Class Struggle Education Workers Newsletter
No. 1, November-December 2008

CUNY Adjuncts, Students Launch Fight to
Stop Tuition Hike, Budget Cuts and Layoffs

To see the full Class Struggle Education Workers Newsletter in pdf format, click on the image to the right.

HUNTER COLLEGE, NYC, November 12 – The plaza outside the Hunter West Building rang with chants: “No budget cuts, no tuition hike!” “Lay off [CUNY chancellor] Goldstein, not adjuncts!” Organized by CUNY Contingents Unite (CCU), the rally protested an announced $600 tuition hike, together with $51 million in CUNY budget cuts (just for starters) which have started to bring layoffs of adjuncts and other “part-time” workers. Departments at several CUNY campuses are announcing course cancellations and the formation of jumbo class sections, pushing faculty to take on more students.

“Join us in saying: NO layoffs, NO cuts in classes, faculty or staff; NO tuition hike; and NO to CUNY’s two-tier labor system. YES to saving our jobs, YES to what our students need, YES to defending public education!” read the leaflet calling the protest, which drew over 200 students together with “contingent” and full-time faculty. The event gained wide coverage in English- and Spanish-language TV, radio, and print media.

“We have to unite faculty and students to stop this attack,” exclaimed a sophomore, who added: “the best teachers I’ve had were adjuncts.” Organizers were delighted by the participation of Hunter undergraduates, at least twenty of whom got up to give the first protest speech of their lives. Not the last, though: “This fight is only beginning,” several declared. As the capitalist financial meltdown continues, Governor David Paterson is calling the legislature back to enact more cuts. “Meanwhile, bankers got more than $700 billion, and they keep getting more,” one freshman said from the soapbox (actually a plastic milk crate).

Many of the impromptu student speakers related how difficult it already is for them to stay in school, as tuition, fees and living costs collide with parents’ job losses. One sophomore said, “They’re trying to des­troy public education and replace it with corporate slime.” Students and faculty alike expressed outrage at the new $55,000 raise for Chancellor Goldstein, which pushes his salary and perks past the half-million mark. Making over $200,000 apiece, the top 27 CUNY execs are now paid a total of over $6 million a year. The crowd chanted to cut their pay by “50, 60, 80, let’s make it 100 percent.”

In addition to the economic crisis and Wall Street bailout, several speakers linked the attack on public education to the colonial wars and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, which go together with war on basic rights “at home.” As an example of how working-class power can be mobilized, some pointed to West Coast longshore workers’ May Day port shutdown against the war. Crucial to a fight against layoffs, cuts and hikes will be bringing in powerful sectors of the city’s labor movement, including immigrant workers, and those not yet organized into unions. With budget cuts aimed squarely at the black, Latino, working-class and poor population, there is a need and potential for large-scale mobilization, which some middle-class sectors, facing impoverishment, would likely support as well. The key is militant, effective mobilization. Leaders beholden to the Democratic Party of Paterson and president-elect Obama are not about to organize this; it’s up to us to make it happen.

The next step by the CCU will be a student/faculty organizing meeting at Hunter on November 18. Student friends of the CSEW have taken the lead in gathering support for this event from innumerable Hunter campus clubs and organizations. Meanwhile, protests are being planned at LaGuardia and a number of other campuses. The Professional Staff Congress (representing 20,000 faculty and staff at CUNY) should immediately call half-day (afternoon) campus assemblies of faculty, students and staff, to prevent any layoffs or course cuts. Up to now, however, PSC leaders have said little and done less.

To win, militant, massive mobilization is required. “You have a right to an education, and it should be affordable, which means free,” adjunct activist Igor Draskovic told the crowd, which responded: “Education is a right – Fight, fight, fight!” The rally’s emcee (also a member of Class Struggle Education Workers) pointed out that the notorious Taylor Law has been used to try to stop people from even uttering the “s-word,” and asked if students knew what the “s-word” is. “Strike, strike, strike,” they erupted. Some chanted, “Student walkout, teachers strike!”

The sentiment was refreshing, especially in light of the virtual non-response so far by union leaders. A few placards asked a pertinent question: “What about ‘a day without adjuncts’?”

To prepare effective action, the basis must be set. This will require persistent, intensive and systematic organizing. If management thinks it can balance the budget on our backs, it’s got another think coming. Our task may be summed up in the motto popularized by Rosa Luxemburg’s comrade, the German revolutionary and anti-militarist organizer Karl Liebknecht:

Educate – Agitate – Organize.

Obama Education Chief Duncan to Lead Attack on Teachers, Public Education

Chicago Schools Chief Axed Over 400 Educators This Year

Obama Education Chief Duncan to Lead
Attack on Teachers, Public Education

By UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers

So President-elect Barack Obama finally broke the suspense and announced his selection of his “good friend” Arne Duncan, the head of the Chicago Public Schools, as education secretary. Big surprise, Obama has been buddies with Duncan for years. The choice has been portrayed as way to please both sides in roiling debates over education policy pitting the conservative teacher union bashers against liberal ed school professionals who want more investment in schools. “Both camps will be OK with the pick,” said the director of education policy for the Business Roundtable. In fact, Duncan will spearhead the drive for corporate education “reform” that aims at regimenting public schools to fulfill the manpower needs of big business and the military. And the first target in this education war will be teachers.

George Bush’s education czarina Margaret Spellings declared Duncan a “kindred spirit,” a “reform-oriented school leader who has been a supporter of No Child Left Behind and accountability concepts and teacher quality” (Washington Post, December 16). Randi Weingarten, speaking as head of the United Federation of Teachers and the national AFT, gave her nod of assent in advance: “Arne Duncan actually reaches out and tries to do things in a collaborative way” (New York Times, December 14). Chicago teachers report that Duncan fired 400 teachers in 2008, even before the current school year began. But don’t worry, says Weingarten, Duncan will fire you “collaboratively.”

Ever since the election of Obama on November 4, the lobbying has been intense over who would get the education post. E-mail petitions circulated against New York schools chancellor Joel Klein or D.C. chancellor Michelle Rhee as secretary. For all his talk of “change,” the Democratic president-elect is staffing his administration with the same right-wing crowd that ran the Clinton regime, plus Bush’s current war secretary Robert Gates. But Obama had already made clear he would keep U.S. forces in Iraq and escalate the war in Afghanistan. It was his liberal, labor and reformist leftist supporters who peddled the illusion that he would be an “antiwar” president.

It’s no surprise the Business Roundtable considered the choice of Arne Duncan ideal for Obama. Duncan has ostentatiously presented himself as the champion of corporate school “reform,” emphasizing management control. In April 2007 Duncan axed 775 probationary teachers on one day. When teachers lose their positions due to school closings, they can be fired if another principal doesn’t pick them up, as Joel Klein yearns to do in New York. If you want to know why it’s important to have teacher tenure, look at Chicago.

Arne Duncan presides over the most segregated school system in the United States. In more than 400 of the 600 schools, the student body is over 90 percent black or Latino. Of the more than 40 schools that Duncan has closed, all were black; elite schools, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly white. In the one integrated segment of the public school system, magnet schools, Duncan has raised the possibility of eliminating diversity criteria as “unconstitutional” and contrary to “school choice.”

But it’s oh-so “collaborative,” says Weingarten. It is true that Duncan “collaborates” with Chicago Teachers Union president Marilyn Stewart, who negotiated a disastrous contract last year introducing so-called “merit pay” and legitimating the CPS’ rampant school closings. Stewart rammed the 2007 contract through the CTU House of Delegates, refusing to count “no” votes. She has done nothing to stop the proliferation of charter schools, an Obama favorite.

But the fundamental point is that Obama has been working hand-in-glove with Duncan for years, and this is widely known in educator circles. Back when Weingarten and the rest of the UFT/AFT leadership were pumping for Hillary Clinton, they alluded to Obama’s support for “merit pay,” charter schools and axing “low performing” teachers. But the minute they switched to Obama, all this was conveniently forgotten. Leading up to the election, an article published by The Internationalist (November 2008) noted of the different groups promoting school “reform”:

“For sellout union bureaucrats and would-be union militants alike, their support for the Democratic Party in particular and capitalist politics in general guarantees that they cannot defend education workers from the approaching storm. So long as George Bush was in the White House, they could count on sympathy from liberals and indeed most of the population. But against Obama they will be isolated, and stymied by their failure over the last quarter century to oppose outright and propose a real alternative to big business education policies….”

Arne Duncan as education secretary is the direct result of the “lesser evil” politics that chain teachers to the Democratic Party. We in the Class Struggle Education Workers call instead to build a workers party that can transform public education under a workers government.

Vote Down the Bureaucratic “Gag Rule,” Keep Government Out of Union Affairs!

Vote Down the Bureaucratic “Gag Rule”
Keep Government Out of Union Affairs!

By UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers

Only a few days after the successful November 24 mobilization at Tweed Courthouse in defense of the ATR teachers, we got some blowback from our union leadership, which had unsuccessfully tried to squelch it. A motion was circulated for the upcoming executive board, and will come up at the December 17 Delegate Assembly. It’s purportedly against the presence of news media, recording, videotaping or transmitting union proceedings. In fact, this is a gag rule.

It’s a given that labor organizations have every right to do business without the prying eyes and ears of management and its hacks and flacks in the media. But that is not what this is about. It grew out of the videotaping, by a union member, not of a regular union meeting, but of a special gathering (complete with wine and cheese) called with the aim of drawing people away from the union protest, which the Delegate Assembly had voted for, outside the Department of Education. But their ploy didn’t work – people came out to the demo in the hundreds.

The leadership could simply rule that there will be no video or audio recordings at meetings and be done with it. But here we have an elaborate resolution about the “free and open debate” in which members can speak “honestly and frankly in union meetings without fear that their words and images will be reproduced in the news media or on the Internet without their knowledge or permission” (our emphasis).

Again in the “resolves” it seeks to demand respect for the right “that their words and images will not be transmitted or reproduced without their permission.” This is not talking about a reporter from the big-business press sneaking into a meeting.

What does this mean? You can’t e-mail back to your chapter what the union reps said at the meeting? That you can’t quote what top union officers said at the D.A. on one of several list serves or blogs? Evidently, only THEY can report on it, and put their own spin on it? In the guise of defending the “words and images” of certain members (the leaders) they really want to stop the words of the membership.

There’s quite a slippery slope here. These open-ended formulations could be used to sanction a UFT member for quoting what an officer (such as president Weingarten) said in her report or discussion at the meeting. While, for now, no specific measures are mentioned, this lays the basis for disciplining dissidents.

What “free and open debate” are they talking about? At the D.A.? You got to be kidding! Two or three delegates get to speak for about one nano-second and the officers drone on for a good hour and a half. Any real discussion is reserved for the last 20 minutes, as most delegates are tromping out of the room. But the bureaucracy has not been able to shut down the free-wheeling discussion on the blogs, which is about the only outlet for real discussion among the union rank-and-file. Our opposition to bonus pay was waged there; our fight to preserve seniority, our struggle to defend the ATRS --- all of these were organized by the rank and file and aided by discussion on the blogs.

Oppose Landrum-Griffin

In objecting to this “inept gag order,” however, a posting on the ICE-UFT blog (November 30) argues that it would be a violation of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959. We strongly object to this appeal to one of the most notorious anti-labor laws regularly used by the government to ham-string, “investigate” and interfere with unions’ internal affairs.

There’s a class line here, and this is where we differ from many union oppositions. It’s an elementary labor principle to oppose all intervention by the capitalist government or its courts in union affairs, just like it’s a principle never to cross a picket line.

Landrum-Griffin grew out congressional investigations of labor, following the election of Jimmy Hoffa as president of the Teamsters union in 1957. It was based on the “perception” that the Teamsters Union was corrupt. What they actually perceived was that under Hoffa the Teamsters were rapidly organizing Midwest over-the-road truckers which a few years later led to the first national Master Freight Agreement, which dramatically raised truckers’ wages. They went after Hoffa in an effort to break union power.

From the moment that trade unions appeared, the government, representing the employers has passed thousands of laws to contain and paralyze if not directly outlaw the labor movement. Even where they ostensibly aided union organization such as the 1935 Wagner Act, setting up the National Labor Relations Board, these bodies are now regularly used to prevent workers from organizing.

These days they don’t use crude measures like the “criminal-syndicalism” acts, and instead profess concern for “union democracy.” But you can be sure that when they pretend to guarantee “clean elections” or “membership rights,” they are doing so in order to control the outcome. Various leftist groups that sued the unions under Landrum Griffin (Miners for Democracy, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, New Directions in the TWU and others) used the government to get into office, and then were beholden to them.

From the Taylor Law (used by Democrat Spitzer against the 2005 TWU strike) to Landrum Griffin (prepared by Democrat Bobby Kennedy), to the Taft-Hartley Act (signed by Harry Truman) which provides the basis for anti-strike injunctions, the government is no “friend of labor.” Where there are problems of corruption, violations of union democracy, etc, labor must clean its own house. It’s our union – we need to take it back.

In the meantime, the answer to the gag rule is “blog away”!

Rallies Against Budget Cuts, Layoffs, CUNY Tuition and MTA Fare Hikes

On December 16, after New York's Democratic governor David Paterson presented his 2009 cutback budget, a rally was held outside Paterson's NYC office, called by the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the union representing faculty and staff of the City University of New York (CUNY). CUNY Contingents Unite (CCU), a grouping in the PSC speaking for adjunct and other part-time employees, also called to protest there, demanding No Tuition Hike, No Budget Cuts, No Layoffs.

At the end of that rally, which drew several hundred participants, well over 100 demonstrators marched to a second protest outside the Midtown headquarters of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) called by the Take Back Our Union Movement in Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, the union representing New York City subway and bus workers. Among the speakers at this demonstration was Sándor John, who teaches labor history at CUNY and is a member of CCU and Class Struggle Education Workers. Below is a video clip of his speech.

Chicago UE Workers Occupy Plant, Electrify Labor

The following resolution is being circulated by UFT members in the CSEW:

WHEREAS, on Friday, December 5, the owners of the Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago abruptly closed the plant, giving their employees only three days notice, in flagrant violation of the federal WARN Act (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) requiring 60 days notice or pay for that period; and

WHEREAS, the workers at Republic Windows occupied the plant demanding that they receive more than $1 million in back vacation pay and severance pay owed to them by the company; and

WHEREAS, the plant occupation, a powerful form of labor struggle harking back to the sit-down strikes of the 1930s that built the CIO industrial unions, has been greeted by workers around the country, pointing the way forward; and

WHEREAS, the U.S. government and Federal Reserve are funneling $8.5 trillion to bail out Wall Street and the major banks, including $25 billion to Bank of America which cut off credit to the company; and

WHEREAS, the courageous workers at Republic Windows, including many immigrant workers, must not stand alone against finance capital, and instead should receive active support from all Chicago labor and workers around the country;

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the United Federation of Teachers convey its full solidarity with the Chicago sit-in strikers and encourage the Chicago Federation of Teachers to actively join picket lines and protests in support of their union brothers and sisters; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the UFT shall make a substantial donation to the UE Local 1110 Solidarity Fund (37 S. Ashland, Chicago, IL 60607); and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the UFT join with unionists around the country, and encourage other New York City unions to do likewise, in picketing Bank of America affiliates in upcoming protest actions.

Below see three short videos on the Republic Windows plant occupation in Chicago from December 6.

Chicago UE plant occupation video #1



Chicago UE plant occupation video #2




Chicago UE plant occupation video #3

Teachers, CUNY, City Workers Under Attack

The following leaflet by UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers was distributed at the November 24 rally to defend teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve. For more information see the Web site of the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend ATRs

As Gov't Bails Out Bankers

Teachers, CUNY, City Workers Under Attack

Mobilize Class Struggle to Defend Our Jobs, Our Students and Our Rights

By UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers

The United States is in the throes of what is admitted by all to be the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Already more than $1.5 trillion have been budgeted to shore up the banking system, while more than a million workers have lost their jobs this year and millions more are about to be thrown onto the unemployment lines. The predatory Wall Street moguls who set off the crisis with their unbridled speculation gave an ultimatum to Congress to come up with the ransom money (the “bailout”) while working people are shafted. Congress complied.

In New York City, billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced multi-billion-dollar cuts in the current budget and more to come. Governor David Paterson is demanding that state workers unions reopen their contracts to give up wage gains already agreed to. Public employees’ pensions are potentially at risk due to the stock market panic and finagling by the reinsurance giants. In the midst of this all-round crisis, the NYC Department of Education has illegally siphoned off millions of dollars mandated by New York State to reduce class size, and refused to give positions to more than 1,500 qualified teachers who are ready, willing and able to teach!

Activists in the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) have been mobilizing to fight against this latest attack by the DOE and its boss, Mayor Bloomberg. Yet the biggest obstacle to a successful struggle against the endless assault on teachers and municipal workers is the labor bureaucracy which chains the unions to the capitalist system and the Democratic Party in particular. This is made crystal clear as Democrats are about to control the White House and both houses of Congress in Washington, as well as the state house and both branches of the New York state legislature in Albany – and the attacks on working people multiply.

During the 2008 presidential election campaign, the Democratic and Republican candidates echoed many of the same themes on education. Charter schools, “merit pay,” making it easier to fire teachers? Barack Obama and John McCain underscored their agreement. And both praised the viciously anti-labor chancellor of Washington, D.C. schools, Michelle Rhee, who has declared war on the unions and vows to eliminate teacher tenure.

Since the election of Obama, the various Democratic Party constituencies have been lobbying for their preferred policies and their favorite candidates for cabinet posts. In the middle of this wheeling and dealing, the new American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten stepped up to the plate to announce that “as a pledge of shared responsibility,” except for vouchers for private schools, “NO issue should be off the table” so long as it is “good for students and fair to teachers.” And who decides that? For Weingarten, it’s all up for grabs.

In addition to her new post as AFT chief, Weingarten continues to head up New York City’s UFT where she has presided over a steady erosion of union gains, particularly under NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg. In fact, Bloomberg introduced the union leader at her November 16 speech to the National Press Club. Weingarten returned the favor, declaring: “is there a role for differentiated pay – the kind of pay that Mayor Bloomberg and others call merit pay and still others call performance pay? Of course there is.” So much for the fundamental union principle of equal pay for equal work.

The UFT leader’s trademark is to go along with just about every anti-union educational “reform,” unless it affects her dues base, while modifying it slightly, repackaging it as the “least bad” option, and selling it as a “victory.” But each of these “victories” eliminates vital union job protections. This is the logic of “lesser evil” politics common to the labor bureaucracy as a whole, which puts them in bed with capitalist politicians (usually Democrats, but also the occasional Republican like Bloomberg). Weingarten says “collaboration” is key. What she’s talking about is class collaboration, when what’s needed is sharp class struggle to defeat the assault on unions.

The AFT supported Obama because “he said repeatedly that education reform must be done with teachers, not done to teachers.” So with a little stroking, the union misleaders will accept from supposed “allies” like Obama what they bridled at when it came from certified labor haters like Bush. Throw in a couple billion dollars and apply some make-up, and the AFT will accept a “new look” No Child Left Behind act, instead of calling to junk the anti-teacher, anti-student law outright. And when Weingarten talks of “teachers’ buy-in,” she is buying in to the bourgeois lie that teachers are responsible for the sorry state of American schools.

A perfect example of the mess created by the UFT is the current battle over the fate of some 1,400 educators in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR), and another 120 first-year Teach Fellows who have not received positions. The highly qualified teachers end up in the ATR pool not because they “incompetent,” as the bourgeois press claims and NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein implies, but because they were “excessed” when their schools or programs were organized out from under them by the Education Department.

In 2005, the UFT leaders bargained away seniority transfer rights in exchange for a salary increase. Where teachers previously were guaranteed a job when schools or programs were eliminated, now they must be rehired by a principal. And under Tweed’s cynically named “Fair Student Funding” formula, school administrators can get two inexperienced teachers for the price of one experienced teacher earning higher pay. Or the principal may not like union activists, or whistle blowers inclined to question some of the shenanigans of school managers. So ATRed teachers sit in sub pools or even do the same job as before, but without the job security of an assigned position.

The bottom line is that under the “business model” education “reform” of Bloomberg/Klein, supported by Democrats from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, administrators are given total authority, until they are unceremoniously bounced by Tweed because they have run afoul of some statistical model based on “high stakes” bubble tests. As long as this is the case, and so long as the union doesn’t buckle on the “no layoffs” clause in the contract or abandon teacher tenure, the DOE’s reorganization mania will continue to produce hundreds of new ATRs every year.

The November 24 rally is demanding that the Department of Education “give assigned positions to all teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve who want assignments before any new teachers are hired.” This was approved at the October 15 UFT Delegate Assembly in an amendment put forward by a rank-and-file ad hoc committee to support the ATRs. The UFT leadership was never enthusiastic about the rally, at one point calling it a candlelight vigil, and did little to prepare for it. Then less than a week before the rally it announced that a side agreement had been signed with the DOE to facilitate placement of ATRs.

The side agreement includes complicated language and funding formulas that would somewhat counteract the present disincentive to hire experienced teachers. This may result in the placement of some present ATRs, which would take some heat off Bloomberg/Klein for refusing to give classes to 1,500 qualified teachers in the middle of an economic crisis, when classes are more overcrowded than ever. But it doesn’t alter the basic frameworks, so there will be more ATRs next year. And as shown in a revealing analysis by James Eterno, it would even create an incentive not to hire ATR teachers until November “when ATRs go on sale” (see “ATR Step Forward?” at iceuftblog.blogspot.com)

In addition, nothing is said in the side agreement about the Teaching Fellows who will be “terminated” if not given a permanent position by December 5. Also, while the new formula applies to centrally funded ATRs (whose schools were closed), it does nothing for school-funded ATRs (whose programs were closed). And in signing the agreement Klein made a point of saying that he had not abandoned his intention to “terminate” ATRs who are not hired by a principal. Far from being a victory, this is an attempt by UFT and DOE bureaucrats try to hide a problem created by abandoning a fundamental union gain.

We UFTers who are members of the Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW), a recently formed union tendency also including members of the Professional Staff Congress at the City University of New York, defend public education against capitalist attack. We fight for all teachers to be given positions, to defend teacher tenure, to abolish disciplinary “rubber rooms” in which teachers subject to unjust accusations are penalized, to restore seniority transfers and for equal pay for equal work. But in addition to upholding basic trade-union rights and opposing corporate educational “reform,” it is necessary to transform public education in the interests of working people and the oppressed.

Bloomberg/Klein won mayoral control of the schools with the support of the UFT leaders, and seek to give dictatorial control to school managers. The CSEW calls instead for councils of teachers, students, workers and parents to control the schools. Such a genuinely democratic school system would be opposed by the capitalists and Democratic and Republican politicians alike. To fight for such demands it is necessary to prepare the UFT, PSC and all municipal and state employees unions, and win the support of students, parents and workers, to defeat the Taylor Law which outlaws strikes by public employees.

The election of the first-ever African American president signals an important social shift in this country founded on slavery, whose legacy continues today. But even as Democrats and Republicans (and most of the left) talk of a historic election, racism has hardly been overcome: U.S. schools are as segregated as ever, and there was a post-election lynch mob murder of an immigrant on Long Island. And Obama in office will defend the interests of capital – starting with the bailout of Wall Street while ripping up union contracts, starting with the United Auto Workers. He will leave tens of thousands of U.S. colonial occupation troops and mercenaries in Iraq, escalate the war on Afghanistan, expand the bombing of Pakistan and perhaps hit Iran.

The continued imperialist war, the war on working people in the U.S., the “bipartisan” lovefest over corporate “education reform” are all part of a broader capitalist consensus to solve the economic crisis by tightening the screws on the working class. To fight this, the key is a build a leadership on a program of class struggle in opposition to the class collaboration of the present union leaderships. While the labor tops keep on backing Democratic and Republican politicians, we in the CSEW call to oust the sellout bureaucrats and build a workers party to fight for a workers government!

Class Struggle Education Workers Formed

Class Struggle Education Workers was formed in September 2008 by activists in two New York City education unions: the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), representing public primary and secondary educational personnel, and the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), which represents faculty and staff at the City University of New York. We also seek to involve campus and school administrative staff and maintenance workers who are in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) as well as other unionized and non-unionized workers. Those initiating the group played leading roles in fights against merit pay and in defense of “excessed” teachers in the NYC schools, in opposition to the “two-tier” labor system at CUNY, in defense of immigrant students and in solidarity with striking teachers in Mexico and Puerto Rico. The felt need was for a grouping to help provide a clear orientation and leadership in the struggle to defend and transform public education in the interests of working people and the oppressed. This intersects almost every crucial social and political issue of the day and ultimately means bringing down the rule of capital. As this requires a thorough-going break from the entire framework of “business unionism” and the outlook of the union bureaucracy, general calls for more militancy and union democracy alone only lead to a dead end. Instead, the Class Struggle Education Workers is based on a class-struggle program, presented below.

Class Struggle Education Workers' Program

We have formed Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) as part of a broader fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed rather than, as it is at present, an instrument for the disciplining of labor in the interests of capital. The subservience of organized labor goes beyond the PSC, UFT and AFSCME, and we look forward to a class-struggle tendency encompassing militants in a number of unions. We support the basic positions expressed in the Internationalist pamphlets Stop CUNY's Anti-Immigrant War Purge and Marxism and the Battle Over Education. We stand for:

Free public education from kindergarten through graduate school. Abolish corporate-dominated Boards of Trustees and mayoral control of the schools: students, teachers and workers (together with parents at primary and secondary schools) should democratically control schools and universities.

Stop education privatization and making the City University of New York into “Wal-Mart U”! For militant action against deepening inequality at CUNY and throughout the school system. Abolish the two-tier academic labor system that pays adjunct and other contingent education workers poverty wages. Job security, parity and full health coverage for adjuncts and all “part-timers,” including graduate students: equal pay for equal work. Unite against the drive to gut public higher education and turn it into a “platform” for making profits.

Defend and transform public education in the interests of working people and the oppressed. Oppose capitalist corporatization. Cancel all student debt. Living stipend and free housing for students. No to “charter schools” as an opening wedge to privatization. Down with “merit pay” in any form. In UFT: Full-time positions for all teachers “excessed” or “reorganized” out of their jobs (ATRs). Defend tenure, restore seniority, abolish “rubber rooms” that penalize teachers subject to unjust accusations.

Oppose resegregation of schools: separate is not equal. Stop discrimination and racist attacks against black, Latino, Asian and immigrant students. Fight budget cuts, tuition hikes, exclusionary tests and all anti-working-class, anti-minority measures. Restore open admissions, no tuition. Down with the anti-education “No Child Left Behind” act. Stop anti-immigrant “war purges” (like the one CUNY launched in 2001) against undocumented students and workers. Full citizenship rights for all immigrants.

Mobilize the power of labor together with minorities, immigrants and students in an all-out fight to smash the Taylor Law. Keep bosses’ courts out of the unions. Police and military recruiters out of the schools. No cops, prison or security guards in the unions. For a single union of all university workers. Oust the sellout bureaucrats, for a class-struggle leadership.

Parental leave for all. Free childcare on campus, available round the clock for students and employees. Full reproductive rights, including free abortion on demand and full availability of contraceptives; no to reactionary campaigns against sex education.

Defend the rights of labor, minorities, immigrants, women, gays and lesbians. Make PSC defense of Mumia real – mobilize workers’ power for his freedom. Solidarity with teachers and all workers in Mexico, Puerto Rico and elsewhere.

End union support to capitalist politicians (Democrats, Republicans, Greens, et al.). For workers’ strikes against the war – Defeat U.S. imperialism. Oppose U.S. war threats against Iran, Cuba, China, North Korea. For a class-struggle workers' party to fight for a workers' government.

– Original version presented 24 August 2008; this updated version incorporates the changes made at the founding meeting of the CSEW, 26 September 2008.

For more information, write to Class Struggle Education Workers at: cs_edworkers@hotmail.com