Union-Busting at Brooklyn Friends School:
Workers Must Be Ready to Strike
·
Outrage
mounts over administration’s anti-union appeal to Trump’s NLRB
· High-powered Biden-allied lawyer hired for sleazy maneuver
· Head of
school’s arrogance in face of overwhelming worker, parent, student and alumni
support for union means workers must be prepared to strike
 |
BROOKLYN, NY, September 5 – In mid-August, after labor negotiations that appeared to be going
well, workers at Brooklyn Friends School (BFS) were suddenly confronted with a
brazen union-busting attempt by management. The BFS board of trustees [1] and
the new head of school, Crissy Cáceres – a self-proclaimed enemy of unions – petitioned
the National Labor Relations Board to revoke the union’s certification as a
bargaining unit. Cáceres and the trustees’ ploy was to claim that BFS is a
religious institution, and as such is not subject to labor laws. They are
relying on the Trump-appointed NLRB to rule against the 200-person workforce
that in May 2019 voted 80% in favor of a union.
In June, Trump’s NLRB did overturn earlier NLRB rulings protecting organizing rights at religious schools. Class Struggle Education Workers emphasizes that workers everywhere must organize, relying on their own strength and class solidarity, whether or not church or state recognizes their “right” to do so.
However, Cáceres is
lying when she claims that BFS is a religious school – it is emphatically not.
The educational program is wholly secular and has no explicit religious
component, other than the occasional reference to Quakerism’s humanitarian
values. Students, teachers, and staff of all ethnicities and beliefs are
welcome. The curriculum even includes lessons on the benefits of unions. The
school cut formal ties with the city’s main Quaker body in 2010. But Cáceres
and her board, which also laid off 30 teachers and staff over the summer,
hardly care about religion.
Cáceres is not a Quaker (the school employs few Quakers), though if she were, she might have considered the fact that the Brooklyn Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, whose Meeting House originally housed the school, opposes her dishonest ploy. Both the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and Manhattan’s Quaker school, the Friends Seminary, are unionized. Indeed, the AFSC explicitly favors unions on its website. https://www.afsc.org/resource/increase-worker-justice
The one religious
feeling Cáceres evidently has is not exactly in keeping with Quakerism. “She
thinks she’s god,” said one BFS union militant. “She begins every speech by
saying, ‘As your leader . . .’.” With their sleazy union-busting move, Cáceres
and her ilk have hit a nerve in New York City, a union town. Outraged teachers,
staff, students, parents, and alumni are fighting back. As reported in the New York Times and New York Magazine, BFS parents received an email from the
administration, informing them of their union-busting attempt. Parents reacted
swiftly: more than 1,000 parents and alumni signed a letter of protest – this
in a school of around 900 students.
Lower (elementary)
school students at BFS are scheduled to begin classes in person on September
14, while middle and upper school instruction will be remote for the first
eight weeks. As the school year begins, workers are fighting back, and union
spirit is running high. At a union rally on September 4 near one of the school
buildings in downtown Brooklyn, workers chanted, “What’s disgusting? Union busting!” Parents and students were on
hand in support, and press coverage was ample and favorable to the rally and the
union.
Workers at Brooklyn
Friends School decided to unionize because they were fed up with years of
callous, secretive, and absolutist rule by the administration. Employment was
offered to each individual in secret, on take-it-or-leave-it terms. Contracts,
which offered some job security, were suddenly replaced with something called “at
will agreements,” drawn up by professional legal bandits. The maintenance and
cafeteria staff, many of whom are immigrant workers, were particularly
powerless to object to their low pay and paltry benefits. No account was taken
of work experience, teacher qualifications or seniority.
At the upper, middle
and lower school, and at the family center (nursery school), teachers, office
workers, and cafeteria and maintenance staff united to organize a
“wall-to-wall” industrial union, Brooklyn Friends School Union, UAW Local 2110,
Technical, Office, and Professional Union. Security personnel, who are agents of management at any company or institution and the enemy of labor, were
excluded.
On May 19 of last
year, BFS workers voted 141–38 to unite in a schoolwide union. Their
organization is a real step forward, and we all can take a lesson from this union
organizing drive. It unites workers in a single organization, rather than
excluding some staff members or setting up separate organizations according to
job category. Furthermore, union militants around the country are now stressing
the importance of keeping cops and security guards out of the unions – a
fundamental position of the CSEW since our founding. Security guards, like
cops, are not workers but the bosses’ blunt instrument against workers. In any
strike, security guards join with cops to do the bosses’ bidding and repress
the workers.
Her holiness Cáceres
and her trustee operatives snubbed the thousand parents and alumni, not to
mention a petition signed by 134 out of 200 workers. They continue to claim
that the union is a “third party” and not in keeping with Quakerism. Notable is
that these antiworker union haters are mainly Democrats. The fact is that both
big capitalist parties in America, the Democrats and Republicans, are
anti-labor. It is true that Cáceres and the BFS board are relying on the Trump
NLRB to bust the union. But Cáceres’ attack dog is a high-level Democratic
Party lawyer, Kirsten White, who was Jill Biden’s policy director when her
husband Joe was Obama’s vice-president. For labor, the 2020 elections are a
matter of “pick your poison”: either Trump or Joe “shoot ’em in the leg” Biden,
but both can kill you.
As many Brooklyn Friends workers have emphasized, these are times of high stress. The new school year, coming in amid the COVID-19 pandemic, means that a strong union is more important than ever, to ensure a safe work and learning environment, for students, teachers, and staff. The fact that the union has so much support among parents, alumni, and students, bodes well for a future struggle. The truth is, when faced with an arrogant, dictatorial ruler who believes she is answerable to no one, the only force we have to rely on is our own solidarity and union power. The BFS union has to be prepared to strike to get what parents, students and workers want and urgently need.
[1] The
BFS board includes a number of high-powered corporate and political operators,
including a former managing director at Deutsche Bank, a former Clinton State
Department official, de Blasio’s current deputy head of personnel, and a
manager of a corporate vulture investment company (specializing in “distressed”
assets).
Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here.