The Power of Teachers’ Unions

to be back in school. At the center of these debates were teachers unions themselves, one of the most significant remaining forms of labor unionism in America today and also in certain respects among the most controversial. To discuss the question of public sector unions power, COVID nineteen and where we're going on this complex of difficult issues. We're joined by Randy Weingart. Randy is the head of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers union in the country.

That makes her one of the most powerful, visible and vocal union leaders in the United States today, and she's also a person who, as a lawyer, has a powerful understanding of the constitutional and legal issues around unionism, as well as the history of unionism and its rise at fall. Randy, thank you so much for being I want to talk to you about the grand topics that you've been so engaged in over the last fifteen months, but I also

want to go to the bigger picture. I don't just want to talk more about COVID and closures, but I want to talk about what has happened to unions, both private sector and public sector unions over recent decade and what that's meant for the power of workers taken as a whole. So I guess the place I want to

start is with a kind of middle level question. Having lived through and been a central actor in the very intense debates around school closing and school openings, do you think that the power of at least public sector unions like the AFT has increased or decreased through the process of the last year and a half. That is a

really good question. I think that understanding of who teachers are and what they need to do the work to help students has increased, and I think the needing to have organization and a union, as a Philip Randolph said so many years ago as a way to create power that has increased, certainly amongst workers if you watch what

the right wing does. Certainly our power has increased. But oftentimes what the right wing does is to pretend we have far more power than we really do, to try to slay that as opposed to actually listen to what

we're saying. So I'm balanced. I think the answer is yes, But it's certainly not enough power to actually ensure that working people and working communities, particularly parents, kids, and those who make a difference in their lives like teachers and emergency medical workers and meat packers and things like that, had the safety conditions that they needed for us to

actually navigate through COVID better than we did. Is it fair to say, Randy, that in just about every case, at least the ones that I know of, teachers unions in the end one the fights about back to school, or I don't know of an instance. Maybe I'm wrong where a union was essentially coerced back to work when it wasn't ready to do so, or do I have

that wrong? I think where there were unions that had decent relationships with parents and with superintendents, and in states that understood that safety was a real concern, like safety

was the way back in. I think that we did win because we were able to show that safety was the way back into schooling, not the obstacle to school But there were lots of different places across the country where there are no unions and where governors pretended that COVID didn't exist, but where there were unions, where people saw that safety really was the way in. I do think we were able to reopen schools safely for in person learning. The issue about in person learning was never

the debate and the dispute. Any educator pre COVID would have told you how important in person learning was. I do think that COVID has made the case for why unions are important, because who else is going to protect the safety and well being of the workers and of the people who use public services and who use private manufacturing services like beat processing plants. Randy, what do you

think of as the costs of those victories? So I hear you saying, and this sounds sensible to me that both for people who are in unions and for people who need them but aren't in them, one of the big lessons off COVID was without a union to protect you you can be put in a situation where you have to return to the workplace under conditions which you don't experience as safe, and that seems like a powerful argument.

On the other hand, there was pretty clearly some public backlash, at least among upper middle class parents about the thought that the school unions, the teachers unions, were too powerful in the sense that there was a genuine dispute about whether kids should go back to school and when, and as you were saying, the unions did for the most

part win those fights. Now, obviously one of the things about exercising powers you can't make everybody happy all of the time, and you have to act on behalf of your constituents. But I'm wondering how you think about the overall costs to teachers unions of the victories that you want, again conceding that they were victories and also that it was probably good that you won. Nevertheless, there's still some

real world downsides. So look, I think that the fact that you saw the tensions between parents and teachers were really terrible. This is part of the reason why you hear be hesitating when somebody says is it a win? Is it a loss? Teachers want what kids need, and most of the time, for us to be successful in

educating kids, parents need to be our partners. So when you see dissonance in that and that there was a real disagreement, particularly you saw in upper middle class households, that is a real problem and we need to reconnect together. But I think what also happened is that you see the inequality of how COVID affected people, because in black and brown communities, where COVID affected people much more lethally,

you see much more of a shared understanding. And frankly, in poll results that we've seen, we've done parent polling with several other groups, there's overwhelming support in that polling for educators, education unions, and for public schools. So I think you saw a real divide based upon how COVID actually impacted people's personal health and their community's personal health. In places where it didn't have the kind of impact,

you saw a real friction. In places where it had real impact, you saw much less friction because there was a shared lived experience. And I think that the least thing I'd say is one of the things that we saw that was done better in other countries than in America was that in other countries the public health concerns and the honesty about them and the transparency about it and how to deal with the public health concerns created a shared community, which it didn't in the United States.

Do you think that the sense that many teachers have of not being fully appreciated in all that they do, that is to say, not having the ordinary person understand the full range of things the teachers do was exacerbated by the struggles that in some places, as you were describing, did happen over COVID. I mean, I certainly had the sense from my friends who are public school teachers that they felt much more misunderstood even than they usually do,

in this last period of time. Yes, I would actually divide it up into three different periods of time March twenty twenty through June July twenty twenty, the fall of twenty twenty through basically November December, and then the winter spring of twenty twenty one. And I think what happened was between March and June of twenty twenty there was a shared sense of teachers and parents that we're in it together. We're all trying to figure out these remote platforms.

We're trying to do the best we can, and there was huge appreciation for teachers because parents at that point had a front row seat because they're listening on the computer to what a teacher is doing, trying to pull things out of kids, trying to make kids feel okay, trying to do that. So I think that you saw

actually more appreciation than teachers normally get. Between March and June, when the data started coming in over the summer to the fall, combined with Trump and Divorce's refusal to actually implement with fidelity the CDC guidelines or give us any resources to actually do that, you saw data that basically said kids don't get as affected, and Trump and Divorce were saying, okay, because kids don't get as affected, all of you have to be back in school, with no

understanding that the teachers were affected and their lives could be at risk, and unlike nurses and doctors, were getting none of the safeguards that they needed. So that's when you saw a lot of real stress and adjita because teachers always wanted to be back in school. We saw that impolling results throughout the year that if we could get the safeguards seventy to eighty percent of MIND members said I want to be in school, because we know

how important that was. The real place which huge stress was January through probably March or April, before the vaccines were seen as such a game changer, because essentially what you saw was that parents were saying to teachers, I don't really care whether you feel like you're going to get sick or not. My kids need to be in school, and teachers who are saying, I want to be in school, I just don't want to get sick. So I need the safety safeguards and so we need the layered mitigation,

the testing, and then ultimately the vaccines. And so by April and May things had really flipped around. But January,

February March were very tough. I love that analysis. Do you think part of what was so bad January February March of twenty twenty one is that there was also an emerging view, which I think is still not definitively the consensus, but an emerging view among epidemiologists that at least for elementary school kids, they were very unlikely to be even asymptomatic carriers who were going to pass on COVID nineteen when I speak to epidemiologists now about what

could have been done differently. One of the things they say is, we didn't know it at the time, but if this ever happens again, we might have been able to keep open schools at the elementary school level. And so was that part of what was happening at that period of time that that view was starting to filter through.

I think that view had started to filter through last summer through September and October, which is part of the reason why we as a union kept saying let's reopen elementary schools fulsomely and hang back on middle and high school. But I think the dissonance was that the government, the people who were supposed to be out there basically saying this is what we know about the science, this is what's happening, they weren't trusted for a whole mess of reasons.

What you're seeing because of the disinformation in the United States is that you had lots of cross information, and

I think that made things much much worse. But we saw it as well in the battery of experts we were talking to, and part of what we were trying to do was create trust and transparency that if we had these safeguards in elementary schools, meaning the mass, the physical distancing, decent enough ventilation that we believed, our union believed, I believed that we could actually keep people safe in elementary schools because of what the epidemiologists were telling us.

Randy drawing back a little bit from the particularities of the last year and change, and that must be hard to do, having been probably twenty four seven, three sixty five living through them, I want to ask you about the broader trend seen in sort of broader historical terms.

The last fifty years have seen an enormous decline in the power of private sector unions, that is, the unions that do their negotiating every day on the opposite side of the table from classic capital right from management of

private entities. But while they have declined, public sector unions that negotiate typically across the table from governments, have not declined to the same degree, and in some ways have actually done reasonably well for themselves, measured, for example, the maybe not by the fight you had to go through over the last year and change, but by your outcomes. Well,

let me just put it this way. Union decline didn't just happen simply because of globalization or because of the Third and fourth Industrial Revolution, there is a fifty year assault on unionization. The managerial interests and capitalists interests in the country made a decision that shared prosperity was not one of their goals. Now fast forward to now, people see, including many capitalists, that when you have this level of inequity,

there's a real problem in the country. And you have, frankly, the president who is more supportive of unions as an economic theory for lifting wages and lifting voices and prosperity of workers than probably any other president beforehand, inclusive of FDR. Now what happened in the public sector is that take teachers, who are now more unionized than any other group of employees.

They understood that individually they had no power or very little power, and so they understood that getting together and trying to create some power was important in order to have better incomes, better conditions, and being able to do their jobs better. And so you see that as well with other public sector unions. But the point is, we do not have the kind of power that the right wing attributes to us. They attribute it to us so

that they can try to slay us. What we've seen in the last ten years is that unions have gotten more popular. You see this in the Gallop polling every Labor Day, and that's because people want to have some degree of agency over their lives. If we use the collective wisdom of educators and use collective bargaining to try to actually make education better than that a win win situation. But is also true of people who work in private

sector unions. But one of the big differences is that the public sector is negotiating with people who are elected, and so the public sector unions can participate in trying to vote for support and encourage the election of public servants who will be responsive to the unions interests and needs, whereas if you work in a private sector union, you don't, for the most part, yet to participate in electing management. Surely that's a significant part of how public sector unions

justifiably exercise power, is it not? So? As a member of a union, Noah, who actually pushed for reforms in New York City that our members could no longer run for school board, I think that's a false equivalency and a false reading of power. I think that the issue has been that in the private sector, we are down to less than seven percent of people in unions, and therefore we don't have the density that we used to

have in terms of community. I think the issue is that what unions end up doing, both in the public and the private sector, is that we try to get people who are pro working people elected in positions of power. So I think that that's just a canard that is used to try to undermine having unions throughout the nation. From the standpoint of classic Marxian analysis, unions were an attempt to solve the social problem of the struggle between

labor and capital. To at least more moderate people influenced by Marx let's say, socialists or social democrats, labor unionism seemed like it was supposed to be, in its glory period, say up through the early nineteen sixties, a kind of semi permanent solution to this struggle. Now, as you said, fewer than seven percent of private sector workers are unionized, and that means that capital has won just a tremendous

victory over labor. So isn't that a tragedy from the standpoint of labor, I mean, doesn't it tell the story of labor unionism as mostly having a succeeded for some period of time, but then historically no longer continue to succeed with the public sector unions almost as a kind of accidental survival because they're not fighting against capital directly.

So I'm going to answer it in the same way as I answered it before, because I think that the labor movement in the United States is different than Marxian in theology. The labor movement in the United States was about trying to create a voice and trying to empower working folks to actually have a bigger piece of the economic pie. And in modern labor parlance, those of us who have been in the public sector, when we have higher density, we have better outcomes in terms education. You

see it in terms of Massachusetts versus Mississippi. And so what I would say is in the private sector, when you have higher density, you see it in terms of higher wages and things like that. So if the public good writ large is how working people can have a better piece of the economic pie, how they can have their piece of the American dream, then unions are aligned with that and are trying to make that happen. But if you don't have enough density, you're not going to

make that happen economically. We'll be right back, Randy. I want to ask you about something that's been very much on my mind. In light of the debates over critical race theory in the sixteen nineteen project, a number of states have adopted or proposed legislation that would prohibit the teaching of certain points of view, or at least what they those statutes try to present as a certain point

of view. Now, at one time, it was an interest of unions in teachers unions and of many individual teachers to fight against legislation that would restrict what a teacher could or couldn't teach. In the famous Scopes monkey trial which involved the ASAU, not a union, but nevertheless, you know, the original party there was the teacher who taught evolution, allowed himself to be convicted of teaching evolution in order to produce a test case, claiming initially a free speech

right to teach whatever he wanted to teach. Now that's not exactly the way the law has evolved. But I'm wondering from the standpoint of your union, when you see laws that are past that restrict what teachers can teach, that say, a certain point of view cannot be taught. Do you take a stance against that, or do you see that as sort of part and parcel of legislation and lots of states that dictates curriculum and that therefore appropriately tells teachers what they can and can't teach. No,

we take a stance against that. We take a stance against that for a few reasons. One, there's a big difference between K twelve and higher education in terms of the freedom to teach and the latitude over academic freedom. So we know in the main that in pre K through secondary through high school, state laws require a certain curriculum and we should have latitude within that curriculum to

meet the needs of kids. However, this has become just like I would say the biology versus the evolution debate that was exemplified by the Scopes trial. We're now into a moral issue. And the moral issue is how do we teach honest history and teach the truth? And what these laws are actually doing is that they are limiting what our kids will get and mostly helping our kids

become critical thinkers. And so I think that Mark Milly, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said it incredibly well when he was getting roasted about why the military would engage in conversations about diversity, an inclusion, and dealing with racism. He wanted to understand White Ridge, and he wanted to understand why there would be this kind of insurrection on January sixth that could have decimated our democracy. And that is the same thing that a high school

teacher would want to do for our kids. We would want the weeks after January sixth to try to understand it, to impart that understanding to our students, not to tell them what to think, but to give them the skills and knowledge, which means that you have to look at an issue from all sides, including what has happened in terms of our history that necessarily can make people uncomfortable.

So what has happened here is that in this zeal to have a cultural war, what these laws are going to do are going to actually stop us, or attempt to stop us from helping to teach kids how to think and to understand history. This is more reminiscent of what they would do in China than what we should be doing in the United States. Can I just ask

before we close, Randy, how reciprocal. Do you think of this issue as being so if there are teachers who teach a perspective on say, the history of race in the United States, that you and I would substantively disagree with and think is wrong, but which is a perspective of opinion, of interpretation of facts rather than facts, and they're in school districts that have a curriculum that requires a different approach, an approach that say you and I favor,

would you similarly or would the unions similarly support the rights of those teachers to express their opinions in the classroom. There's a difference, Noah, between going to be trying to be very clear about this. Telling kids what to think is not our job. Engaging kids in understanding critical thinking and being able to discern fact from fiction is our job. And so there are lots of different viewpoints in terms of this work. But basic integrity, basic honesty about facts

that have happened in the past, there's a line there. So, for example, if someone is a holocaust denier, I think that is inappropriate. Well, that's a matter I think we can agree that's a matter of fact. Right. So the issue here is we're talking about for example, take sixteen nineteen. Is that a fact that in sixteen nineteen was the first year that ships carried waved Africans to this country, and using that as a jumping off point, I think

that's perfectly appropriate. The issue about whether or not one then teaches is their systemic racism in each and everything that we do. I think that's something that happens in law schools and something that happens in higher education. But in K twelve we start with the fact of what enslavement was and what that means and what the effects

have been. So answer is I think we have to have a wide birth in terms of whatever people's personal ideology and opinions are, but ultimately we teach fact and the consequences of those facts, not our personal ideology. Randy, thank you very much for your fascinating commentary there, and more importantly for your hard work over the last year and for talking to me about these issues. So frankly,

thanks Noah. Listening to Randy Weingarten, I was actually pretty surprised by the extent to which she depicted the teachers Union's efforts during COVID as effectively a win. I understood her argument that if you're somebody who feels that you have no protection from your employer. COVID probably brought home to you, very, very clearly the value of a union.

And I also understand from that perspective that probably members of teachers unions who were worried about being pushed back to work and were not pushed back to work are reasonable in construing the union's successes as victories. On the other hand, it also seems possible that losing a struggle with upper middle class parents who can be, even if they shouldn't be, disproportionately influential in local politics may actually be costly to teachers unions when the time comes for

the next big fight about working conditions and salaries. Randy was very forthright in acknowledging that it's important to control not only outcomes, but also narrative and the challenges to understand what the right narrative is to take away from COVID. In that sense, it may be that her argument that COVID should best be understood as providing an opportunity to remind us of how important unions are is part of her very savvy effort to control the narrative in a

way that will be advantageous to the unions. Similarly, I was struck by Randy's argument that the true job of the exercise of power today is to exercise power for the common good. The optimist in me and the idealist agrees with her entirely. In this day and age, you can't just win a fight and expect that to mean you're going to win in the long run. You need to win the fight and show the world that the fight that you've won actually effectuated circumstances that are better

off for everybody. My final thought is just an observation on how extraordinary it is that in this day and age, when fewer than seven percent of private sector workers are unionized, public sector unions such as teachers unions, remain such an important, significant,

and vibrant part of the American political scene. Whether you observe that split screen phenomenon from the left and see it as not enough, or from the right and see it as too much, it remains a fascinating aspect of how labor unism has evolved in America and how it operates against the backdrop of power today. Randy has written an interesting article saying that by this fall, all schools should be open with everybody vaccinated and being tested. That's

the right kind of optimistic. Note to remind me again that I'm trying to reformulate my covid era sign off. So for today, let me say to you. Then, until the next time we speak, breathe deep, think deep, and try to have a little fun. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is Ben Tolliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by

Luis Gara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Faine, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weissberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's originals later podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash Podcasts, And if you like what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is Deep Background.