The pre-eminent international human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, has produced a comprehensive study of “Wal-Mart’s violation of US workers’ right to freedom of association,” Discounting Rights. It is rich with detailed descriptions of how Wal-Mart systematically denies its employees their First Amendment right to organize a union and bargain collectively.
Reading this report brings to mind some noteworthy takes on Wal-Mart and teacher unions we have seen recently.
There was the screed of an op-ed in the Sunday New York Times, a week past, with a litany of complaints about how teacher unions take positions on issues that the author deemed unconnected to education. The author was especially disturbed by the opposition of our national union, the AFT, to Wal-Mart’s anti-worker policies. It is easy to see that something is seriously amiss here, even if one did not know that the author’s Lexington Institute, presented in the most innocuous terms as a “public policy research organization” in the pages of the Times, is part of a network of right wing think tanks opposed to unions as a matter of principle. Wal-Mart is the leading violator of child labor laws in the United States, and you don’t have to be a teacher to know such activity has everything to do with education.
American teachers are citizens in a democratic society, with every right to state our views – individually and collectively – on leading issues of the day that may or may not be directly related to education. It is not altogether surprising that those who ignore First Amendment rights to freedom of association would have a problem with the exercise of First Amendment freedom of speech.
This topic also brings to mind the recent Education Sector puff piece report on Wal-Mart’s “educational philanthropy,” Big Box, published as part of its Ignoring the Connections Connect the Dots series. The end of the report had a lengthy paragraph of disclosures on the various ties between Education Sector principals and organizations which had taken Wal-Mart/Walton Family Foundation money. [Our disclosure is a little more mundane: there was a little blog exchange on Big Box shortly after its publication, and we participated.]
The cynics might see a connection between such Education Sector publications and the fact that Ed Sector co-head Andy Rotherham has turned over his Eduwonk blog to a regular regimen of gratuitous anti-union one-liners. These days Eduwonk’s strong suits do not run in iconoclastic opinion or in narrative tension, with conclusions that are not completely predictable from the moment one reads the heading.
In his defense, Rotherham argues that the problem is in the teacher unions themselves – as seen by his long list of honorable liberals who are critics of those unions. Rotherham has a very interesting definition of liberal – it includes, for example, those who speak on the “deleterious effect” of teacher unions to meetings of the National Right to Work Legal Defense and Education Foundation, the strident and extreme anti-union national organization committed to the elimination of unions. To the ordinary rank and file liberal, such a definition may seem a tad bit promiscuous, not all that different than declaring ‘liberal’ a speaker at a John Birch Society event.
But what do we know? We think the workers at Wal-Mart have the right to organize into a union, and bargain collectively.
