The United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) was, for decades, the largest local union in Louisiana and one of the largest and most influential educators’ unions in the US South. An integrated, democratic, Black-led union throughout most of its history, UTNO linked its organizing to the civil rights movement, centered the needs of its lowest-paid members in contract struggles, and bargained for educational funding and improvements that benefited students and their communities. In city and state politics, UTNO served as a wellspring of Black political power, a bulwark against white supremacy and neoliberalism, and an engine of progressive change. Yet until I read Jesse Chanin’s remarkable new book, Building Power, Breaking Power: The United Teachers of New Orleans, 1965–2008, I knew UTNO primarily as the union destroyed by the charterization of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Chanin analyzes this archetypal moment of disaster capitalism, of course, but UTNO was so much more. As she lays out in the introduction and shows convincingly throughout the book, “the union persistently demonstrated a commitment to participatory democracy, economic redistribution, and the improvement of students’ educational outcomes and social mobility” (17).Histories of teacher unionism have multiplied over the past decade as present-day struggles have galvanized the educational sector and the labor movement, but the field remains dominated by studies of northeastern and midwestern cities. Telling the story of teacher unionism from New Orleans, Chanin shows convincingly, reframes our understanding and periodization of teacher militancy, union bureaucratization, and what we know today as “bargaining for the common good.” While predominantly white American Federation of Teachers (AFT) locals in New York, Chicago, Newark, and elsewhere clashed with Black community organizers in the 1960s and 1970s, “UTNO’s collective bargaining victories garnered widespread community support by explicitly combining the struggles for racial and economic justice” (6). Years after the urban fiscal crises of the 1970s and the public sector union busting of the 1980s chilled the militancy of better-known AFT locals up north, UTNO staged a successful 1990 strike, the core demand of which was raises for the overwhelmingly Black, working-class paraprofessional educators in the union. The struggle, while not without contention, Chanin writes, “provided a unique opportunity for UTNO members to develop their class analysis, show solidarity with their colleagues, learn from each other, and rise to positions of leadership within their schools as well as the union” (132). The following year, a highly mobilized UTNO was instrumental in defeating Klansman David Duke in the Louisiana governor’s race.In between these moments of triumph, Chanin provides a detailed look at the internal organizing and day-to-day movement building UTNO undertook across four decades, drawing on fifty-one oral histories to supplement deep archival and periodical research. After a successful 1978 strike, UTNO took the lead on the creation of a “Center for Professional Growth and Development,” originally cofunded by the district with federal grant monies. When that money ran out, UTNO took over and sustained the “teacher center” with its own Health and Welfare Fund. The center provided professional development and prompted pedagogical innovation across decades of underfunding by the local school board and the state. It also served as an incubator for union leadership. As one of Chanin’s narrators recalls, “It was like we were educating our own people and we were fine-tuning our own trade” (95). While the presence of this union-run font of educational improvement did not keep neoliberal reformers from deploying their standard rhetoric, it exposed the claims that unionized educators cared neither for quality teaching nor their students as baldfaced lies.As for the rising tide of neoliberal education reform—practiced, in Louisiana as elsewhere, by opportunistic politicians from both parties—UTNO recognized it and fought it for twenty-five years before being undone by the disaster capitalists. Here, too, Chanin’s detailed account is clear: “UTNO was specifically targeted and weakened in order to limit Black political power and stymie a redistributive agenda in the name of color-blind neoliberalism” (13). Chanin does give ample attention to changes in the union itself in the decade before Katrina, including the departure of beloved longtime president Nat LaCour and shifts in the educational and social landscape of New Orleans that made the union more bureaucratic and less intimately tied to communities.Nonetheless, in the end the union’s demise was predicated, in part, on the cruelest of ironies: a union that had built a distributed, community-based, highly effective network of building reps and area coordinators lacked the centralized bureaucracy to reach and mobilize its members when the storm scattered them across the country. As it became apparent, as one of Chanin’s interviewees notes, that the post-Katrina plan was “this absolute power play to break them,” UTNO tried to organize through door-to-door canvassing and legal and political challenges, but “without school-based organizing . . . UTNO was not able to build meaningful power” (190, 204). The union’s contract with the Orleans Parish School Board expired in 2006, and while it has organized at a few of the district’s many charters, it remains today a shadow of the integrated, democratic union it was for half a century.Chanin’s conclusions are addressed to historians of labor and education as well as the wider world of school reform and its discontents. UTNO’s decades of success demand attention, as does the way it incubated strategies in wide use today, from the linking of racial and economic justice and “bargaining for the common good” to privileging the needs of paraprofessionals, clerical workers, and other low-paid, working-class union members in contracts. UTNO’s was a fighting vision for a labor movement; as Chanin argues, “These strategies, which aim to address both economic and racial justice simultaneously, and as well as both workers’ needs and the community’s needs, open new opportunities for democratic participation and engagement” (232). This stands in stark contrast to the neoliberal reforms imposed on New Orleanians after Hurricane Katrina, which were explicitly “anti-union and anti-democratic . . . with devastating and disproportionate impacts on Black workers and the Black community” (232). Surveying a present-day landscape of frequent school closures, discriminatory discipline, and diffuse opaque bureaucracy, Chanin is clear that everything UTNO fought for—and the strategies it developed to great effect—remains in high demand in New Orleans, and wherever “reforms” have worked to divide educators, schools, and working-class communities.
Nick Juravich (Sun,) studied this question.