Archives for category: Unions
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John Oliver Explains Union-Busting

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2021 //
12

On his regular television show “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver explains how big corporations like Amazon prevent their workers from forming a union. They hire expensive consultants to advise them on tactics. They bombard their workers with warnings about what they will lose if they join a union. They require them to watch anti-union videos.

His show is both informative and amusing. He runs an anti-union video in which two actors play the part of workers who warn their colleagues not to join the union. After all, “we are one big family here.” Oliver points out that the two actors belong to a union. When he questions them about their hypocrisy, he responds that he can be paid to act like a rapist, but that doesn’t make him a rapist.

This show is a must-see. Oliver relies on data gathered by the Economic Policy Institute in D.C., which is a rare think tank that supports labor unions and progressive legislation.

Categories Economy, Unions

Scranton: Teachers Will Go on Strike

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2021 //
10

A wave of labor activism is underway. Amazon workers in Staten Island in New York City are trying to organizing a union. Bloomberg News reports:

Deere & Co. employees, who launched a 10,000-person strike Oct. 14, cited the mandatory overtime that can stretch their shifts to 12 hours. At Kellogg Co., the union went on strike this month after decrying the toll of seven-day workweeks that had kept cereal flowing to stuck-at-home customers during the pandemic. And at Frito-Lay Inc., workers have this year challenged what they called“suicide shifts”: being made to leave late and return early, with only eight hours of turnaround time in between.

Scranton teachers announced their decision to strike on November 3.

SCRANTON, Pa.—The Scranton Federation of Teachers, which represents more than 800 teachers and paraprofessionals, announced today that it will set up picket lines and go on strike at 12:01 a.m., Nov. 3. The union has been working under a contract that expired in 2017.

“We’ve reached the end of the line and our patience with the Scranton School District. The district has refused to address our concerns about the slash-and-burn budget cuts that are significantly affecting the quality of education,” said Scranton Federation of Teachers President Rosemary Boland. “Strikes are always the last resort. We held off for many months, hoping, in vain, we could agree on conditions that are good for kids and provide decency, fairness, respect and trust for our educators.”

Boland expressed optimism that new members will be elected to the Scranton School Board on Nov. 2 and that the needs of students and educators finally will be prioritized.

SFT gave the district more than the required 48 hours’ notice before starting a strike. Picket lines will begin early Wednesday morning on Nov. 3 at most schools.

Teachers and paraprofessionals want realistic solutions to reversing the teacher turnover crisis; raising educator pay that has been frozen since 2016; returning Scranton’s esteemed and essential preschool program; and restoring libraries, bus routes and electives such as consumer[LBC1] science and music.

The austerity budget that is starving Scranton classrooms of the necessary resources, coupled with the administration’s disrespect for teachers, are issues reminiscent of what led to the walkouts in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado and Chicago in 2018 and 2019, SFT said.

“Teachers and paraprofessionals don’t want to walk out, but they will when their students’ needs are ignored and schools are starved of resources,” Boland said.

Scranton public schools are operating under a state Recovery Plan, which is akin to a state takeover.

“The Recovery Plan prioritizes financial recovery over student achievement, balancing the budget on the backs of students. Yet the plan has not been amended to factor in the $60 million in federal aid that should be used to stabilize the district and pay teachers decent, competitive wages,” she said, noting that the Recovery Plan originally factored in the use of “windfall funds,” such as federal aid when defining “recovery.”

“Since the recovery plan began in 2019, more than 100 teachers and paras have left the district, demonstrating a serious recruitment and retention problem that has harmful ramifications for students,” she said. Classes are severely overcrowded. Special education students are not being served adequately because teachers are pulled into other classrooms. Students aren’t getting individualized attention. In the COVID-19 environment, overcrowded classrooms pose a health hazard.

Boland said teachers and paraprofessionals deserve a pay raise. Teachers have not received a raise for more than four years, which has prompted many of the teacher defections to other school districts. Several paraprofessionals were furloughed, only to be brought back at a lower salary after public outrage. The district also is insistent on an inferior health scheme that would directly impact the Scranton community, as they are still dealing with the impact of COVID-19, the union said.

“It’s time for a contract that’s good for students and fair to educators,” Boland said.

Categories Budget Cuts, Pennsylvania, Teacher Pay, Teacher Shortage, Teachers, Unions

Peter Greene: What Is the Christian Educators Association?

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2021 //
31

Peter Greene notes that 2021 has been a year of attacks on public education, and he introduces us to an organization that is a little-known but influential player behind the scenes. It has actively sought to destroy teachers unions and to bring Christian beliefs into the classroom. That is, their version of Christian beliefs.

He writes:

The Christian Educators Association is not a new player (you may have heard the name before–we’ll get to that shortly). They were founded as the National Educators Fellowship in 1953 by Dr. Clyde Narramore, an author of over 100 books, most focusing on psychology. He even had a syndicated radio show with his wife Ruth. His shtick was psychology steeped in Christian belief, and he eventually launched and led the Rosemead School of Psychology which has since been folded into Biola University, a private evangelical Christian university in La Mirada, California (we’ll meet them again). Biola was founded as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles by the president of the Union Oil Company of California, based on the model of the Moody Bible Institute, later broadening their programs (including an education department)…

In 1984 they changed the name to Christian Educators Association International, and in 1991, then-leader Forrest Turpen continued restructuring the group to be “an alternative to teachers’ unions, at a time when unions were embracing values more and more hostile to the Biblical worldview.” I was teaching then; I’m not sure what exactly they were upset about (Outcome based education?) Turpen led the group from 1983 till 2003, expanded membership, and went after the secular unions. As always, the mission was unequivocally evangelical; when he died, friends noted his “dogged determination to see the gospel proclaimed to the children of this nation.” After his death, CEAI set up the Forrest Turpen Legacy Grant, asking teachers “Do you dream of impacting your school for Christ?” Grants were awarded for Bibles, tracts, t-shirts, and transportation costs to visit the Ark Encounter, all for various school clubs.

Of one thing you can be certain, the CEAI wanted the schools to be religious. But they also had a political goal: to weaken the teachers’ unions, which they considered godless. CEAI was behind a lawsuit intended to free teachers from any obligation to pay dues. Their plaintiff was Rebecca Friedrichs. She represented teachers who wanted to collect the benefits negotiated by the unions without paying dues. As Greene explains, her case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, but was deadlocked when Justice Scalia died. The next anti-union case, Janus, completed the mission.

Categories Religion, Separation of church and state, Unions

Harold Meyerson: The Little Union That’s Reviving the Strike

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2021 //
18

The American Prospect publishes two of our nation’s most thoughtful commentators: Harold Meyerson and Robert Kuttner. They represent liberalism at its best; they are on the side of working people, and they aim for a fair and just society. Nothing “neo” about them. You might want to sign up for their “On Tap” bulletins.

Here is Harold Meyerson, with news about the union that is reviving the strike as a way to gain better wages and hours.

Meyerson on TAP


The Little Union That’s Reviving the Strike


The roll call of unions that have actually changed the trajectory of American labor is relatively short: the United Auto Workers, the Mine Workers, and other CIO unions in the 1930s and ’40s, as factory workers organized; AFSCME and the American Federation of Teachers in the 1960s and ’70s, as unions took hold in the public sector.

Today, a much smaller union, punching way above its weight, is vying to join that list. After 40 years in a desert of union decline, workers’ ultimate weapon to win what’s rightly theirs—the strike—looks to be coming back, a long-overdue development that I discuss and analyze in some detail in my article on the Prospect website today. In that piece, I note that 2021 is beginning to look like 1919 and 1946, the years in which America experienced its greatest number of strikes. To be sure, today, with the private-sector rate of unionization reduced to less than 7 percent, most of the striking is individual rather than collective: employees refusing to return to their old poor-paying no-benefit jobs, creating a worker shortage that has compelled such anti-union behemoths as Amazon and Walmart to raise their employees’ wages. In tandem with this new form of individualized collective bargaining (ours is a time that requires oxymorons), unions themselves are beginning to strike, a phenomenon not seen ever since Ronald Reagan busted the air traffic controllers union when it went on strike in 1981.

And the union leading the charge today is the BCTGM, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Union, founded in the same year as the American Federation of Labor: 1886.

You’re forgiven if you haven’t heard of the BCTGM, but they’re the folks who put breakfast on your table, bread in your sandwich, and candy in your kids’ time-to-see-the-dentist mouths. This year, though, they’re also the folks who are restoring a needed level of strategic militance to American labor. In July, protesting the crazy hours they were compelled to work (in some cases, up to 84 hours a week), their members struck a Frito-Lay plant in Topeka. The following month, members struck five Nabisco factories across the nation, also to protest the plethora of hours and the dearth of benefits. They’ve done a bang-up job of pressuring those corporations to grant their workers’ demands, by both striking and publicizing the absurd schedules and conditions their members were compelled to endure.

Now, this week, BCTGM members have struck every Kellogg factory in the United States, after negotiations over schedules and benefits had produced no results. Kellogg workers have documented how they’ve been compelled to work straight through the weekend, and how some have had to work 12-to-16-hour days to keep turning out those Frosted Flakes.

Though I’ve been writing about unions for the past 40 or so years, this is the first time I’ve written anything about the BCTGM. I can tell you that since this spring, the union has had a new president, Anthony Shelton, but I can do no more than infer that this may have something to do with the union now having to produce more picket signs.

But I do know that this outburst of militance has a lot to do with the same factors that produced the strike waves of 1919 and 1946. Those were the years following the two world wars, of course, when the words “front line” still meant exposure to deadly fire. Today, as the pandemic (we hope) recedes, it refers to workers who had to show up every workday and risk contracting a potentially fatal virus. In all three cases, those workers were hailed as heroes, and in all three cases, most of the jobs to which they either returned or continued to hold offered pay and working conditions that were anything but heroic.

So—strikes then and strikes now. And this time around, with the bakers leading the way.


~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Categories Economy, History, Unions

Economic Policy Institute: Why Unions Are Good for America

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2021 //
33

The union movement built the middle class. For most of the past century, big business and plutocrats have waged war on unions and have largely succeeded. As the following analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows, the high point of the labor movement was in the in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As the strength of unions waned, inequality grew.

The EPI study begins:

Unions improve wages and benefits for all workers, not just union members. They help reduce income inequality by making sure all Americans, and not just the wealthy elite, share in the benefits of their labor.

Unions also reduce racial disparities in wages and raise women’s wages, helping to counteract disparate labor market outcomes by race and gender that result from occupational segregation, discrimination, and other labor market inequities related to structural racism and sexism.

Finally, unions help win progressive policies at the federal, state, and local levels that benefit all workers. And conversely, where unions are weak, wealthy corporations and their allies are more successful at pushing through policies and legislation that hurt working people. A strong labor movement protects workers, reduces disparities, and strengthens our democracy.

Categories Democracy, Economy, Unions

NEA Endorses Mandatory Vaccination or Testing for Teachers

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2021 //
9

The best strategy to end the pandemic is mandatory vaccinations for everyone, unless they have a medical condition that makes it in advisable. Until now, both major teachers’ unions refused to take a stand. Last Sunday on Meet the Press, Randi Weingarten endorsed mandatory vaccinations for teachers, but she must get the support of her members. She will. Now NEA has changed course.

The nation’s largest teachers’ union on Thursday offered its support to policies that would require all teachers to get vaccinated against Covid or submit to regular testing.

It is the latest in a rapid series of shifts that could make widespread vaccine requirements for teachers more likely as the highly contagious Delta variant spreads in the United States.

“It is clear that the vaccination of those eligible is one of the most effective ways to keep schools safe,” Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said in a statement.

The announcement comes after Randi Weingarten, the powerful leader of the American Federation of Teachers, another major education union, signaled her strongest support yet for vaccine mandates on Sunday.

Ms. Pringle left open the possibility that teachers who are not vaccinated could receive regular testing instead, and added that local “employee input, including collective bargaining where applicable, is critical.”

Her union’s support for certain requirements is notable because it represents about three million members across the country, including in many rural and suburban districts where adults are less likely to be vaccinated. Overall, the union said, nearly 90 percent of its members report being fully vaccinated.

Still, any decision to require vaccination for teachers is likely to come at the local or state level. And even with their growing support, teachers’ unions have maintained that their local chapters should negotiate details.

“We believe that such vaccine requirements and accommodations are an appropriate, responsible, and necessary step,” Ms. Pringle said on Thursday. She added that “educators must have a voice in how vaccine requirements are implemented.”

California has ordered all teachers and staff members to provide proof of vaccination or face weekly testing, an order that applies to both public and private schools. Hawaii is requiring all state and county employees to be vaccinated or be tested, including public-school teachers. And Denver has said that city employees, including public school teachers, must be fully vaccinated by Sept. 30.

— Sarah Mervosh

Categories Health, Science, Teachers, Unions

Randi Weingarten Supports Mandatory Vaccinations for Teachers

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2021 //
44

Randi Weingarten appeared on “Meet the Press” and endorsed mandatory vaccinations for teachers.

She said on Sunday that she wants the union to support mandatory coronavirus vaccinations for teachers. Currently, the AFT (and the NEA) favor vaccination being a voluntary choice.

Randi said:

“Since 1850 we’ve dealt with vaccines in schools, it’s not a new thing to have vaccines in schools. And I think that, on a personal matter, as a matter of personal conscience, I think that we need to be working with our employers – not opposing them – on vaccine mandates.” — NBC’s Meet the Press

This should not even be a story. Of course, teachers, hospital workers, and all essential personnel should be vaccinated. The virus will not be conquered until almost everyone is vaccinated against it.

How can parents send their children to school without the secure knowledge that the child’s teacher is vaccinated.

Mandatory vaccination is nothing unusual, as Randi said. I recall as a child having to present evidence that I was vaccinated for a variety of contagious diseases, most less serious than COVID.

When will the NEA step up and join with Randi in doing the right thing for themselves and their students?

Categories Health, Science, Teachers, Unions

Mississippi: School Bus Drivers Face Fine, Even Jail, for 2–Day Strike

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2021 //
14

School bus drivers in Greenville, Mississippi, did not report to work for two days to protest their low wages. Apparently they were unaware that the legislature had passed a law in 1985-36 years ago-absolutely prohibiting any strikes by any school employees, including bus drivers.

The local school board debated whether the drivers’ failure to work was or was not a strike. They did not realize that their own board could be fined thousands of dollars each for failing to report the names of those who struck.

One thing is clear: Mississippi loathes the very idea of unions. And another: they “appreciate” their teachers and other school staff but they don’t want to pay them a living wage.

Categories Education Reform, Mississippi, Teacher Pay, Unions

Valerie Jablow: D.C. Has Lost a Great Education Leader, Elizabeth Davis

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2021 //
1

Valerie Jablow is a parent advocate in the District of Columbia. Here she remembers Elizabeth Davis, the president of the Washington Teachers Union, who died tragically in an automobile accident on Easter evening. She was part of the new wave of teacher unionism, which is social justice unionism, a commitment not just to the benefits of teachers but to the well-being of students and to their opportunity to have a well-resourced and equitable education.

Teaching for Change posted this beautiful tribute to Liz Davis and her amazing life in DC. It is both a very welcome personal history–and the story of our DC schools.

Indeed, Liz Davis’s work as the head of the Washington Teachers’ Union has lived larger in my life as a DCPS parent than that of all other DC education leaders I have known put together—and touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of other DC residents. Just since the start of 2021, my email inbox has broadly distributed messages from Liz about needed action on nearly every current pressing matter in DC education, including the research practice partnership, DCPS re-opening, PARCC testing, a survey about teacher computers, re-examining school governance, and school librarians being excessed.

Our mayor may be in control of our schools—but no mayor, and no other elected or appointed leader in DC, has ever been in command of DC education advocacy and justice like Liz Davis. Her tenacity in the face of injustice has been both balm and shield for everyone who has battled for better schools in DC.

Yet always, always, behind everything I ever knew she did or said was that quiet, unflagging belief in a better, more equitable future, which seems to be the legacy of every great teacher. When I chose to sue DC over the chancellor selection panel excluding teachers, parents, and students and had only a few plaintiffs, Liz Davis simply put me in touch with a teacher who agreed to be a plaintiff. Then, without a word otherwise, Liz had the WTU submit an amicus brief. That document was indeed a friend (per the Latin word amicus) in what was for me, a DCPS parent, a notably unfriendly proceeding.

It is hard for me to believe that someone who was so alive is gone–and so suddenly. 

The last email I got from Liz was a letter to the chancellor about IMPACT, DCPS’s teacher review process. Fittingly, it came on April Fool’s Day.

Her last phone call to me was Easter morning, when she left a voicemail about a special education committee meeting this week she thought I might want to know about–and then noted what she thought were two important posts from this blog regarding IMPACT (here and here).

How lucky have we been to have known Liz Davis–and what a great teacher we have lost.

Categories District of Columbia, Equity, Justice, Teachers and Teaching, Unions

Rhode Island: Teachers Demand End to State Takeover of Providence Schools

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2021 //
6

Rhode Island is a mess. Two years ago, the state took control of the Providence public schools. The Governor, Gina Raymond, is a former hedge funder and not a friend of public schools. She loves charter schools and welcomed them to her state. She is now Biden’s Commerce Secretary and has been succeeded by her Lieutenant Governor Dan McKee, who is also a privatizer. The relatively new State Commissioner is Angelica Infante Green, who comes from Teach for America and had a desk job in the New York State Education Department. She is a member of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change. The Providence Teachers Union originally supported the state takeover, hoping that it would bring new resources to the schools. Instead, the takeover has meant disruption, turmoil, threats to teachers, and bitterness between the hard-charging, inexperienced State Commissioner and the teachers.

Mary Beth Calabro, the president of the Providence Teachers Union, has been a teacher for 24 years and president of the union for five years.

Less than two years later, and with the COVID-19 pandemic overshadowing nearly all of the takeover, Calabro now says that the relationship between the union and Infante-Green has deteriorated beyond repair, and she is asking state lawmakers to give control of the school district back to the city of Providence. She is also calling for Infante-Green and Superintendent Harrison Peters to be removed from their positions.

The union voted “no confidence” in both the state commissioner and the city superintendent. Calabro warned that the district was forcing teachers out with its hard-nosed tactics.

“We had hope that our state takeover here would provide the much-needed support, resources, and changes to help our students move forward,” Calabro said during a Monday press conference. “And we had hope that our educators’ collective skills, experience, and expertise would be seen as a welcome part of transforming out schools. Sadly, our hopes have died.”

The state commissioner made clear from the beginning that she wanted to control the union and its contract:

The most recent sticking point between the union and management has revolved around a provision in the current union contract that gives veteran teachers preference over newer teachers when it comes to hiring. Seniority tends to be a sacred cow for public employee unions, and the teachers have resisted changes that would give Infante-Green and Peters more control over the hiring process.

Both Infante-Green and Peters say they believe the Crowley Act, the state law that gave them the power to take control of the school district, allows them to make unilateral changes to the contract. But they fear that such a tactic would send the two sides to court, prolonging a series of negotiations that has already resulted in the city paying more than $1 million to lawyers advising management.

The Boston Globe turned to Brown University professor Kenneth Wong, who was previously known for praising mayoral control as the answer to urban school problems.

Kenneth Wong, an education policy expert and professor at Brown University who has advised city and state leaders on a wide range of school funding and reform initiatives over the past decade, said he sees the next few weeks as crucial to finding common ground.

Wong said the state deserves some credit for some initial progress during the takeover. The state has issued a clear set of goals for Providence schools, like raising the graduation rate from 73.6 percent in the 2018-19 school year to 89 percent by the 2024-25 school year, and slashing chronic absenteeism from 37 percent to 10 percent during the same period.

Frankly, it is hard to see why the state deserves any credit for setting ambitious goals when it has not supplied the means to reach them and is driving away experienced teachers. The one thing that we supposedly learned from the ambitious “national goals” of 1989 was that setting goals is easy, reaching them is hard.

Here is a piece of advice for Commissioner Infante-Green: No teachers, no education. A good leader provides encouragement to the troops; a bad leader puts them in the line of fire.

Meanwhile, the new Governor Dan McKee, aligned himself solidly with the Walton-funded parent group that wants more charter schools. Democrats in the legislature have lined up behind a three-year moratorium on charters, but McKee made clear that if the bill passes, he will veto it.

The article in the Providence Journal accepted at face value that the pro-charter lobby was led by ordinary parents, but Maurice Cunningham of the University of Massachusetts has demonstrated that the group called “Stop the Wait, Rhode Island” is funded by the Waltons and other Dark Money billionaires. And see here as well.

Governor McKee is doing the bidding of the Waltons of Arkansas.

Categories Chiefs for Change, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Disruption, Providence, Rhode Island, Teachers, Unions
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