|
Open
World Conference of WorkersAddress to the California Federation of Teachers Convention March 10, 2001
by Olivier Frayssé (National Union of Higher Education and
Science Workers, Force Ouvriere, France)
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
I wish to extend my warmest thanks to Mary Bergan and the California
Federation of Teachers for inviting me to this convention. I also wish to
thank Dan Kaplan for telling me about this event and its focus on the
issues raised by on-line education.
May I introduce myself. My name is Olivier Frayssé. I am a professor at
the Sorbonne in Paris, France, where I teach American studies. I am also
the president of the National Union of Higher Education and Science
Workers of Force Ouvrière. Force Ouvrière, which means Workers' Strength
in English, in short FO, is the sister organization of AFL-CIO in France
and was a co-founder, with AFL-CIO, of the International Confederation of
Free Trade Unions.
My union is certified, along with other unions that belong to other
confederations or are unaffiliated, to bargain for higher education and
science workers on a nationwide basis.
I came here because you have been pioneers in addressing the issue of the
use of new technologies in education, a large part of which you have
correctly identified as a corporate assault on public education.
I came here to learn and report to my membership on possible strategies to
fend off this assault, an assault that takes different forms in different
countries but which always has the five same distinctive characteristics :
1. Education is considered as a market rather than a public duty,
knowledge as a commodity rather than a means to become more human,
students as consumers rather than citizens or future citizens.
2. Institutions try to appropriate the intellectual property rights of
faculty and plan to sell their courses to other institutions, firms, and
the public at large.
3. Huge investments of public money are made to fund efforts to develop
on-line education.
4. The promise of high-tech education is used as an excuse to reject
claims for the building of needed schools and colleges and the hiring of
new teachers and classified workers.
5. As in other "service industries" technology is used by
management to cut labor costs, deskill a majority of workers, improve
productivity and monitor compliance with employer-made rules. Which means
that the "information age" is different from the
"industrial age" mainly in that industrial methods are applied
to the so-called "knowledge workers", which means us.
I understand that there are many obstacles to the completion of this
corporate blueprint. One of them is economic : recent NASDAQ history has
shown the limits of hype in high-tech.
Yet, to this day, major corporations all over the world are planning to
invest huge sums of money to corner what they call the education market
and governments give them encouragement in many ways, that include
inducing universities to behave like corporations, which also serves to
cut public funding for higher education as the institutions of higher
learning are turned into profit centers.
And the history of health-care in this country in the last ten years shows
that such knowledge workers that were once shielded from the common fate
of workers as doctors and nurses are now experiencing vastly modified
working conditions as a result of the commoditization of medicine. This
commoditization has been the high-tech, hyper-wired, network-modeled way
to cut expenditures on people's healthcare and to increase corporate
profits. If you do not believe that commoditization can happen to you, ask
your doctor if he diagnosed the development of HMO's ten years ago.
We think that international cooperation is needed in this matter for three
reasons :
First, we need your help. European governments have a habit of imitating
America's mistakes rather than America's achievements. They do it after a
certain time lag. Typically, they will adopt policies that start to be
implemented in Europe at the very moment when Americans realize they are a
failure. So we are interested in knowing beforehand the likely outcomes of
these policies, so that we prevent their development or mitigate their
negative outcomes.
Your early experience of these issues is invaluable to us.
In particular I have in mind the contract language that you have prepared
and that we would be very glad to have at hand when we start bargaining on
these issues.
Second, we might help you. The push for the commoditization of education
is in direct proportion to the size and attractiveness of the market.
Given that English is a global language, the whole world is a market for
US made courseware, which might well change some of the basic economics of
the problem by making the enterprise more profitable. The broader the
market, the more commoditized public education in other countries, the
more intensive the pressure on your educational system to be turned into a
courseware churning mill. So it is your interest to monitor developments
abroad and help us resist this trend.
And finally, international labor solidarity is called for to preserve and
improve public education everywhere. Together, we can block a policy that
would shortchange students of working families, jeopardize the status and
working conditions of faculty and classified staff, and threaten these
priceless inventions of ages, namely the free intercourse of ideas between
students and teachers and the existence of compulsory free time for
thinking, which also goes by the name of class hours.
This is why my union would very much like to see CFT and AFT input their
substantial knowledge in this area into the planning of an international
conference on on-line education and related issues. Ideally, such a
conference should be placed under the auspices of Education International,
of which both AFT and Force Ouvrière are founding members, and which is
the education branch of the International Confederation of Free Trade
Unions.
To conclude, I wish to thank you all again for your warm welcome, and I am
very happy to give Mary Bergan this little book. It is on Abraham Lincoln,
Land and Labor. I have written things that deal with other, more topical
subjects, but this one is in English, and if I understood your answers to
Rob Reiner's questions yesterday, it is a safe choice.
And I think Lincoln is still a very topical subject. Because he was loath
to accept the unacceptable, he turned the tide of the extension of
slavery, and much good came of it. Thank you again.