongst GTCS, government, colleges of education and universities. Following its own trajectory, Scottish Education resisted and rejected policies emanating from an ‘English’ ideology, capitalised on respect for and influence of the GTCS, and successfully moved teacher education’s base from autonomous colleges to high-status universities. At the core of teacher education in Scotland is the continuing desire for partnership-working amongst key stakeholders: local and national government, GTCS, schools, teacher education institutions, teaching unions, parents and pupils. A teaching profession of trained graduates, underpinned by university-led subject study, is now moving steadily towards Masters-level professional learning for all. Although having faced some troubled episodes, this period has also been characterised by remarkable stability and consensus and, although still tackling the improvement agenda suggested by the recent Donaldson review, teacher education in Scotland has retained a high degree of public and political trust.     

State teacher union strength and student achievement

A new and very small literature has provided evidence that students have lower test scores in larger school districts and in districts in which the district's teachers union has negotiated a contract that is more favorable to the district's teachers. The teachers’ unions at the state and national levels contribute a great deal of money to candidates for state and federal offices. This gives the unions some influence in passing (defeating) bills that would help (harm) the state's teachers. We introduce two novel measures of the strength of the state-wide teachers union: union dues per teacher and union expenditures per student. These reflect the key role of political influence for state-wide unions. We provide remarkably strong evidence that students in states with strong teachers unions have lower proficiency rates than students in states with weak state-wide teacher unions.     

Creating a web of support: an important leadership strategy for advancing campus diversity

Research demonstrates that leadership, particularly among presidents, is important for moving a diversity agenda forward and make appreciable progress on it. The research questions pursued here are: What is the role of the college president in advancing a diversity agenda? What strategies do presidents identify as important to facilitating a diversity agenda? There were three main findings: (1) strategies are deployed in a non-linear way best represented through a web metaphor, (2) six sets of actors that serve as key nodes on the web and specific strategies were crucial to enhancing and deepening the web-developing an internal network, hiring, mentoring, partnering with faculty on the curriculum, supporting student affairs staff, working directly with and learning from students, and establishing external networks; and, (3) strategies within the human resource frame are noted by presidents as particularly important to moving a diversity agenda forward.     

The importance of workplace learning for trade unions: a study of the steel industry

This paper is concerned with the relationship between trade unions and learning in the workplace, particularly in relation to the enhancement of worker employability profiles. With the restructuring and modernising of the European steel industry as its context, this paper argues that the organisational and structural features of a sector have a profound influence on the way workplace learning is organised. Equally, trade union organisation and approaches also shape the learning agenda. In the steel industry, trade unions have failed to address the significance of workplace learning, partly because of the ways that they approach this topic. In the context of traditional sectors, with relatively vulnerable workforces, the weakened state of union bargaining positions means that they have limited capacity to address workforce employability or workplace participation. The outcome is that trade union involvement in skill formation and workplace learning is marginal.     

Rescaling education: reconstructions of scale in President Reagan’s 1983 State of the Union Address

This article presents a discourse analysis of President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 State of the Union Address. Focusing on questions of scale, the article considers how and with what effects Reagan reconstructs education as a local, state, national and global endeavour. It is argued that by situating education in a competitive global economy, Reagan justifies his project of rolling back social/educational programmes and placing the USA’s institutions more squarely in service to capitalist growth. Furthermore, it is argued that Reagan’s efforts to rescale education and society contribute to a New Right project of re-establishing a white-dominated racial order in the USA and around the world. Although Reagan did not prioritise education in his domestic agenda, his statements on education advanced the New Right’s project of rescaling society and set the terms of debate in education for subsequent presidents.     

Heroes,villains, or something in between? How “Right to Work” policies affect teachers,students, and education policymaking

Although the Janus v. AFCSME (2018) decision fundamentally changed the institutional context for U.S. teachers’ unions by placing all public school teachers in a “Right to Work” (RTW) framework, little research exists to conceptualize the effects of such policies that hinder unionization. To fill this gap, I exploit the different timing across states in the passage of RTW policies in a differences-in-differences framework to identify how exposure to a RTW policy affects students, teachers, and education policymaking. I find that RTW policies lead to declines in teachers’ union power, but contrary to what many union critics have argued, I find that efforts to weaken unions did not result in political opportunities for education reforms nor did they improve student achievement outcomes.     

后金融危机时代工会在劳资博弈中的生存困境——来自南海本田停工事件的启示

2010年南海本田停工事件反映出当前我国工会共同存在的一些问题：部分基层工会组织的天然缺位;地方工会职能的扭曲错位;工人代言人的处境艰难。这背后的深层原因有资本力量的步步强化,工会生命力基础一再削弱以及工会代表权强有力保障机制的缺乏。在劳工阶层与资本之间的博弈对抗愈演愈烈的趋势下,中国工会的制度建设方向迫切需要调整。     

A quest for legitimacy: on the professionalization policies of Sweden’s Teachers’ Unions

The aim of this article is to contribute to the ongoing discussion on teacher professionalism by analyzing the professional strategies of Sweden’s two teachers’ unions from an organizational perspective. Drawing on institutional theory, the article argues that the teachers’ unions’ focus on strategies of professionalization has as much to do with questions of legitimacy in the eyes of the public, as with any specific effort at transforming the practice of teaching in a professional direction. Against the background of two recent Swedish education reforms, the article shows that the unions are ‘trapped’ within a normative order emphasizing professionalization as the primary way of organizational development and legitimacy, resulting in a need for the unions to adopt professional attributes. In the case of the Swedish unions, this is accomplished through mimetic processes whereby union policies, aimed at the improvement of teaching, are modeled upon the medical profession, regardless of the differences between the technologies and practices of the occupations. In this way, the professional rhetoric of the unions is decoupled from the practice of teaching in order to maximize the public legitimacy needed for improving the declining societal status of teaching.     

The impact of teachers’ unions on educational outcomes: What we know and what we need to learn

In this paper we consider more than three decades of research on teachers' unions in the United States. We focus on unions' role as potential rent-seekers in the K-12 educational landscape, and specifically how teachers' unions impact district and student outcomes. We review important methodological improvements in the identification of union impacts and the measurement of contract restrictiveness that characterize a number of recent studies. We generally find that the preponderance of empirical evidence suggests that teacher unionization and union strength are associated with increases in district expenditures and teacher salaries, particularly salaries for experienced teachers. The evidence for union-related differences in student outcomes is mixed, but suggestive of insignificant or modestly negative union effects. Taken together, these patterns are consistent with a rent-seeking hypothesis. We conclude by discussing other important union activities, most notably in the political arena, and by noting that recent changes in state laws pertaining to teachers and teacher unions may provide context for new directions in scholarship.     

The foundation of the Turkish National Student Union and the attendance of the International Student Union at the Second Warsaw Congress

Abstract

In the early twentieth century many countries across the world established national student unions and sent representatives to the International Student Union. Believing this to be a fundamental need in a globalising world, the new Turkish state did not wait long before joining this union. In fact, several student associations in Turkey attended events run by the Turkish National Student Union, which was founded in the 1920s. Several student associations that had existed before the Turkish National Student Union and were founded by university students after the Second Constitutional Period, began to organise events such as debates, protests, and conferences related to the political, social, and cultural issues of the day. For instance, they organised protests against those teachers who did not support the national struggle. In 1924, these disparate unions, having previously functioned without any particular structure, were re-constituted as a national union, the Turkish National Student Union. The code of practice of this union was formed by looking at those of the unions of several European nations. Some members of this union attended the Warsaw meeting of the International Student Union in September 1924 to represent Turkey. It could be said that a culturally transformed and newly reformed Turkey was thereby presenting itself to the international world of education. The realisation of this project and Turkey’s participation in the Second Warsaw Congress is discussed in this article. Printed sources and reports of the period also allow us to take into consideration the foundation history of the Student Union established in 1919.     

安徽省异质性区域图书馆联盟研究

由区域内的公共、高校及科研三大系统的图书馆组成的异质性区域图书馆联盟,对区域经济社会文化的发展所产生的效益是多方位的,也是同质性区域图书馆联盟所无法达到的。通过对中外异质性区域图书馆联盟实践研究,分析构建安徽省异质性区域图书馆联盟的必要性,并提出构建安徽省异质性区域图书馆联盟的具体策略。     

工会法律角色初探

劳动者自愿结合的工人阶级的群众组织是我国工会的本质属性,工会具有相对独立的法律地位。代表和维护劳动者的合法权益是工会的基本职责。工会有对用人单位的经济裁员发表意见、对用人单位单方解除劳动合同的监督、参与处理劳动争议等权利。维护劳动者合法权益是工会最根本的工作,工会的一切工作都要以维护劳动者的合法权益为中心。     

略论近代国立大学校长之任职资格与教师聘任

近代国立大学校长之任命,其路径取向基本上是沿着行政干预减少、教育渐趋独立的方向发展,而校长的任职资格,虽然没有明文专门规定,但于近代中国高等教育法律法令体系中亦可略见其概。析其源流,近代中国国立大学校长的任命与任职资格乃深受德美法大学之综合影响。在校长与教师聘任之关系上,历经了校长独具权责至与其它机构共享聘任权力的过程。     

努力加强和推动工会经审工作

摘要：工会经审工作是工会工作的重要组成部分,它是工会组织一项必不可少的基础工作。加强工会经审工作,是维护工会经济利益、促进工会组织发展、发挥工会有效职能的有力保障。只有确实管好用好工会财产,才能做到工会财产的保值增值,才能产生良好的社会效益,维护好工会声誉,树立良好形象。     

Lifelong learning: a national trade union strategy in a global economy

The paper considers the role of trade unions in lifelong learning, their strategic approach to lifelong learning, and the opportunities and limitations set by the current stage of globalized capitalist development. The paper has four sections, the first of which considers the relationship between ‘modernization’ as a trade union project and concepts such as reflexive modernity and risk society which have structured much debate in the social sciences in recent years. Secondly, there is a discussion of the exact nature of the role of trade unions in education and training. While it will be suggested that recent developments have greatly increased the scope of trade union involvement in education and training, the third section of the paper will argue that these developments do not represent a coherent strategy on the part of unions, but more a series of responses to the complexity of the contemporary workplace. Based on a theoretical interrogation of data from a number of empirical and policy document sources,¹ the paper will argue that there is a need for conceptual clarity in this field. In the final section, the context of globalization will move to the foreground, in the context of a discussion on the relationship between national trade union policies and global capitalist development.     

Making diversity safe for democracy: American pluralism and the presidential local address, 1885–1992

Research suggests that modern U.S. presidents increasingly use the local address to speak to voters where they live, both literally and figuratively. Yet most explanations of these speeches suggest that their political efficacy is limited to winning votes. Here I call for a reconsideration of the local address as part of rhetorical presidents’ responses to U.S. citizens’ diversity. Specifically, I provide a historical‐critical account of why presidents may have been able to use the local address to manage American pluralism and then offer a reading of how they might have done so, using examples from 1885–1992.     

如何有效开展高校工会的维权职能

近年来随着社会的发展,高校工会的存在责任和性质又有了新的发展,通过对高校工会维权现状的调查显示,绝大多数高校工会组织都能紧扣学校自身改革和发展的主题开展维权工作,但由于受传统发展观影响,高校工会迄今为止大都尚未能清楚完全的认识自身的特殊地位和作用,导致在高校人员维权过程中还存在着诸多问题反很多困境。     

企业工会在员工维权中角色缺失职能弱化的原因与对策

严格按照《工会法》及其他相关法律、法规规定的程序和方式选举产生工会委员会,与时俱进完善工会立法,要搞好工会自身建设,提升工会代表及工会委员会组成人员的素质,加强对工会权益行政保护与司法保护的力度,赋予工会在与企业交涉无效的情况下有组织员工与用人单位进行集体对抗直至罢工的权力等对策。