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
- It’s also its anti-LGBTQ strategy. We need to tread carefully when we pick a side in a religious freedom case in 2020.
- I.e., the ethnic groups then working long hours at dangerous jobs and organizing unions.
- We also had some “Select Schools” just for Quaker children but I’m not talking about them. I’m thinking of the Quaker-founded schools with a token Black, Italian, and Jewish kid in each class.
- Do I even have to note that most nonprofit boards are not economically representative?
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