The union bureaucrats seem to have a few passionate defenders on this newsgroup.
My claim that 200 teachers picketed the UFT offices was admittedly an estimate. Our anonymous UFT member, on the other hand, seems to have an exact body count. Where was it taken? It doesn't sound like s/he was participating in the protest. From inside the picketed UFT compound, perhaps?
*My rendering of the delegate vote was likewise an estimate, based on conversations with a couple delegates leaving the assembly. More exact numbers weren?t given because they were never provided. I watched the assembly from a closed circuit TV in an adjoining room (in which Weingarten and others speaking in favor of the contract could hardly be heard over jeers and imprecations from the angry teachers who filled the seats and aisles). After about a half hour of pro-forma debate, Weingarten called the question on a motion to recommend the contract to the membership. She declared that it clearly passed without counting the votes. The four-to-one ratio represents official UFT line. The delegates I spoke to said that the ballots cast against the deal approached a third when a second vote excluding the retirees was taken. They also said the "no" vote was much higher than in previous assemblies.
*The raises in the proposed contract are as follows:
First six months: zero Following year (12/1/03 - 11/31/04): 2% Next 11 months (12/1/04 - 10/31/05): 3.5% Next 11 months (11/1/05 - 9/30/06): 5.5% Last 12 and a half months (10/1/06 - 10/15/07): 3.25%
So the total term of the contract is 52 months. Teachers get 5.5 percent in retroactive pay for the 29 months in which they received no raises at all. In addition, they get 8.75% for the next two years. This is actually less than 15%, and represents the total increase over a period of 52 months, averaging less than 3.5% per year. If we now factor in the additional time teachers must work for this money, which represents a 2.6% increase in the working day, the raise is considerably less.
*As our anonymous UFT member points out, the contract only calls for an increment of ten minutes in the total time teachers must spend in school (on top of an additional 20 minutes that Weingarten agreed to in the last contract she signed). But the TEACHING day is lengthened by 37.5 minutes--for "small group instruction" during four out of five working days. This, in effect, adds the better part of a sixth period to the five periods teachers are already required to spend in the classroom. Add to this new hall, cafeteria and bathroom duties, and there won't be a lot of time left for class preparation, much more of which teachers will probably have to do at home in addition to the other tasks they take home with them already.
(Bloomberg's whole idea of additional instruction time is an attempt to address problems concerning the quality of education with a meaningless, quantitative abstractions meant for public consumption. Much of the time that students already spend in school is not used for instruction, but for "advisory" periods, "electives," and "study halls" which in many schools amount to little more than the warehousing of kids; these periods are often taken up with video watching and game playing, to the excruciating boredom of students. Demanding additional time in exchange for raises is simply another way of bludgeoning the union. Any decent union leader would have opposed the whole idea in principle from the beginning.)
*New teachers after this year would only get a 9% increase instead of the 15%
* Teachers calling in sick would now be required to make their medical records available to the Department of Ed.
*Any teacher even charged under criminal or NY state law with a sexual offense would be suspended without pay until he or she is proved innocent.
What we have here, in short, is an agreement meager in improvements and rich in givebacks. If this isn't a sellout, I'd like to know what is.
Apart from the specifics of this contract, our anonymous UFT member (or maybe UFT staffer?) is right to point out that the proposed contract represents one more chapter in the concession bargaining that began in NY during the fiscal crisis of the 70s, and became a model for employers of that period and since--first at Chrysler, then at many other places. Were the union chiefs who made these givebacks simply implementing the wishes of the rank and file? Was it rank-and-file union members who collaborated with Felix Rohatyn and the MAC to eliminate 60,000 jobs, and who, in reward, got jobs for their sons at Rohatyn's financial firm of Lazard Freres? Was it ordinary union members who went on Easter egg hunts with Rohatyn and Henry Kissinger? It was rather, as I recall, the head of AFSCME, Victor Gotbaum who did these things and received these emoluments. And neither was it the rank-and-file who, when one member of the General Labor Council proposed a general strike in response to the city's wage freeze and job reduction demands, replied that general strikes were political weapons used in Europe by Communists, and therefore definitely not for him. Again if memory serves, the author of these remarks was Albert Shanker, then head of the UFT.
Anonymous notwithstanding, concession bargaining is neither inevitable nor a simple reflection of membership attitudes ("the low level of class struggle") nor merely a matter of tactics. The actual concessions are made by union leaders who regard the imperatives of bankers, stockholders and CEOs as essentially legitimate, and who also want, for very palpable considerations of material rewards and social status, to stay on their good side. Nothing fills them with greater dread than the prospect of organizing to fight back. Is it any wonder that much of the rank and file has become pessimistic and demoralized after decades of such leadership? But, whether this contract passes or fails (and I think a majority will probably approve it out of resignation rather than enthusiasm) the growing anger at the Weingarten regime is not about to go away. The ruling dynasty of the UFT may just find itself facing a crisis of leadership one of these days. The sooner the better.
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