From the rank and file to the Union and Back again

The day following my departure from the Chicago Teachers Union I was wracked with doubt. Had I had done the right thing? Could I teach after an 8 year hiatus? I worried about my colleagues and co-workers at the union, whether I had made a decision that could be harmful to members or community partners, among a litany of other broken and random thoughts that riddled my brain as I underwent a drastic change in identity, day to day life and schedule.

I haven’t written in a journal for years, but in reaching the end of my 8 year tenure at the CTU and feeling a need to write down my observations and complicated emotions about the transition, here are some of my initial thoughts:

1) Union leadership can easily ossify without sufficient planning for succession and willingness of others to take on different roles. Making room for new leadership and exhibiting a willingness to transfer roles and responsibilities in a deliberate and intentional way is a critical necessity to advance the dynamism of worker run and controlled organizations.

2) This decision demonstrates to the rank and file generally, that the union leadership sees itself as symbiotically linked to the day to day reality of the classroom experience. A constant effort to do that concretely and deliberately develop a rotation that embeds itself into the culture of the office and within the workplace is critical to our viability. This decision will help establish an orientation to our program that affirms, recognizes and acts upon bringing a rotation of leaders into union work both inside and outside the CTU office, caucus, etc.

3) To fortify a rank and file strategy that prides itself upon highly functioning systems and organization that is constantly recruiting more leaders into a broader movement to fight racism, demand labor rights and, at minimum, the social democratic transformation of our city and country.

4) Address systemic problems and issues that have gone unresolved, unanswered, left to fester worsen, etc. Some examples are racial dynamics of the membership, ineffective distribution of labor among key activists, inability/ unwillingness to recruit into a more radical agenda and organizing model, an outdated communications methodology, etc.

5) Workers are capable of controlling their own destinies and organizations. All that being said, an activist and colleague said to me the other day that “the idea of leadership returning to membership is principled, ideologically in line with a worker-led, democratic organization, very admirable and yet/still we wished it was some one other than you making that decision.” Leadership matters, relationships aren't built overnight, and not everyone has an identical skill set or ability to push the envelop and evolve the structures and personnel to the appropriate vision and mission.

I have also found that there is a tendency to over-generalize the role and necessity of “rank and file” leadership in organizational success and development. Understanding and executing union work at a high level has a steep learning curve for a variety of key areas of leadership. It took me a couple of years just to get my bearings on how to offer critiques to those i supervised, how to align program across departments, how to learn about the dynamics of other external factors that impede and open doors for other goals we have for ourselves. I left the union world childless and with an ulcer to show for it, along with plenty of battle-tested experiences. Like any role where ongoing struggle with adversaries defines the day to day, we had casualties, people who got tired, fed up, disillusioned. However, like with teaching itself, it takes time to get the skills necessary to become confident, competent and capable. We cannot afford to idealize the nature of union work, which will come at our own peril of over-simplifying the tasks at hand, the skills needed to accomplish them or the leadership development necessary to reproduce and enliven our models. In fact, the fate of the American working class depends on our ability to get it clear and correct.