In one of the paintings that Ralph Fasanella did of the great Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike of 1912, a detail shows the state militia entering the city to help break the strike...Standing there are three little boys, each holding signs that together read “Go Back to School.” While the meaning of those signs may not be so clear today, at the time it was obvious to all concerned what they meant: that students from Harvard, Tufts and other elite universities in the region had willingly joined the state militia, with the support of their school’s presidents, to break the strike.... “…college students represented a major and often critically important source of strikebreakers in a wide range of industries and services.”
In fact, public and private universities at the time were so identified with monopoly capital that their very nicknames stand as signposts of their class identification: “Standard Oil University” (U of Chicago), “Southern Pacific University” (Stanford), “Pillsbury University (U of Minnesota).
Today, with the near-total collapse of private sector unionization, the last bastion of organized labor in the US is in the public sector. And among public sector unions, teacher unions have become a major focus in the effort to “reform” or “rationalize” the educational workplace, and to shape and form the “product” that is to be delivered to employers upon graduation. While this effort is always couched in the language of “Children First,” “The Civil Rights Movement of Our Time” or other such PR and focus group-generated slogans, the reality is that recent efforts to change public education are largely motivated by a desire to control the labor process and labor markets within and outside the schools.,,,
So, having taken a peek at the Ivy League (and other) union-busting efforts of one hundred years ago, what do we see today? Let’s... briefly look at Harvard... Harvard is the currently the home of The Program on Educational Policy and Governance (PEPG), which is affiliated with the Kennedy School of Government, and has notable alumni such as Michelle Rhee (whose anti-teacher and anti-labor behavior needs no introduction) and Cami Anderson (who is currently busy privatizing and charterizing NYC’s District 79/alternative high schools).
PEPG describes itself as “a significant player in the educational reform movement” that provides “high-level training for young scholars who can make independent contributions to scholarly research… foster a national community of reform-minded scientific researchers… and produce path-breaking studies that provide a scientific basis for school reform policy.” (I’ll have some more to say on the ideological basis of the pseudo-science that forms their “scientific research”)...
http://nyceducator.com/2010/09/ivy-league-union-busters-then-and-now.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
