ABSTRACT
There is a danger that if unions work only to keep the professional happy, focusing on the 'bread and circuses', there will never be a real discussion about whether their work is of good quality or is making any sense. The essential point here is that it is always easier to talk about money than quality. There has of course always been a strong lobby for more money and bigger salaries, but professional organizations that focused on the quality of their work had become increasingly marginalized. It is not without reason that Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that: Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. Neoliberal reform is in part an attempt to overcome this issue and to make quality of work tangible or measurable, or even objective, and is also an attempt to enforce this perspective of quality on teachers.
