Teachers are not the only professionals who have taken this step. Nurses and other health care professionals are broadly unionized through AFSME, SEIU, and even the Teamsters. Health Professionals and Allied Employees, which represents the nurses at Brookhaven Hospital, is affiliated with PMCT's parent union, the American Federation of Teachers. Now that more than half of all doctors are employees of HMOs and hospitals, doctors too are unionizing! (Click here for a good explanation of why doctors need labor unions.)
Teacher unionism goes back to the first years of this century, and the American Federation of Teachers was formed in 1920. Interestingly enough, among the first concerns of the early unions was the need to fight administrator favoritism and school board patronage. This involved opposing unfair "merit pay" plans, and winning due process rights (tenure) so that teachers could not be unjustly fired.
Mary C. Barker, who was President of AFT from 1925 until 1930, expressed the mixed feelings many teachers had about affiliation with organized labor. "The suggestion that teachers affiliate with organized industrial workers," she said, " once seemed to me an absurd proposition. Their work was so different. Organized association on the basis of their work appeared incongruous. How little I knew about organized labor and what it was all about! The organizers of the American Federation of Teachers gave us the common denominator. We are all employees, they said. As such we have common problems. We pool our resources the more effectively to solve those problems."
Indeed, teachers have much in common with other workers. Like other workers, teachers need unions to negotiate fair contracts, make sure those contracts are enforced, and to protect their legal and civil rights. Without unionization, teachers would have to rely on the good will of hopefully benevolent despots. They would be powerless to affect the conditions of their professional lives.
When workers have no control over their work, they cannot be real professionals. In PMCT, we believe that one of the most important functions of our union is to protect our professional status. In recent years, basic rights that protect our ability to exercise professional judgment -- tenure is a prime example -- have been under attack. We believe that our union has protected not just our individual rights, but the integrity of our educational system as well.
Finally, it is through unionization that teachers, over the past thirty years, have been able to lift themselves out of poverty and earn salaries commensurate with their education and special skills. This benefits not only teachers, but the communities they serve as well. It no longer is possible to hire competent teachers for the same kind of salary that bought a good teacher thirty years ago. (Why not? Click here.)
For more information on the early history of teacher unionism in the United States, be sure to see the slide show on the website of our national affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers.
PMCT Home Page