American Federation of Teachers (AFT)

The American Federation of Teachers or AFT is an American labor union founded in 1916 that represents teachers, paraprofessionals and school-related personnel, local, state and federal employees, higher education faculty and staff, and nurses and other healthcare professionals. It is affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

The AFT is the second-largest education labor union in the United States, representing about 889,000 members as of fall 2009.[1] Unlike the 3.2-million member National Education Association, the AFT has since its founding been affiliated with the AFL-CIO. A proposed 1998 merger between the two was rejected by the NEA's annual meeting.

In general, AFT locals tend to be in large cities and on the East Coast, while the NEA's membership is more concentrated in rural and suburban areas and in the West. Another significant difference between the two organizations is that the AFT has made a serious effort to organize workers outside the field of K-12 public education. The union currently represents higher education faculty (including professors, non-tenure-track faculty, and graduate student employees), nurses working in private-sector hospitals, state public employees, school nurses, school librarians, and educational paraprofessionals, such as bus drivers and cafeteria workers.

Early history

The AFT was founded on April 15, 1916 as a labor union (as opposed to a professional association). After several failed attempts to form a national teachers' union, teachers from three Chicago unions and one from Gary, Indiana, met to organize the American Federation of Teachers. They were supported by teachers from Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, New York state and Washington, D.C.. The union sought and received a charter from the American Federation of Labor the same year.

The union grew slowly during its first 50 years. Many teachers in the United States rejected the AFT's assertion that teachers should join unions, and the legal and political climate discouraged collective bargaining in education. 'School boards mounted a campaign against the AFT, pressuring and intimidating teachers to resign from the union. By the end of the 1920s, AFT membership had dropped to fewer than 5,000—about half the membership of 1920.'[2]

When many trade unions excluded African-Americans from membership, the AFT was one of the first American unions to extend full membership to minorities. In 1918, the AFT called for equal pay for African-American teachers, the election of African-Americans to local school boards and compulsory school attendance for African-American children. In 1919, the AFT demanded equal educational opportunities for African-American children, and in 1928 called for the social, political, economic and cultural contributions of African-Americans to be taught in the public schools.[3]

In 1941, under pressure from the AFL, the union ejected Local 5 (New York City), Local 537 (the City College of New York) and Local 192 (Philadelphia) for being communist-dominated. The charter revocations represented nearly a third of the union's national membership.

In 1936 teachers in Butte, Montana negotiated the first AFT collective bargaining agreement. In 1948, the union stopped chartering segregated locals. It filed an amicus brief in the historic 1954 U.S. Supreme Court desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education. On December 10, 1956, Local 89 in Atlanta, Georgia left the AFT because it would not comply with the AFT directive that all locals integrate. In 1957, the AFT expelled all locals that refused to desegregate.

Throughout this period, the union also struggled over the issue of militancy. 'We realized,' said Margaret Haley, an early AFT leader, 'that we had to fight the devil with fire...' [4] But Haley's view was not shared by a majority of AFT members in the union's first decades. Like many unions of the era, the AFT relied heavily on making a statistical case for its wage and benefit proposals and then consulting with the school board rather than utilizing the power of collective action.

By the late 1940s, AFT was slowly moving toward collective bargaining as an official policy. The St. Paul Federation of Teachers struck on November 25, 1946. It was the first AFT local to ever strike. The local settled on January 1, 1947 after 38 days on the picket line. Nearly a decade later, the union held—and won—its first collective bargaining election in East St. Louis, Illinois on December 10, 1956. The vote tally was AFT-226, NEA-201. Robert G. Porter was treasurer of the East St. Louis Federation of Teachers at the time of the election and later went on to become the longest serving secretary-treasurer in the history of the national AFT. In 1963, the AFT convention voted to end the union's no-strike policy.

Creation of the UFT

After the pro-communist purge in 1941, the Teachers Guild remained the sole AFT affiliate in New York City. In 1960, New York City social studies teacher Albert Shanker and Teachers Guild president Charles Cogen led New York City teachers out on strike. At the time, there were more than 106 teacher unions in the New York City public schools — many existing solely on paper with no real membership or organization. At the same time other unions flourished such as the Brooklyn Teachers Association.

The motives behind the strike were wages, establishment of a grievance process, reduced workloads and more funding for public education. But in order to win on these issues, Shanker and Cogen argued, the city's teachers had to be in one union. In early 1960, the Teachers Guild merged with a splinter group from the more militant High School Teachers Association to form the United Federation of Teachers or 'UFT'.

The UFT struck on November 7, 1960. More than 5,600 teachers walked the picket line, while another 2,000 engaged in a sick-out. It was a fraction of the city's 45,000 teachers. But intervention by national, state and local AFL-CIO leaders pressured New York City mayor Robert Wagner Jr. to appoint a pro-labor fact-finding committee to investigate conditions in the city's schools and recommend a solution to the labor problem.

The fact-finding committee recommended a collective bargaining law, which eventually was forced onto the city's Board of Education by the state of New York. Despite political infighting with the NEA, an infusion of cash by the national AFT and the AFL-CIO enabled the UFT to win the December 16, 1961, election with 61.8 percent of the votes.

Almost overnight, the AFT's membership swelled by 30 percent. In 1964, the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO pledged to match dollar-for-dollar the expenditure of AFT funds to organize teachers.

( Reff : Here )