Union Busting and Quakerism Collide at Brooklyn Friends

A look inside a sur­pris­ing move at Brook­lyn Friends School:

Employ­ers usu­al­ly don’t wel­come unions, and they can adopt ugly tac­tics to pre­vent work­ers from orga­niz­ing. But Brook­lyn Friends isn’t the aver­age work­place. The school is famous­ly pro­gres­sive. Par­ents hear of its com­mit­ment to social jus­tice on ori­en­ta­tion tours. Second-graders study the lives of labor lead­ers Dolores Huer­ta and Cesar Chavez as part of a cur­ricu­lum on “change­mak­ers.” The school’s union – which includes about 200 teach­ers, main­te­nance staff, and office work­ers, and is rep­re­sent­ed by Unit­ed Auto Work­ers Local 2110 – seemed like a nat­ur­al exten­sion of its left-wing ethos. At least to staff. 

Quak­ers have long had a com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry with unions. The com­plaint that unions get in the way of one-on-one rela­tion­ships between the boss­es and work­ers was not uncom­mon in nine­teenth cen­tu­ry Quak­er cir­cles. It dis­rupt­ed the fam­i­ly mod­el of social orga­niz­ing that ear­ly Amer­i­can Friends had devel­oped at least in part to jus­ti­fy their slave hold­ing. While Friends final­ly turned against slav­ery the atti­tudes of work­place pater­nal­ism remained strong. The arro­gance of the Quak­er fam­i­ly mod­el under­gird­ed a lot of cringey his­to­ry — things like Indi­an board­ing schools, Hen­ry H. God­dard­’s Kallikak Fam­i­ly, and embar­rass­ing Quak­er edu­ca­tors like M. Carey Thomas.

But it’s 2020. Friends today are far more like­ly to be wage earn­ers than fac­to­ry own­ers. Many Quak­ers belong to unions. Pow­er dynam­ics in a mod­ern metrop­o­lis in twenty-first cap­i­tal­ism looks noth­ing like a nineteenth-century cozy Quak­er vil­lage. Our under­stand­ing of pow­er is much more sophis­ti­cat­ed. There are many mod­ern lib­er­al Quak­er atti­tudes that would have scan­dal­ized our spir­i­tu­al for­bear­ers — our atti­tudes toward music and the arts, our sup­port of gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions to pro­tect envi­ron­ment and work­er rights, social safe­ty nets like social secu­ri­ty and Medicare, our embrace of LGBTQ identity.

We’re a diverse group. There are Quak­ers who still hold to an ide­o­log­i­cal anti-unionism (they might well be over-represented in boards of trustees at Friends schools). But the posi­tion doesn’t hold any kind of con­sen­sus among con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can Friends. That Brook­lyn Friends School is argu­ing with Trump’s NRLB that this is a reli­gious free­dom issue is insult­ing. Union bust­ing is not a Quak­er value.

www.msn.com www​.msn​.com

Ps: full dis­clo­sure that in my career I’ve interned at one union and belonged to anoth­er.

Posted August 27th, 2020 , in Quaker.

One thought on “Union Busting and Quakerism Collide at Brooklyn Friends

  1. This is what makes me despair for the left. If unions are good for Ama­zon, they are good for a Friends school. Friends who care about the equal­i­ty tes­ti­mo­ny should be mod­els lead­ing the way in union­iz­ing, as that is a proven path to greater equal­i­ty. But the big­ger anx­i­ety I have is the fear that the lib­er­al val­ues those on the left mouth are sim­ply hypocrisy. When we give up our val­ues because they hap­pen to be incon­ve­nient for us, we are lost. The bedrock of ethics is that we do painful things not because they are con­ve­nient but because they are the right thing to do. I hope Friends Jour­nal will devote time and space to this issue.

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