Can Public Education Be Saved?

Walkouts, student strikes, and marches shook every level of California’s embattled public education system March 4. And the action paused only briefly as activists savored short-term victories and set about planning the next wave of challenges to lawmakers and administrators.

University of California (UC) students at Berkeley blocked campus gates and Santa Cruz students shut down their campus for the day. In the afternoon, college students joined forces with K-12 students and teachers in Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento, and Los Angeles.

Rallies in each city numbered in the thousands—a gathering sponsored by the San Francisco Labor Council drew 20,000 people to the Civic Center. Hundreds of marchers took their protests onto the freeways, stopping traffic for nearly an hour in Oakland. UC Davis students marched through two police lines before baton-swinging cops turned them away at an on-ramp.

The call for action against crippling state budget cuts—$17 billion in two years to California’s education fund—was taken up on all 10 UC campuses, at each of the 23 Cal State campuses, and at dozens of community colleges. The turnout was as unprecedented as the crisis. “It just brought out a positive energy from so many new spaces,” said Claudette Begin, a clerical worker at Berkeley. Actions spread to 32 states.

After an October conference drew 800 people to Berkeley, regional committees organized and formed demands, which varied from place to place. In Oakland, the list was broad: fully funded, free public education, pre-school through higher ed; an end to the federal No Child Left Behind Act and the Race to the Top competition; restoration of all public sector cuts and expansion of public services; full citizenship rights for immigrants and an end to ICE raids; a halt to foreclosures, to name a few.

PRESSURE COOKING

Organizers now face a test of stamina in battles against a federal restructuring of K-12 schools, still-looming state budget cuts, and corporate campus management.

Thousands of K-12 teachers rallied after school in downtown Los Angeles, gearing up for a fight against 2,800 pending layoffs. Class sizes have already exploded after last year’s cut to the teaching force.

In Oakland and San Francisco schools, students and teachers walked out of class during a morning “disaster drill” called jointly by unions and school districts.

Campus unions have organized with students for months. The Technical Employees at UC (UPTE-CWA) called two one-day strikes last year that meshed with large student mobilizations against fee hikes. No campus unions struck on March 4, but the UC clerical workers (CUE)—working without a contract—encouraged members to take the day off. Service workers (AFSCME) joined marches statewide.

UPTE gained a tentative agreement just before March 4. If approved on March 19, it would resolve the standoff over furloughs, accepting the days off but securing sizable raises over the next three years. The deal also caps health care premiums and defines UC’s pension contributions.

“This is a direct product of our months-long pressure campaign targeting UC administrator greed,” said UPTE President Jelger Kalmijn. “Now we have to bring the fight to the state government.”

MACHETES READY

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and state legislators are readying their machetes as another $20 billion budget deficit approaches this year. The state’s inability, or unwillingness, to raise revenues brought a 20 percent funding cut to higher education last year.

Student fees have spiked—by 182 percent since 2002 in the Cal State system. Programs and classes have been abolished, while lecturers and campus unions still fight over layoffs.

Berkeley professor George Lakoff is sponsoring a long-shot ballot initiative to overturn the requirement that the legislature pass budgets or any new taxes by a two-thirds majority. The California Faculty Association, representing teachers in the CSU system, is pushing a bill that would garner $2 billion for higher ed by taxing oil companies. California is the only oil-producing state with no oil extraction tax.

Meanwhile, activists won’t let UC administrators off the hook. While pulling down fat salaries, school officials are contracting out campus services and pursuing private donors to stay afloat—looking for corporate solutions to a public concern.

When UC President Mark Yudof proclaimed support for the March 4 protests, in an attempt to deflect blame to state government, students called the regents out for funding campus expansion, including a multi-million-dollar renovation of Berkeley’s football stadium.

Months of student building takeovers and experiments in democratic organizing have been animated by their call for free public education and to democratize the appointed regents. Students also want transparency in UC’s spending, salaries, and investments, a call that prompted a state senator to initiate an audit of the UC budget.

RACIAL JUSTICE

The crisis of priorities—and resulting student fee hikes—is exacerbating long-standing problems of access to higher education for students of color. Black and Latino students are vastly underrepresented at UC campuses: 1 percent of UCLA’s 26,000 undergrads, for example, are Black. The state’s ban on affirmative action in 1996 spurred a drop in Black and Latino enrollment at UC.

The fight for racial justice became a major element of March 4 activities. At UC San Diego, whose freshman class is 1 percent Black, administrators tried to tamp down anger over a racist fraternity party. Hundreds of students demanded “real action” after walking out of a university-sponsored teach-in on race relations.

The madness continued: a noose was discovered in a school library and a KKK-style hood was found on a campus statue. The Black Student Union and allies celebrated on March 4 when administrators met their deadline and their list of 19 demands.

The students say institutional policies have marginalized people of color on campus, creating the conditions for racism and ignorance to fester.

“More fees, more cuts to programs that serve underrepresented communities—it’s all serving the re-segregation of the university,” said Eric Gardner, a member of the student-worker coalition that organized for March 4 at UCLA.

GETTING ATTENTION

In Sacramento, Schwarzenegger seemed to be trying to appease: his January budget proposal would set aside more for higher education and make fewer cuts to schools than last year. But to free up cash, he proposed privatizing the state’s vast prison system.

“Some people are saying, ‘look, he’s paying attention,’” said Berkeley grad student Eli Friedman. “But his funding guarantee doesn’t include K-12 schools—they’re trying to divide and conquer.”

As the next budget negotiation approaches, California’s right wing remains in an anti-tax frenzy. A group of Republican legislators have taken an oath never to raise taxes, all but ensuring more cuts—a situation that has drawn little more than a shrug from President Obama.

The student and worker mobilization is hammering both parties for their refusal to get their priorities straight. “The Republicans are a party of ‘no,’ and Democrats can’t figure out how to stabilize things without a transfer of wealth” from the rich to working people—a move they’re reluctant to make, says Oakland teacher Jack Gerson.

Organizers know more cuts could be on the way. CUE activist Begin remains wary of the summertime lull when administrators can slash and burn at emptied campuses.

But activists’ unprecedented mobilization across campus, union, and generational lines is providing fuel for the long haul.

“I had gotten very pessimistic over time, but I’m not now,” says Gerson, a veteran of the ’60s. “We’re starting to see a mass movement, and this is just the beginning.”

Charter Schools Iced, Los Angeles Teachers Win Bids To Run New Schools

Charter school companies in Los Angeles were licking their chops last summer when the school board gave outside managers a chance to operate 36 schools next year.

After yesterday’s packed board meeting where officials voted to award 29 of those schools to teacher-led groups supported by United Teachers Los Angeles, the charters are licking their wounds.

What looked like another bonanza for charter operators in Los Angeles—which already has the most charter schools in the country—turned into an opening for teachers to build power with parents.

Yesterday’s competition is just the first round of what promises to be a titanic fight between the charter operators and union-backed coalitions in Los Angeles as 250 district schools will be opened to outside bids in the next several years.

LA’s school board started the bidding this summer on 12 low-performing "focus" schools as well as 18 brand-new campuses, which will house 24 schools. Proposals flooded in from 85 groups, including charter management companies, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s school franchise, and the union.

Gillian Russom, a teacher at Roosevelt High School and a UTLA activist, built alliances with parents at her school to submit a proposal for the still-in-construction Esteban Torres High School—where some of her students will go next year to relieve overcrowding at Roosevelt. With neighborhood walks, community forums, and proposal writing sessions, teachers and parents tailored their own reforms.

"We had something positive to organize around in addition to defending from charters," Russom says. "We showed the community that teachers have a vision for these schools, too."

Some of the plans developed by teachers and parents were formed along the lines of pre-existing alternative school models in the district.

At the new Torres High, plans by teachers and parents to start up five subject-based pilot schools beat out two charter giants: Green Dot and the Alliance for College-Ready Schools.

"The biggest charter companies in this city got iced," Russom says.

The pilot model—imported from Boston schools—is debated within union ranks. While they allow teachers some autonomy from district mandates over curriculum, they also open union contracts to alteration around hours and work duties—changes decided on by each school's governing board of teachers.

Teachers, staff, students, and parents at affected schools voted on proposals February 9, returning overwhelming support for teacher-led applications—a strong rebuke of charter bids. In an election administered by the League of Women Voters, 87 percent of parents voted for teacher-led proposals across the city. High school students voted, too, with strong majorities in favor of teacher-led plans. Not one charter plan won parent, teacher, or student votes—leading UTLA to claim an early victory.

Superintendent Ramon Cortines and a panel of reviewers sent their recommendations for each school to the school board before yesterday’s decisive meeting. Cortines backed many teacher-led proposals, but ignored some community votes in favor of charters.

Board Member Yolie Flores, who had introduced the "Schools Choice" resolution over the summer, downplayed the votes. Charter bidders hoped the community polls would remain only "advisory" when the board issued final decisions February 23.

Teachers, union activists, and charter supporters packed the hours-long meeting for their final lobbying effort.

Many suspected that the board would snub the parent votes, overrule the superintendent’s endorsement of most teacher plans, and assign many of the schools to charter operators. Instead, they overturned three of the superintendent’s charter nominations. The board also reversed Cortines’s recommendation to split two new campuses into schools run by union and charter plans. The Mayor’s Partnership for Los Angeles Schools took control of three schools, and four new schools went to charter companies.

The parent votes proved too compelling to ignore.

"They sold this whole process in the name of ‘parent choice,'" Russom says. "Once people saw 87 percent parent support for our plans, it was harder for charters to claim that they worked on behalf of parents."

Yesterday’s decision follows another recent blow to charter backers: a study from the UCLA Civil Rights Project showing intensified segregation at charters, further wearing at charter school claims to equity and racial justice.

Despite the victory, teachers remain focused. Yesterday’s decision is only the beginning of a years-long process during which hundreds of district schools will be opened up to bids. UTLA is challenging the entire “choice” process in court, claiming that publicly funded schools built to relieve overcrowding cannot be given away to (non-union) charter schools without a binding teacher vote.

The state’s budget catastrophe looms large, too. Drawing on strengthened ties to parents and students, teachers are gearing up for a statewide Day of Action March 4—and a march to Sacramento beginning the next day—to fight off crippling budget cuts threatening thousands of classroom layoffs.

"We’re not out of the woods yet," Russom says.

DC Teachers Could See Shakeup in Union's Spring Election

An outspoken critic of D.C. schools Superintendent Michelle Rhee has entered the race to lead the Washington Teachers Union (WTU). Nathan Saunders, the union’s current vice-president, says the May election is a chance for teachers to take a different direction in contract talks with Rhee, which have dragged on for three years.

Rhee’s original contract proposal to swap teachers’ job security for promises of merit pay has been effectively killed by rank-and-file opposition. Saunders has been fiercely against the plan, and has also turned his critique toward President George Parker. “Rhee and company are not the type of people you need to be timid with,” he says. Parker, who will face off against his veep in the election, has repeatedly dismissed Saunders’ critiques as driven by political ambitions. Saunders says the discontent has now gone far beyond him.

The contract standstill prompted national AFT President Randi Weingarten to intervene in talks last winter. The AFT/WTU counterproposal born from the intervention fizzled, and the union and district called in an outside mediator.

In the meantime, Rhee has worked around the contract talks, seizing a “Plan B,” to place hundreds of teachers on 90-day termination watch. Then, last summer, she cited budget shortfalls as the pretext for firing hundreds more. The move became especially controversial after she turned around and hired hundreds of new teachers months later.

The “reduction in force” did not go unnoticed. DC police arrived at schools during class time to escort teachers and counselors from the buildings, prompting students—upset at the departure of some of their most beloved instructors—to walk out in protest. Students got the attention of City Council, which called Rhee to testify over the dismissals. The union led an unsuccessful legal challenge to the firings.

The AFT, and newly-anointed AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, entered the fray, calling hundreds to a rally against the layoffs in early October.

LONG-TERM ACTIVIST

Even before Rhee hit town with a teacher-bashing vengeance, Saunders was working on his gadfly credentials. The union was rocked by a corruption scandal that sent former WTU President Barbara Bullock to jail for stealing $5 million from the local between 1994 and 2002. Saunders filed a lawsuit against the AFT for its complicity in Bullock’s embezzlement. He says the case set a precedent by making national unions legally accountable to rank-and-file members of local unions. The national AFT settled out of court, and paid $1 million to the local.

Following the AFT’s trusteeship, Saunders ran with Parker and took office in 2005. The “new Local 6” would fracture over strategy. The union’s rolls had already been decimated by years of non-union charter school invasion, and nearly each year brought a new superintendent determined to save the system. Nearly two years before Obama rode to victory on the hope of change, Rhee arrived in D.C. on much the same promise. Media profiles (and later Obama himself) endorsed her youthful energy and relished her quotable, tough-talking vision for reform.

Many teachers, including Saunders, charge union negotiators, led by Parker, with taking a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach to contract talks. Saunders, who boasts a wall of diplomas from the National Labor College and Harvard’s Trade Union Program and elsewhere, remained outspoken when members were called to meetings in the summer of 2008 where Rhee and Parker presented details of a nearly-completed contract. That fall, the union rift went public. Saunders pursued a recall effort and later sued the union for conspiracy.

Parker has been criticized (and censured by the union’s executive board) for a lack of transparency in 36 months of talks. Saunders is running on a promise to alter the bargaining process to include rank-and-file teacher activists. Models of parent-teacher organizing, such as those in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, says Saunders, are “the future of the labor movement,” and essential to reining in Rhee—even over basic questions like snow days. This week the district initially called a two-hour delay on a day that witnessed record snowfall in D.C. Parents flooded the district with calls. “They were on the phone saying ‘the snow out there is taller than the average third grader,’” Saunders said. School was canceled.

Teachers will need that support in facing continued attacks from Rhee—whose most recent loose-cannon moment came when she implied that last summer’s fired teachers were guilty of sexual misconduct and corporal punishment. Parker called for an apology—Saunders wants her to resign.

It’s clear to a growing number of teachers and community members that Rhee’s agenda in the last three years has not met AFT President Weingarten’s repeated standard for acceptable reform—neither fair for teachers nor good for students. Now, a perennial critic of both the union chief and the schools chief is putting together a slate, opening community forums to shape a platform, and harnessing a growing frustration over the attack on public education in the District.

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(Join Nathan and DC teacher activists at the Labor Notes Conference for strategy sessions on K-12 public education fights, rank-and-file contract campaigns, and running for office. Register today for the April 23-25 event in Detroit.)

Worker Center Reports on Restaurant Industry: Bad Jobs—and Lots of Them

It’s apparent now more than ever why restaurant workers are urgently organizing. While members of the Restaurant Opportunities Center roll on with workplace justice campaigns in several cities, affiliates of the national worker center released reports this week from Chicago, New Orleans, Portland, Maine, and Detroit highlighting the low lights of one the largest and fastest-growing private sector employers in the country.

Among the findings released yesterday by ROC-Michigan: The median wage for restaurant jobs in Metro Detroit is just $8.32 an hour, less than half of the average wage for all workers in the area.

In Detroit, 200 people gathered to hear from a sampling of the city’s more responsible employers, industry experts, and its restaurant workers. The study of the city and its suburbs, where 134,000 people work in restaurants and constitute about 8 percent of the private sector workforce, gathers the stories of hundreds of workers into a not-unexpected narrative of low wages, poor working conditions, racial discrimination in hiring, and harassment on the job.

In the heartland of economic collapse, 7.6 percent of Metro Detroit jobs have been lost since July 2009, reports ROC, but restaurant jobs have grown steadily since 2000. They’ve dropped slightly in the last two years. ROC-Michigan has gone after the lowest of the “low-road” employers at Andiamo Fine Italian Dining in Dearborn for months, filing a lawsuit over wage theft and racial and gender discrimination.

ROC’s study clarifies that Andiamo is sadly not alone in abusing the restaurant workforce—or in adhering to well-defined barriers of race, class, and geography in the Metro Detroit area.

Higher paying restaurant jobs are in the whiter suburbs, and 82 percent of those jobs are held by white employees. The report quotes Awet, a Black Eritrean woman who immigrated to Detroit from Italy in 1998. When the six-year veteran server applied to an Italian restaurant in the suburbs, the management told her there were no applications. A white friend of hers applied for the same job on the same day, and was hired on the spot. “I asked two of my other friends, one white and one Black, to go and apply, and the same thing happened,” she reports. “The white friend got hired, and the Black friend did not.”

Segregation exists inside restaurants themselves. Among Latino restaurant workers, 69 percent fill “back of the house” jobs in the kitchen. Seventy-nine percent of white restaurant workers and 67 percent of Asian workers work the “front of the house”—server or host jobs. The breakdown for Black and Middle Eastern workers is closer to 50-50.

Some results from ROC-Michigan’s study, Behind the Kitchen Door: Inequality and Opportunity in Metro Detroit’s Growing Restaurant Industry:

* In Metro Detroit, 80 percent of restaurant workers are paid less than $10 an hour.
* Overtime is paid to just 51 percent of all restaurant workers.
* Only 13 percent of the workers surveyed reported making a living wage.
* Thirty-nine percent of workers surveyed said they did not have legal status to work in the US.
* Only 5 percent get paid sick days—leading 60 percent of employees to work while sick.
* Employers don’t provide health insurance to 81 percent of workers.

The study also cheers for the few restaurants in the area that pay their workers well, have safe working environments, and provide benefits—noting that such establishments achieve profitability by maintaining a safe, stable workplace where disruptive turnover isn’t as likely. Their task is made harder by the slew of bad actors around them. Still, ROC members are not relying on the boss to save them. A worker-run cooperative, both restaurant and worker training center, is slated to open in Detroit this summer.

Restaurant Workers Launch Multi-City Campaign to Transform Low-Wage Industry

Published in the February, 2010 issue of Labor Notes.

The restaurant industry is one of the largest and fastest growing private employers in the country. But just as swinging doors often separate patrons from the kitchen, the working lives of 13.5 million restaurant workers—a largely non-union workforce—remain out of sight.

In four cities, cooks, dishwashers, servers, hosts, and busers are organizing workplace justice campaigns with the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), bringing their aspirations to overhaul a low-wage, high-discrimination industry out onto the streets.

ROC got its start when workers at New York’s “Windows on the World” restaurant in the World Trade Center lost 73 of their co-workers—and their jobs—on 9/11. The worker advocacy group began organizing, training workers, and conducting research and policy work, and now has 3,200 members and its own restaurant.

Through coordinated legal and direct action campaigns, ROC-NY has notched several wins garnering millions in wage and hour claims, as well as legal settlements with restaurants that mimic collective bargaining agreements. ROC formed a national organization in 2008—ROC United—and chapters in seven cities formed soon after.

While ROC is not a union, its organizing work could be a path to unionization. UNITE HERE Local 100, New York’s food service local, has struggled to build density among the fragmented but growing ranks of restaurant workers. Only a small fraction of the city’s restaurant workers are Local 100 members. But the local was instrumental in helping set up ROC.

Union card or not, ROC members have found winning collective strategies capable of raising the bar.

HOW DO I LOOK IN THIS MESS?

“One of the things every restaurant cares about more than anything else is their image,” says Jose Oliva, ROC national policy coordinator. “It’s their most valuable asset.”

Workers in ROC build direct action campaigns with community support to go after bad actors in the industry. Workplace campaigns are live in Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago, and Portland, Maine.

Workers at Andiamo Dearborn, an Italian restaurant with 11 other locations in the Detroit area, filed a federal lawsuit January 12 after months of weekly picket lines on the sidewalk outside. Seventy-five supporters from student, faith, and labor groups—including the head of the Detroit Metro AFL-CIO—converged in front of the restaurant as ROC announced it was pursuing claims of upwards of $125,000 for eight workers who allege a raft of wage violations, gender and national origin discrimination, and retaliation.

Servers and busers in the complaint, which includes one current employee (the others quit or were fired) said they weren’t paid the state minimum wage, even after tips. Others say the company illegally deducted wages for uniforms and equipment, and refused overtime pay after 70-hour work weeks.

Workers also complain of discrimination within the restaurant, claiming that Andiamo gives promotions to lesser qualified white and male employees. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit say the restaurant’s head chef routinely made disparaging remarks about “wetbacks” without facing discipline. One female worker alleges that management refused to punish a male employee after she complained of sexual harassment.

The week following one particularly raucous sidewalk protest, one worker-leader, Bertha Piña, was fired. ROC filed a retaliation complaint with the NLRB, and Piña, a mother of five, was reinstated days later—but got few hours.

When she returned to work, Piña said, Andiamo’s CEO pulled her aside for a tongue-lashing. “He wanted to know why we don’t care about his reputation,” she said. “I asked him why he doesn’t care about our lives.” Piña has been demoted to dishwasher, one day a week.

ROC-Michigan is keeping the pressure on during the lawsuit, scheduling weekly protests. ROC-Maine and six workers at Portland’s Front Room restaurant also filed suit in early 2010, claiming that what’s happened in Detroit is no anomaly.

PAYDAY DELAY

When paychecks from Chicago’s Mexican fine-dining tapas restaurant Ole Ole! began bouncing two months ago, workers showed up at the ROC office. “One server’s missing $20,000 over the course of three years,” said Veronica Avila, ROC-Chicago coordinator.

The campaign took off when other kitchen staff complained of getting paid whenever the owner felt like it. When checks came through, Avila says, they’d be hundreds of dollars light. ROC says six employees of the restaurant’s predominantly Latino workforce are short $200,000 total.

Owner Regina Tavone, who has admitted to owing at least $80,000 to four workers, stalled repeatedly on ROC’s demands for a meeting, and the group picketed on January 6, promising not to go away.

In New Orleans, another crowd has joined the tourist mobs along the city’s bustling Bourbon Street. Five former employees have drawn support from ROC-NOLA in a lawsuit and public campaign against restaurateur Jobert Salem. Next to his bar, the Old Absinthe House, Salem owns two restaurants in one building—Tony Moran’s and Jean Lafitte Bistro.

Workers say management gives them two employee ID numbers, one for each restaurant. When they get close to overtime pay on one ID, their hours get logged on the other. ROC member Van Joseph says he was paid $100 for 60 hours’ work in Salem’s catering business.

Protests have continued despite Salem’s deployment of security from the bar to bat away cameras and intimidate outspoken workers. According to Darren Browder, ROC-NOLA co-coordinator, workers have been roughed up and tasered. One reports being assaulted after being fired and asking for his last paycheck. Fifteen out of 50 former employees at Tony Moran’s told ROC they were physically assaulted by the bar’s enforcers.

Following a large November protest, Browder says Moran’s management came to the table—but mostly to suss out what kind of evidence ROC had. The lawsuit and public campaign continue.

PUTTING NUMBERS ON IT

ROC backs up the claims of workers at individual restaurants with citywide studies. While the organization seeks to build relationships with restaurant owners that treat workers well, two major studies by ROC-NY show that most employers, unsurprisingly, take the low road in a low-wage industry.

In 2005, half of New York restaurant workers made less than $9 an hour, and 90 percent had no health coverage through their employers. Average salaries were $25,000 less than the average private sector job in 2000—and the gap has only grown.

ROC-NY’s 2009 study on hiring discrimination put the numbers behind a common conception that people of color are trapped in “back of the house” jobs. The study sent dozens of job applicants from a spectrum of racial and ethnic backgrounds into nearly 200 city restaurants, revealing that high-priced establishments offered jobs to white applicants twice as often, and chose them more frequently for high-visibility jobs like host and server.

Meanwhile, restaurant workers in New York made their own high road. Colors, ROC-NY’s union restaurant in Manhattan, gives each worker an equal share of ownership. A general manager and chef hire and fire, but are accountable to a board of directors elected by workers—who have a living wage, health care, and training programs through ROC. The idea is spreading. In Detroit, restaurant workers are moving on plans to open their own establishment inside an old, rarely used downtown club.

ROC United’s Oliva says the group’s multi-pronged strategy aims at raising standards across the growing service sector.

“Before people were unionized in the auto industry, it was dragging down the rest of manufacturing,” Oliva says. “Restaurants set the standards for the service industry. We’re trying to create a culture of organizing there, to make restaurant jobs stable jobs.”

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Evan Rohar and Enku Ide contributed to this story.

Growing Labor Support for Palestine Faces Stiff Opposition in the U.S.

Union members who want to organize U.S. labor support for war-torn Palestine often compare their cause to the battle against apartheid in the 1980s. They point to striking similarities between Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the former South African system: In Israel, Arab citizens face legalized segregation in housing and employment. In the occupied West Bank, separate and unequal conditions are even more overt.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis live in growing settlements connected by “Israeli-only” roads. Palestinians are left in disconnected towns, stalled at hundreds of military checkpoints, and hemmed in by an Israeli-built wall that grabs more land.

And just as in South Africa, dozens of U.S. companies are involved. Industrial zones allow corporations familiar to U.S. union activists to import low-wage guest workers from Palestine and overseas.

“Palestinians are being exploited by the same entities that are exploiting U.S. workers,” says Sharon Wallace, a teacher from Kentucky who has organized two U.S. tours of Palestinian labor activists and who just returned from a pro-Palestine march in Egypt (see box).

She and a small but growing band of U.S. unionists—some of whom are Jewish—are fighting to educate fellow members and mobilize their unions behind a global call to pressure Israel with a boycott, divestment, and sanctions.

They face substantial barriers to winning union support: Activists say leaders of U.S. unions still seem enamored with the myth that Israel is a pro-labor government. In an October speech at the Jewish Labor Committee, AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka opposed international efforts to boycott Israel, suggesting that opposition to Israeli policy was anti-Semitism in disguise.

Those attitudes are reinforced by an organized pro-Israel lobby and a receptive U.S. government that sends Israel billions a year in military and other aid.

But when Israeli warplanes bombarded Gaza in late 2008, killing 1,500 civilians and destroying the country’s infrastructure, union activists joined protests all over the country. Several union councils, including the California Federation of Teachers, called for an end to the bombardment. On the East Coast, SEIU1199 delegates condemned the violence in Gaza and sent $5,000 to bolster medical relief efforts there.

Today in Gaza, Palestinians—45 percent of whom are unemployed—are still digging out from the rubble. Because of Israel’s blockade, they are unable to move in and out of the country or control their airspace, ports, or borders.

“Families aren’t getting paid, and don’t have jobs. So much of their resistance is just about survival,” Wallace said.

Labor activists are trying to expand isolated protests into a full-fledged campaign.

Garnering support from “a larger small group inside labor than before,” says activist Michael Letwin, Labor for Palestine recently issued a letter to Trumka calling for a boycott of Israeli goods and applauding South African unions for turning away Israeli ships from their ports during the Gaza war.

The union anti-war group U.S. Labor Against the War plans to dispatch a fact-finding mission to Israel and Palestine at the end of the year. And American unionists were among those attempting to bring solidarity and aid to Palestine in December.

USLAW staffer Michael Eisenscher notes that when the group started agitating against the Iraq war in 2003, “opposition was not a majority opinion.”

YOU’RE PAYING FOR IT

U.S. workers are connected to Israel’s occupation of Palestine because, for one thing, they’re paying for it. The U.S. is the largest donor to Israel, giving $26 billion in military aid over the past 10 years, according to the Congressional Research Service.

U.S. labor is in the mix as well: 279 labor bodies, including locals, labor councils, and the AFL-CIO itself, fill their pension portfolios with state of Israel bonds—to the tune of $5 billion. The federation owns no other country’s bonds, says Stan Heller, a longtime high school teacher in Connecticut.

Heller is heading up a labor campaign to “Dump Israel Bonds,” underway in New Haven. The labor council there has called on the state AFL-CIO to sell its $60,000 in bonds. Heller says the national Teachers union (AFT) recently sent him a letter proudly informing him of the union’s large investment in the state of Israel.

But globally, union opinion is openly critical of Israeli policy. The Congress of South African Trade Unions initiated the Cairo Declaration in January, signed by unions around the world, including the United Kingdom’s major union federation, Ireland’s largest public sector union, and labor bodies in France, Canada, Australia, Norway, and Scotland.

The document calls for an international tour of South African and Palestinian trade unionists to emphasize the parallels to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. It also echoes the Palestinian labor movement’s call for an international campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against the Israeli government.

BREAKING THE TABOO

Monadel Herzallah is an activist with the Arab American Union Council; he moved from Palestine to the U.S. in 1978. Alongside patient education of American workers, he feels an urgency to support Palestinians who are resisting occupation amid a humanitarian crisis.

Herzallah’s extended family lives in Gaza. His 20-year-old cousin was killed in Israel’s bombing last December. “The level of crime being done by Israel makes it essential for the labor movement to take courageous steps to break the taboo that exists when it comes to Palestine,” he says.

Organizing from the Bay Area with labor and community activists, Herzallah sent funds to the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions in Gaza, whose headquarters was destroyed by Israeli bombs. His network of Arab American unionists has plans to train, educate, and provide equipment to Palestinian unionists, to develop more than a cosmetic solidarity with them.

Herzallah believes the outrage over conditions in Gaza is opening up space for labor activists to organize against the occupation. And, he points out, the U.S. government’s giant military aid to Israel is part of the lavish war spending that’s draining funds needed in the states and drawing growing criticism from U.S. unionists.

Steward's Corner: Txt & Tweet 2 Org & Inform

From the January, 2010 issue of Labor Notes.

By Paul Abowd

Online social media tools like Twitter are often dismissed as time-wasters for the procrastinator in all of us. But they’re also being harnessed for greater causes. You can use Twitter and text messaging to keep members educated and mobilize them for action.

Twitter is a “micro-blogging” website that allows you to post frequent, short messages, using your computer or cell phone, to be read by people who’ve signed up to get your entries via their own computer or cell phone. Text messages are nearly the same, but are sent to specific people by cell phone. Here are examples from four campaigns.

TWITTER ARMY

The Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) formed in 2008 to push the Chicago Teachers Union to oppose school closings and fight for its members. According to Kenzo Shibata, the union had an “immense communications capacity which lay dormant.”

As the city prepared to close yet more schools last winter, CORE deployed a “Twitter army” to monitor major goings-on in the Chicago education world.

At twitter.com/coreteachers, the group began sending live “tweets” from the union’s monthly House of Delegates meetings. The gatherings are sparsely attended by non-delegates, but now everyone can keep tabs on how their dues are spent.

The Twitter brigade also descends on monthly Board of Education meetings, which are held during the work day. Shibata says CORE sends “quick bursts of analysis” to teachers, who read up during their lunch breaks.

When Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke to a pro-privatization group, CORE activists picketed outside and reported via Twitter that they had been threatened with arrest for trying to enter. A flood of teachers responded with solidarity messages, and others asked for directions to the protest.

TEXT TO WIN

In summer 2008 Teamsters at Sotheby’s, the art auction house in New York, won their best contract in a decade. The campaign was helped along by a text-message phone tree, which members set up to connect the workforce of 50.

Rank-and-filer Julian Tysh says the shop’s organizing committee set up the network after discovering that workers young and old were punching out texts on their cell phones. “We started using it for impromptu meetings: hurry up and meet outside, the bargaining committee is going to give you an update. We’d meet on the street in front of the building or on the loading dock.” Seventy to 80 percent showed up.

When the campaign began to escalate, says Tysh, designated texters might send messages asking workers to wear a union shirt the next day and gather at the time clock 20 minutes early.

TEXTS ON THE DOCKS

Texting brought together far-flung longshore activists in a yearlong contract campaign stretching across dozens of ports from Maine to Texas.

The Longshore Workers Coalition, a reform group inside the East Coast Longshoremen’s (ILA) union, used texting to reach hundreds of new recruits, quickly disseminate bargaining updates about concessions union leaders had accepted in secret meetings, and organize a contract rejection that sent the deal back for improvement.

Texting is an organizer’s new best friend, says Marsha Niemeijer, LWC staffer. Receiving messages gives a recruit an identification with the organization. From there an organizer can use the connection to have a conversation and build a deeper relationship.

“Besides an information tool, it’s an action tool,” Niemeijer said, noting that she tailored texts to specific ports or groups of activists, inviting members to distribute flyers and join rallies.

In a union culture where members get little information and meetings are poorly attended, the LWC’s texts became must-have items at contract time. In Norfolk, Virginia, signs went up on the local’s wall with the number to subscribe. One Baltimore member called the message system “our CNN.”

About 90 percent of the LWC membership is on the text list now, up from 60 percent before the campaign.

How much is too much? At its peak, the LWC blasted out three messages a day, several days a week. Niemeijer says she can count the number of negative reactions on one hand. “It’s not a replacement for the human connection,” Niemeijer said, “but it adds a level of excitement, and members feel good about being in the know.”

FROM PHONE TO NET

In Southern California, a digital storytelling and community journalism project built by students and low-wage workers gives recent immigrants without computers a connection to the digital world by using low-cost new media.

The project developed software that allows workers to use their phones to capture and publish pictures, videos, and stories about their jobs, families, and activism. The “Mobile Voices” program, or “Vozmob,” exists primarily for day laborers and domestic workers, said Sasha Costanza, a board member.

Workers are now editing their own videos and sharing their knowledge at worker-to-worker trainings throughout LA. The software for uploading stories to the web can be downloaded free here, and works on any basic cell phone. Workers send their dispatches by phone to an email address, which directly uploads the messages to Vozmob’s blog.

A project of the LA-based Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California, and the University of Southern California, Vozmob has been used by workers to cover a community health conference, job centers and day laborers’ issues, and student organizing against tuition hikes.

At the November national Domestic Workers Alliance conference in the Bay Area, a Vozmob member who blogs as “Madelou” trained other domestic workers how to use the technology. Madelou took pictures of the spirited march for domestic workers’ rights and sent updates throughout the conference to the Vozmob blog.

Constanza says workers are also using this technology to document their workplace problems on the net with pictures, text, and audio—a great way to catalog evidence for grievances.

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.