Neoliberalism, Gender and Education Work

Sarah A. Robert, Heidi Pitzer, Ana Luisa Muñoz García

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351207850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How does neoliberalism in the education field shape who teachers are and what they can be? What are the effects of neoliberal logic on students? How is gender at the core of what it means to teach and learn in neoliberal educational institutions? Neoliberalism, Gender and Education Work examines the everyday labour of educating in a variety of contexts in order to answer these questions in new and productive ways. Neoliberal ideals of standardisation, accountability and entrepreneurialism are having undeniable effects on how we define teaching and learning. Gender is central to these definitions, with care work and other forms of affective labour simultaneously implicated in standards of teacher quality and undervalued in metrics of assessment. Gathering research from across four continents and education settings ranging from elementary school to higher education, to popular social movements, the methodologically diverse case studies in this book offer insight into how teachers and students negotiate the intertwined logics of neoliberalism and gender. Beyond an indictment of contemporary institutions, Neoliberalism, Gender and Education Work provides inspiration with its documentation of the creative practices and selfhoods emerging in the "cracks" of the neoliberal ideological apparatus.

It was originally published as a special issue of Gender and Education.

When solidarity doesn’t quite strike: the 1974 Hortonville, Wisconsin teachers’ strike and the rise of neoliberalism

Eleni Brelis Schirmer

ABSTRACT

As public-sector unions such as teachers’ unions used the boon of post-war liberalism to form their political power, they imported many of liberalism’s key contradictions: its formation of racial contracts, its misappraisal of affective labour, and its opportunistic collective action logics. This article suggests cracks within liberalism weakened the political power of teachers’ unions, disempowering a feminised workforce. Using a historical case study of teachers’ strike in rural Wisconsin in 1974, this article shows how the tenuous solidarity afforded by liberal accords made teachers’ unions more vulnerable to future neoliberal offensives on public education and its workers. The aftermath of the strike generated an opportunistic labour movement in which workers pursued their interests through legal provisions rather than by developing teachers’ broader community and labour solidarities, subverting feminist possibilities of teachers’ unions. This history suggests how teachers defend their rights as workers amidst a rising tide of neoliberalism matters.

Introduction

Critical scholars increasingly expose the effects of ‘neoliberalism’ on public education, documenting how such policy regimes divest from public institutions such as schools, relax state regulations, weaken workers’ rights and open new educational arenas for private ventures (e.g. Burch 2006; Ball 2007; Scott 2009; Anderson and Donchik 2014). A body of literature describes the deleterious impacts of these programmes, such as their exacerbation of social inequalities and loss of democratic processes (e.g. Bartlett et al. 2002; Cucchiara, Gold, and Simon 2011; Lipman 2011). Increasingly, teachers’ unions are hailed as leaders of resistance to these policies, and for good reason (Compton and Weiner 2008; Hagopian and Green 2012; Weiner 2012): mobilised teachers’ unions have a powerful voice to speak against market-based education reforms, highlight racial and economic disparities, and revalorise teaching work, depreciated by its feminisation (Weiner 1996; Rousmaniere 2005; Gutstein and Lipman 2013; Uetricht 2014). Yet, despite notable recent examples, teachers’ unions typically do not mobilise for gender, racial or economic justice within and beyond schools, instead tending to short-term, economistic interests of individual members. This economism has spurred political whiplash against teachers’ unions, who are critiqued for acting against the interests of students and communities (e.g. Lieberman 2000; Moe 2011). Yet critics and defenders alike treat teachers’ unions as monolithic and predetermined characters, rather than polyvalent creations of a contingent history. Furthermore, this perspective assumes political economic changes affecting teachers’ unions originate entirely outside of schools, obscuring the relative autonomy of schools and teachers.

This article aims to add historical nuance to this conversation by exploring the residual pathways from which neoliberal policies – specifically the weakening of workers’ rights – have emerged. Through a historical case study, the article suggests that how teachers’ unions configured their political power during a period of rising militancy in the mid-1970s made them subsequently more vulnerable in the burgeoning resentment towards the public sector and workers’ rights of the late 1970s. The diminished political power of public-sector unions is a decidedly gendered issue: most public-sector employees are women, their work sustains public institutions and thus constitutes public care labour. Weakened labour rights for public-sector worker politically disempowers women and care labour. Diminishing teachers’ unions’ rights evident today, I aim to suggest, is best understood not simply as the rise of neoliberalism, but the failures of liberalism, the political and economic programme of individual rights that hailed in the United States between 1940 and 1970 (Mills 1997; Rodger 2011; Cowie 2016). As public-sector unions, including teachers’ unions, used the boon of post-war liberalism to form their political power, they imported its key contradictions: its formation of racial contracts, its misappraisal of affective labour and its opportunistic collective action logics. This article shows how cracks within liberalism weakened the political power of teachers’ unions, disempowering a feminised workforce.

To do so, this article takes a historical detour through a small town in rural Wisconsin in 1974, during a violent teachers’ strike in which all 88 striking teachers were fired. The town of Hortonville’s violent response to the striking teachers triggered calls for a statewide sympathy strike, and ultimately sparked successful arbitration legislation in Wisconsin for public-sector workers. Therefore, the Hortonville strike is often interpreted as something of a victory for labour because of its role in yielding arbitration legislation (Saltzman 1986; Mertz 2015). However, the following analysis suggests the Hortonville teachers strike and its aftermath is better understood as the advent of labour’s weakening, an emblematic fulcrum between public-sector union’s vigorous assent in the early 1970s and its swift decline in the late 1970s (McCartin 2008a). Drawing from oral histories of teachers, union activists, townspeople and school board members, collected in 1974 by a Wisconsin Historical Society field researcher, as well as archives from the Wisconsin Education Association Council archive collection, housed in the Wisconsin Historical society and the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association (MTEA), I show how the state teachers’ unions assumed a pragmatic form of action post-Hortonville, which ultimately undermined teachers’ solidarity and contributed to the advance of market liberalism. After a brief note on the strike’s significance for the present, this article assumes the following trajectory. First, I will provide a narrative of the 1974 Hortonville teachers’ strike and the actions leading up to it, and the significance of the strike and its blowback for a feminised workforce. Then, I will review the decision of the statewide teachers’ union federation decision not to strike, and the racial contract embedded and urban–rural divide embedded within that decisions. Finally, I will assess the shifting collective action logics resultant from Hortonville, turning to sociologists Offe and Wiesenthal’s (1980) to explore the theoretical and practical implications of this strategy shift.

I suggest that the strategy shift post-1974 Hortonville teachers’ strike had fundamentally gendered effects, depreciating not only a workforce that was predominantly female but also the rights of care workers and affective labour. One of the chief impacts of the Hortonville teachers’ strike was a decisive turn against public-sector unions’ rights to strike, a resulting in a long-term weakness of US labour power, a position taken up by both labour and its opponents (e.g. Burns 2014). In the early 1970s, public-sector workers were predominantly female and workers of colour (Bell 1985; McCartin 2006). Therefore, the shift away from striking and other legal rights represented a fundamental loss of power for a significant number of female workers. What’s more, the popular blowback teachers received from striking revealed a basal antipathy towards the rights and remuneration of affective labourers (Shelton 2013). Because a central element of teachers’ work is to care for dependent (students), many viewed their pursuit of independent rights as inapt, even offensive. This negative reaction revealed deep-seeded fault lines in the economy’s growing reliance on immaterial labour – labour that provides service, information and communication (Hardt 1999). As the Hortonville strike foreshadowed, the economic misrecognition of immaterial labour – despite the economy’s increasing reliance on such labour – would come characterise the political economy of neoliberalism, creating gendered inequalities in educational work and beyond (McRobbie 2010; Kostogriz 2012). Therefore, the Hortonville strike reveals not only the growing conservatism outside of teachers’ unions, but also the problematic organisation within teachers’ unions that failed to offer a strong alternative to external threatens. The weakening of teachers’ unions characteristic of neoliberal programmes not only disempowers a predominantly female workforce, also it devalues affective labour.

Ultimately, I wish to communicate that in order to understand the potential of teachers’ unions to act as transformative agents of education justice and effectively lead resistance against the neoliberal order, we must understand the – perhaps unstable – forms of collective action with which teachers unions built their power. If teachers’ unions are to be a means of defence against the neoliberal devaluing of public education, they must be prepared to chart new political ground to redefine solidarity and its requirements.

Why does the 1974 Hortonville strike matter for today?

Mounting conservative pressures from the changing political economy put teachers’ unions like those in Hortonville, Wisconsin in a defensive position in the 1970s as the economy collapsed, and conservative ideology took root, transforming citizens from public beneficiaries to private taxpayers (Apple and Oliver 1996; Apple 2006; Cowie 2010). Between 1940 and 1970, Wisconsin led the nation’s labour movement. In 1959, after nearly a decade of organising and lobbying for legal protection, Wisconsin’s council of municipal employees won the right to bargain collectively with their employers, becoming the first state in the country to provide public-sector collective bargaining rights. Over the next two decades, Wisconsin’s public-sector employees continued to push for legal expansion of their union rights, establishing key legal victories of compulsory bargaining and setting pace for the rest of the nation. Across the nation, teachers’ unions witnessed a growth in power and militancy in the early 1970s. Yet by the late 1970s, growing rural conservatism shifted popular support away from public institutions and unionised workers (Slater 2004; Cowie 2010; Scribner 2013).

My intention in this essay is not to condemn teachers’ actions. Indeed, I view the teachers’ opportunistic tactics post-Hortonville as rational given the political balance of public opinion at that time, which generally favoured public-sector unions in the 1960s and 1970s. The legal victory embodied in interest arbitration was made possible by a sympathetic state legislature, a progressive governor and energised labour lobbyists. However, when this leadership and these political forces were no longer in power, an important question surfaced: was labour strong enough to hold itself up on its own? This question is especially pertinent today, given the radically different political forces in power today. In the past five years, Wisconsin has heralded a nation-wide evisceration of public-sector employees’ rights, with historic anti-labour legislation passing in 2011 in Wisconsin, again in 2015 when Wisconsin became the nation’s 25th ‘right-to-work’ state, and the pending current Supreme Court decision that would nationally dismantle public-sector unions (Antonucci 2015). In addition to highlighting both the rational and unstable tendencies of political opportunism, the Hortonville case offers important resources for labour’s next horizons. The nation-wide changes to public-sector union rights which erupted in 2011 in Wisconsin begs the question, on what basis did these rights form? What cracks may have been present in the initial formation of these rights that contributed to their subsequent political vulnerability?

1974: Hortonville, Wisconsin

Hortonville, Wisconsin is a small rural town located near the Fox River Valley. In the mid-1970s, the town mostly comprised of small-scale farmers and small industrial owners of a local paper mill, who had maintained long-time influence over the school system. The school board was controlled by the small-town power elite, described by a local organiser as ‘a country-club circle [with] a whole mystique wrapped up around them … and one-hundred years of traditional subservience to that power.’¹ Yet, in the 1970s, as the nearby city of Appleton’s economy shifted to more white-collar employment, Hortonville experienced suburbanisation pressures, particularly as the population grew in the adjacent town of Greenville. This put increasing pressure on the Hortonville’s school district, which covered a large geographic area that was fifteen miles wide. The town of 1500 people now served 1900 students in its schools (Hensel 1974). Between 1970 and 1973, a referendum to build new schools to deal with overcrowding was proposed three different times. Each time, the referendum was voted down, in high-turn out votes; the majority of local voters were rural, conservative and resistant to increases in property-taxes, despite a documented need for expanded facilities (Lee 1973).

The lack of public investment in education bore heavily on Hortonville’s teachers. Rising growth in student population and lack of sufficient space and resources made the work of teaching more difficult. For one thing, overcrowding meant that classrooms took on multiple purposes; teachers and students crisscrossed through...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. When solidarity doesn’t quite strike: the 1974 Hortonville, Wisconsin teachers’ strike and the rise of neoliberalism
• 2. Gettin’ a little crafty: Teachers Pay Teachers©, Pinterest© and neo-liberalism in new materialist feminist research
• 3. Neoliberalism and higher education: a collective autoethnography of Brown Women Teaching Assistants
• 4. Encountering gender: resisting a neo-liberal political rationality for sexuality education as an HIV prevention strategy
• 5. Contesting silence, claiming space: gender and sexuality in the neo-liberal public high school
• 6. An education in gender and agroecology in Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement
• 7. Aligning the market and affective self: care and student resistance to entrepreneurial subjectivities
• Index