You're the Top: Reflections on Transformational Union Leadership

• In Event: Global Teacher Organizing and Union Resistance to Neoliberal Education Reforms

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores the tensions, possibilities and constraints in the process of transforming a top-down business union to a rank and file social justice union.

Perspective and theoretical frame
In a political moment of great instability and threat, a defense of the commons and the attainment of justice require a movement in which labor is a significant actor. To do so, labor needs to transform itself from business unionism to social justice unionism that is more deeply democratic, understands power as in the rank and file, and takes on fights within and beyond the worksite for a broader vision of economic and racial justice. (Weiner, 2012)
The Chicago Teachers Union’s transformation through the Caucus of Rank and File Educators has become a national model for using caucus development to win leadership and advance a new vision of the union. (Bradbury, Brenner, Brown, Slaughter and Winslow, 2014 )This paper explores union transformation from the perspective of a rank and file caucus that won leadership prior to building capacity.

Methods, modes of inquiry
This auto-ethnography will access personal reflections and observations of my experience as the president of a statewide teachers association elected as a member of progressive caucus within the union, an election, as an insurgent candidate, that surprised the caucus and the association. (Denzin, 2005)

Results
Rank and file power and leadership development benefits from statewide leadership that provides a vision and spaces for transformative practices and relationships to happen. But caucus capacity is challenged when the caucus wins, has access to the mechanisms of the union, but does not have the capacity to both develop and use the mechanism and to grow rank and file power. Being on top of the bureaucracy comes with significant constraints and demands to be responsive to the bureaucracy and not to the membership. Finding a role and maintaining ones focus and integrity entails not challenging the bureaucracy directly but supporting continued possibilities for insurgent activities. The growth of caucus capacity must maintain as a priority, as well as active and structured support for the leader in order to forestall against the isolation and alienation of the position.

Scholarly significance
Hope for a better world lies in people engaging in collective action to name our struggles, developing a shared vision, and plan and act to make that vision a reality. Each effort of contestation and transformation informs the next. The narratives of success and failure in each story reframe what is possible and give courage to those who come after. (Alexander, 2005;Madeloni, 2014; Suzuki and Mayorga, 2014)

Author

• Barbara Madeloni, University of Massachusetts - Amherst