Gindin 2011

Gindin, Julián. 2011. "La Tradición Sindical y la Explicación de las Prácticas Sindicales: Conclusiones de una Comparición Internacional Sobre los Docentes delSecotr Publico." Revista Latinoamericano do Trbalho, año 16 no. 26, 119-143.

• Introduction
• comparing Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico throughout the length of the 20th century
• this article proses the idea of "teacher unionism of the base", which is defined by a gravitation of the unions to the union base (in teachers unions), labor demands as the axis of activity, and open collective conflict with the government (120)
• this article presents how the union tradition can explain how a union works
• seven elements go into structural elements of the union (121)
• political relation with the state
• expansion and development of education system
• local work realities
• ideas of decent employment
• recruitment of teachers
• gender
• social image of the public school and teacher
• history of the union is also a key part of how/what a union does, as it often informs values and norms of the union
• its a little bit working class culture, a little bit union history
• two parts to the idea of "sindicalismo docente de base (122)
• union base includes leaders whose power is not taken by upper level leaders
• willingness to have open and strong conflict with, opposition to the government
• uses critical junctures to compare time periods that aren't actually the same across countries (123)
• notices three junctures:
• one, the existence of some sort of group that says it will represent workers (124)
• two, that group must become the representative of a large base of teachers
• three, consolidation of sindicalismo docente de la base, where the union is able to free or reorganize itself as independent from the state
• Critical junctures in teacher union history
• first, unions in Mex, Arg, Brz form as part of popular mobilization for democracy against the oligarchy (125)
• for Argentina this was the first radical government, Revolution in Mexico, and jsut before Estada Novo in Brazil (125-126)
• groups become solid as opposed to small, marginal
• these weren't necessarily unions, just teachers groups
• second, these groups became real unions, attached to a base
• either through state of mobilization of the teachers themselves (127-8)
• in Mexico it seemed like teachers were mobilizing themselves, but int he end the state was able to impose  union (128)
• in Argentina Peron started to organize through state, but coup meant that teachers ended up mobilizing themselves
• Brazil teachers mobilized themselves weakly and failed to consolidate in the face of government repression (128, 130)
• third, unions serve the base, can count on leaders in the base, are autonomous from government
• Mex: 1974-83, with CNTE emerging and the SNTE, for the first time, using its power within the SEP to not implement government changes (131-132)
• for Argentina and Brazil this happened in the 1980s with the return of democracy, both places unions willing to mobilize against the government (132)
• THE KEY IS A NETWORK OF LEADERS AMONG THE BASE
• Brazil uniosn join PT, but it becomes unclear if uniosn serve party or vice versa (133)
• SNTE plays politics, but its clear that union does so as a pragmatic way to gain power, since it doesn't succumb to too many political demands (133)
• national strikes are rare in Argentina, but happen at the state level depending on union history and political situation (133-4)
• conclusions
• union tradition is a mediating factor between teachers demands and union actions (134)
• union tradition is a legacy of critical junctures, and as such is also... (135)
• a mechanism of that explains path dependence (135)

Fischman 2007

Fischman, Gustavo E. 2007. "Persistence and ruptures: The feminization of teaching and teacher education in Argentina." Gender and Education 19.3: 353-368.

 

 

 

• Apostles and second mothers
• normal schools, when they were set up, were dominated by women, both as teachers and students (353-354)
• paradigmatic images of teachers were mothers and/or lay missionaries devoting their lives to the (social and religious) reproduction of students (354-356)
• teachers were seen as similar to middle class ousewives (355)
• this idea of teachers as second mothers and the dominant position of normal schools persisted until the military dictatorship in the 1960s (356)
• reform under the dictatorship actually raised training for teachers, made the normal schools on level with tertiary education, but reinforced the feminization of teaching (356-8)
• male experst produced lessons, women taught them, men were always higher administrators (357)
• but lack of university degree meant teachers were still seen as semi-professionals, not professionals (358)
• democracy again
• schools and teachers were supposed to play an important role in the refoundation of democracy, but economic crisis pushed education spending and reform to the back burner (359)
• 1988: seven small strikes eventually become one 47 day strike for better wages and conditions (359)
• but print opinion turned against them, and they lost hte strike
• enrollment in teacher education programs nationwide dropped, and CABA saw an approx 40% drop (Braslavsky and Birgin 1995)
•  of course, open enrollment in universities and massive drop in teachers' salaries also happened at same time...
• Menem signed law that demanded all teachers have a university degree (360)
• "Yet it is fair to say that the old representation of teachers as enlightened and heroic figures was replaced by depictions of educators as bureaucratic and mediocre (361)
• teachers salaries still low, normal schools start complaining theat there students are increasingly coming from the poorer segments of society (362)
• strike in May 1997, government and media suggest teachers are betraying their students by not working (362)
• images of teachers as a second mother were invoked, part of expectations of (some of ) the public
• conclusion
• women are in positions of leadership in the ministry of education, unions, and research centers (363)
• calls women in education a zone of "equality' because women make up such an important part of the system (363)
• motherhood is still a strong image in edcuation, but Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Evita at least make this a complicated identity, one that can be politically strong (364)
• composite image is a person who teaches and serves out of a sense of altruism (365)
• 
  

 

 

Kosack 2012

Kosack, Stephen. 2012. The Education of Nations : How the Political Organization of the Poor, Not Democracy, Led Governments to Invest In Mass Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Chapter 1:
• education is important for development, development without education leads to low-road economies (3)
• Argument: Government will choose to expand quality education based on two factors: (3-4)
• a tight but flexible skilled labor market, with little ability to attract skilled foreign workers
• government engagement in political entrepreneurship of the poor...that is, government subsidized collective action on the part of poor people
• looks at Ghana, Taiwan, Brazil to show theory
• (7-8) governments don't seem to invest in education based only on the needs of businesses...shows some poorer countries spend way more on tertiary education than they should
• most scholars think democratic regimes are more interested in educating citizens. This book suggests that overall and throughout recent history regime hasn't been as important a variable as others think (9-10)
• he suggests that it is less the regime type and more the existence of collective action demanding education that will result in education spending (11)
• the key is political entrepreneurship, where collective actions problems and costs are overcome (12-14)
• government needs the support of a "vital constituency", and political entrepreneurship will determine if the poor are part of this constituency or not (14-15)
• employer demands for labor (skilled, unskilled, trained by govt or not) also affect govt motivations for providing education (15-16)
• (17) 3x3 matrix of when government will provide mass education. short story: any time poor are part of the vital constituency (either as part of it or as all of it) AND when employers need workers in a flexible skilled labor market
• Chapter 2: the government's educational goals
• education is NOT a public good (24)
• education as "bad collateral" (Milton Friedman), and thus banks don't want to invest in individual's education (26)
• demands of families
• the richer the family, the more they can afford education, the more they want government to subsidize TERTIARY/higher levels of education, and low enrollments overall (30-31)
• poor families are the opposite, they can't afford much of anything, so they want govt to spend lots of money on primary (and maybe every other level, too), high enrollments at every level (30-31)
• demands of employers:
• three types of demands for worker training:
• none: from biz that either doesn't need skilled workers or can import them (34)
• broad: biz needs skilled workers, can't import them, and wants a lot of them to lower wages of skilled workers (35)
• selective: biz needs skilled, can't import, and can't expect wages to be lowerd (thanks to unions or govt employment or sthg) (35)
• type of education system created depending on vital consituency:
• bottom up = more spending on primary, when VC is only poor
• all levels = equal spending, when VC is cross-class
• top-down = more spending on tertiary, when VC is elites (45-48)
•  
• see also 69-71
• chapter 3
• lots of tools in the governments use, like fees, buildings, outsourcing, to point educational resources toward the vital consituency (49-60)
• but constraints like budget size, inherited school systems, and need to keep social peace affect how govts allocate schooling resources (61-67)
• chapters on Taiwan, Ghana, and then...
• Brazil!
• Vargas era
• cross class alliance, Vargas as the political entrepreneur for the poor, but not the VERY poor (228-230)
• Vargas and his direct successors created an All-Levels system, but enrollment was limited so basically only those in the vital constituency (workers, middle class) had access to education (about 42% enrollment rate, rural sectors had low enrollment) (235)
• middle class had the access, also had high quality teachers, making the eudcation system pretty nice, but tradeoff was that it didn't serve many people (236-7)
• some intra national differences during the dictatorship, state-level becomes important when federal level politics are sort of cut off (253-254)
• top-down education system built between 1964 and 1990 to serve the agricultural elites who were the vital consituency (254-267)
• education projects were also a great way to dole out jobs in a clientelistic style, meanign rural landowners used education spending more for the sake of remaining in power than for actual education...foreign education grants were essentially wasted funding these patronage networks (259-262)
• soem equalizing after return to democracy, post 1990, but system still retains many of the private school advantages, better track for elites, it just opened up primary schools to more people (278-287)
• analysis stops at 2000, so doesn't include PT's rise to power, not sure how that affects the edcuation system
• Conclusion:
• regime type does not predict improvements in mass education, at times democracies don't fund education and yet autocrats do (300)
• could be that pro-poor collective action is what spurs any sort of pro-poor policymaking, rather than relying on ideological feelings of the leaders or some sort of platform: if the poor take to the streets adn demand things, they are more likely to get them! (302-4)

Carnes 2014

• Theory (chapter 1)
• questions on differences between labor codes and stability of labor codes are interrelated (20)
• Argument(s)
• higher skill levels lead to, in the long term, more protective and generous laws governing individual employment relations
• greater organizational potential relates to, in the short to medium term, political action and better collective laws
• short term disruptions are fragile, likely forced by undemocratic governments or bait and switch
• overall, economic constraints (skills) are the foundation of laws, and political action (unions) can change them in the medium term (21)
• typology of labor regimes: variation in indivdual and collective law (27-29)
• Corporatist =individual high + collective high = mex and arg
• Encompassing = individual low + collective high = peru
• Professional - individual high + collective low = chi and uru
• Market = no regulation
• Labor policies that last and achieve consensus do so because their provisions are consonant with the prevailing economic order (32)
• "skill distributions are entrenched in local economic institutions, and as a result tend to be very slow to change." (33)
• relative ratio of high to low skill workers will affect labor law (35)
• lots of high skill workers = individual protections, job stability
• lots of low skill workers = high employment favored over protections
• strong labor movement improves hand of workers demanding labor legislation (36-40)
• earlier laws, political history, international institutions, and national political regimes also affect labor law promulgation (40-42)
• same typology as above, except repalce indiv protxns with "skill endowment" and collective protxns with "union/organizational strength" (42-44)
• also, even though regime may change, labor law may create feedback loop to constrain transformations in skill endowment, legislation: meaning corporatism begets groups that are good at corporatism, etc. (path dependence) (43-46)
• chapters 2 and 3 code, quant analyze labor codes...looks pretty cool.
• 
  

Murillo 1999

Murillo, M. V. (1999). Recovering political dynamics: Teachers' unions and the decentralization of education in argentina and mexico. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 41(1), 31-57. 

• this draws out some of the same ideas in her 2001 book, but looks at differences in education reform in Mexico and Argentina, noting the reforms occurred differently due to variation across partisan identities (of the unions), organizational fragmentation (in the unions) and leadership competition (both for union and government officials) (31)
• education reform became an important issues because education was seen as
• important to developing human capital, increasing social equity, and consolidating young democracies (33) see footnote 6 for some citations
• the public felt the edcuation systems were becoming inadequate to mee the countries' needs
• The suggestion made by many groups is that decentralized education is more responsive to local needs, and thus more efficient than hihgly centralized education systems (33-34)
• BUT unions can play an important role in enhancing or sabotaging reforms (34)
• Public sector unions:
• public sector militancy is often more visible to the general public, which would suffer from loss of delivery of public goods thanks to strikes (35)
• "Indeed, strikes often serve the dual purpose of demanding higher wages from the government and mobilizing public opinion to call for greater budget allocations for public services." (35)
• teaching is labor intensive, teachers are distributed across the country, and they can have a great affect on public opinion (36)
• a large proportion of education budgets is directed to salaries (36)
• decentralization reforms in Mexico and Argentina
• The SNTE suppressed it's opposition to decentralization and the government met some of its demands (38)
• CTERA kept unsuccessfully resisitng decentralization and was ignored by Menem (38)
• Stats:
• Law 1,420 of 1881 established free public edcuation and compulsory primary education for all Argentina (39)
• initially the federal government centralized education, by 1952 feds controlled 42.7% of primary, 64.8% of secondary, and 82.5% of vocational schools (Paglianetti 1991)
• military started to decentralize
• By 1987 the national jurisdiction had only 1.9 % of primary schools, 44.7% of secondary schools, and 37.8% vocational schools (40)
• 1991 law enacted in 1992, Law 24,049, transfered all the rest of the schools to provincial jurisdiction (40)
• history of teachers unions (42-43)
• CTERA was with CGT and PJ int eh 1980s, but broke with Menem in 1991 and formed CTA (42)
• CTERA has been strong at province level, but never really centralized enough to be strong national presence (43)
• reform
• most teachers unions rejected Menem's reform (44)
• feared financing would be hurt
• also concerned with declining real wages and wage dispersion once bargaining became decentralized
• teachers struck and demonstrated against reform
• government officials ignored militancy and demands (45)
•  decentralization DID enhance CTERA's position over other competing union confederations (45)
• CTERA joined UCR to form coalition, but meant they found few allies among the mostly PJ provincial governors who didn't want to ally with enemy party (46)
• also competition over teachers weakened all unions, meaning government had no desire to offer concessions (46)
• explaining the difference between SNTE and CTERA
• SNTE was PRI, and not fragmented, CTERA was opposition and fragmented (47-48)
• why not get allies where you can? not really a full explanation here
• conclusion:
• party loyalty can speeed reforms but hinder their effectiveness (see Murillo 2001) (49)
• when there is leadership competition, as there was for SNTE, government will make concessions to keep their leader in power
• CTERA had neither leadership competition (it seems) AND teachers unions were fragmented -- seems a bit weak here

Carlson 1987

Carlson, D. (1987). Teachers as political actors: From reproductive theory to the crisis of schooling. Harvard Educational Review, 57(3), 283-307.

• Article about critical theories of schooling
• In critical theory, most have seen teachers as witting or unwitting servants of the state, and thus capitalism (283)
• "...schooling must be heavily impositional...I mean that it must be imposed, in an authoritarin manner and against some resistance, upon students, whose schooling prepares them for the lower rungs of a high inequitable social and labor hierarchy..." (283)
• in this case school is not seen as a leveling instrument, but an instrument of reproductive labor, in that it produces workers and ingrains capitalistic social theory into students 
• BUT teachers are not unwitting, and their reproductive role makes their job much harder (284)
• thus they are bureaucratized and watched, to make sure they produce the right sort of product/student
•  efficiency thus heightens the contradictions experienced by teachers, who are caught between teaching knowledge and the demands of the state to produce worker bees
• Critical theories about schooling:
• de-schooling (285-287)
• liberate schools from the (capitalist) state, use vouchers! (286)
• but efficiency may be better for capital (287)
• structural functionalism and teaching
• middle classes, including teachers, help alienate workers (288)
• "Teachers supervise, discipline, and indoctrinate future workers in the service of capital. Structural-functionalists generally argue that because members of this class serve as agents of capitalists interests and do not directly add anything of value to what is produced by human labor, their work cannot be considered 'productive.'"
• but under socialism this job would become productive because their are contributing socially beneficial skills and knowledge
• also the middle classes are proletarianized (289)
• new techonologies deskill labor (290)
• their labor is intensified
• and finally they become eminently replaceable
• But teachers are not merely puppets of the state (291)
• any movement to reform schools, really, bmust begin with the "...recognition that the state, and state schools, are strongly, in not directly, determined by the reproductive needs of capital..." (291)
• Proletarianization suggests that workers increasingly identify with the political interests of the working class (292)
• teachers can make their own culture through everyday practices (293)
• and they can resist and capitulate to pressurs in paradoxical ways, not deterministic ones (293)
• history of teahers' unions in USA (295-304)
• Conclusions
• if teachers have to do the dirty work of clas formation, then their roles must be carefully circumscribed (304)
• reproductive work demands a great deal of top-down control (306)

Gindin 2008

Gindin, J. 2008, "Sindicalismo docente en México, Brasil y Argentina: una hipótesis explicativa de su estructuración diferenciada", Revista mexicana de investigación educativa, Abril-junio 2008 volume 13 number 37, p 351-375.

• Argument: the fundamental variable that explains the difference between the cases in Brazil/Argentina and Mexico is the relationship with the sate established at the period of consolidation of labor relations systems (353)
• Argentina
• CTERA created in 1973 (367)
• generally CTERA has been pretty fragmented and weak
• in 1987 there was a split in the CTERA, half were under a UCR leader and half under a PJ leader
• but the PJ half essentially dissolved after it started and lost a big national strike in 1988 (367-8)
• CTERA helped create CTA (368) and bolstered its own power by allowing for leadership at every level to be elected directly, making them the most centralized of the teachers unions (369)
• White tent in 1997 against Menem (369)
• stayed up unti lthe UCR-led coalition won in decemeber 1999
• CTERA got close to NK after his election, but this closeness allowed the teachers to be a sort of internal opposition and still be militant (370)
• the differenc ein that the SNTE was a mediator between teh government and teachers, while in ARgentina and Brazil the government(s) didn't incorporate teachers into the coproate system, and simply ruled them directly when it wanted to. (370-371)
• the mobilization of the 1980s restructured Argentina and Brazil docente unions, while it didn't have this effect on teh SNTE (372)
• said another way, SNTE in Mexico was part of corporatism, and not in Arg and Brazil
• author suggest this starting point helps us understand current teachers' unions