Guilds and unions: Alternative histories

Education Minister Alejandro Ventura is publicizing a technical note published by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB, or BID in Spanish) issued last August. IADB technical notes are published with the disclaimer that they are the opinions of the authors, not the IADB.

The study, which is a thorough attack against the education unions in Honduras, is long on opinion and light on credible supporting sources for those opinions. But that's a topic for another time.

Honduran teachers' unions are actually quite different from the image of modern labor unions. And the IADB study illuminates those cultural differences sharply.

Honduran teachers' unions are technically gremios. Gremios, or guilds, arose in the 11th century A.D. as confederations of artisans and merchants that controlled the production, price, and quality of a certain craft. You had to be a member of the guild to make and sell that craft in a particular town, and your education and even the tools you could use were often spelled out. The guild guaranteed your pay. Guilds also provided services like funerals, hospitals, and loans.

In this area of services, guilds served the same function as cofradia memberships did. Cofradias were lay-religious organizations licensed by the Pope that developed at the same time as guilds. Cofradias were concerned with the adoration of a particular saint, but also provided diverse social services such as funerals, hospitals, and loans. We'll return to this shortly.

Honduras has had some form of teacher's union since 1895. The compulsory education law of 1966 established that all teachers must belong to a professional organization recognized by the Honduran government, and those organizations are gremios; guilds. They set the teaching standards, define a code of ethics, and the conditions under which teachers work.

Fast forward to today. What do teachers say are the most important reasons for joining one of the gremios?

According to one study cited in the IADB technical note, they are (in order from most to least important) loans, life and health insurance, and discounts on funerals.

In Honduras teachers are part of the group Hermano Juancito called the "lower middle class." For these people, gremios continue to play a vital role in ensuring economic stability and access to social services.

This is reflected in an otherwise difficult to understand fact: about 20% of the teachers' union members belong to two or more teachers' unions. This matches the practice among cofradia members in medieval Spain, where multiple memberships were common. Each cofradia or guild had a diverse set of social services that could attract members. Some people belonged to as many as five cofradias in sixteenth century Zaragoza, for example.

A World Bank/IADB Public Expenditures Survey (PETS) in 2008-2009 found that having multiple memberships was explicitly a strategy to get more and better health coverage and life insurance, to have greater access to loans, and to have access to a greater suite of diversified services.

(The PETS study found a different set of priorities cited as the main reasons members joined a gremio: salary concerns, academic training, and the formulation of education policy. But that may reflect the contemporary salary negotiations just concluded at the time, and the pattern of multiple memberships is not explained by these interests.)

Medieval institutions still function in our day, still provide benefits to their members. More modern institutions seek to dismantle them in the name of decentralization, not particularly concerned with replacing those services that keep the older institutions popular.

Whatever else is driving the conflicts over teachers' unions that the IADB note seeks to dismantle, one of the effects of their recommendation would be to replace a way to secure social services that has centuries-long roots in the Spanish culture brought to Honduras in the 16th century.

Cutting Off Your Nose To Spite Your Face!

The school year in Honduras is 200 days. It began in January and is supposed to run through November. But this year and last, school has been interrupted and the instructional period shortened.

The administration of Roberto Micheletti thought nothing of ending the school year more than a month early last year to clear out the public schools so the military and police could take them over to hold their flawed election last November. This year, various days have been lost to protests and, most recently, to a two-week strike.

In this situation, the Lobo Sosa administration's Education Minister, Alejandro Ventura, just made an absurd suggestion:

It hurts us to say this, but its preferable to cancel the school year from September on, because the teachers are acting irresponsibly.

Really?! If the teachers are acting irresponsibly, how is it responsible to the students to make the irresponsible suggestion that the government just cancel the rest of the school year?

What is behind this questionable proposal is a labor dispute that the Lobo Sosa administration could settle.

A confederation of teachers' unions, the Federación de Organizaciones Magisteriales de Honduras, has been out on strike the last two weeks because the government is two years behind in its payments to their retirement fund, and is up to three months late in paying the monthly salary of 3000 teachers, among other issues.

It is not that all the teachers all over Honduras are out on strike, but there's a large contingent of them protesting in Tegucigalpa.

As a result, for the last two weeks, many, but not all, schools have been shut, children not receiving classes. The government says about 2 million students are affected.

The protesting teachers have been peaceful, but the security forces have been disproportionately violent of late. Over the weekend the Assistant Security Minister threatened more violence against the protesters if they block the streets, a common tactic in Honduras, that he said interferes with the citizen's right of free passage.

There are many other paths forward that would have better educational outcomes than canceling the school year. Suggesting canceling the rest of the school year is a political response, not one made by someone acting responsibly towards Honduras's students.

Instead, the Education Minister is considering issuing a decree declaring a state of emergency, canceling the remaining school year, and beginning procedures to fire the striking teachers. Here again the disruption of normal constitutional order last year echoes forward: having developed a habit of suspending normal constitutional protections by using the "state of emergency" claim, the Honduran government seems to see it as a solution for all problems.

Not one that will ensure students get the education they deserve. Not one that will settle the debts already owed to teachers. Just one that would allow unilateral elimination of opposition in an undemocratic manner.

"Neither Forgive nor Forget" Shouts the Resistance

Yesterday, the Frente de Resistencia in Honduras carried out a massive protest march in Tegucigalpa. Coverage by Honduras' Tiempo, which provided the headline quoted above, reported estimates of 20,000 participants who marched to demand constitutional reform and accountability for human rights violations that followed the coup d'etat of June 28, 2009.

The crowd was described by Tiempo as composed of

Teachers, union members, workers in general and the unemployed... galvanized by the popular leaders Rafael Alegría, Daniel Durón and Eulogio Chávez.

The pro-coup La Tribuna took a different approach. Their story, which offered no estimate of the crowd size, focused more on the participation by teachers-- who have been the long-term target of conservative backlash from the media and political elites. La Tribuna quoted the Lobo Sosa administration's Minister of Education, Alejandro Ventura, as calling the strike by participating teachers "unfortunate". In response, Jaime Rodríguez, president of the Colegio de Profesores de Educación Media de Honduras (COPEMH) was quoted as saying "It is also possible to teach students in the streets". So much for the idea that Lobo Sosa's appointment of Ventura had resolved the opposition of teachers.

But that didn't stop El Heraldo-- also resolutely pro-coup-- from headlining its story mentioning the march Majority of Teachers Gave Classes Thursday. Their first line tells it all, from their (nakedly biased) perspective:

Primary school teachers from the capital city did not attend the Zelayist march that ended in the accustomed acts of vandalism.

Well, glad we got THAT sorted out.

So is anyone taking notice outside Honduras?

Well, the Jamaica Observer wins the award for highest attention to the issue in the global English-language media. Its coverage estimated the crowd at 10,000 and managed to accurately communicate that the marchers "called for reform of the constitution and denounced corruption and rights abuses since Zelaya was ousted last June".

Of course, its opening paragraph mis-characterized the marchers as simply "pro-Zelaya".

This confusion between a national movement for reform and the personal supporters of a specific politician is not unusual in English-language media. But it detracts from the real issues, and facilitates the media ignoring the fact that it is not just a segment of the Honduran population that remains concerned about what the success of the coup has produced, both in Honduras and more broadly in Latin America.

When Argentina's Christina Kirchner discusses the negative reaction of Latin American governments to the failure of US policy in the face of the coup on CNN-- negative reactions that contributed to the creation of a new regional group excluding the US-- US media should follow through with analysis of what she, and others in the region, are concerned about.

But instead, the US media rely on two strained storylines for Honduras: Zelaya is the past; Lobo is doing everything needed to create "reconciliation".

But there is no reconciliation without actually facing the facts of what divided Honduras, and continues to divide Honduras. To ignore public protest is to shape the news.

Or, as Ida Garberi puts it in the headline of her article on Vos el Soberano about the event:

we are not five, we are not one hundred, sold-out press, count us well...

The Ministry of Education and the Teachers Union

Teachers' unions in Honduras have been a powerful force in dramatizing deteriorating economic conditions for quite some time. Typical of the actions they took throughout the Zelaya administration were strikes in fall of 2008 marked by fiery rhetoric, public takeovers of bridges in Tegucigalpa, and a refusal to conduct classes.

The response to the strikes launched by teachers has been extremely negative, getting to the point that the regrettable Human Rights Ombudsman, Ramón Custodio, argued that the denial of education to students that was produced by teachers strikes should be treated as a violation of human rights, or even terrorism, and those responsible be prosecuted.

So it was a surprise to many when Porfirio Lobo Sosa named as his Secretary of Education Alejandro Ventura, prominent leader of the teachers' union. El Heraldo described him on the occasion of his swearing-in to the cabinet in the least flattering way possible:

the promotor of the most ruthless strikes that have affected millions of children and youths.

Lobo Sosa stated that the naming of Ventura was "a recognition of the teachers' guild". In November, a teachers' coalition called GANADOR, in which Ventura played a leading role, presented Lobo Sosa with a plan for teachers to carry through on the 200 day teaching schedule required by the law, in return for their concerns being addressed by the government. Coverage at the time noted that Ventura was a National Party activist, which in part accounts for his nomination to the cabinet post that so distressed the editorializing reporter writing for El Heraldo.

Teachers refused to return to the classroom in early January, as demanded by the Micheletti regime. Micheletti's government had passed a decree-- Decreto PCM-021-2009-- that suspended instruction for two months in fall, but tried to cover up this sign of weakness by requiring teachers to return a month early for training sessions in January, before the official opening of the school year on February 1. Instead, the Federación de Organizaciones Magisteriales de Honduras (FOMH) said its members would follow the Law of the Teacher (Estatuto del Docente) and return to work on February 1.

And in fact, on January 3, Alejandro Ventura, then still president of the Primer Colegio Magisterial, one of five teachers groups included in FOMH, was quoted as saying that the majority of the teachers would not return to work until the government paid back salaries, as well as a bonus for social adjustment and educational quality called the PASCE. PASCE was supposed to be a payment of four installments of 3200 lempiras a year, on top of base salary. Micheletti's under-secretary of education said that the bonus was not going to be paid because the teachers had not met the quality standards required in 2009, a year marred by extensive strikes even before the coup d'etat.

Ventura said at the time

The teachers have decided that they will not present themselves at the centers on January 4 because the government has not paid the PASCE and in addition various of our comrades on the national level are without salary.

Classes were suspended two months early in fall 2009, El Heraldo noted, because

various teachers had abandoned their students to walk in marches in favor of Manuel Zelaya Rosales.

So the Honduran public is primed to see teachers as part of the suspect internal enemy that supported Zelaya.

FOMH did decide to stay out of the classroom after the coup d'etat, but constituent teachers' groups did not all follow the same course. The Primer Colegio Magisterial that Ventura headed opted to return to teaching. At the time, Ventura was quoted as saying

We understand that we are trying to fix a political problem, whose solution could extend for an indefinite time. In addition, we cannot continue acting irresponsibly with our youth.

Ventura's ability to keep teachers on the job is going to depend on the degree to which he can follow through on his promise to carry out cuts mandated by Lobo Sosa without cutting teachers' salaries or benefits. Just today it was announced that he has signed an agreement with FOMH: in return for back payments of 1400 lempiras, including 300 million for the PASCE bonus, 473 million for vacation pay, 171 million owed to the teachers' organizations, and a payment of 200 million on debt owed to the Instituto Nacional de Previsión del Magisterio (INPREMA). While a staggering amount, 1.4 million lempiras is less than half of the 3.7 million lempiras outstanding, including back-pay for vacations, bonuses, payments to INPREMA, and to the colegios magisteriales that make up FOMH. Probably not coincidental was the announcement that funds from the World Bank would be used in the areas overseen by the Health, Education, and Security ministries. While the stated use of these loan funds is not directly linked to the repayments to teachers, obviously having these funds for other programs relieves pressure on the budgetary priorities of Educación.

So far, the gamble of naming a controversial teachers' union leader seems to be paying off for Lobo Sosa. Teachers had already agreed to go back to the classroom and see what happens with the new administration, as urged by Ventura. While the reported claim by Ventura that 2010 will be one of peace and tranquility in the schools may be wishful thinking, starting out with the teachers in the classroom is politically much better for Lobo Sosa than facing an immediate strike.