UFT Head Sees More Teacher Power

"Teachers today are demanding the power to say 'no' to their superiors," the leader of New York City's 54,000 public school teachers said Saturday, "and when they say no they will cut off their services."

Albert Shanker, president of the United Federation of Teachers, predicted that teachers will refuse to be judged by autocratic principals with no competence in their fields--and he suggested that the best solution would be to have teachers elect a faculty member principal for a specific term of office.

Shanker made his witty and occasionally fired-up speech to a WGBH television conference on collective bargaining between teachers and school administrations. The meeting was sponsored by the Harvard Chapter of Pi Lambda Theta and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The professionalism to which teachers are supposed to adhere, Shanker said, is actually militarism. "Obey the principal and shut up. That's professional," he quipped. In addition, it has always been considered unprofessional to come to the bargaining table frankly concerned about an increase in teacher salaries. "Teachers have the right to be as selfish as any other group in our society. This doesn't conflict with the idea of public service."

If teachers have to strike to get more money and more power, Shanker said, then they will. When a questioner from the audience suggested that this would be a violation of the law, the union leader responded somewhat philosophically. "Rights are usually not given, they are taken. Then the legislature sits down and says 'let's make this legal, because everyone is doing it anyway'".

Shanker predicts a change in public strike laws around the nation. Rather than a blanket prohibition of strikes in the public section, the criterion should be the degree of emergency created by the strike. A strike by public bus drivers is not as serious, Shanker suggested, as a strike by employees of Con Edison.

Earlier in the day, John T. Dunlop, David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy, told the same audience that the special nature of the education industry would require a different collective bargaining structure than the one common in industry. "I doubt that the legal right to strike is a suitable basis for employee-teacher relationships," he said.

Dunlop believes that academic matters should be excluded from the scope of collective bargaining; teachers should be consulted on these matters, but they should not be part of labor negotiations.