Brook­lyn Paper and Gothamist has the news that Brook­lyn Friends School lead­er­ship is with­draw­ing its peti­tion to decer­ti­fy the teacher/staff union.

When reached by phone Wednes­day night, UAW 2110 Pres­i­dent Mai­da Rosen­stein said work­ers had won a hard-fought vic­to­ry and that Thursday’s strike will not take place. “Strike is over, it’s a total vic­to­ry,” said Rosen­stein. “It’s real­ly great that they’re going to with­draw the peti­tion, peo­ple are very hap­py to be able to go back to their jobs… We’re hop­ing for a new begin­ning here.”

At some lev­el we could shrug and say “who cares?” Like many elite East Coast Friends schools, very few of the stu­dents, teach­ers, staff, or admin­is­tra­tion at BFS are Quak­er. The school stopped being under the for­mal care of a Friends body back in 2010. It gives reports to New York Friends and par­tic­i­pates in Friends Coun­cil on Edu­ca­tion but these are rel­a­tive­ly weak ties.

But Brook­lyn Friends School’s admin­is­tra­tion brought reli­gious free­dom into its bat­tle against the union. Trump’s Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Board has latched on to “reli­gious free­dom” as a union-busting strat­e­gy¹, recent­ly over­turn­ing an Obama-era rul­ing that gave reli­gious­ly affil­i­at­ed insti­tu­tions the right to orga­nize. The BFS lead­er­ship and its board lift­ed up their under­stand­ing of Quak­er val­ues and used it to argue their case with the NLRB. For the non-Quaker head of a nom­i­nal­ly Quak­er school to file a reli­gious lib­er­ties legal argu­ment on behalf of Quak­er reli­gious free­dom is quite a reach.

If the BFS head and board had first approached its his­toric Quak­er body — New York Quar­ter­ly Meet­ing — to for­mal­ly minute agree­ment with the BFS under­stand­ing of Quak­er val­ues, then the fil­ing with the NLRB would have had some legit­i­mate mer­it. A hundred-some years ago, Friends were an almost-exclusively White and owning-class body who lim­it­ed the num­ber of African Amer­i­can, Jews, south­ern Euro­peans², etc., in their schools ³and they would have had lit­tle trou­ble back­ing up BFS’s claim that unions aren’t com­pat­i­ble with Quak­er val­ues. There are cer­tain­ly Friends who con­tin­ue to voice con­cerns about the com­pat­i­bil­i­ty of Quak­er process and orga­nized labor (includ­ing some on the BFS board⁴) and I don’t want to min­i­mize their voice. But Friends are a far-more diverse body now and there’s lit­tle chance that a rep­re­sen­ta­tive body of New York Friends today would have come to con­sen­sus on an anti-union minute. With today’s news, we’re spared see­ing the Friend­s’s name caught up in a reli­gious free­dom cul­ture war fight not of our choosing.

Pre­vi­ous­ly: Brook­lyn Friends School strike, Union Bust­ing and Quak­erism Col­lide at Brook­lyn Friends

Brook­lyn Friends School is closed today and tomor­row in response to its teach­ers strik­ing against the admin­is­tra­tion’s attempts at union-busting⁶. Gothamist reports that as recent­ly as a few days ago the admin­is­tra­tion was work­ing on a “mission-aligned part­ner­ship” with a hir­ing agency so they could get enough sub­sti­tu­tion teach­ers to keep the school open dur­ing the strike. The agency balked when they learned about the strike but the BFS admin­is­tra­tion still has ads for sub­sti­tute teach­ers up on Indeed.

Gothamist includes a quote from long-time teacher Sue Aaronson:

I’ve worked under six heads of school and 16 upper school heads, and so many times what­ev­er process and pro­to­col has been there has been thrown out and the new admin­is­tra­tion has to start all over again… My mantra is that process and pro­to­col shouldn’t depend on the per­son­al­i­ty of admin­is­tra­tors. That means peo­ple are not treat­ed equi­tably and that’s the most impor­tant thing.

The union was vot­ed in before the cur­rent head of school arrived. That the new head want­ed to “decer­ti­fy” it as one of her first acts under­scores Aaron­son’s point.

Not much news report­ing on how the strike is going but the local labor coun­cil tweet­ed out some col­or­ful pic­tures this morn­ing.

Relat­ed: I wrote about the con­flicts at Brook­lyn Friends School in late August, Union Bust­ing and Quak­erism Col­lide at Brook­lyn Friends.

Update, Oct 8: Union win at Brook­lyn Friends

Emi­ly Provance on liv­ing as a Quak­er in times such as these:

We are to expect to be chal­lenged and changed in our encoun­ters with God. We aren’t yet per­fect. And that’s espe­cial­ly dif­fi­cult to deal with in a moment when everything’s already in chaos. Soci­ety seems to be struc­tur­ing itself in such a way that more and more peo­ple are cling­ing to one extrem­ist ortho­doxy or anoth­er, reject­ing any­thing that isn’t ful­ly in line with that point of view, even ver­i­fi­able facts. This is a nat­ur­al psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non in times of uncer­tain­ty. There’s only so much uncer­tain­ty that we can deal with, so when society’s unre­li­able, we clamp down inter­nal­ly: at least I know I’m right. At least I can depend upon my own judgment. 

This week’s fea­tured FJ arti­cle is George Lake’s “The Fiery Forge of Polar­iza­tion”. I’ve been think­ing a lot about it since I first read it in sub­mis­sion form ear­li­er this year. George’s the­sis is that major polit­i­cal change tends to hap­pen in times of great polarlization.

It makes sense from a cer­tain intel­lec­tu­al lev­el. I think a lot of Trump­ism is a cer­tain seg­ment of voter’s wor­ries about the end of White dom­i­nance in this coun­try. It’s show­ing up in our pol­i­tics now because the Oba­ma years showed that we can make head­way on pro­gres­sive ideals. Only regres­sive insti­tu­tions like the elec­toral col­lege and vot­er sup­pres­sion tac­tics are keep Repub­li­cans in pow­er. The shift will hap­pen. The ques­tion is how much of our coun­try gets ripped apart in the meantime.

From my edi­to­r­i­al col­umn:

And yet in great tur­moil comes oppor­tu­ni­ty. In “The Fiery Forge of Polar­iza­tion,” George Lakey shares how his dis­may at our polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion gave way to opti­mism when he began research­ing the twentieth-century his­to­ries of Scan­di­na­vian coun­tries. They were poor, with few demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions, and polar­ized by the pol­i­tics of the 1920s and ’30s. But it was in this very cru­cible that these coun­tries began forg­ing demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions that under­lie today’s eco­nom­i­cal­ly suc­cess­ful democ­ra­cies. Fun­da­men­tal soci­etal change often hap­pens in these dark­est of times. 

My Friend Peter Blood wrote me that he’s host­ing a new online Bible series on the first Sun­day after­noon of each month this fall. There’s a dif­fer­ent guest leader every month. It’s cospon­sored by Wool­man Hill and Bea­con Hill. and will take place 4pm East­ern Time.

There’s a dif­fer­ent leader each month. Upcom­ing peo­ple include:
* Carl Magrud­er (Pacif­ic YM) on Oct 4
* Adria Gulizia (New York YM) on Nov 1
* Col­in Sax­ton (North Val­ley Friends Church, New­berg OR) on Dec. 6.

This is a great line­up. Infor­ma­tion on reg­is­tra­tion can be found on the Bea­con Hill website