Mike Klonsky reports on the deal that preceded the privatization of the jobs of custodians in Chicago. It’s a shocker.
“It was SEIU Local 73 leader Christine Boardman who first signed onto Rahm’s $340 million sub-contracting deal with Aramark and SodexoMagic (magic, my ass) in the first place. These two contracts combined make it one of the largest privatization moves of any school district in the nation. Under the agreements, SodexoMAGIC oversees 33 schools, while Aramark oversees the remaining 500-some district-run schools.
“Boardman then put icing on her sell-out with a $25,000 contribution to Rahm’s campaign war chest. Ugh! She’s dirtier than a a CPS bathroom.
“But what about progressive SEIU Local 1 Pres. Tom Balanoff? Why so quiet, Tom?”
The privatization has produced dirty schools, rats, roaches, and the layoff of nearly 500 custodians.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well…today my faith in humanity and the future of our species has been shattered.
One of the things that teachers and other union members will need to do is to replace their union leadership with people who are not sellouts. It’s an old struggle and it never ends — it certainly goes back to the struggle inside of the old AFofL to get rid of racist and corrupt and complacent union leaders who rejected the vast majority of American workers because they were immigrants, or black, or hispanic, or chinese, or were simply unskilled.
Teachers have become so identified with unions today, that I think it’s going to be difficult for them to ever recover the public’s trust until such a time as they forsake said unions and demonstrate that they’re actually professionals….with the interests of their profession and the students they’re supposed to be educating placed above their personal “gimme, gimme”‘ism.
Looking through blogs like this one, is it any wonder that society at large sees [so-called] “teachers” as simply another group of grasping “blue collar” workers, whose primary concern is [figuratively] the weight of the ink on their paychecks? Until that perception is changed, I can’t help but feel that the stance teachers take against privatization in the educational system in ANY form is going to be considered merely a case of their trying to feather their own nests…..and as being AGAINST the publics best interests.
OMG…such awfulness, but…no surprise. Wonder what perks and $$$$$ are being given and taken for this travesty.
She learned from the best:
http://www.thenation.com/article/andy-stern-savior-or-sellout
Mark Collins, the Nation article has been taken down.
Also the right had no problem bashing Andrew:
Americans for Taxpayer Reform
http://www.atr.org/seiu-president-andy-stern-visits-white-a4152
The PBS TV program “Chicago Tonight” aired a segment on this last night. This kind of political intrigue seems to be becoming more and more the way things are done. Tragic.
What did she get in return, either for herself or, suspending my disbelief, for her membership? I doubt that last one, and the campaign contribution? DISGUSTING TO THE MAX!
Again, some historical reminders — and some facts — are in order.
When corporate “school reform” began in Chicago in 1995, the three most powerful unions in Chicago Public Schools were the Chicago Teachers Union, SEIU Local 46, and the Operating Engineers Local.
At that point in history (1995) Christine Boardman wasn’t even a part of the Chicago reality, at least in terms of CTU power.
Christine Boardman wasn’t the only union leader to praise and profit from privatization and union busting. Long before Boardman was head of the (reorganized) SEIU local, the President of the Chicago Teachers Union, Tom Reece, ignored the mandate in the Amendatory Act of 1995 that custodial workers be privatized. Reece spent the 1990s praising the Board of Education while the non-teaching jobs were privatized across Chicago. By February 1999, after thousands of jobs of custodians and engineers has been privatized, the President of the Chicago Teachers Union, Tom Reece, stood up at a public meeting of the Board of Education and said that this was the “best Board in history.” Sitting on the stage while Reece made that proclamation were Paul G. Vallas, who at the time was CEO of CPS, and Gery Chico, who at the time was President of the Chicago Board of Education (just recently at that point the “Chicago School Reform Board of Trustees”). Reece was a partner with Vallas and Chico (and later with Arne Duncan (long before Christine Boardman emerged from her lawyer life to head the combined “Local 73.” Under Andy Stern’s rule, powerful (and locally run) locals of SEIU like the old Local 46 were obliterated. Local 46 of SEIU had represented Chicago school custodial workers for more than 50 years. Under Stern’s reorganzation, Local 46 was terminated and forced into “Local 73” to dilute the power of the CPS custodial workers.
Local 73 today represents everyone from school bus drivers in Gary, Indiana to the people who collect the tolls on the Illinois Tollway — and the remaining handful of union custodial workers in Chicago Public Schools. The destruction of union power in Chicago’s communities was not the work of Boardman alone, but the work of other union officials during those sellout years, including Andy Stern at the top of SEIU and Tom Reece, who in those years was president of both the Chicago Teachers Union and the Illinois Federation of Teachers. While Reece was sucking up to Vallas and Chico (and later to Arne Duncan and the corrupt Board of Education leadership under Michael Scott), Boardman was cutting political deals and praising those who were screwing the workers she was supposed to be representing.
Boardman in August 2012 signed an early contract with Rahm Emanuel’s Board of Education, which included a No Strike clause — one month before the CTU went out on strike under the leadership of Karen Lewis (and CORE). Boardman’s contract enabled Rahm Emanuel to declare that schools would be “open” when teachers struck in September. But by the second day of the strike, there were more adults (custodial workers and SEIU represented “security” people) in the open schools than kids. The kids were on the picket lines with us from one end of town to the other. Boardman had forced her own members into scabbing, and many apologized (and supported the strike in many ways, even after “their union” ordered them to cross the CTU picket lines).
CTU won the strike anyway. And Boardman continued her craven career as a “leader of labor” by taking cheap shots at the CTU on issues ranging from pensions to Rahm Emanuel.
George –
I hope you are writing a book! When we win this long struggle, many will want to study all the details of all the shenanigans.
Thank you for your work.
I’m trying to write the book. Anyone know any publishers.
Check with Haymarket Books. They published MAYOR 1% and a few others.
Or try, Palgrave Macmillan.
Last year, they published John McNay’s book on the battle over anti-union Ohio Senate Bill 5. John is President of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors. He might be helpful, if contacted. He has e-mail at the University of Cincinnati, where he is a history professor.
SEIU has done exactly the same in Los Angeles — agreeing to privatization and cuts and donating $$$$$ to the privatizers – they gave to the latest inexperienced privatizer over George McKenna. And then they look terrific because they ask for $15 minimum for THEIR EMPLOYEES ONLY – when there are many others in LAUSD who earn under that amount. These are very scary ambitious and in my opinion evil people.
Ohio just fined Aramark. The fines are tiny in terms of the size of the contract – 100k. Aramark can just blow that off, and they will.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time our people are doing a great job,” Hanner said. “These are Ohio citizens that we’ve hired. These people come to work every day and do a great job under trying circumstances.”
The quality of food has gone down since Aramark began work last September and food service concerns are more significant than in the past ten years, Joanna Saul, chief of the oversight committee, said in earlier testimony Wednesday.
Aramark’s low wages lead to high turnover and a temptation to smuggle in contraband, Saul said.
“You’re making $10 to $11, you can bring in a pack of cigarettes and sell it for $300 — what are you going to choose?” Saul said.
The state on Wednesday announced a second fine against the private vendor – Philadelphia-based Aramark – that took over the job of feeding inmates last year as the company defended its operations before a prisons oversight committee.
The $130,200 fine against Aramark Correctional Services covered continued staffing shortages, unacceptable food substitutions and shortages and sanitation issues, including maggots observed in food service operations at five prisons this month and last, according to Ohio’s July 23 letter to the company.”
I love the “Ohio citizens” line from the company. I guess we’re supposed to be grateful they’re not bussing in low-wage workers from Kentucky or something?
http://www.delcotimes.com/general-news/20140730/ohio-slaps-2nd-fine-on-aramark-for-prison-food-problems
One of the updates that could be done this year about Chicago’s public schools’ use of Aramark is that the lunch program is also in disarray. For reasons that have not been made clear, Chicago Public Schools announced over the summer that in the coming (this, 2014 – 2015) school year, all children in Chicago Public Schools would be able to get free or reduced lunches for “free.” This seemed to contradict the SNAP program guidelines for schools. We have two boys in elementary school, and every year we had sent in the forms accurately indicating that our family (like most of the families at the school they attend on Chicago’s Northwest Side) do NOT qualify for free lunch. So… every morning for years, I have been the person who makes the sandwich parts of the lunches for the family (Sam, Josh and Sharon).
We continued that practice this year despite the notice we got that EVERYONE gets “free” lunch from CPS this year.
I just finished making today’s lunches, ending the third week of school here. We go over the day with the boys every night, and lately they’ve told me that most days the school is “running out of” the “free” lunches before everyone is served. Our boys, along with a few others, don’t have to wait in the (much longer) lunch lines to get their lunches, so they are not rushed like many others are. The lunchrooms in CPS have been privatized for several years with most of them operated by — you’ll never guess — Aramark. It was an earlier attack on the lunchroom workers’ unions by Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan, when those two guys were the phony “Chief Executive Officers” of CPS. As we reported (exclusively) then, the lunches got worse and the lunchroom ladies had their pay and benefits cut.
One other aspect to this nonsense…
Every year, the “Inspector General” of Chicago’s public schools issues a report on corruption that he has uprooted. And every year for the past decade, the majority of “corruption” cases have been brought against families that engaged in one of two kinds of fraud:
— Falsely applying for free lunch (even principals have been found “guilty” of this “crime”)….
— Falsely claiming Chicago residency for children whose actual residence is in the suburbs (Chicago’s magnet schools are among the best in the state, so this doesn’t sound as silly as it might…)…
While the Inspector General has been unable to locate the major sources of corruption (e.g., this week, the licensing of the cleaning products that Aramark “owns” and which CPS is now forced to use instead of traditional mops and buckets; a part of this whole scam…), they’ve been great at chasing down nickel and dime stuff, and getting annual headlines from the Chicago Sun-Times when they leak their annual report to the corporate media as part of the usual propaganda campaigns. (You can find the IG reports on the cps website, if you are interested in these particular sanctimonious frauds…)…
As for our family?
Our boys get their lunches packed and provided from home every day. And they are learning that the government should provide for those in need but that it’s “wrong” to play these games, even if in Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago. Not all CPS kids and families are “poor” — just the majority. And so not all CPS families should be getting “free” lunches…
The SEIU has a long history of such back room deals. In 2003-04, against the express wishes of the school custodians and food service workers that they represented, the SEIU supported the privatization of St. Louis Public Schools custodial and food service jobs to Sodexho and Aramark, made campaign contributions to the privatizers, and opposed parent and teacher protests against school cuts. It later came out that international president Andy Stern had made a secret deal with Sodexho to support privatization of public services in return for Sodexho staying neutral in regarding organizing campaigns the SEIU had with certain specified groups of Sodexho workers.
I agree with the above criticisms of such deals, but I disagree that it is a matter of principle. There is an argument that workers are potentially better off in the private sector than in the public sector that is not easily dismissed. In Missouri, for example, private sector workers have rights to engage in strikes and job actions that public sector workers do not. Private sector workers are covered by health, safety, and overtime regulations that do not apply to public sectors workers. So, privatization potentially gives workers more leverage to extract a better deal than they could get from the school board, if they are organized to win it. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, I have not seen the SEIU organize workers to take advantage of the additional rights they get after privatization. On the contrary, I’ve seen the SEIU break up worker organizing so that they don’t use those rights.