New York City Teachers Stand Up for ATRs

Part of the demonstration outside NYCDOE headquarters, Nov. 24.

By UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers

Hundreds of New York City teachers and supporters rallied at the headquarters of the New York City Department of Education headquarters at Tweed Courthouse on November 24. They were protesting the DOE offensive, echoed by the media, against 1,500 teachers placed in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool due to the endless school “reorganizations” ordered from Tweed. Another 100+ first-year Teaching Fellows faced dismissal by December 5 if they do not find positions. (As a result of a grievance filed by the union, this deadline was pushed back to the beginning of February 2009.)

The teacher bashing is ultimately in the service of union-busting, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein take aim at teacher tenure. Those placed in ATR status include some of the most experienced and dedicated teachers in the system. This is no accident. Klein wants these teachers “terminated,” as he put it. Partly it’s to save bucks, so they can hire two beginning teachers for the price of one senior teacher. Partly, Klein wants to pit senior teachers and newer teachers against each other, just like he wants to foster “competition” between teachers with so-called “merit pay.” And in large part, it is to uphold the corporate principle that the principals run the school and can hire whomever they want, seniority and tenure be damned. That is, until “underperforming” principals as well get axed by the management “experts” at Tweed who know nothing of education.

An Ad Hoc Committee to Defend ATRs was set up last September following the DOE/media threats against these teachers. The Committee issued a fact sheet that was widely distributed around the system, and launched a petition campaign calling on the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) to hold a citywide union mobilization to defend the ATRed colleagues. Hundreds of teachers at more than 100 schools signed the petitions. As a result of this work, the UFT agreed at its October 15 Delegate Assembly to sponsor a rally to show support for ATRS and demand that no new hiring take place until ATRs receive permanent placements.

However, seeking to undercut the mobilization, which it only reluctantly agreed to in the first place, a few days before the rally the UFT and DOE signed a side agreement to encourage, but not require, the placement of ATR teachers. On the day of the rally the UFT leadership held an “informational session” at union offices to explain the side agreement, and even stationed some flunkeys at Broadway and Chambers to re-route arriving teachers away from the rally. But despite this active sabotage, as the UFT tops were sipping wine and munching cheese at 52 Broadway while patting themselves on the back for their “victory,” some 225 teachers rallied in support of the ATRs at Tweed Courthouse. After 1 hour and 45 minutes, the suits finally arrived.

It was a real teacher rebellion. Numerous teachers, social workers, counselors, school staff and supporters spoke from the open mike about their ideas, their stories, their struggle. Every single person who came played an important role in building it at their schools, their committees, and among their friends. Speakers said that while hopefully some ATRed teachers will get positions from the agreement, it does not change the basic structure, which continually produces hundreds of new ATRs, as the DOE keeps shutting down schools, its favorite ploy to shirk responsibility for its own failure to improve education. The demonstrators vowed to continue to struggle for a job freeze until all ATRs who want them have positions.

When the UFT leaders showed up around 6:15 p.m. along with several dozen rank and file UFTers, the demonstrators started a spirited march around the DOE/Tweed Courthouse chanting. Facing shouted objections when she started to start the "official rally" while the march was underway, UFT president Randi Weingarten waited until they returned from the walkaround. After she had spoken, a request was made that Marjorie Stamberg of the ATR support committee be allowed to speak. This was angrily refused. Teachers started chanting to let Stamberg speak, and finally Weingarten had to agree. So the message of the rally was gotten out again, that it was grass-roots organizing in the schools that built this rally, and we need to keep up the struggle.

There were many chants and shouts of “Bring Back Seniority” directed at the Unity leadership--an understanding that it was the sellout of the 2005 contract which has in good part led to this mess we're in. After awhile, when the leadership kept repeating “Let Teachers Teach,” the crowd chanted back, "Place ATRs!"

At the speak-out, which lasted for well over an hour, there were many powerful voices. One of the first speakers was Dr. Lezanne Edmond, Ph.D. in education, literacy specialist and an ATR! She said "we have to stop making education a business and get back to the business of education." Among the speakers were John Lawhead from Tilden High School in Brooklyn, where they have lost many ATRs; Robert Bobrick who came with a group of teachers and students from Lafayette High School; Michael Fiorillo, chapter leader at Newcomers HS, colleagues from the “rubber room;” Christine Grassman from GED-Plus; Angela DeSouza from TAGNY, Keith Brooks from Restart. Dan Feldman spoke from the Teaching Fellows.

There were speakers from ICE (Independent Community of Educators), Teachers for a Just Contract, Progressive Labor Party, the Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW), a student from the CUNY Internationalist Clubs, the Support Committee for the Federation of Teachers of Puerto Rico (FMPR), and others. Everybody wanted to talk, and did. There was a class of 30 students with their teacher from the Harry Van Arsdale Labor Studies Program at SUNY, who came to observe labor struggle in action.

At the speak-out, and again from the UFT bullhorn, Marjorie Stamberg of the CSEW called to “smash the Taylor Law” which keeps us from exercising labors powerful weapon – the strike. The main way the labor bureaucracy ties workers to the bosses is through what Daniel De Leon called “the labor lieutenants of capital.” We need a class- struggle leadership, a break from the Democrats and Republicans, and a workers party and workers government, she concluded.

The union leadership wanted to have at most a celebration of their side agreement. Hundreds of union rank and filers showed they were determined to keep up the struggle, not just for the ATRs but against all the anti-union attacks coming down the pike in this economic crisis. There is a lot of work to do, but November 24 was a great beginning.

After November 24...

After November 24…
(A Contribution to the Discussion)

Recent postings by Angel Gonzalez and Sean Ahern underscore a broader discussion that has gained force in the wake of our successful demonstration in defense of teachers being held in the limbo of the Absence Teacher Reserve this past November 24. After years of givebacks, as the UFT leadership abandons one gain after another while critical voices in the union are marginalized; in the face of a broad offensive to gut public education, which puts children last and ensures that no vendor is left behind, how can we take the readiness to fight that energized everyone on November 24 and go forward.

What gave the mobilization for the ATRs its energy was that it was a united-front action built by union activists which drew in several opposition groups, as well as many unaffiliated teachers – because we all understood the common danger and the need for a powerful response. The slogan, “If you’re not an ATR today, you could be tomorrow” summed it up. That’s why we fought for it to be an official union demonstration – this affects everyone. And that’s why teachers and other school workers turned out in a real teacher rebellion despite the best efforts of the UFT leadership to divert and derail the struggle.

As both Angel and Sean note, the ATR issue is the “tip of the iceberg.” It is the current point of attack of the privatizers and corporate “reformers” who are waging a frontal assault on public education. A few months ago, the issue was “merit pay.” Tomorrow it will be teacher tenure. But it’s important to see the big picture: that beyond the particular attacks, there’s a war going on here, a class war. And if it’s “one-sided class war,” as many have commented, that’s because of the role of the labor bureaucracy in keeping workers in check. It’s not about Randi Weingarten personally.

The united front is a method for common action. It is not the basis for building an on-going opposition to the present Unity Caucus bureaucracy, which is busy selling out what union gains are left. For that, we need leadership based on a class-struggle program, and that is what we need to build now.

Angel links the teachers’ struggle to the current financial/economic crisis, the worst since the Depression of the 1930s. This is quite correct – teachers are under attack while the government is showering $8.5 trillion to save the Wall Street banks. To fight this poses questions of class, power and leadership. Sean's posting emphasizes how the struggle against the corporate education “reformers” is a multi-faceted struggle. His emphasis on the racist hiring policies of the Bloomberg/Klein administration is a key element of what we need to fight.

It's also true that the response to this has been fragmented, with a number of different blogs, caucuses and groupings struggling on issues of class size, ATRs, high-stakes testing, union democracy, police brutality against minority students, etc.

The answer is not to simply amalgamate all the opposition groupings in one big mega-caucus. The result will be mega-confusion. Many colleagues were greatly encouraged by the turnout and militancy of the November 24 demonstration. Those of us involved in organizing it were taken by the power of the response, despite the active sabotage by Unity. Running off endless leaflets, and distributing them all over the boroughs more than paid off, as it touched a chord of struggle among teachers.

A common action is one thing, and there will be others. A common caucus, or coalition or “rank-and-file” movement is something else again. The rule in such coalitions is that the program gets determined by the “lowest common denominator,” where everyone can agree. And that LCD will be simple trade unionism. But simple trade unionism in this period where working people are under attack across the board, where every union gain is being taken away, is impossible. In this period of capitalist decay, reformism is a dead-end: if you are not prepared to fight the system as a whole, you are destined to fail.

Case in point: Michelle Rhee and the Washington D.C. school system fight against teacher tenure, which is shaping up as the formative education battle of the next administration. If it’s broken there, the fight will come to New York. If you haven’t seen it, read Time Magazine’s chilling cover story of Rhee as the wicked witch of corporate education reform, complete with broomstick to “sweep away” teachers who don’t toe the line.

You can’t fight against these attacks within the framework of the capitalist system that created them. That is why the UFT leadership supports the thrust of the so-called educational “reforms” (read: union-busting) while trying to make them marginally more palatable. They are loyal to this system and the politicians who uphold it, from Democrat Eliot Spitzer, who enforced the Taylor Law against the TWU, to Republican billionaire Bloomberg, and now Barack Obama. Obama’s election represents a significant social shift in this country, which was founded on chattel slavery and has been a bastion of racism ever since. But Obama in the Oval Office will rule in the interest of capital, from bombing Afghanistan to keeping the U.S. in Iraq to “reforming” D.C. schools.

We also need to be clear on the nature of the union bureaucracy, which acts as a transmission belt from the bosses to the workers, what Daniel DeLeon called the “labor lieutenants of capital.” Randi Weingarten is carrying out the program of Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg, while trying to sugar coat the bitter pill so we’ll swallow it.

It’s necessary as well to understand the role of the government and the state. Both the Puerto Rican teachers in their recent strike and New York teachers face draconian anti-labor laws. The minute we step out on strike, when we do, we’ll be hit in the face with the Taylor Law, just as the FMPR had their representation cancelled under Puerto Rico’s Law 45. The fundamental fact is that it is a class struggle, and what we need is a leadership with a class-struggle program and the determination to fight this through.

Program is key. It’s not enough to just oppose Michelle Rhee in D.C. – or Joel Klein as Education Secretary. Those who support Obama will be paralyzed when his education minister comes out for those policies or a soft-core form of them. Weingarten can’t fight them, because she supports the Democratic Party. That’s why she is busy “putting everything on the table,” from charter schools to “merit pay” to teacher tenure. And neither can union oppositionists who join the UFT bureaucrats in supporting Democrats mount a real fight.

Obama is in favor of “performance pay,” doubling money for charter schools, making it easier to fire teachers and reforming rather than abolishing No Child Left Behind. When the UFT/AFT switched its support from Hillary Clinton to Obama, they conveniently “forgot” these facts. Clinton, by the way, has supported “merit pay” since the 1990s when as a lawyer in Little Rock, Arkansas she got a $100,000 contract from one of the main organizations pushing for this.

Likewise, it’s not enough to be for “union democracy.” For example, in opposing Weingarten/Unity’s attempt to gag the opposition in the guise of prohibiting videotaping (which the union has a right to do), some have cited the Landrum-Griffin Act as an authority. This anti-labor law was passed after the Teamsters won the first national Freight Agreement in the mid-’50s, in order to control the labor movement, in the name of defending ... “union democracy.” We want to rip up these labor laws, not stand on them.

What’s next? Taking the union to the bosses’ courts like so many union caucuses have done over the past couple decades. What happens when they win? A new layer of bureaucrats get in, who proceed to sell out struggles because they “owe” the government. Just look at the TWU, and how Roger Toussaint called off the December 2005 strike that shut down the city, and has just signed a no-strike pledge.

These are just a couple of illustrations of why we cannot all “join together” in one big happy opposition family caucus. It will fall apart at the first test. A lot of colleagues have done a lot of good work on class size, on ATRs, on high-stakes testing and other issues. They should continue to do so. It’s necessary to address other issues as well, including immigrants’ rights. There has to be a serious discussion about the history and future of this union, from the “AFL-CIA” “state department socialist” Albert Shanker, to his wannabe imitators of the fourth reincarnation.

I am putting forward the program of the Class Struggle Education Workers, a newly formed group including members of the UFT, PSC and other education workers. The issue of public education today raises every question of racism, class and imperialism. As we fight on every issue of social justice, we need to understand their roots in and to struggle against the capitalist system as a whole. That’s why we call for a class-struggle workers party.

We will be proposing a public forum on the battle over public education, in the hopes of furthering this crucial discussion. In the meantime, I encourage people to read our CSEW leaflet that was distributed at the November 24 demonstration and the CSEW program on our web page: edworkersunite.blogspot.com.

Marjorie Stamberg
December 2, 2008

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