Albert Shanker: 'Power Is Good'

In Sleeper, Woody Allen's film about America in the year 2173, one of the characters explains how the northeastern part of the U.S. was obliterated: "A man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead." The real-life Albert Shanker, leader of New York City's public school employees, scarcely looks like an earthshaker. In fact, he could easily pass for what he once was: a full-time schoolteacher. He wears thick glasses and is virtually blind in one eye; his face droops in a hangdog expression, and a habitual slouch seems to shrink his 6-ft. 3-in. frame. What places Shanker in the megaton range is the power he wields.

As president of the 81,000-member United Federation of Teachers, he not only leads the nation's largest union local but also holds considerable sway over the country's biggest local school system. During New York City's fiscal crisis, Shanker has emerged as the toughest and most intransigent of its municipal labor leaders, backed by an equally determined rank and file that deeply believe in the simple rubric he has taught them: "Power is a good thing. It is better than powerlessness."

Under Shanker's leadership since 1964, the U.F.T. has shown that teachers could be transformed from genteel professionals who seldom raise their voices into members of an aggressive union that rarely lowers its voice.

This has won Shanker a place in the AFL-CIO hierarchy. At 47, he is the youngest member of the AFL-CIO's 35-member executive council and is reputed to want to succeed President George Meany. "Usually, white-collar union leaders don't understand trade-unionism," says New York Labor Mediator Ted Kheel. "Shanker could have been the leader of the Steelworkers."

Though Jewish, Shanker grew up in an Irish-Italian section of New York's borough of Queens. His father distributed a union newspaper; his mother was a member of two garmentworkers' unions. As a student in New York schools and later at the University of Illinois, Shanker was an active socialist who campaigned for Norman Thomas. In 1952 he became a city schoolteacher. But seven years later, he gave it up to become a full-time union organizer. On his rounds, he met a Queens teacher named Edith Gerber, whom he made a strike captain and later married ("I organized her," he says). They have three children, aged 10 to 13, and live in a split-level house in suburban Putnam County.

sb In his public posture, Shanker appears to be a dogged, stubborn defender of what he deems to be right. In private, he is different: "Because of the strikes," says Tom Kahn, a Meany assistant, "Al has been portrayed as power-hungry and overly aggressive. Personally, he's a shy, intellectual type." Shanker reads voraciously and likes to consider himself close in political attitude to the moderate liberalism of Commentary and Public Interest. In reflective moments, he professes to wonder why he got into the union presidency at all. "I never sought this career," he says, "I backed into it. I like to hike, be with my children, make bread and Viennese pastries. I don't have enough time for these things."

Reluctantly or not, Shanker really established his firm grip on the union in 1968, when the city started an experiment in school decentralization in the largely black Ocean Hill-Brownsville area of Brooklyn. Black militants in control of the schools dismissed 13 teachers who were active in the U.F.T. In response, Shanker called a teachers' strike that lasted for 35 days and led to a nasty period of public hostility between New York's black community and the heavily Jewish teachers' union. The U.F.T. eventually won reinstatement of the teachers, but Shanker spent 15 days in jail for breaking the state law against strikes by public employees.

Since the 1968 strike, Shanker has been accused of retreating from his earlier liberalism. Says a city labor leader: "My disappointment in him is that as the new face in the American labor movement, he adheres to the status quo. He is not innovative in terms of reform." Shanker is not enthusiastic about busing, and he has opposed affirmative-action programs that impose racial or ethnic quotas. "Quotas are authoritarian and essentially discriminatory," he says. "Why not just confer an M.A. at birth on blacks and minorities?" On the other hand, he takes pride in the some 10,000 blacks and Hispanics whom he has brought into the U.F.T. as para-professionals with the opportunity of eventually becoming full-fledged teachers.

Some observers think Shanker is under attack because he has done his job too well. "Once [a union chief] gets to be magnanimous and takes the broad public point of view, he's defeated," says Kheel. "Every leader of a special-interest group is basically selfish. That's why he is the leader."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.