Representing everyone
Friday, June 15th, 2007This week I spent several days at the Florida Education Association’s summer leadership institute, generally a set of meetings and workshops for elected officials of the union’s locals across the state (along with other professional development, which this year included instructional strategies, behavior management, and investigating mold problems in buildings). The vast majority of those at the workshops are from K-12 unions, which represent teachers, school counselors, school psychologists, and a few other professional certified groups. In many counties, FEA also represents support professionals, those whom most students would recognize as teachers’ aides, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, maintenance crew, and others who in Florida are generally known as education support professionals, or ESPs.
Among the various things I learned is that in one regard, the UFF-USF chapter has more in common with the support professional bargaining units than with the certified units in terms of representing employees in disparate jobs and very different interests and perspectives. The challenges range from contact (if you want to talk with a maintenance staff person, you first have to find out where they work, and it’s usually not at a shed in one district office) to the various interests and needs that can diverge. University faculty and professional employees differ in many ways from school bus drivers,* but I quickly recognized the stretch in representing such a diverse bargaining unit, since it’s the challenge we face at USF. We represent approximately 1800 faculty and professional employees, from visiting faculty and student advisors to Distinguished University Professors, from non-tenure-track faculty who spend 125% of their time teaching to full-time researchers, from those who identify themselves primarily as serving a community through a regional state university to those who identify themselves primarily as members of their national disciplinary organizations.
Unlike the support professionals in K-12 unions, we can’t split representation by job group, because the interests and identities aren’t so easily classified. But talking with some of the ESP leaders (mostly teachers’ aides, including a wonderful woman who works in the room next to my wife), I’m realizing that the same internal organizing issues exist at both levels, and we can learn a thing or two from the ESPs. If they can successfully represent everyone’s interests, we must, too.
* Two friends of mine who are married are a university faculty member and a school bus driver, so they’re obviously not that different!