August 16, 2020
Dear Crissy and the Members of the Board of Trustees,
We write in response to the email you sent to the school community on Friday evening, August 14, announcing your intention to contest the BFS staff union that was established in 2019. We write in multiple capacities: as a labor and employment lawyer; as a historian of the labor movement, familiar with the history of union busting efforts around the world; as a multi-generational alumni of a Quaker school, where we studied Quaker beliefs and were taught the history of Quaker social activism; and as the parents of two children who attend BFS because of the value that we place on Quaker education and Quaker values. Although we recognize that Covid has placed unprecedented stress on you and the school in general, we nevertheless most strenuously object to this course of action. Far from being responsive to Quaker values, we believe this is diametrically opposed to Quaker values.
Historians of the labor movement, both in this country and elsewhere would not help but note that your email referenced the problem of a ‘third party’ coming between you and the school's employees. This is standard union busting boiler plate, familiar from the rhetoric of such well known anti-labor employers as Walmart, which we doubt BFS would strive to be associated. Moreover, in the long and sordid history of union busting globally, employers have long claimed that they wish to approach their employees as individuals, and that outside agitators are making that impossible. Faculty and staff at the school are individuals, who keenly perceived the ways in which they were in a structurally weak position as such; they thus made the decision to organize into a union. There is no ‘third party.’ There is only the collective will and duly executed election of employees who opted to form a union to advocate for their best interests. The idea that BFS is now considering joining the ranks of opportunists and scoundrels who claim that they, not the workers themselves, know what is in workers’ best interests is offensive to us.
Even more disturbing is your reliance on ‘Quaker values’ to justify the school’s actions. Such references are profoundly ironic. For centuries Quakers have recognized that the pursuit of equality demands organization - often into ‘third parties’ - when situations of power iniquity make it impossible for the light of each person to find its fullest expression. This recognition was at the heart of Quakers’ steadfast abolitionism, no matter slaveholders’ repeated claims that such ‘third parties’ violated the ‘relationship’ they had with those that they enslaved. Indeed, slaveholders often justified slavery as precisely that - a ‘sacred relationship’ - in which outsiders were not to meddle. This was an odious lie, which Quaker agitators recognized and organized against. We could go on to cite Quaker activism against militarism in Latin America, against apartheid in South Africa, and on and on. That is Quakerism. Union busting that employs the same rhetoric as those Quakers righteously opposed is not.
Given this, we have to ask who in the Quaker community did BFS consult prior to making this decision, allegedly in the name of Quaker values? Did you consult the American Friends Service Committee, which has long been unionized and aggressively supportive of organized labor, including with its vocal stance against Republican Scott Walker’s union busting efforts in 2011? Did you consult with Friends Seminary, which has recognized its teachers' right to organize for the last 40 years? Surely neither you nor the Board would accuse either group of violating Quaker values.
Finally, we fail to see how your avowed goal of honoring the light of each individual can be reconciled with seeking to overturn how those individuals expressed their will through their vote to unionize. You and the Board have every right to be opposed to unionization for any number of reasons. During the union’s organizing drive, the school’s administration had ample opportunities to (and did) make their case as to why a union was not the answer to employees’ dissatisfaction. Yet, when the votes were counted, the majority of the faculty and staff voted in favor of unionizing. To claim that seeking to overturn the will of that majority is the best way to honor their individual light is highly offensive. This is particularly true given that now, more than ever, faculty and staff deserve to have a collective voice as many are being required to report to work in the midst of a pandemic.
We chose Brooklyn Friends for our children because of the cherished role Quaker education played over many generations in our family. By your acts you have caused us to reconsider that decision. We are profoundly disappointed and urge you and the Board to recant and reconsider.
Please let us know when you and representatives of the Board will be available to meet to discuss this further.
Sincerely,
Katy Hansen
Daniel Magaziner
(Liya 6th, Micah 3rd)