On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 5:20 PM, Carrol Cox <[email protected]> wrote: > I agree completely that shorter hours SHOULD be central to an attack on > capital. But even the CTU has not raised this slogan. Have the California > Nurses. It's the kind of slogan that needs to be raised by the workforce.
Carrol Cox laments that even the CTU has not raised shorter working hours as a key issue. He is mistaken, or more precisely, he is correct but not in the way his message suggests. I happen to remember from back during the CTU strike that the issue of working hours was actually one of the most important points of contention in the strike. But it was NOT about the CTU demanding shorter working hours; instead it was the CTU fighting back attempts to *increase* working hours. The debate surrounding this issue is worth studying in detail for those interested in the politics of working hours. The opponents of the CTU represented by Rahm Emmanuel and his allies used the tactic of deliberately conflating the working hours of teachers with the duration of the school day to call for longer hours even in the face of budget cuts. In the end I believe the CTU were successful in resisting longer working hours, but they did so, by reframing the issue as one of a "better school day" rather than a longer one, and raising issues of safety and lack of funding. In the process though, they completely sidestepped the debate about working hours. In fact they explicitly agree that longer hours is a "moot point", and the debate should really about working conditions rather than hours. It was a wise tactic in my opinion, because I don't think working hours is a battle they can win in the current political situation. I don't think teachers or public-sector workers in general are in the best position to take up that particular battle right now. Here's a couple of articles related to that: http://www.ctunet.com/media/press-releases/chicago-teachers-union-wins-victory-in-longer-school-day-dispute http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/01/extending-the-school-day-is-a-lot-harder-than-it-seems/283203/ -raghu. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
