Lynn Fitz-Hugh on elder­ing:

The over cor­rec­tion for this was Friends large­ly have turned their back on this prac­tice. I regard this as too bad because from my point of view we are sad­ly lack­ing true elder­ing in mod­ern Meet­ings. We both lack Friends who are real­ly ground­ed in Quak­er prac­tice, we lack men­tor­ing for younger friends in every­thing from clerk­ing to giv­ing faith ministry.…but most impor­tant­ly we lack a real account­abil­i­ty when things go estray.

For­mal elder­ing requires a kind of con­nect­ed com­mu­ni­ty that I don’t see as much any­more and I can’t recall ever see­ing it in the wild. In my expe­ri­ence elder­ing has hap­pened when some­one I real­ly admire as a ground­ed soul ques­tions some­thing I’ve said or done. The weight of my respect for them makes me recon­sid­er my sure­ty and cock­i­ness. It can take months for me to process just their few words of obser­va­tion. It can be wonderful.

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.

MSN 

www​.msn​.com

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

From Emi­ly Provance:

Now ask your­self: are the same activ­i­ties, or even thoughts about the same activ­i­ties, still bring­ing me joy? Still feel­ing as if they come nat­u­ral­ly? This might be a hard ques­tion. For some of us, very few things are feel­ing joy­ful right now. Maybe noth­ing is feel­ing joy­ful at all.

Danc­ing the Change