> staff. Yet each school -- NYC has well over 1000 -- has its own chapter
> leader (our term for shop steward), and each chapter leader is trained not
> only to do grievances, but also to run an active chapter with regular
> meetings and newsletters, to do informal problem solving, to interface with
> parents and PTAs, to access a rather substantial Board bureaucracy, and to be
> the point person on all sorts of educational, health and safety,
> technological issues and more.
How big are these schools? I.e. how much ground does each chapter leader have to cover? 50 people? 100? This sounds like an awful lot to dump on one person. At the GTFF we have 7 or 8 officers to do all this, plus lots and lots of volunteers. Of course, if the schools are in different locations, this makes sense.
> could only come from, well, a graduate student. I would kill for the amount
> of time I had to read and wrote as a graduate student, and devote to all
> sorts of activism.
If I had a nickel for every time someone in the AFT told me, "But you grads don't *really* work all that hard, you're just *part-timers*" I'd be rich enough to retire to Monaco. My own experience is (1) I worked like a dog as a grad, and barely had time to breath, (2) all my friends worked like dogs, and (3) everyone I met in other departments worked like dogs. The mental and psychological pressures are very, very intense, and lots of people dropped out, burned out, or couldn't hack it; meanwhile, you go heavily into debt, because tuition and fees are skyrocketing out of sight (even at relatively cheap state schools like the U of O). I was lucky, in that Comparative Literature is a terrific department and gave me lots of support. Still, now I have 71K of debt and no prospect of earning 40K for at least ten years, a pretty normal situation for my fellow grads.
So are you involved in the UFT's leadership, Leo? Any spicy rumors we know know about?
-- Dennis