Mr. Kagan’s letter, published in the May 7 issue of  The Chief, is profound and far-reaching. It encapsulates all the bedrock principles of the labor movement. He views its core values as timeless but battle-prone and fears that even professed supporters of labor’s struggles have “ceded ground to our opponents.”

Over seniority, for instance.

Even if, for the sake of argument, it could be conceded that an alternative to the rule of seniority was a more reliable determinant of teacher quality ( an unstable and apocryphal theory), that option would be “dangerous” to exercise because it would play into the hands of the Department of Education and its allies who would inevitably, with the aid and comfort of statistical alchemists and concept contortionsists, enable an incontrovertible lie to masquerade as unimpeachable truth.

Just think of the latest revelations concerning standardized tests. The hot potato of scandal becomes lanolin in the DOE and its armies’ consultant-wiped hands.

Whether or not any postulated alternate and superior measure to seniority actually exists is largely besides the point to Kagan. “I don’t care if it’s a better system,” he says, justifying his “heretical thought” with a scalpel-sharp analysis and revisitation of historical labor unionism.

He recognizes that “The actual purpose of unions is to improve workers’ lives by challenging the free market…to make it hard for the employer to…fire the higher-paid worker. Unionism;s foes realize that also. That’s why they are so paranoid about seniority. They are sorely aware that longer-serving teachers are generally more highly paid.

Kagan envisages potential “attacks on every public union in the city that has some kind of seniority pay grade. With cutting humor, he comments that “the City can ‘prove’ that 23-year-old studs make better sanitation workers than 38-year-olds. Or that 42-year-old firefighters have lost a step or two compared with their firstyear brethren.”

He warns against slogans such as “for the students.” It’s a “mantra” that sounds selfless and expresses an ideal that no worthy person could oppose, but it’s used to manipulate public opinion and conceal a hostile self-serving agenda.

Kagan is proud of the track record of unions.for holding “the idea that working people’s lives and rights were socially more important than employers’ profits and rights.” He emphasizes the many victories won over the years by unions ( such as the 8-hour day, the weekend, and pension plans), noting that these trophies of solidarity and negotiation would “tend to spread even into nonunionized sectors.”

The forward  continuum of workers’ progress may have been arrested and even reversed, he seems to suggest, stating that we have “at least temporarily lost the battle of ideas in this country.”  Instead of deploring the surrender of their wages and benefits to exploiters and extortionists ( my word) in the market place, many nonunion folks are often consenting participants in the “frantic race to the bottom”, lamenting that union workers are not “giving back.” 

Kagan warns that it is critical that “the line is held somewhere.” By “the line” he must mean the conscience and activism of hallowed unionism. It cannot be separated from the contexts of history, including the evolution of ethics in organized societies and the tenets of economics, etc.

“Negative Externality,” part of the 12th grade economics curriculum mentioned by Kagan, is a phenomoneon of which, he points out, “we have been reminded in recent months.” We observe it when “unregulated free markets can make a handful of people money at the expense of the larger society.”  An example he gives is a “polluter who saves a few bucks by fouling the drinking water of the whole town.

He identifies other illustrations of “Negative Externality.”  One of them is Chancellor Joel Klein himself.
Kagan elaborates: “It’s morally and ethically wrong to take away the jobs of people who have worked hard for decades, simply because a cheaper body can be found. It is a spiritual pollution of the values that we should uphold. It is another step away from civilized behavior toward the idea that only might makes right.”

It is of uttermost importance to our survival, he implies, that we “make this case to the public”.

Marc Kagan gives the devil his due, if for no other reason than to know our enemy so that we may frustrate him. “Management, whether private or Mayor Bloomberg, thinks hard about how its labor strategy will unfold over the next 10 or 20 years; if we could learn to do the same, we might have a brighter 2030.”

He has offered a masterful reiteration of the labor movement’s manifest destiny.