Campus Unions, Students Defy Attack on Higher Education in California

From the January, 2010 issue of Labor Notes.

by Paul Abowd and Kate Maich

Annual fees at the University of California in 1979 were $685. Thirty years later, the University of California regents, who oversee 10 campuses throughout the state, raised fees by 32 percent—in the face of opposition by a growing coalition of students, faculty, and campus workers. UC’s appointed regents set undergraduate fees at $10,302 for next fall.

Schools throughout the state’s three-tiered public education system—including hundreds of state schools and junior colleges—are seeing fee hikes and program cuts. Technical, clerical, and service workers, facing layoffs and cuts at the bargaining table, have entered the fray.

No state spends more on prisons than California, while nearly every state spends more per capita on education. It wasn’t always this way. An unprecedented coalition of students and workers is responding to the attacks on affordable higher education with large-scale democratic organizing—including marches, teach-ins, strikes, and building occupations—to which police have responded fiercely.

There are no illusions about the size of the task at hand, but organizers on various campuses are linking up their organizing with an understanding that a long-term movement is needed—and has begun.

“There has never been a coalition like this on campus,” says Claudette Begin, whose clerical workers union, the Coalition of University Employees, called a two-day strike together with technical workers (UPTE) at UC Berkeley and UCLA.

At Berkeley, the seven days between the last class and the first exam is referred to as “dead week.” It made a lively comeback this December when students, workers, and community members “liberated” Wheeler Hall, a major classroom building, during a 24-7 open occupation that lasted four days.

Students reclaimed the space for meeting and study, holding lectures and teach-ins on the budget crisis, distributing literature on the fee hikes, and dancing. At the end of each night, students diligently mopped the lobby floor.

The takeover wasn’t easily accomplished. Police videotaped protesters and threatened arrests of those who peaceably remained inside on the first night. On Friday, they made good on their threats with a pre-dawn raid. Sixty-six occupiers awoke to the sound of handcuffs, and were spirited away to a jail 40 miles outside the city.

INCLUSIVE ORGANIZING

The tedium of democratic organizing has rolled on for months. Frequent two- to three-hour open meetings of the general assembly, student-worker action team, and graduate student organizing committee have drawn hundreds.

Students and workers voted for three days of action to coincide with the regents meeting in late November, where the tuition hike would be decided. Students called a three-day strike at Berkeley coinciding with the clerical and technical workers’ walkouts.

On November 20, students barricaded themselves inside the second floor of Wheeler Hall, and communicated their demands by bullhorn to thousands of supporters gathered outside: rehire laid off service workers, make the budget transparent, and reverse the fee hikes.

UPTE members set up pickets to protest what they call the university’s “illegal bargaining tactics,” and called a rally.

UC called in several police departments, which were unable to break barricades for several hours as students held the doors and called, unsuccessfully, for negotiations. “They kept yelling through the doors, ‘prepare for the beat-down,’” said UC grad student Zach Levenson.

Police eventually arrested 40, but faculty and students negotiated their release. The cuffs came off and the students emerged after dusk before a cheering crowd.

Throughout the day, students linked arms in tussles with cops, while others sat down in the street to block police trucks entering campus.

Service workers with AFSCME Local 3299 have supported student organizing against fee hikes. They blocked a back entrance to the building, one of several actions aimed at reversing layoffs—44 have lost their jobs at Berkeley. “How do you have a 32 percent fee hike and then cut services on campus?” asked President Lakesha Harrison.

The nonviolent actions were returned with force—police shot one student with a rubber bullet, and another had her finger smashed by a police club, requiring reconstructive surgery.

ORGANIZING EVERYWHERE

Students at UC Davis and Santa Cruz also led several occupations during the week of the regents meeting, which was held at UCLA. The administrators were greeted in Los Angeles by thousands of protesters. Students and campus workers established a tent city outside the meeting—which took place behind a police line. As at Berkeley, UPTE workers walked out.

Eric Gardner, a member of the Coalition of University Employees, spent the day running between an assembly outside the regents meeting and another that formed outside Campbell Hall, where dozens of students had locked themselves in. “After they voted for the tuition hikes, the anger was palpable,” he says. “People more or less spontaneously blocked the regents from leaving.”

For three hours, activists sat down in front of a garage where a van full of fee-hikers was trying to escape. The police attacked with pepper spray.

Though their demands were not met, Gardner says the culture has already changed. “Campus has been quiet for years,” he said. “We did this to show we can take over this place.”

WORSE AT CAL STATE

The California State University system of 23 schools relies more heavily on state funding than does the UC system, which draws only about 20 percent of its budget from the state. Summertime budget cuts turned into department cuts, teacher layoffs, and fee hikes at CSU.

San Francisco State University’s sizable working class population is dropping out in droves, unable to weather new fees or find classes they need.

Undergrad Ryan Sturges, an organizer with Student Unity & Power, says the hikes (he paid $300 more this semester) are helping construct a multi-million-dollar recreation center aimed at attracting a wealthier “clientele.”

Sturges and 300 students marched into the administration building in late November as part of an open occupation. Two weeks later, 20 students locked down the SFSU business building for a day. Police broke through student pickets outside and, with guns drawn, arrested them.

The statewide resistance has brought questions of class, race, and privilege to the fore as the new fees will make public education unreachable for many residents.

Huge public events don’t mean that the movement has been a huge success, however. Protests have left some students alienated and many on the sidelines. The fees hikes remain, as do the UC regents, an undemocratic, appointed body with little concern for the workers and students most affected.

Despite President Yudof’s claims that financial aid will rise, there won’t be enough to offset hikes, which will disproportionately affect working class students and students of color. Already, only 3.5 percent of students at Berkeley are African American.

But setbacks are a crucial part of movement building. They lay the groundwork for organizing that can really work, even while the list of demands grows and the clock ticks.

Organizers are crafting a different list of priorities for the school. “We don’t want to just return to the way the university was in, say, 2007,” says Berkeley’s Levenson.

The list includes lower pay for the highest-salaried administrators, re-emphasize outreach to communities of color, halt construction projects funded by fee hikes, make school governance structures more democratic, and “de-privatize” as Levenson says. With 80 percent of UC funding not generated by the state, he says, the university is at the whim of private funders.

The fight against privatization of a public good—education—isn’t happening only in California. It is tied to a series of strikes, rallies, walkouts, and occupations taking place in schools across the U.S. and in Austria, Germany, and Greece. The highs and lows are shared in solidarity with a much larger movement.

Meanwhile, organizers are casting a wider net, fomenting an ambitious March 4 student and worker strike throughout the state’s education system that will bring together K-12 and higher education activists.

Tired of Teacher-Bashing, Union Educators Grow Their Own Schools

From the December, 2009 issue of Labor Notes.
www.labornotes.org/2009/12/tired-teacher-bashing-union-educators-grow-their-own-schools

Attacked daily as the biggest roadblock to improving public education, union teachers have their work cut out for them, both in the classroom and in the court of public opinion.

They responded this fall, opening their own schools in two cities.

“Teachers have been getting the most blame and the most responsibility and the least amount of decision-making power,” says Lori Nazareno, who leads a new teacher-run school in Denver.

Teachers in Boston have their own school, too, and educators in Los Angeles are pushing for community-centered models—all while a hurricane of teacher-bashing is pushed ahead by school privatizers, the press, and Obama administration policy.

TEACHERS RULE

Three grades of the Boston Teachers Union School opened up two months ago. The young school, which will expand to K-8 by 2012, is part of the city’s controversial pilot school program dating from 1994.

The BTU, the school district, and the mayor initiated pilot schools in order to head off the rise of privately managed, publicly funded charter schools, which Massachusetts had approved earlier that year.

But the schools have been a point of contention ever since. A years-long battle between union and district ended in 2006 when the union won more paid hours for teachers, and in turn agreed to approve seven more pilot schools—including a union-run school.

Before it was all over, though, the union had taken a beating in the local press. “They kept calling me an ogre standing in the way of progress,” says Richard Stutman, BTU president.

The union now must prove that teachers can run a successful school—and one where work rules and quality education aren’t cast in opposition.

The school follows in the pilot school traditions of a longer school day and a less-scripted curriculum. But unlike its fellow pilots, the BTU hires solely from inside the district and enrolls students randomly from its section of the city. The school also pays teachers for working the longer day—a point of pride for the union.

The major difference at the BTU school is the lack of a principal. Teacher-leaders run the show, making all long-term decisions by consensus. “Anything that doesn’t have to be done today will be decided by a collective,” says Stutman.

As for the union contract, teachers are in the bargaining unit and work under nearly the same contract, but have a different relationship to it. After all, they’re the boss—to a degree.

Standardized tests remain the rubric for success, as they do throughout the education system. Stutman says the testing regime is easily manipulated by the city’s charters—which tout higher scores than district high schools but cherry-pick students and have what he calls “high eviction rates.”

Elementary charter schools, which can’t select their students, show no improvement in scores over district schools.

Stutman says that because teachers have more creative control, the new school will rate highly by any measure. But as its students enter grades that take state-administered standardized tests, the curriculum will inevitably bend toward test prep.

While Boston’s teacher-leaders aren’t yet burning bubble sheets, the development of teacher-run institutions itself signals a seismic shift.

SMOOTH START IN THE ROCKIES

Union teachers are at the helm at Denver’s Math and Science Leadership Academy. Members of the Classroom Teachers Association (a National Education Association affiliate) jumped at the chance to run their own school when the city began taking proposals for new educational models three years ago.

After 19 years of teaching in Miami, Lori Nazareno moved to Denver and became the lead teacher at MSLA, an elementary school with 130 students, grades K-2.

The school’s 12 teachers sit on decision-making committees that develop curriculum, professional development plans, and a vision of the school’s culture. The two lead teachers still teach two hours a day. “We designed it, we put this together, and we’re running it,” says Nazareno. “Everybody gets that it’s our responsibility.”

The school draws students by lottery from a working-class neighborhood on Denver’s southwest side, composed largely of first-generation Mexican, Somali, and Korean families. Sixty percent of its students are English-language learners, and up to 90 percent receive reduced-fee lunches.

Though they’ve maintained the district’s curriculum for math, science, and literacy, MSLA teachers take different approaches to teaching. For example, every Friday students undertake “serv-ice learning” projects that promote engagement with the community and teach skills through programs on renewable energy, hunger, and homelessness.

Teachers work under the local contract, but they waived provisions outlining a principal’s powers. At MSLA, educators assess each other.

And they’ve already shown that schools in less affluent neighborhoods can attract good teachers with the promise of more ownership. The school fielded around 30 applications for each position, and is already receiving dozens more for next year, when the academy adds a grade.

LA SCHOOLS IN THE BALANCE

In Los Angeles, the school board accepted bids in November for the management of 36 schools. The schools include 12 existing sites deemed low-performing as well as 24 new ones set to open in the next year to relieve overcrowding.

Charter companies are in a frenzy to snap up the sites, but the teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, is organizing with teachers and parents to keep them at bay.

UTLA gathered teachers and parents (and administrators) of the low-performing schools at union headquarters. There they wrote proposals for how they would transform their schools.

Superintendent Ramon Cortines will evaluate the proposals, consider teacher and parent votes at schools (and student votes at high schools), and make a recommendation to the school board in January.

However, final decisions will be made in February by the charter-friendly school board that approved the school-bidding idea in the first place.

The process will repeat for the next several years, as 300 LA schools come in for some form of shake-up.

Teams of union reps are trying to seize that opening to develop proposals with each school’s community. Though there’s no talk of a UTLA-run school yet, the union is pushing for greater autonomy for teachers and parents.

The union already has collaborated with the district on a variety of “alternative” schools that allow greater local control over a school’s curriculum, budget, and staffing.

“Parents are getting active, and it’s not just the union talking to parents, it’s parents organizing with each other,” says Ingrid Villeda, a UTLA rep working on proposals. Teams of parents are going door to door to build support for a community-centered model.

OBAMA CRACKS THE WHIP

While teacher-run schools make strides in autonomy, creativity, and collective decision-making, they haven’t yet found a way to determine their own measures of success—a struggle that will continue during President Obama’s tenure.

The U.S. Department of Education released final rules in November for the contest over $4.5 billion in federal education aid. The money rewards states and districts that tie teacher evaluations and pay to student performance on standardized tests.

While Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently toned down his teacher-bashing, the White House’s rules are no friendlier. Obama’s “Race to the Top” program requires districts to close low-performing schools, many of which will reopen after firing and replacing the entire teaching staff.

UNITE HERE Keep Rising Against Big Hotels

From the November, 2009 Issue of Labor Notes. www.paulabowd.blogspot.com

As dozens of contracts with hotel giants Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott, and Starwood expired in three cities in late summer, UNITE HERE launched another round of battles over health care, pay, and working conditions. The union’s nationally coordinated contract campaign—known as Hotel Workers Rising—centers on building “bargain to organize” deals in its Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles hubs that will allow it to expand while raising contract standards.

The union scored bargaining and organizing victories in 2006 after fighting to line up contract expiration dates for 60,000 workers in six cities.

This year’s showdown finds hotel workers, and their union, at a moment of truth. The hotel giants are making unprecedented attempts to cut health benefits and up workloads in the recession, while the union is opening new organizing fronts that highlight stark contrasts between union and non-union working conditions.

The campaign this year has been hampered, though, by the March split in UNITE HERE, as its former laundry and textile division left and joined the Service Employees (SEIU). The resulting convulsion of raiding and counter-raiding has forced UNITE HERE to siphon staff from Hotel Workers Rising, most recently to battle over cafeteria workers in Philadelphia. (Update: UNITE HERE's Local 634 won a recent NLRB election 2 to 1, despite being outmatched by a heavy SEIU staff invasion.

BOSTON’S HYATT 100

This year’s target, Hyatt hotels, hasn’t done much to bolster its public image lately: in late August it replaced 98 housekeepers at three non-union Hyatts in Boston with workers hired through a subcontractor at half the pay.

The company wasn’t banking on non-union workers resisting nor on their getting the support of UNITE HERE Local 26. Nearly all the workers met with the union, which strongly backed their fight. Within weeks of the firings, UNITE HERE had held protests nationwide in front of Hyatt hotels, demanding the “Hyatt 100’s” reinstatement.

The company scrambled, offering workers health care through the end of the year and one-year jobs with a temp agency at their former wages.

Workers rejected the offer, saying they didn’t want to replace other workers just as they’d been replaced. Instead, they joined 1,000 demonstrators who gathered in a Jobs with Justice-sponsored, bagpipe-led “march for jobs” October 1 that culminated outside the downtown Hyatt.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick called a statewide boycott of Hyatt, echoed by Boston’s city council and heeded by the city’s cab drivers’ union and dozens of others who switched their reservations in protest.

NATIONAL TOUR

While Local 26 targeted organizations that had events booked with Hyatt, Boston workers hit the road. The nationwide tour of six cities where the union is organizing began at a rally in Long Beach, where housekeeper Corpornia Belis wept recounting her abrupt dismissal after 25 years of service.

“My shoulders, my back, my knees stayed in that hotel,” she said. “And what did they give me? A garbage bag so that I could empty out my locker.”

The tour dovetails with contract fights in Chicago and San Francisco, where the union staged civil disobedience actions as a first escalation over dozens of contracts in the two cities.

Hotel business is off during the recession, but companies are hardly in line for a bailout. The industry has garnered $200 billion in profits in a decade. Hyatt is squealing about a $36 million loss in early 2009, but raked in $1.3 billion over the last four years. Starwood, Marriott, and Intercontinental are all still making money while asking workers to pony up.

NOT AFRAID IN CHICAGO

Boston workers arrived in Chicago, where Local 1 is fighting over 30 hotel contracts. “Me-too” rules dictate that the city’s smaller hotels, also with open contracts, follow the agreements hammered out by the major chains.

Hours after Chicago filled several police buses, San Francisco’s Local 2 followed in kind. At two downtown hotels, 1,700 showed up for an action that has sparked a series of smaller pickets.

After rallying outside the Grand Hyatt, Lorna Villanueva and dozens of her co-workers pushed further, taking over the lobby before getting locked up. Ninety-two were arrested, including Villanueva, a 36-year veteran room inspector—who chalked up her fifth protest arrest. This time, she says, the action was to protect future workers from the companies’ two-tier proposals. “We don’t leave anybody behind,” she said.

Talks over a citywide contract continue, with a 14-hotel multi-employer group covering 9,000 workers. One goal of the campaign is to win organizing rights at three city hotels, where drives are at a tipping point.

Hotels are putting the squeeze on. Ringo Mak, a veteran room service attendant, says the Hilton raised prices for the service so high that customers won’t use it—and then cut the department staff in half. “Everyone in the hotel besides the CEO is hurting,” he said.

Mak’s picking up extra hours serving in the hotel restaurant, and, for now, can maintain his family’s medical coverage even with reduced hours. Hilton wants to freeze its pension contributions and eliminate retiree health care.

Villanueva says frontline managers are playing nice while company negotiators lay down a hard line—a strategy that members recall from their 2004 strike and lockout, when a general manager brought breakfast to the picket lines. “Nobody touched the coffee or the donuts,” says Villanueva. “We buy our own food.”

Members continue their increased contributions to the strike fund, as they have for months. “The hotel lost a lot of money in the last contract fight,” says Mak. “I hope they learn their lesson.”

EXPANSION PLANS

UNITE HERE has achieved 90 percent density in New York and San Francisco through deals ensuring card check at newly built hotels. The union is also devoting resources to several “breakthrough markets” with low union density: Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta, and San Antonio, and those with none: Long Beach and Indianapolis.

The Boston workers made a stop in San Antonio, where a tumultuous organizing drive has stretched out over a year. Worker-leaders who haven’t been fired are getting assigned higher workloads than co-workers. If company intimidation weren’t enough, SEIU showed up to disrupt the drive.

UNITE HERE presented cards from a majority of workers last spring, but SEIU organizers flew in, claiming to be the real bargaining representative—despite having no contact with the worker committee. Hyatt happily obliged SEIU’s request for closed-door meetings, which drew worker protests inside the hotel.

Eventually the NLRB called an election with both unions and “no union” on the ballot. SEIU pulled its staff out before the election, and in July UNITE HERE called off the vote.

Back to square one, Hyatt workers are pressuring the city council to support unionization at the hotel, which was constructed with city incentives on city land. They’re also hoping the nationwide campaign will tip their drive over the top.

While local committees build muscle and multiply, the International is trying to swing organizing deals with the chains. The union reached agreements in 2006 with Starwood and Hilton (where it has the highest density), laying out a broad framework for new organizing rights. This year’s target, Hyatt, is not amenable to such talks.

UNITE HERE researchers say that upwards of 80 percent of hotel workers are still without a union, but 14,000 have joined in 35 metropolitan areas in the last five years—a 14.5 percent gain.

The union is challenged on three fronts: battling global corporations in a recession, keeping a rival union at bay, and creating a culture where hotel workers are at the fore of a democratic union.

Though a loyal membership has repeatedly shown its willingness to confront management, some of the union’s former organizers are raising concerns about the degree of rank-and-file involvement in decisions shaping local campaigns.

In a public letter, a group of ex-organizers at San Francisco hotels challenged UNITE HERE to make good on its professed “bottom-up” strategy, decreasing staff’s role and opening more space for worker control as contracts expire in several major cities next year.

Teacher Reformers Prepare for Battle over Public Education

http://paulabowd.blogspot.com/

When President Obama laid out his plan to reshape public education this summer, he wasn’t subtle with his symbolism: he was introduced by an eighth-grader from a charter school. Soon after, teacher activists from LA, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., met in Los Angeles. The reformers shared strategies to build union caucuses with parents that shape an alternative to the federal education plan as it takes form in each city.

The president’s “Race to the Top” fund, championed by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, promises billions in federal dollars to cash-strapped states. But there will be “winners and losers,” Obama says.

The unprecedented payout takes a bead on the teachers unions: money will flow to districts that alter pay and seniority provisions in union contracts and states that roll out the carpet for (mostly non-union) charter schools.

The reformers will meet again in October for a workshop on gearing up their unions to fight. They’ll organize forums and joint press releases in each city before the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention in Seattle next year—where they will bring a vision of education reform that puts educators, not “education management organizations,” in the driver’s seat.

LOS ANGELES: FRONT LINE FOR CHARTERS

Nonprofit and private charter school operators stand to make big gains from the federal incentive package. Several states have already amended their laws to expand charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed.

The Los Angeles Unified School District took a big step in that direction in August. Charter operators and other groups will get a crack at running 250 city schools—including 50 brand new, taxpayer-funded buildings.

“They got just what they didn’t have: real estate,” says Alex Caputo-Pearl, a United Teachers Los Angeles board member.

Since 2005, a reform coalition has run UTLA, bolstered by growing rank-and-file engagement in various caucuses, including the Progressive Educators for Action, which helped propel the current leadership into power.

The union has fought hard against layoffs, charters, and cuts to funding and health care benefits—and also internally, over union strategy. Teachers from several LA caucuses joined the July sessions, including some who launched hunger strikes against layoffs and criticized union leaders’ cancellation of a planned one-day strike in May. Some caucus members say the union’s effort to stem the charter tide was too little, too late.

All agree that UTLA’s focus needs to center on charters—and fast. Proposals for the first round of new schools are due by November, giving charter operators with ready-made proposal templates a distinct advantage.

UTLA Vice President Joshua Pechthalt says the union is moving on a multi-faceted plan as bidding season opens, including possible legal challenges to the motion, which does not honor district rules ensuring teachers and parents a deciding vote on any charter conversion. Instead, the school superintendent will recommend bidders to the school board.

UTLA contract language ensures teachers will be union in any new school built to relieve overcrowding, but it’s still unclear whether the board plans to respect that.

LA has the most charters in the nation, and adding hundreds more threatens to erode enrollment in public schools (which affects their funding) as well as union strength.

The union is focused on organizing charters, following a victory this spring at Accelerated Charter, where teachers approached UTLA about joining up.

Union leaders are also working with teachers at schools targeted for conversion, and plan to put in their own bids for union-run schools (the Boston AFT local just opened its first this year).

Pechthalt says the teacher-led vision “is not rocket science.” It entails democratic control over budgets and curriculum that teachers, parents, and administrators can tailor to the school site. Past attempts to publicize such plans in the face of rampant teacher-bashing in the media, however, have been difficult.

“We have to improve on that,” says Pechthalt, “so that after a few months people can say, ‘I agree with the teachers’ vision for schools.’”

CHICAGO: ACTIVISTS ‘EVERYWHERE’

In a gentrifying Latino neighborhood in Chicago, Kristine Mayle learned firsthand about the “renaissance” Obama’s Department of Education wants to bring to the rest of the nation.

The district shut down the award-winning De La Cruz middle school where she worked until last year, citing low enrollment and the need for major renovations—only to lease the building to the charter operator United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) a year later for $1.

Community organizations and parents from a feeder elementary school led hearings, and fought to extend De La Cruz’s life. But the district, which had already authorized UNO schools in the area, was intent on the operator, despite its promise not to reopen the building for charter use.

“On the last day of school, the board sent workers to fix our basement floor—which had been leaking for years,” Mayle says.
UNO has a reputation for cherry-picking students—Mayle says UNO students were routinely kicked back to her school. And the operator hires very few special education teachers, failing to maintain De La Cruz’s legacy as a highly touted special ed provider.

BORN IN CHICAGO

Duncan’s national initiative was born in Chicago, where charters continue to expand under a privatization plan he brokered as schools chief in 2004.

The Chicago Teachers Union has lost 6,000 members and 70 neighborhood schools have closed since 2001, making a new law that expands charter schools in the city especially foreboding.
“There really was no pushback from the CTU at the onset of this program, and now we have to play catch-up,” said Kenzo Shibata of the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE).

“We've been fighting this from the beginning,” said CTU chief of staff John Ostenburg, noting the union’s yearly actions against closings, and its stalled push in the statehouse for a moratorium on Duncan’s plan.

The AFT-affiliated CTU negotiated card check rights at new charters, and the local recently organized several campuses of the state’s largest operator.

Several CORE members were at the LA meeting. Originally formed in spring 2008 to push the CTU to stand up to the city’s school restructuring plan, the youthful caucus grew quickly, becoming a viable challenger to CTU’s incumbents in next May’s election.

CORE’s website offers news and grievance forms, and features its candidates for pension trustee, who promise to forestall plans to slash the teachers’ fund. Members are active on Chicago-area news and blog comment sections, an attempt to counter teacher-bashing. And Shibata says a “Twitter army” posts live reports from school board meetings and teacher actions. “We’re everywhere,” he says.

Over the winter, teachers worked with the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), a collection of community organizations and parent groups, turning out more than a thousand people to protest 22 slated school closures.

“The CTU finally joined the protest, and then released a flyer to delegates saying they organized it,” says Shibata. “Either way, we got them out, and won a big victory.” The board decided not to close six schools.

NEW YORK: TWO FLOORS, TWO TIERS

Charters are knocking on the door at dozens of New York schools too, regardless of reputation. Public School 123, for example, now shares a building with Harlem Success Academy, after the city’s Department of Education (DOE) forced the elementary school (good test scores and all) to relinquish its third floor to the charter operator.

Over the summer, HSA hired contractors to dismantle classrooms while district dollars paid for renovations—of HSA’s floor only. Parents and teachers gathered outside, chanting, “Paint the whole school!”

When classes began in September, teachers and parents protested again after finding the school in disarray: movers had piled teachers’ equipment into unmarked boxes to make way for HSA. A special education class was moved to a dusty basement, and other classes were pushed into the library.

HSA hums a floor above the chaos.

“The charters just tell the city they need more space,” says Brian Jones, a teacher activist, “and the DOE is doing back-flips to make it happen.”

The charter companies focus on New York’s largely Black neighborhoods. “You don’t see charter conversions happening on the Upper East Side,” Jones says. They are exploiting a legacy of racial tension that has festered within the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) since 1968, when the union went on strike to protest attempts by African-American communities to take more control over school management and curriculum.

A handful of reform groups continue to chip away at the UFT’s ruling Unity caucus, in power for four decades. Sally Lee of Teachers Unite, which organizes workshops on the union and workplace rights, says decades of Unity caucus rule have made the union either an enigma or a stigma for new teachers—who see themselves more as individual activists in their classrooms.

“We can only address this system by collectively organizing,” says Lee, whose organization primes new teachers to run for chapter chair. “And guess what? We already have this powerful teacher organization to do it.”

Lee and other New York teachers shared cautionary tales at the LA meeting about AFT President Randi Weingarten. As president of the New York local, she negotiated a 2005 contract that included merit pay and the oddly-named “mutual consent,” which allows principals to ignore seniority when filling open teaching positions.

As charters grow from inside public schools, they hire non-union teachers, increasing the ranks of displaced veteran teachers. When the contract opens in October, city leaders will push hard to fire teachers who can’t land a job after a year.
D.C. AND DETROIT: SECRET TALKS

The takeover has been achieved quietly in Detroit and D.C., where around half of school kids in each city are now enrolled in charters.

Under the emergency control of a state-appointed manager, Detroit opened 29 fewer schools this fall and put many high schools under control of private management groups.

The next target is the teachers’ contract. Proposed 10 percent wage cuts, elimination of step increases, and increased fines for work stoppages from $250 to $7,500 per day drew thousands of Detroit teachers to protest in late August. Talk of a strike circulated.

The union leadership agreed instead to extend contract talks until the end of October—a delay that’s become familiar for teachers in D.C. A small, outspoken group of teachers and union officials there has challenged the threat of a concessionary contract for two years.

Vice President Nathan Saunders and Trustee Candi Peterson have criticized President George Parker (and Weingarten, who joined the D.C. talks over the winter) for keeping teachers out of the loop and failing to mobilize rank-and-file pressure against schools chief Michelle Rhee. The teacher activists drew Parker’s ire this fall for publicizing details of a draft contract, which included plans for large buyouts of veteran teachers and a “mutual consent” provision like New York’s.

Union leaders at the LA meeting shared strategies for caucus building with Saunders, who is gearing up for an election run in 2010. Upon return, the D.C. duo pre-empted Rhee’s announcement of coming layoffs, calling the community to join rank-and-file educators at a protest in front of district offices.

Wherever the Secretary of Education has sold his “reforms,” large chunks of public money have disappeared into private hands—and local unions find themselves under siege. Weingarten has maintained her signature openness to it all, as long as reforms remain fair for teachers and good for students. The National Education Association, by contrast, came right out and said it: Obama’s plan for more charters, more reliance on test scores, and more union concessions, does neither.

Duncan has stumped for his plan coast to coast. Teacher reformers, now equipped with a fledgling network of activists, aren’t waiting any longer to go national themselves.

"You Lie!"

Last night's "you lie!" outburst is pretty weak tea compared to this (which is also far more entertaining):



All the time and energy spent decrying Joe Wilson's "bad manners" makes clear that our mainstream political discourse is not only deadened by protocol, but also more concerned with maintaining an appearance of "civility" than with maintaining a civilization.

Instead of spending a day considering the merits of including 12 million "illegal" immigrants in a universal health care plan, the media's too eager to focus on some loud-mouthed congressman from South Carolina, whose politics are undoubtedly more offensive than his lack of decorum.

More than a few Democrats are to blame for not displaying Wilson's gusto while Bush stood at the same podium, spinning tales about enriched uranium.

Food Service Workers Buck Secret Organizing Deals

From the September, 2009 issue of Labor Notes

A delegation of U.S. food service workers flew to the Paris headquarters of their employer Sodexo last winter, delivering petitions against the company’s anti-union practices. They also took to the streets, joining French food service workers in the general strike rippling through the country. For one of the Americans, a member of Service Workers United, the act of solidarity abroad would have been a breach of contract back home.

UNITE HERE and the Service Employees (SEIU) had formed the joint union called Service Workers United, or SWU, in 2005. In secret talks with multinational food service giants Sodexo, Compass, and Aramark, the new union traded a lot—including workers’ right to strike—for contracts in a low-wage, hard-to-organize industry dominated by the “Big 3.” Aramark dropped out of the talks, but made a separate pact later that year.

To seal the unprecedented deals, contract standards were settled before the first worker signed a card. Workers faced termination if they slowed down or picketed. Conflicts over terms of the agreement would go before a national labor-management committee instead.

The companies, which have contracts to run cafeterias and concessions in schools, stadiums, and corporate offices, reserved the right to choose where the union would organize, and how many total members could join.

Sodexo capped organizing at 11,000 workers and Compass at 20,000 through 2008. Despite that, federal filings show that the union had just 6,000 members last year.

The Big 3 scattered approved organizing sites across the country and forced the union to pull the plug on other drives. The union could reject a site management selected, but it would still count against the quota. The companies also established separate expiration dates for each shop, atomizing members’ bargaining power.

Four years later, the deals with management have collapsed, UNITE HERE and SEIU are embroiled in conflict, and restless food service workers aren’t waiting for distant leaders to come to their rescue.

BOILERPLATE CONTRACTS

As lead negotiator in the 2005 talks, then-UNITE HERE president Bruce Raynor fashioned a national “boilerplate” contract for all SWU members. The new union, christened UNITE HERE Local 2552, set up in the International’s Manhattan headquarters. The office opened a “Workers’ Resource Center,” an 800 number workers were to call for step two grievances. The “national local” assigned each worksite a representative from the nearest UNITE HERE or SEIU local to work with stewards and bargain contracts.

Since details went public last year, the SWU deal has been used to both exalt and disparage organizing-by-partnership models. “We’re dealing with companies that don’t make decisions in our community; they make decisions in their central offices,” said Raynor, in a union video. “And the union has got to have the scope and power to match up with that company.”

Jim Dupont, a former SWU negotiator and now head of UNITE HERE’s Laundry and Food Service division, says SWU’s terms curtailed workers’ ability to fight the boss. “SEIU’s definition of partnership is you do what the company wants,” he says. “Our definition is, you’re treated as an equal.”

After the 2005 deal was struck, hundreds of workers like Daqwell Carrasquillo got called into meetings with their employers where SWU organizers asked them to sign union cards. Now a steward at Blue Cross Blue Shield’s cafeteria outside New York City, Carrasquillo said workers eagerly agreed, and days later had a first contract modeled on the national template. It included job security and seniority language, wage increases, health care, and pensions.

It was an improvement from the non-union days, but well below the standards of other unionized food service workers.

At Chicago’s UNITE HERE Local 1, food service contracts are “very much a work in progress,” according to organizers. Their stronger contracts peg starting pay at $13 an hour. A hundred SWU members at a DePaul University cafeteria, meanwhile, start at $9.25. Under the 2005 deal, companies agreed to pay members at least 50 cents above minimum wage.

Before SWU was formed, UNITE HERE Local 100 represented about half of Aramark food service workers in New York City. President Bill Granfield viewed SWU with cautious optimism. “We didn’t expect SWU members to fall in and hit our standards right away, but we were going to get a bunch more people in,” he said.

The crown jewel of Local 100 contracts, full family health coverage, is a far cry from what their fellow members at SWU have achieved. New York’s SWU members, with salaries around $20,000, pay monthly contributions of up to $400 for family plans.

Four years later, standards nationwide haven’t risen, and the merits of SWU are under fire from members. Carrasquillo and his co-workers haven’t had a raise since 2007, and when they violated the SWU agreement by leafleting outside work for better terms, the company called police.

Now in talks over a second contract, Carrasquillo says the company won’t budge. “Sodexo is cocky,” he says. “They come right out and tell us SWU already agreed to boilerplate contracts, and we can’t change it. But I never voted on anything.”

BREAKDOWN

Granfield says his local planned to break out of the template agreements but SWU leaders haven’t supported his bid. “The local negotiations have been totally limited by the framework at the top,” he says. “We wanted to make strides in second contracts, but that was not SWU’s program. That’s when we started getting angry.”

UNITE HERE’s conventional contracts with Aramark were expiring in late 2007, right as the union and company bargained a new national agreement for SWU. SEIU joined UNITE HERE in a nationwide campaign: strikes erupted in Granfield’s New York local, as well as at UNITE HERE shops in Vancouver, Ontario, and Boston, adding leverage to the SWU talks. SEIU pushed new organizing drives against the company.

Soon after, in summer 2008, Raynor struck an organizing deal with Aramark that UNITE HERE leaders criticize. Dupont says he was kept out of the room while Raynor allowed the company to maintain control over new organizing, forcing SEIU to interrupt an Aramark drive in Houston.

Raynor’s Aramark deal—which later fell apart—added fuel to burning divisions within the union that blew up in March, when he pulled 100,000 members out of UNITE HERE and into an affiliation with SEIU.

But the feuders remained attached at the hip by their joint union, and haven’t accepted a mediator’s proposal to settle food service jurisdiction geographically.

SWU’s leadership is now a part of UNITE HERE only in name. Its two appointed leaders, one from SEIU and one from UNITE HERE, both supported the March exodus. They’ve been reassigning servicing of SWU members to SEIU locals, strengthening the Service Employees’ presence in the industry. Currently, UNITE HERE claims 60,000 food service members nationwide—SEIU has far fewer.

There’s emerging anger in the ranks about SWU. After Carrasquillo filed five grievances through SWU’s call center that weren’t resolved, he picked up the phone again, joining national conference calls with other SWU members two years ago. At UNITE HERE’s June convention he presented a petition signed by 1,000 members demanding a SWU bill of rights. The call for local control, elected leaders, and an end to backroom deals passed, but has no binding effect.

PARTNERING UP

SWU leaders say no national deals currently exist (Compass and Sodexo have failed to give permission for new units), and that the UNITE HERE split has disrupted attempts to resume talks with the Big 3 over new card check arrangements.

They echo SEIU’s call for a settlement so companies can no longer use the rift as an excuse to keep dues in escrow, stall contract talks, and block new organizing. UNITE HERE leaders have sued over the split, willing to pursue a protracted legal process.
“If it takes a long time stop the growth of this corporate unionism, then so be it,” says Dupont.

Raynor calls SWU the most successful private sector organizing project labor’s seen in years—and a model for the future. SWU President Kurt Edelman says the union is mobilizing members (dozens just met in D.C. to lobby for a child nutrition bill) while organizing new ones. Acknowledging lagging contract standards, he hastens to add: “They’re better than what people would get without a union.”

UNITE HERE blasts that idea, pointing to its approach to hotel chains, where a coordinated campaign of strikes and mobilization won new card checks—and contracts that didn’t drag down industry standards.

Four years ago, UNITE HERE and SEIU were on the same page. They left the AFL-CIO, signing partnerships with food-service CEOs soon after. SWU, Dupont says, actually sprang from Wilhelm’s idea to combine the two unions’ efforts at common, institutional workplaces.

But what to do once the deal was signed divided the unions. UNITE HERE leaders saw SWU as a temporary project and claim the two unions had agreed to phase it out. Raynor and Stern want to preserve SWU and the employer-approved approach that gave it legs. Now, UNITE HERE intends to make sure that SWU doesn’t expand.

“We’re not going to let them enter this jurisdiction and be the company’s favorite cheap alternative,” Dupont says. “They want to be the Wal-Mart of unions.”

Chicago Charter Teachers Score First Win

From the August, 2009 issue of Labor Notes.
http://labornotes.org/node/2346

It’s an oxymoron no longer: charter schools are unionizing.

Pioneering teachers and staff sealed an overdue victory in June at three Chicago International Charter Schools, the state’s largest charter operator.

Although the schools run primarily on public dollars—and Illinois allows public sector employees to unionize by card check—management rejected cards signed by 75 percent of employees in April. The charter operator argued that its unelected board of directors was not “responsible to public officials or to the general electorate.” CICS forced a Labor Board vote, battling for two months until workers voted 73-49 to unionize anyway.

When he championed charters as labs of educational innovation, former American Federation of Teachers(AFT) President Al Shanker thought they’d be organized. Two decades later, nearly all charter operators—despite varied teaching methods and missions—agree on one thing: teachers should be non-union.

Teacher unions now acknowledge charters have become a fact of life, and few would argue against organizing their teachers. But debate rages over how, and whether, to manage charters’ spread.

The AFT says charters work when they’re teacher-driven schools that share innovations with district schools, when the public can exercise oversight, and when teachers can join unions.

The schools have not succeeded by these measures but continue to expand, especially in urban districts. So that’s where the AFT is concentrating attention, picking up wins in Florida, Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles.

Instead of fighting tooth and nail to undermine charters, which have steadily chipped away at union ranks and siphoned off public dollars from traditional schools, the union has committed itself, even if belatedly, to organizing their tens of thousands of teachers.

They’ve got their work cut out for them: only around 80 of 4,600 charters are organized nationwide.

EDUCATE, ORGANIZE

In Chicago, teachers began to see their vulnerability to the boss’s whims as a flaw in the school’s educational model. At Northtown High School, workers called meetings when the school’s former CEO—who had no background in education—announced instructors would teach an additional class but be paid the same.

And instead of summer school, teachers would instruct failing students during night school. “If we didn’t like it, they basically told us ‘there’s the door,’” said Emily Mueller, a Spanish teacher.

Teacher turnover was high: “at will” employees were quickly booted, and other teachers simply left, overworked, underpaid, and kept at arm’s length from many curriculum decisions. The founding core of teachers dwindled. At Ellison High, only six of 20 teachers returned to the classroom last year.

To squelch the organizing drive, CICS used both stick and carrot. Two members of the school’s board, lawyers at a Chicago firm specializing in “union avoidance efforts” for groups “whose business is education,” came in with another anti-union consultant to fight the drive.

CICS made nice, too, hiring a new CEO who reversed the class load increase and reinstituted summer school, but opposed the union, calling it a threat to school autonomy—presumably his.

Most teachers had set their sights beyond immediate management regardless. “This drive was about creating a culture in our school where teachers will stick around for years, and have a formal voice in our school no matter what CEO comes along,” Mueller said.

In talks beginning this summer, teachers seek higher wages (entry salaries are several thousand dollars lower than district teachers’) and due process (but not the formal tenure system that exists in district schools), hoping that both help retain committed teachers.

They also want more control over curriculum, but making fundamental changes could be tough. Teachers at CICS are told to prep students on specific parts of standardized tests, which comes at the expense of basic educational needs—like supplies for other classes.

“I was told I’m not a social science teacher, I’m a reading teacher,” says Ellison teacher Jennifer Gilley. “It’s ironic because I taught three classes and only one of them came with a book.”

A TEACHER IS A TEACHER

The Chicago Teachers Union, AFT Local 1, has a conflicted relationship with the charters. Union reps were on hand last spring when charter teachers presented cards to their CEO, and CICS teachers received a warm reception from CTU delegates for breaking into non-union territory.

But a reform grouping within the CTU, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), is raising a ruckus.

“If you’re organizing the charters without taking a position on defending existing schools against charter proliferation and expansion, that’s a failed strategy,” says Jackson Potter of CORE.

CORE is targeting Secretary of education Arne Duncan, whose nationwide tour sailed through Chicago in June. He’s offering urban districts additional federal money if they give the mayor executive control over schools, extract concessions from teacher unions, and allow charters to expand.

The strategy is straight from Duncan’s tenure as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, where he hatched a plan that has closed nearly 70 neighborhood schools and established charters in their wake, promising to raise student achievement.

Five years later, a Stanford University study shows a majority of charter schools performing worse than or comparable to traditional public schools on standardized tests. Some in the AFT are calling for a moratorium on charters.

With strong parent and student involvement, CORE rallied to save six district schools from the gallows last winter. But other schools close, and charters keep opening in them—erasing the elected decision-making committees of students, teachers, and parents at each site.

A University of Chicago study—which Duncan’s corporate backers allegedly tried to suppress—shows the city’s charters under-serving special education students and English-language learners. And because of limits on enrollment, many kids are left without neighborhood school.

Though charter and district teachers refuse to succumb to divide and conquer tactics, CORE says existing union strategies are making divisions difficult to avoid.

WHERE TO FIGHT?

Just as teachers won at CICS, the Illinois Federation of Teachers negotiated a state law allowing 45 additional charters to set up in the city. Though they constitute only 3 percent of publicly funded schools nationwide, charters are 10 percent in Chicago, a share that will now rise again. IFT inserted provisions that beef up oversight of charters and allow charter teachers to organize under the state’s card-check provision for public employees.

The AFT’s organizing pitch is finding a growing audience among charter teachers, says Hugo Hernandez, an AFT staffer. The way to affect charters’ impact on education, he argues, is to bring them into the union. “If they would open the doors, we could find out what’s happening in these schools,” he said. “And to do that, we’re organizing.”

CORE wants the union to defend neighborhood schools and slow charter growth, but with the bludgeoning of teacher unions in the media, AFT is reluctant to fight Duncan’s strategy, which also has the blessing of the Obama White House.

Meanwhile, Chicago teachers—who’ve seen a 6,000-member drop in a decade—are bracing for another wave of non-union charters crashing into neighborhoods. “Perhaps they’re bargaining from a position of weakness,” Potter said of union leadership. “But that weakness is going to mean the end of us all before too long.”

Dancing with Death: "Waltz with Bashir"

My review from the July/August, 2009 Issue of Against the Current.
Watch the film here:



(“Vals im Bashir” in Hebrew)
an animated documentary film written and directed by Ari Folman, 2008.

IT TOOK ARI Folman 25 years to make “Waltz With Bashir,” his animated film about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. First, he had to remember the war.

[For our own readers who don’t remember: The Israeli government under Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon under the pretext of driving the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) away from the Israel-Lebanon border. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) seized control of the entire country up to Beirut, culminating in a horrific slaughter of Palestinian refugees by Israel’s rightwing (“Phalangist”) Lebanese allies and a bloody 20-year Israeli occupation of the south of the country — ed.]

Folman was 19 during his stint with the IDF in Beirut, stationed a few hundred yards from the massacres of hundreds (some claim thousands) of Palestinians in the city’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. In the film’s opening scene a graying Folman listens to his war comrade Boaz tell of a recurring nightmare: the 26 guard dogs he killed during the invasion hound his sleep.

Folman, for his part, says he recalls almost nothing about the war: “It’s not in my system,” he tells Boaz.

At the advice of a therapist friend (Folman underwent analysis while making the film), he seeks out friends who saw combat. Their stories become flashbacks that fill the animated documentary, as Folman, hounded by a troubling lack of memory, tries to piece together his own role in Ariel Sharon’s butchering of Beirut.

We're tempted to ask: Why did it take so long to remember? But on top of the widely experienced suppression of war trauma, Folman's forgetting is helped along by a willful amnesia that's inseparable from Israel's national story. Denying a catastrophe is required to celebrate independence. Founding mother Golda Meir maintained that Palestinians “did not exist.” Charitably, the Israeli officialdom “neither confirms nor denies” the existence of its nuclear arsenal.

Folman hasn’t forgotten alone. He places himself in the film to confront this denial, opening questions about his past before the Israeli public.

White phosphorous rained on Gaza while the film picked up awards worldwide. As it wrapped up its tour of the States, Israeli soldiers testified to war crimes during the early 2009 bombardment.

But “Waltz” doesn’t actively connect Folman’s narrative to a legacy of Israeli theft and brutality. Instead, it could offer those who share his guilt a deep sigh of release from the isolated incident, when Israel waltzed briefly with the Phalange as they passed through the IDF’s green light into the refugee camps.

Folman has maintained in interviews that the Lebanon war was wrong because it was not a “survival war,” like 1948 or 1967 — the land grabs defended as existential struggles. From this perspective comes “Waltz,” an antiwar — not anti-colonial — film. He illustrates the hellishness of this particular episode in the Israeli colonial project, but avoids the colonial dynamics of the violence, refusing to turn a critical glance toward Zionism itself.

Instead we’re thrown into Lebanon, 1982, without mention that the invasion marked the beginning of a long occupation of the South — and the eventual ascent of its criminal architect to Israel's top post.

The Animation Technique

Animation depicts the shakiness of memory and dreams, but also allows Forman some buffer from a reality he’s uncomfortable with. His combination of cartoon and documentary (drawing on interviews with war veterans) allows him to produce what is ultimately a highly interpretive film.

Just as the stories begin to construct a narrative of the real war, the animation pulls that foundation out from under us. With Folman as our guide, we’re pushed to accept his ambiguous relationship with the past, always threatening the question: Did any of this really happen?

Folman’s visits with army buddies reveal a common thread: they were all freaked out teenagers arriving in Lebanon. One young soldier arrived on shore, guns blazing out of trigger-rattling fear. He riddles a Mercedes with bullets, and then discovers a family inside.

Facing fire immediately from an unseen enemy, Folman and his crew return round after round into the infinite Arab void. “We’re shooting everywhere, at everything, until nightfall,” he says. The bullets from IDF guns are usually retaliatory. They kill a boy in the woods, but only after he appears with a gun twice his size, aiming straight for the Israelis.

The soldiers, gunned out and glad to be alive, get some R&R to cranked early eighties punk hits — drinking, smoking and playing on someone else’s beach. It’s impossible not to feel their fear, but equally difficult to find within the film any broader context for why they’ve been put in that situation to begin with. We rarely see, and hear even less from the “enemy,” remaining tied to the memories of Israeli veterans instead.

“Waltz” flirts with glorification of violence, as each empty shell falls to a beat. The movie’s “title track” scene features Frenkel, a former IDF soldier, now a shiny-skulled karate master. In a memory-recalled Beirut gun battle, he decides he can do better with his friend’s weapon. A Bach concerto shines through as Frenkel wrestles the gun away, and jumps into the street, firing mad martial brilliance, choreographing a graceful dodge and dance.

As the camera floats out above the street scene, Folman narrates. “He cursed the shooters. Like he wanted to stay there forever.” From a giant mural, Lebanon’s Christian President Bashir Gemayel — who had just been assassinated by rival factions — oversees the waltz, and it is beautiful.

[Bashir Gemayel, essentially installed in power by Israeli bayonets, showed an independent streak shortly before he was killed in circumstances that were never explained. His militia, consumed with revenge lust, were allowed by the Israeli Army to enter the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian camps that had been evacuated by PLO fighters after an American-brokered pledge that the civilians would be protected. This context is not explained in the film, although some older Israeli viewers will understand it — ed.]

The Massacre

We can't discern from the film alone if Lebanon in 1982 was an isolated, nightmarish episode or a defining example of sustained military and colonial policy. Forman lets the viewer decide, opting for a more personal objective — to explore his own complicity in the massacres. A string of such flashbacks triggers Folman's own recollection of firing flares from a rooftop, lighting the nighttime sky for a Lebanese raid on the refugee camps.

The following morning, an Israeli officer arrives on the scene and prevents the Phalange from another round of revenge killings. “Stop the shooting!” he yells into a bullhorn. The scene is, again, open to interpretation: The IDF commanders are finally portrayed as the sole rational voice — their “mistake” was looking the other way too long. Or, despite the IDF’s supposed peripheral involvement in the massacre, the officer's command proves who was really calling the shots. Or for the more optimistic, it could be Folman's final argument that complicity is perpetration, while he exhorts Israelis (and Americans) to cut the supply lines.

But the film does not operate outward; instead the final flashback zooms inward, right at Folman's face as he surveys the aftermath of the massacre. Then, in a stunning transition, the animation drops away, and we’re left with the first real footage; piles of the dead, and the hysterical cries of Arab women. No doubt here: This did happen.

Still, the women’s words don’t carry subtitles, a fitting close to an ambiguous film. Folman acknowledges the gravity of the crime, while preventing us from hearing anything more than rage from its victims.

ATC 141, July/August 2009

D.C. Teachers Resist Attacks on Tenure

From June, 2009 issue of Labor Notes.

Teachers and D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee haven’t agreed on much during 18 months of contract talks with the Washington Teachers Union (AFT), but there’s consensus on one point: any agreement will affect schools far beyond the capital.

Rhee’s proposal for record merit pay bonuses, combined with attacks on tenure, has landed her on the national stage, where she’s drawn praise from President Obama. The view from the classroom is less glowing.

“She’s got two years of teaching experience, and she’s telling the world how to save public education,” said Nancy Martell-Stephenson, a veteran teacher at Murch Elementary School.

The union is split, wracked with conflict over how to negotiate with a school chief keen on firing older teachers and bringing in younger replacements.

Union president George Parker has come under fire from the union’s executive board. Board members censured Parker last winter for lack of transparency in negotiations, and called on their own education policy icon, American Federation of Teachers national president Randi Weingarten.

She set an ambiguous tone upon arriving in D.C. this winter, proclaiming the AFT’s openness to nearly any reform of public schools—as long as it’s “good for children and fair for teachers.”

With AFT funding and counsel, the WTU rolled out a counterproposal in February offering more fanfare than facts. Parker and AFT staff gave a select group of teachers less than an hour to examine the thick proposal before putting it on Rhee’s desk.

“They rushed me through it,” said Candi Peterson, a building rep at Garfield Elementary. “It made me feel like, ‘what are you hiding here?’”

SCHMOKE AND MIRRORS

Rhee didn’t budge. The two sides recently called in an independent mediator, former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke.

Schmoke piloted several school privatization programs in the 1990s. His “Enterprise School” model created local decision-making boards, but included a “neighborhood representative” from private businesses. Three hundred companies signed on, in order to take advantage of relaxed rules for contracting school services without district oversight. In 1992 Schmoke placed nine public schools under the control of a private management firm.

The company slashed art, music, and physical education teachers, as well as special education classes, prompting a union outcry. Schmoke ended the program when student achievement failed to rise as promised. Toward the end of his tenure, he gave the state partial control over the city’s schools in exchange for a $250 million subsidy.

WORST PRACTICES

As mediation begins in D.C., tenure remains the deal-breaker.

Not just job security but academic freedom is at stake in the struggle over tenure, say teachers like Arthur Goldstein, a veteran ESL teacher in New York City. He has challenged administrators in the hallway and in the press, and said his principal screamed at him for talking to media. “He would have fired me if he could have,” Goldstein said.

Union activists say Weingarten is pushing “best practices” from other cities to resolve the D.C. deadlock. One of these comes from New York City and is called, oddly, “mutual consent.” It allows principals the power to disregard years of service when hiring for vacant teaching slots.

As president of New York’s teachers union, Weingarten negotiated a 2005 deal that introduced the rule, which has created a large pool of unemployed veteran teachers in New York. They still receive pay and benefits.

Their ranks have grown while principals fill vacancies with less experienced, lower-paid teachers. D.C. teachers who saw the local’s latest counterproposal say Weingarten has included “mutual consent” as a compromise to Rhee’s attack on job security. The chancellor’s five-year plan for the district proposes mass buyouts while calling on principals to identify underperforming teachers for dismissal.

Such a provision would undermine protections in the current contract that give preference for open positions to teachers with more experience.

Rhee, meanwhile, continues to work around the union. She’s used an obscure district law to place hundreds of teachers on 90-day evaluation plans—setting them up for dismissal by year’s end.

Some of Rhee’s most vocal opponents, like Jeff Canady, are on the chopping block. With 18 years of experience, Canady says his students’ high test scores (and his endorsements from city newspapers during a run for the school board) have not saved him from the 90-day plan.

Canady claims that administrators are now fudging his evaluations. “I’m a high-value target,” he said.

The plan sets up observations by school administrators for teachers who have “unsatisfactory” ratings on at least a third of their evaluation criteria. Canady has 90 school days to work with administrators to improve. Parker says teachers on the plans are not being given proper support, and the union will challenge dismissals on that basis.

But Canady says Parker is helping the district purge dissent within the union at a critical moment in negotiations. District officials denied Vice President Nathan Saunders his leave of absence to continue union work when Parker failed to sign forms, before relenting days later. Saunders, an outspoken critic of Parker, may challenge him for union president next year.

WHAT’S THE MERIT?

Rhee is dangling a privately funded merit pay plan with unprecedented bonuses in front of teachers, to get them to surrender tenure. District officials have raised concerns that they would not be able to fund Rhee’s enormous bonus offers (teachers could make up to $131,000 a year) if private donors pulled their support down the line.

The WTU supports school-wide and individual merit pay programs, but calls for an evaluation system that uses “performance scorecards” based in part on reviews from other teachers. Rhee wants to focus on test scores as the primary measure of student achievement. She’s forming her criteria for evaluation alongside ongoing talks, and has convened a series of meetings with teachers to get their feedback.

Weingarten’s knack for partnership with administrators has had some effect. Rhee has backed away from outright teacher-bashing, and rescinded a threat to pursue emergency legislation that would have freed her from contract obligations.

But the district’s buyout-and-firings plan remains intact. Rhee seeks to expand a “pipeline” for young teachers into the district, with the promise of big money. The plan also would close under-enrolled or low-performing schools and convert others to privately run “education management organizations,” a page taken from mediator Schmoke’s playbook.

Saunders says Weingarten and Parker have not mobilized members for aggressive action, choosing instead a radio ad campaign, leafleting at subway stops, and yard signs to garner public support for the union.

While talks inch along, Rhee continues to place teachers in jeopardy, betting on the support of the city government and media, which have largely bought her story that the union stands in the way of a groundbreaking plan.

“There is not one shred of evidence out there that shows what Rhee and the district are doing is effective,” says Canady. “But the district doesn’t need a contract, because Rhee’s got an award-winning fable.”

Del Ray Crib in the Hood

On the way back from Toledo today, I got off 75 North a little early. I ended up in Del Ray.

Workers United Finds Membership Divided

From the May, 2009 issue of Labor Notes
by Daniel Denvir and Paul Abowd

The 15 regional boards that seceded from UNITE HERE in March to create a new union in partnership with the Service Employees have not exactly made a clean break.

Allies of former UNITE President Bruce Raynor formed Workers United at a March 21 convention in Philadelphia, but not everyone in the city—much less the country—is on board.

Lynne Fox, president of the regional (or joint) board and a vice president of the new union, claims all 9,000 members in Philadelphia became part of Workers United. To prove member support, Fox and joint board staff are holding secret-ballot elections in dozens of shops, giving workers a choice: stay with UNITE HERE, or join the new partnership with SEIU. The premise for the breakaway campaign is member discontent. Still, several stay-or-go votes came weeks after the union’s founding, raising questions about its democratic bona fides.

“They’re acting more like a boss than a union,” said Doris Smith, president of a Philadelphia local representing public school food service workers which has opposed the breakaway union.

Regina James, a cafeteria worker, disagrees. She says UNITE leaders brought steward trainings and the local prospered when the joint board put the HERE local under trusteeship four years ago.

“UNITE HERE wants control of our local, and they’ll go back to using and abusing us again,” she added.

Most members don’t seem much involved. The joint board held a disaffiliation vote in mid-April, attracting 75 votes from 2,400 cafeteria workers. James says the 61-14 result proves workers want out of UNITE HERE.

But Workers United is bogged down with legal challenges and a member revolt within some shops. Hotel workers in the city say that a secret ballot vote to gauge workers’ support was tampered with, a claim the joint board rejects. “UNITE HERE won’t accept the election when it doesn’t go their way,” said Fox.

Workers United claims 150,000 members support the breakaway from the 450,000-strong International, headed by both Raynor and HERE leader John Wilhelm since their unions merged in 2004.

Civil war broke out when UNITE supporters realized that Raynor lacked the votes to remain in power at UNITE HERE’s upcoming convention. Leaders of the regional boards sued for divorce and headed for the door, attempting to take real estate and the Amalgamated Bank—which UNITE brought into the merger. Wilhelm says these assets became the International’s property after the two unions joined forces.

SEIU swooped in, offering to collect limited dues from Workers United members in exchange for organizing and legal support—essentially subsidizing the split. The two unions say they will organize among hotel and gaming workers in key HERE strongholds Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and elsewhere.

Wilhelm has filed suit against the secession attempt, a proceeding that will last for months.

WHO DO YOU LOVE?

Meanwhile, a battle for members’ hearts and minds continues. Workers United staff has launched a nationwide campaign using petitions and elections to prove popular support for the split. In New York and Pittsburgh, joint board officials claim overwhelming victories in large hotel locals.

But the breakaway attempt has encountered resistance in Philadelphia, where even joint board leaders were divided on whether or not to split.

The president of Philadelphia’s hotel workers union supports Workers United, citing a more stable financial future with SEIU, but members at the Radisson Hotel have bucked the new union. Corean Holloway, the local vice president, works in laundry at the Radisson, and says workers’ April 1 vote to stay with UNITE HERE was tampered with. The joint board claimed a 42-12 victory, but more than 30 workers at the hotel have since signed affidavits saying they voted to stay with UNITE HERE—a charge Fox calls a “baldfaced lie.”

Holloway says joint board staff told her to warn co-workers they would lose their union contract, pay dues increases, and face layoffs if they didn’t support the new union.

When Workers United officials postponed a scheduled vote at Philadelphia’s Hyatt hotel, workers supporting UNITE HERE gathered dozens of cards in lieu of an election. “People don’t want their dues funding the people trying to break up their union,” said Jamie Hamod, a steward and server.

Aaron Seiz, a host and bargaining committee member, says 112 out of 152 Hyatt workers had already signed a petition to remain with UNITE HERE. Fox doesn’t recognize those petitions, calling instead for a secret-ballot election. UNITE HERE says the elections have no legal bearing.

‘SLAP IN THE FACE’

Valerie Halls, a barista in the Hyatt lobby, calls the Workers United actions a “slap in the face, just two months after winning our contract.” Hyatt employees won a 16-month contract battle in February, while joint board officials were making plans to leave.

Before the split, workers received now-infamous purple flyers urging them to support the new union. After Workers United formed, Halls and others received robocalls and house visits from the union.

The joint board had pulled two of her co-workers off the job months ago. No one knew why until they appeared on house visits targeting workers less involved in the local.

The split from UNITE HERE has been all about speed. Raynor, with SEIU assistance, focused attacks on Wilhelm’s organizing methods, claiming they produced results too slowly. Their secession campaign was lightning quick. In a matter of weeks, Workers United had pinned its gray logo to the wall of a Philadelphia hotel ballroom, as the June UNITE HERE convention loomed.

In the stampede to leave, Philadelphia workers say the democratic process has been trampled, and many resent being consulted about the fate of their union, after the fact.

“This was decided over a month ago by Lynne Fox, before we were ever asked,” Hamod said.