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