Bonding for the common good
In this moment of chaotic authoritarianism, I think it’s important to focus on a couple things. First, trying to beat the neofascists in as many public contests as possible, like in elections and the parts of the apparatuses they’re trying to capture. Second, planning for what kind of policies we want to put in place after we beat them, and building capacity to enact and implement those policies.
School finance is a great terrain to organize on when it comes to both of these vectors: running for school boards, for example, and getting into study groups to thinking technically and strategically about how we’re going to make education as public as possible.
To that end, I’m helping put together a school finance training institute (it’s in the very early stages, watch this space!).
In a recent conversation about that institute, I had an idea that I thought was kinda cool and punchy, so I thought I’d write about it this week.
The basic idea is that bonds are a kind of contract whose terms institutions negotiate. These bonds exist in a society. They have all kinds of impacts on the lives of the people within their institutional purview and thus they can help or hurt those people, but the bonds also interface with all kinds of entities out in society that we want to transform.
Why can’t diverse working class groups get involved in the bond negotiation process and bond for the common good? What would bonding for the common good look like?
The slogan “bond for the common good” is a riff on bargaining for the common good, which is a powerhouse in union organizing at the moment and has spawned other offshoots like investing for the common good (targeting pensions). The idea is simple and powerful: contract negotiation is a place and time to win programs, policies, and resources for the diverse working class. We’ve seen education unions use this approach in Chicago, Los Angeles, and at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
In these cases, union negotiators have negotiated housing provisions, reparations, and other kinds of stuff directly through the union contract.
A premise of the approach is that contracts aren’t just about bread and butter issues. They’re not just about whether the members have good pay and benefits. That’s important, of course. But these contracts live in a society.
Teachers teach students who can’t pay attention in class because their housing is insecure, for instance. When the teachers bargain for the common good, they think of public housing for their students’ families as a contract issue.
In this framework, when educators go and bargain for their contracts, they don’t just think about pay and benefits. They think about housing, criminal justice, racial justice, environmental justice, etc.
Bonding for the common good applies this logic to bonds.
In this case, unions and/or social movement groups would get involved in an institutions bonding process and influence that process to make sure the bond (1) benefits the diverse working class rather than harms it, both within the institution and beyond it, and (2) works to transform the political economy in and around the institution to give more power to its diverse working class.
For instance, could a teachers union get involved its district bond process and make demands for that bond to benefit the wider diverse working class in which the bond exists? Doing so would politicize something that has a ton of power over people (bonds), about which they tend to know very little. It could potentially win important resources for those people. And it could potentially lend energies to alternative institutions in finance that work towards racial, environmental, climate, and other kinds of justice.
Bonds also come to bear on institutional budgets in ways that can help or hurt workers. Debt service payments, interest payments, consultant fees, capital expenditures (or loans for operating expenditures) all are part of the budgeting process that can threaten workers’ pay and benefits.
And bonds also support institutions out in the world that hurt workers, like Wall Street affiliated for-profit banks, investment firms, consultants, etc. A bond is a debt instrument that extracts precious resources from the institution. They should be a target!
Workers could potentially threaten to strike if a bond doesn’t go their way, for instance, shutting the institution down unless it meets their demands in how to structure the bond.
There are important differences between the bond negotiation and contract negotiation we’d have to keep in mind.
The contract negotiation is between the union and management. The bond negotiation however isn’t so cut and dry. It takes place between the institution’s finance office and a host of other entities: underwriters, consultants, lawyers, credit raters, investors, state and local officials and various authorities. The way that unions and movements could intervene in this negotiation would be more complex than in the contract negotiation, where the union represents members at the table negotiates their contract.
The political education, and thus the moral authority, of a union strike to influence a bond negotiation process would be a more complicated tactical affair. How do you communicate to members and the wider community that this bond and its terms are so important we should withhold our labor to change it? How do you educate to make this complex stuff understandable to members and their families? And then, beyond that, how do you make the case to them that certain bond terms would help the common good?
These are questions we’d have to answer. But I think bonding for the common good could be an interesting vector to push on, particularly as the federal government appears be under direct attack. Bonding is a state and local affair. Bonding for the common good could be a new terrain on which we can fight and build movement capacity as we prepare for the next federal elections.