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