Confidence?! Confidence?!! Pancho don't need no stinking confidence!!

 

Does Pancho look worried?

Of course not.

Pancho's job is quite safe.

And thanks to the time tested tactic of divide and conquer...

Your job is...well...somewhat less safe.

 

Pancho Durkin's announcement that she would be firing 50% of the teaching staff didn't make much sense outside of the fact that nice round numbers tend to be psychologically pleasing.  I explained my thoughts on the matter here.  But after a few weeks of thinking about it, her announcement makes perfect sense for another reason.

 

Humans are not ants.  All of them are individuals with individual and often mutually exclusive objectives.  The New Bedford Teachers Association is legally considered a union, but in reality there has never existed a group of people that could not be turned against each other or otherwise divided.  On Friday there was a lively meeting where members of the NBEA were deciding whether or not to cast a vote of "no confidence" in their Superintendent of Schools.  The appearance of unified purpose is certainly intact.  But Pancho Durkin's 50% announcement was the opening move in what may be a very successful effort to divide the teachers union into smaller, more manageable, and perhaps more toadying and compliant chunks.

 

If every teacher in the New Bedford School System simply handed in their resignation on the last day of school, Pancho would have little choice but to change her tune.  Her exact response is not knowable of course, but she would certainly have difficulty replacing everyone before September.  There's only one problem...

 

Pancho Durkin understands that unions are unified in name only.  There are teachers who are in no financial position to lose their jobs because they are no more than a few paychecks away from being homeless.  There are teachers who are not that bad off, but certainly don't want to empty their savings or decimate their retirement fund while they look for another job.  And their are possibly a few teachers who simply have no loyalty to their fellow union members.  Pancho Durkin, like any competent Guerrilla familiar with Sun Tzu's "Art of War" understands that the secret to defeating a larger, more powerful foe is to divide and conquer.