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Arthur Goldstein: An Open Letter to Michael Mulgrew, President of NYC’s Union

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2024 //
1

The United Federation of Teachers worked closely with NYC Mayor Eric Adams to persuade municipal union workers to give up Medicare and accept enrollment in a for-profit Medicare Advantage plan.

Many municipal retirees opposed the changeover. Unhappy retired municipal workers formed an organization which they called the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees. They concluded that the quality of their healthcare would decline if they accepted enrollment in a Medicare Advantage plan. MA might not accept their preferred doctors, and they would run the risk of being denied permission for treatment that their own doctor recommended. The retirees fought the city and their unions to block the switch to MA. They won in the state courts, and they won control of the retirees’ sector of the UFT.

Following the retirees’ victory in the courts and in the union elections, Michael Mulgrew announced that he would no longer support MA. Now the retirees are asking for the active help of the UFT.

Arthur Goldstein, retired high school teacher, wrote the following open letter to Michael Mulgrew, president of the UFT.

He wrote:

Dear President Mulgrew:

As you know, we’ve been fighting for years to preserve our health care. The recent Retired Teacher Chapter election showed a healthy majority of our members want to continue with our current premium and co-pay free Medicare/Medigap plan. We were all encouraged that you dropped your support of the Medicare Advantage plan into which the city wishes to place us.

That said, we are still in trouble. As you know, Mayor Adams is fighting for the MA program, and appealing our recent victories to the NY State Court of Appeals. As you are no doubt aware, they are the highest court in the state and have the power to overturn our thus-far unbroken string of victories. 

There are two ways we can prevail. One would be to win in court. Since UFT now opposes this plan, we need an Amicus brief from UFT. That’s quite important. If you oppose this plan, you need to demonstrate this to the court, and show that UFT is a force to be reckoned with. Mayor Eric Adams is, in fact, our contractual adversary, and we need to treat him as such.

This, of course, is not our only court battle. Mayor Adams also wants us to pay co-pays with our Medigap plan. That is unprecedented, and co-pays have a way of increasing endlessly. We need to halt this now. 

I heard you say at a meeting that co-pays were intended only as a temporary stopgap measure. Given your statements about how the city is interested only in saving money at our expense, I think it’s fair to assume we can no longer trust the city to make any such measures temporary. Therefore, UFT needs to file an Amicus brief in our battle against additional expenses for retirees on fixed incomes. As you know, many of our retired brothers and sisters in DC37 are just getting by as is.

In 2016, MLC effectively suppressed the HIP rate, via so-called HIP/HMO Preferred. This resulted in additional costs for 40% of enrolled city employees. Obviously, it’s an error to tie this to the base rate, because I’m sure you want our members, and all city workers, compensated at the highest rate possible. This needs to be corrected, and we need your support to do so. I’m sure you don’t want retired UFT paraprofessionals paying co-pays, higher deductibles, and/or premiums. We will need UFT support in the upcoming Campion case so as to preclude this.

Our other avenue of protection is via the legislature. As you know, there are bills, set to be reintroduced, both in the city and state protecting Medicare and Medigap for retirees. Union support could make the key difference, particularly in the state. I’m told the state bill would have passed but for “union opposition.” I don’t know who in the union opposes this, but the recent RTC election shows our retirees overwhelmingly support it. In fact, I’d argue the overwhelming majority of city retirees do as well.

This brings me to my final point. Since unions, for whatever reason, have not been in the habit of protecting our current health care, the group NYC Retirees was formed. This group, entirely on donations, has been protecting us in court for years. The recent election demonstrates that UFT retirees support the goals of this group.

Therefore, it’s high time the UFT, perhaps through COPE, made a sizable donation. This is clearly the will of our chapter, and it’s time we honored that will with something more than words. 

Sincerely, 

Arthur Goldstein, Vice Chair RTC

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Health, New York City, Teachers, Unions

Florida: New Law Undermines Unions

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2024 //
23

Last year, the extremist Florida legislature passed a law that requires unions to apply for recertification if their membership drops below 60% of eligible workers. The long-term goal was to drive unions out of the state. So far, the law has caused a drop in 50,000 union members. If you are a Republican, that’s good news. If you are a Democrat or just someone who believes workers should have rights, that’s bad news. This law is the product of Ron DeSantis’ hatred of unions.

The article was written by McKenna Schueler, an investigative labor, housing and government reporter.

A new teachers “union” that is reportedly financed at least in part by the anti-union Freedom Foundation will soon appear on the ballot with the United Teachers of Dade, an existing teachers union in Miami-Dade County that represents nearly 24,000 public school educators and school staff. 

United Teachers of Dade, the largest local teachers union in the state, was recently forced to petition the state for an election to recertify — essentially, to remain formally recognized as a bargaining agent — due to consequences of a state law in Florida approved last year.

Specifically, the union was forced to petition for recertification after reporting less than 60% dues-paying membership in annual paperwork—a threshold they’re now required to meet under Florida law to remain certified. The new “union” — the Miami Dade Education Coalition — boasts itself as a viable alternative that wants to replace United Teachers of Dade.

State records show the organization officially registered with the state Public Employees Relations Commission (PERC) in February, with the backing of the Freedom Foundation, a right-wing think tank based in Washington that’s funded by billionaires. Brent Urbanik, a social studies teacher in a public magnet school in Miami-Dade County, is reportedly the new union’s president.

Unlike United Teachers of Dade, which was required gather cards in support of recertification from at least 30% of the thousands of school staff they represent, state law only requires “intervenors” like the Miami-Dade Education Coalition to gather 10% of signed cards to appear on the ballot with them. 

According to state records, the new “union” failed to even do that…on the first try…

So, MDEC tried again. 

This time, the organization only submitted 11 invalid or duplicate cards. 

But, sure, they made the cut…

Broadly speaking, there are dozens of unions across Florida that have petitioned for recertification following the passage of last year’s Senate Bill 256, a sweeping anti-union bill that was over a decade in the making. 

The law essentially makes it harder for workers to pay union dues, by prohibiting payroll dues deductions, while requiring more workers to do so in order for a union to remain certified. Membership information has to be reported to PERC annually…

So far, more than 50,000 public sector workers have lost their union representation following the passage of the new law. The Freedom Foundation, which lobbied in favor of last year’s law and sent mailers to union members telling them to ditch their unions, hasn’t been shy in sharing its delight. 

On X, formerly known as Twitter, the organization shared a screenshot of my recent article for In These Times on this fallout, declaring that these workers had “been freed from union bondage.”

“[W]e’re just getting started,” the organization added in a June 7 post.

Categories DeSantis, Extremism, Florida, Teachers, Unions

Peter Greene Debunks the Leading Evangelist for the School Choice Movement

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2024 //
5

Peter Greene, who taught for 39 years in Pennsylvania, wrote recently in The Progressive about Corey DeAngelis, who travels the nation to trash public schools and to advocate for vouchers. If you hate public schools and unions, he’s your guy. If you adore Betsy DeVos and her plans to destroy local communities and to get more children into discriminatory religious schools, he’s your guy.

Greene writes:

Corey DeAngelis is an influential, if not the most influential, voice in the rightwing campaign to demonize public schools and privatize public education. The guy’s résuméhits all the bases in the libertarian gameplan. After earning a doctorate at the University of Arkansas’s education reform program (funded bythe pro-school choice Walton family), DeAngelis helped found the Education Freedom Institute, became a senior fellow at the Reason Foundation, worked as an adjunct scholar at the CATO Institute, took up an appointment as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and was hired on as a senior fellow at Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children.

He still holds all of those jobs, but his more common title is “school choice evangelist.” As the recent school voucher wave has surged in state after state, DeAngelis has been there to spread the word. While on tour in support of his new book, he distills the current pro-voucher argument.

In a recent talk at the Heritage Foundation, DeAngelis touched on most of the main arguments for vouchers (many of them false) and revealed a few truths about the pro-voucher strategy.

1. The Evil Unions and COVID

The villainy of the teachers union is a thread that runs through much of DeAngelis’s argument, especially related to the COVID-19 pandemic narrative. DeAngelis blames the unions (and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten) for “fear mongering” and accuses them of extorting ransom payments by holding schools hostage. The unions, he charged, used the pandemic to empower themselves and the “government schools” that he calls “a jobs program for adults.”

There’s no recognition that teachers had a legitimate fear during the pandemic or that hundreds of educators died of COVID-19. Nor did he mention the many private and non-union charter schools that also closed their doors. Every problematic decision that he cited from pandemic times is blamed on the union, with no mention that Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education provided little or no guidance to districts facing difficult decisions in an evolving situation.  

DeAngelis’s narrative argues that parents viewing Zoom school were appalled and awakened by what they saw. That oft-repeated tale stands in contrast to polls that show the vast majority of parents were satisfied with how their schools handled COVID-19. A 2022 Gallup poll found that, while the general public’s opinion of public schools is “souring,” parents’ favorable opinion of their own school matched pre-pandemic levels. The common sense conclusion to draw from this data is that people who don’t have first-hand experience with public schools are developing a low opinion of them based on some other source of information.

DeAngelis’s argument has other flaws. He claimed that the unions extracted a huge ransom from schools. But he also argued that pandemic relief funds given to schools never reached teachers and were, instead, soaked up by administrative bloat, which would seem to be a big tactical blunder on the unions’ part.

2. The Evil Unions and the Democratic Party

DeAngelis made the unusual claim that Democrats aren’t having kids, but Republicans are. But that, he said, won’t save conservatives because schools are fully “infiltrated by radical leftist union teachers.” The left uses schools as a way to control other people’s children. The Democratic Party, he added, is a fully owned subsidiary of the teachers’ union.

DeAngelis also repeated a false narrative of the National School Board Association’s supposed campaign to muzzle parents. In fall 2021, local school boards found their usually sleepy meetings had turned into wild, threatening, and even violent chaos. The NSBA turned to the Biden Administration for help, calling some of the actions “the equivalent of a form of domestic terrorism or hate crimes.” This was quickly and inaccurately cast as the Democratic administration calling parents domestic terrorists.

The resulting controversy caused the NSBA to lose some members, which DeAngelis seemed happy about. “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” he said.

This narrative that smears public school-friendly groups fits a general pattern of conservative attacks on groups seen as Democratic Party supporters.

Open the link to read more about the DeVos-funded public school hater who is spreading his propaganda across the nation.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Bigotry, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Evil, Extremism, Privatization, Propaganda, Segregation, Shame, Unions, Vouchers

UFT President Drops Effort to Force Retirees into For-Profit Medicare Advantage Plan

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2024 //
6

There’s an old saying that “you can’t fight City Hall.” Public service retirees in New York City just proved that you can fight City Hall and win. You can fight City Hall and your own union and win. With a passionate leader and small donations from retirees (mostly teachers), the retirees prevailed because they had the law on their side and they never gave up.

For the past three years, New York City retirees have been fighting a plan hatched by City government and some union leaders to compel retirees to leave Medicare and enroll in a for-profit Medicare Advantage plan. The retirees, led by Marianne Pizzitola, a retired EMT in the NYC Fire Department, have won multiple lawsuits and won control of the UFT Retiree Caucus (the first time in its 64-year-old history that the Unity Caucus that controls the UFT ever lost an internal election.) This story appeared in City & State, a publication about public employees.

Yesterday, UFT President Michael Mulgrew announced that the UFT was dropping out of the effort to push retirees into an MA plan. He blamed the city, not the retirees’ objections to MA.

In a dramatic reversal, Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation Teachers, notified the Municipal Labor Committee on Sunday that it was withdrawing its support of a controversial Medicare Advantage plan as well as from “the current healthcare negotiations for in-service and pre-Medicare retirees” with the Adams administration.

The bombshell news came in the form of a letter that Mulgrew sent to Harry Nespoli, the chair of the Municipal Labor Committee and leader of the city’s largest Department of Sanitation union. 

“It has become apparent that this administration is unwilling to continue this work in good faith,” Mulgrew wrote in the letter. “The city has delayed our current in-service and pre-Medicare retiree healthcare negotiations for months, and we no longer feel that it is in the interest of our members to be part of that process. This administration has proven to be more interested in cutting its costs than honestly working with us to provide high-quality healthcare costs to city workers.”

Mulgrew also sent a separate letter to retired UFT members explaining his decision.

“The city’s losses in the courts and the needless anxiety created among retirees has made it clear to us that our support for this initiative cannot continue … You did not deserve the angst and fear you went through as we worked toward our goal of improving our health care in an increasingly difficult national landscape,” he wrote in the letter. “I have heard your voices. And as we have all grown increasingly frustrated with this process, we will use our strength in the MLC to push for a new strategy moving forward.”

Following the news, a spokesperson for the city’s Law Department defended the city’s Medicare Advantage plan.

“We have been clear: the city’s plan, which was negotiated closely with and supported by the Municipal Labor Committee, would improve upon retirees’ current plans and save $600 million annually. This is particularly important at a time when we are already facing significant fiscal and economic challenges,” the spokesperson said.

Going back several years to the de Blasio administration, the Municipal Labor Committee – which includes representatives of every municipal union – had been working collaboratively with the City of New York to try to reduce the city’s health care costs while maintaining the quality of coverage and ensuring that city workers would still not have to pay health insurance premiums.

As part of that grand bargain during the de Blasio era, the Municipal Labor Committee agreed to shift New York City ‘s 250,000 retired civil servants from their current Medicare plans to a Medicare Advantage plan managed by a private, for-profit health insurance company. Boosters of the controversial Medicare Advantage plan that insisted that it would save the city $600 million annually.

Almost instantaneously, a racially and economically diverse coalition led by retired FDNY EMT Marianne Pizzitola formed the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees. With close to 50,000 members, Pizzitola’s organization helped fund a successful legal challenge to the plan that has already won several rounds in the courts. State court judges have consistently ruled in favor of the retirees, finding that under the legal doctrine of promissory estoppel, the city’s past commitments to its retirees as active employees were still binding….

In his letter to the Municipal Labor Committee announcing UFT’s withdrawal from the Medicare Advantage plan, Mulgrew did not mention the recent leadership election for the Retired Teachers chapter – a fact that upset Bennett Fischer, who won that election by running on an anti-Medicare Advantage platform.

“President Mulgrew should have acknowledged that he is changing his position because elections have consequences,” Fischer wrote in a statement. “He could have acknowledged that he is taking these steps because Retiree Advocate wrested control of the 70,000+ Retired Teachers Chapter from his Unity caucus, and because he sees that his control of the UFT is slipping away. … Until now, Michael Mulgrew and Mayor Adams have been on the same page.”

In a free-ranging interview with City & State, Mulgrew said that the decision to pull the plug had been coming long before the recent electoral rebuff by his retirees, though he conceded it was part of his  final calculus.

“About eight weeks ago, I started talking to people at the MLC that this was ridiculous with the courts clearly saying over and over again through all the appeals that this [Medicare Advantage] was not going to work,” Mulgrew said. “And when I read this latest decision out of the Court of Appeals of New York State, half of the decision was about the incompetence of the city’s attorneys.”

Mulgrew continued. “At the same time, we were getting nowhere, I mean nowhere with the negotiations for health care for our in-service active members,” he said, adding that when some of the unions wanted to meet with Mayor Adams to jump start the talks, they were rebuffed by management’s representatives at the table.

“This has got to stop – the members have spoken, the courts have spoken – so why are we continuing to do this?” Mulgrew asked. “Why would the city continue to put its retirees through this process anymore?”…

Pizzitola, the president of the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees, said that the city should finally give up on its attempt to force retirees to Medicare Advantage plans.

“For three years, an ad-hoc coalition of retirees has been fighting this illegal scheme in the courts and in the City Council,” she wrote in a statement. “And while retirees have been continuously successful – winning 9 victories over three separate lawsuits and thwarting an attempt to change the law  – the City still can’t seem to get the message: enough is enough!”

Pizzitola continued. “It is time for the City to come to its senses and end its senseless, illegal war on retirees. If retirees are forced off of traditional Medicare and into the City’s new Medicare Advantage plan, thousands will be denied access to the doctors they depend on and the medical care they desperately need. And, as the director of the NYC Independent Budget Office testified, City taxpayers will not save a dime.”

Categories Education Reform, Health, Unions

NYC: Why Retirees Turned Against Their Own Union Leadership

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2024 //
61

The United Federation of Teachers in New York City is the largest chapter in the American Federation of Teachers. The UFT was created in 1960. It represents nearly 200,000 city employees, including about 60,000 retirees.

Since 1960, the UFT has been run by the Unity Caucus, which controls the officers, the executive committee and the delegate assembly. The president of the UFT is a powerful figure in New York City, New York State, and national politics. Its best known leaders were and are Albert Shanker and Randi Weingarten (Sandra Feldman served between their tenures, first as UFT president, then AFT president; she died of cancer at age 65). Shanker was president of the UFT from 1964 to 1985, then president of the AFT from 1974 until his death in 1997. Randi Weingarten was president of the UFT from 1998-2008 and became president of the AFT in 2008. The NEA has term limits, the AFT does not.

Weingarten was succeeded as president of the UFT by Michael Mulgrew. Since the union’s founding, the Unity Caucus has won every internal union election by large margins. Splinter groups came and went. Some persisted, but none ever won an election.

Until last week. Until June 15.

The UFT retirees rebelled. At the union’s annual internal elections, a dissident faction called Retiree Advocate upset the Unity slate. The retirees are angry because Michael Mulgrew made a deal with former Mayor DeBlasio to switch the city’s 250,000 retirees from Medicare to the for-profit Medicare Advantage. This switch was supposed to save the city $600 million a year.

The city government and the UFT told the retirees that the MA plan was better than Medicare.

The retirees were skeptical. How does a for-profit deliver make a profit while delivering better care than Medicare, many wondered. The answer, they soon discovered, were these two tactics: One, the person cannot use a doctor who is out of network; but even more important, the healthcare company may deny services. MA is very profitable for its executives.

Medicare accepts all licensed doctors and does not require the patient to get prior approval before they can get the treatment or surgery recommended by their doctor.

The retirees found a leader in a retired Emergency Medical Technician in the Fire Department named Marianne Pizzitola. She began posting videos on YouTube against the switch and collected a large number of retirees who agreed with her. She founded the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees, Inc. She posted more videos, explaining that the city had broken its promise to retirees. Their contract promised Medicare, not MA. She argued that the city and some (but not all) unions were collaborating to deceive retirees. The city’s two largest unions—UFT and DC 37, which represents the city’s lowest paid workers—agreed with the city.

Marianne and her allies met with elected officials, organized rallies, and most consequentially, filed lawsuits to block the switch from Medicare to MA. All this activity was funded by retirees’ donations. Despite the huge disparity in resources, the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees won every lawsuit. Judges agreed with them that the city had broken its promises to provide Medicare and a low-cost secondary plan.

The Retiree Advocate slate won 63% of the vote at the June 15 meeting. A majority of the retirees voted against the Unity Caucus slate because of the Medicare/MA issue. They poked a hole in the ironclad dominance of the Unity Caucus (which still has all the officers, 94 of the 100 members of the executive committee, and the vast majority of the delegates. But the retirees now control the retiree caucus.

I have a personal connection to this battle. I wrote an affidavit for the court case. In 2021, I was told by my cardiologist that I had to have open heart surgery to repair a damaged valve. People with this condition are walking time-bombs. I arranged to have my surgery done at New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell by an excellent surgeon. I got a second and third opinion. I did not need prior approval because I was covered by Medicare and my wife’s secondary (she is a retired NYC teacher, principal, and administrator). If I had been on Medicare Advantage, I would have been denied coverage because I was asymptomatic. I had no pain, no shortness of breath, none of the symptoms associated with a serious heart problem. But without surgery, I would have died. (P.S.: Al Shanker was a close personal friend. Randi Weingarten is a close personal friend.)

I wrote about the retirees’ most important victory in court here. Just a month ago, the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees won a unanimous decision in the New York Appellate Division. The city will likely appeal to the State Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. I wrote “The NYC retirees’ group sued the City, on the grounds that the City was withdrawing benefits that were promised to its members when they were hired. Many had accepted lower pay because of the excellent benefits, especially the healthcare.”

The NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees summarized their victory:

NEW YORK, May 21, 2024 — Today, the New York Appellate Division issued a unanimous decision holding that the City of New York cannot force its roughly 250,000 elderly and disabled retired municipal workers off of their
longstanding Medicare insurance and onto an inferior type of insurance called
“Medicare Advantage.” Unlike Medicare—a public program that has protected City retirees for the past 57 years—the City’s proposed new Medicare Advantage plan was a private, for-profit endeavor that would have limited
retirees’ access to medical providers, prevented retirees from receiving care prescribed by their doctors, and exposed retirees to increased healthcarecosts.


The Court confirmed what retirees have been arguing for months: that they are entitled to the healthcare they were promised for over 50 years. The Court wrote: “The City has made clear, consistent, unambiguous representations – oral and written – over the course of more than 50 years, that New York City municipal worker-retirees would have the option of receiving health care in the form of traditional Medicare with a City-paid supplemental plan. Consequently, the City cannot now mandate the proposed change eliminating that choice.”

The Court permanently enjoined the city from forcing the retirees to leave traditional Medicare and to transfer to a MA plan.

Here is a brief explanation of why the retirees fought against privatization of their healthcare.

Arthur Goldstein, who worked as a high school teacher for 39 years, celebrated the victory in a post called A New Dawn. He followed up with a description of the meeting where Randi spoke and the Retiree Advocate group won control of their caucus. He is a long-time critic of Unity; he’s now vice-president of the UFT Retiree Caucus.

The members and leaders of the Retiree Advocate group are passionately pro-union. They wanted their voices to be heard. The UFT’s acquiescence in the Medicare-to-MA was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. They could not believe that the Union would join with the city government to save money by puttting them into a for-profit plan.

Here is Marianne Pizzitola rejoicing on the day of the Retiree Advocate in the UFT meeting.

Here is Marianne Pizzitola talking about the ramifications of this victory on “Medicare for All.” About half of the nation’s retirees are in Medicare Advantage plans. MA represents the privatization of Medicare and will block Medicare for All.

It’s a shame that the retirees had to fight their own union to preserve their health care. It’s rumored that the city (and the unions?) might go to Albany to try to change the law. The unions should pay attention to their retirees. They may be old, but they are smart and relentless. They will not give up. And I will be with them every step of the way.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Equity, Ethics, For-Profit, Health, New York City, Teachers, Unions

Harold Meyerson: Elon Musk Demands a Payout of $50 Billion or He Will Leave Tesla

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2024 //
4

Harold Meyerson is an editor at The American Prospect. He ranks out Elon Musk in this article for his maniacal greed. At a moment like this, I think of the book The Spirit Level, which argues that the happiest societies are those with the most equality. Tesla stockholders apparently approved the $50 billion payday.

Meyerson writes:

It’s election season near and far. Voting begins today, and continues through Sunday, for the European Parliament, in which parties of the far right are expected to pick up seats. India’s just-completed election demonstrated the limits of Hindu nationalism, with lower-class (and -caste) Hindus joining Muslims to put the brakes on Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu-über-alles policies. Mexico’s incoming president is a female progressive climate scientist—a trifecta breakthrough for our southern neighbor. And on July 4, U.K. voters will go to the polls, likely to reject the continued misrule of the Etonian twits and LizTrussian libertarians who lead the Tory party.

But the most ridiculous and outrageous of this month’s elections will take place one week from today in our very own United States. On June 13, Tesla shareholders will vote on whether to grant founder and CEO Elon Musk a bonus worth roughly $50 billion (estimates range from $45 billion to $56 billion).

This is the first time in recorded history that the proposed pay level of a single person has been so large that it’s actually a macroeconomic issue.

Over the past several months, we’ve seen shareholder fights over various CEO compensation packages, including the reward of $30 million to the outgoing head of Boeing. The proposed Musk bonus, however, is more than 1,000 times the amount proposed for Boeing’s ex. No remotely comparable paycheck appears ever to have existed. The Musk bonus is more in line with the amount of money that Congress appropriated for Ukraine—$61 billion—earlier this year after months of legislative and political maneuvering. Moving this amount of money is customarily a question before nations, not shareholders or banks, and only very wealthy nations at that.

The tale begins in 2023, when Musk purchased Twitter through some bank loans secured by his Tesla holdings, as well as $20 billion that Musk put up himself through the sale of some of his Tesla stock. His moves caused Tesla’s share value to plummet, costing him roughly another $20 billion or thereabouts. In consequence, Musk fell from his perch as the planet’s wealthiest person all the way down to the planet’s third-wealthiest person. By granting Musk $50 billion in stock, Tesla shareholders could push him back up to where Musk believes he belongs: not just Earth’s wealthiest human, but also a guy worth more than the GDP of numerous small countries.

This isn’t the first time Musk’s cronies on Tesla’s board of directors have asked shareholders to reward him with a bonus of this size, but the reward that those shareholders approved was struck down by a chancery judge in Delaware, where Tesla, like most major U.S. corporations, is incorporated. On June 13, shareholders will not only have the opportunity to rectify that judge’s mistake, but also to move the company’s incorporation from Delaware to Texas, where law and the Texas Rangers have always favored the rich. 

Several of the leading companies that advise shareholders on how to vote, including ISS and Glass Lewis, have recommended that shareholders reject granting the bonus, noting that the value of Tesla’s stock ain’t what it used to be, and that other companies have now entered the market that Tesla effectively had to itself for the past decade. Musk himself has lobbied for the bonus on X (the new name for Twitter) and issued dark hints that he might redirect his energies to some of the other companies he owns, such as SpaceX, if he’s not suitably rewarded. (His redirected energies to X, I’m compelled to report, have not necessarily helped that company.) Indeed, just this week, Musk ordered Nvidia to redirect AI chips that Tesla had ordered to two of his other companies, X and xAI.

In both speech and action, Musk has made clear that he abhors unions, telling one New York Times DealBook forum that he’s opposed to the very idea, and refusing to bargain with the Tesla mechanics in Sweden—where 90 percent of the workforce is unionized and employer acceptance of unions is the norm—who’ve joined a union. But by withholding those AI chips from Tesla and redirecting them to his other concerns, and by threatening to all but abandon Tesla unless he gets his greater-by-orders-of-magnitude-than-anything-in-human-history bonus, Musk has become the one-man equivalent of a protesting union: Give me a raise or I’ll walk off the job.

Let it not be said, then, that Elon Musk is against all unions. When it comes to the Union of Elon Musk, he’s a total fanboy.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

Categories Billionaires, Character, Ethics, Unions

Newark: Teachers Union Wins Five-Year Contract

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2024 //
4

Remember when reformers were going to make Newark a model district transformed by charter schools and Teach for America? Mark Zuckerberg gave $100 million. Charter leaders arrived. Chris Cerf and Cami Anderson took charge. Senator Corey Booker advocated charters, even vouchers. The reformers gave up.

Newark Teachers Union Members Ratify New Five-Year Contract

NEWARK, N.J.—Newark Teachers Union members ratified a new five-year contract tonight that gives them a voice on classroom and district policies as well as a significant pay raise for each year of the five-year contract.

“NTU members voted to approve the transformational contract that makes them a true partner with the Board of Education on classroom and district policies. The negotiations and the contract itself are an example of labor-management collaboration at its best,” said NTU President John Abeigon. 

The contract provides all NTU members with a significant raise over the course of the five-year contract, depending on the person’s step level, longevity and degrees they have earned. The new starting salary will be $65,000 and in the fifth year of the contract, it will be $74,000. In addition, the contract includes salary increases for non-instructional staff, substitutes and hourly-pay employees.

Teachers will be able to select or even design curriculum, provide professional development that matches the standards-based curriculum, and receive support if their evaluations show they are underperforming. 

# # #

Categories Education Reform, New Jersey, Newark, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Unions

Nancy Flanagan: Just Who Is Trashing Public Education?

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2024 //
14

Veteran teacher Nancy Flanagan explores the question of who is trying to destroy our public schools. She nails some of the loudest critics, who have personally benefitted from public schools. She doesn’t explore why they are trying to annihilate the schools that educated them, but that may because we know what the privatization movement has to offer: money. There is a gravy train overloaded with munificent gifts from Betsy DeVos, the Waltons, Charles Koch, Michael Bloomberg, and a boatload of other billionaires. They can endlessly underwrite anti-public school organizations that offer well-paid jobs.

On the pro-public education side, it’s hard to find big spenders or highly compensated jobs. The two big unions have resources, all of which come from the dues of their members. They do not have the funds to support the numerous grassroots groups that are found in every state. Most, if not all of the state and local groups, operate on a shoestring; typically, their employees are volunteers. They do not have six-figure jobs for someone who tweets and writes statements. No one who works for a state “Save Our Schools” group makes big money.

The Network for Public Education is the biggest pro-public education groups; it has 350,000 people who have signed up to support it, but there is no membership fee. NPE has one full-time employee and a few part-timers.

So, Nancy Flanagan asks, just who is trashing public schools?

She writes:

Get ready for a big dump–a deliberately chosen word–of anti-public education blah-blah over the next five months. It’s about all the right wing’s got, for one thing–and it’s one of those issues that everybody has an opinion on, whether they went to public school. have children in public schools, or neither.

Public education is so big and so variable that there’s always something to get exercised over. There’s always one teacher who made your child miserable, one assigned book that raises hackles, one policy that feels flat-out wrongheaded. There’s also someone, somewhere, who admires that teacher, feels that book is a classic and stoutly defends whatever it is—Getting rid of recess? The faux science of phonics? Sex education that promotes abstinence? —that someone else finds ridiculous or reprehensible.

Not to mention—teaching is the largest profession in the country, So many teachers, so many public schools, so much opportunity to find fault.

In other words, public education is the low-hanging fruit of political calculation. Always has been, in fact.

A few years back, when folks were going gaga over Hillbilly Elegy, seeing it as the true story of how one could rise above one’s station (speaking of blahblah)—the main thing that irritated me about ol’ J.D. Vance was his nastiness about public education. Vance has since parlayed a best-seller that appealed to those who think a degree from Yale equates to arriving at the top, into a political career—and putting the screws to affirmative action, in case anyone of color tries to enjoy the same leg-up he did.

J.D. Vance’s education—K-12, the military, Ohio State—was entirely in public institutions until he got into Yale Law School. He doesn’t have anything good to say about public ed, but it was free and available to him, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. When I read Rick Hess’s nauseating interview with Corey DeAngelis in Education Week, I had a flashback to ol’ J.D., intimating that he achieved success entirely on his own, without help from that first grade teacher who taught him how to read and play nice with others.

DeAngelis says:

I went to government schools my entire K–12 education in San Antonio, Texas. However, I attended a magnet high school, which was a great opportunity. Other families should have education options as well, and those options shouldn’t be limited to schools run by the government. Education funding should follow students to the public, private, charter, or home school that best meets their needs. I later researched the effects of school choice initiatives during my Ph.D. in education policy at the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform.

So—just to clarify—Corey DeAngelis went to public schools K-12, for his BA and MA degrees (University of Texas), as well as a stint in a PUBLICLY FUNDED program at the notoriously right-focused University of Arkansas. That’s approximately 22 years, give or take, of public education, the nation-building institution DeAngelis now openly seeks to destroy.

I’m not going to provide quotes from the EdWeek piece, because anyone reading this already knows the hyperbolic, insulting gist—lazy, dumb, unions, low bar, failing, yada yada. He takes particular aim at the unions—although it absolutely wasn’t the unions—shutting down schools during a global pandemic. He paints schools’ turn-on-a-dime efforts to hold classes on Zoom as an opportunity for clueless parents to see, first-hand, evidence of how bad instruction is. He never mentions, of course, the teachers, students and school staff who died from COVID exposure.

Enough of duplicitous public school critics. My point is this:

The people who trash public education—not a particular school, classroom or curricular issue, but the general idea of government-sponsored opportunity to learn how to be a good, productive American citizen—have a very specific, disruptive ax to grind:

I got what I needed. I don’t really care about anybody else.

This goes for your local Militant Moms 4 Whatever on a Mission, out there complaining about books and school playsand songs and health class. It’s not about parents’ “rights.” It’s about control. And never about the other families and kids, who may have very different values and needs.

It’s about taking the ‘public’ out of public education. And it’s 100% politically driven.

OPEN THE LINK TO FINISH READING THE ARTICLE!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Unions, Vouchers

Thom Hartmann: The Close Connection Between Monopolies and Labor

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2024 //
2

Thom Hartmann is releasing his new book The Hidden History of Monopolies on his blog, one chapter at a time. This one is fascinating. Big business has always opposed labor unions. They drive up wages, meaning less profits.

Thom explains:

When people consider monopolies, or even highly concentrated markets like airlines or pharmaceuticals, generally the only thing they think of is the ability of companies in concentrated markets to set prices wherever they’d like. But there are fully three primary benefits to monopoly or oligopoly, from the monopolists’ point of view.

In addition to setting prices by restricting competition, monopolies can (and typically do) drive down wages so that they end up with a steady supply of cheap labor, and—both by market (selling) control and labor market (workers) control—they send vastly more money flowing to stockholders and senior management than can companies in truly competitive marketplaces.

At its core, though, virtually every aspect of the movement that embraced monopoly (Bork actually wrote about all the “lost” inventions, innovations, and profits that were caused by a lack of monopoly!) boiled down to cheap labor. 

Joe Lyles, writing as Conceptual Guerilla, put up a brilliant analysis of this more than a decade ago titled “Defeat the Right in Three Minutes,” suggesting that quite literally everything we call “conservative” was really about driving down wages. While racial hatred and misogyny also play big roles these days in the “conservative” movement, there’s still a lot of truth to Lyles’s analysis.50

Cheap-labor conservatives don’t want a national health care system, because they want workers to be dependent on their employers and thus willing to accept lower wages.

Cheap-labor conservatives hate the minimum wage and unions because both support wage floors and, over time, raise wages for working people.

Cheap-labor conservatives want women relatively powerless (particularly over their own reproductive functions) so that, as in the era before the 1970s, they’ll work for far less than today’s $.78 to a man’s dollar.

Cheap-labor conservatives go on and on about, as Lyles notes, “morality, virtue, respect for authority, hard work and other ‘values’” so that when workers can’t climb the ladder, society will blame it on the individuals instead of a system rigged to maintain cheap labor.

Cheap-labor conservatives encourage bigotry, fear, and hatred to prevent working people from seeing their commonality of human and economic interests, regardless of race, gender identity, or the urban/rural divide.

America has a long history with the cheap-labor crowd: slavery was the ultimate expression of this “conservative” value system, and under the 13th Amendment, it continues to be legally practiced in the United States in our for-profit prison systems.

The 13th Amendment didn’t actually end slavery in the United States; it merely turned it over to prisons, be they state-run or for-profit corporations. It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” As a result, the pressure on Congress and state legislatures from for-profit prison corporations to increase criminal penalties to give them more literal slave labor has exploded.

Cheap-labor conservatives, it turns out, are also huge fans of monopoly and oligopoly, in large part because these systems keep wages low. 

There’s a marketplace for labor, just like for everything else, and when a small number of corporations control a large number of employment venues, they can simply keep wages low through that market power. Check out the pay of fast-food workers or flight attendants or nurses back in the 1960s compared with today; every industry that concentrates or consolidates sees wages go down….

Please open the link to finish reading.

Categories Disruption, Economy, Unions

D.C. Charter School Votes to Form a Union

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2024 //
9

One reason that big charter donors fund charter schools is to break the teachers’ union, whether it’s AFT or NEA. Big business has opposed labor unions since they were first organized. 90% of charters have no union affiliation, and the Waltons and DeVos-funders want to keep it that way. A few days ago, a charter school in D.C. voted to unionize. Why? Because the teachers think they need a union to bargain with the charter leadership and make sure they get due process, health benefits and a pension. They want what only unions can get.

For Immediate Release
May 2, 2024

Contact:
Kelley Ukhun
513/578-2646
kukhun@dcacts1927.com

Capital City Public Charter School in D.C. Votes for a Voice on the Job

All 200 Teachers and Other School Staff Will Be Members of 

DC Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff, DC ACTS, AFT

WASHINGTON—Teachers and all other school staff at Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., voted tonight to unionize, joining the membership of the District of Columbia Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff, DC ACTS, an affiliate of the AFT.

Capital City Public Charter School has 200 employees, including teachers, instructional assistants, counselors, librarians, secretarial staff and custodians, all of whom will be represented by DC ACTS. The school educates 1,000 pre-K through 12th-grade students. DC ACTS also represents all employees at both Mundo Verde Public Charter School campuses in D.C.

“Capital City educators and other employees want to have a voice when the school makes decisions about the education of their students. They are the folks who are in the classrooms every day and who work the closest with the kids and know best what’s needed for them to thrive and excel. Only through a union can this be accomplished,” said DC ACTS Acting President Kelley Ukhun, adding that she hopes to be able to negotiate a first contract in the coming months.

Besides having a voice in decisions made about their school, Capital City employees said they want to end a “right to work”-contingent atmosphere in which every staff member was subject to annual contract renewal, making it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain staff given the precarity. Educators and staff also indicated a collective desire for better retirement benefits, a more progressive and transparent discipline procedure (including a grievance and arbitration system) and a duty-free lunch period.

Guadalupe Campos, a Capital City high school Spanish teacher, strongly supports the union.

“I believe that all workers, regardless of rank or position, deserve the opportunity to participate in decisions that affect students, our families and ourselves. United, we can create a healthy, equitable and sustainable environment for all,” she said.

Kate Lenegan, an after-school teacher, said: “I support this union because our staff is what makes Capital City great, and our students deserve the best from us.”

AFT President Randi Weingarten said this labor victory reflects a growing trend of workers organizing across the country, growing the labor movement so that we can be a force that improves the lives of workers, their families and their communities.

“Whether it’s at a traditional public school or college, or whether it’s at a charter school or any other workplace, working people are seeing the value of a union as a vehicle to access a better life for themselves, their families, and the communities they serve,” Weingarten said. “That’s why the AFT has seen unprecedented organizing growth, organizing 146 new units across multiple sectors, including education, higher education, healthcare and public service since our last convention in July 2022.

Charter school educators see this, Weingarten said. The AFT represents about 7,500 educators and school staff across the country at more than 250 charter schools. More than 1,000 teachers and staff at more than 15 charter schools have organized with the AFT just since the start of the 2022-23 school year, and hundreds of those have already won strong first contracts at their schools. 

“Union membership can be transformative in the life of any working person. I am so glad the educators of Capital City have elected to join us. We are so happy to welcome them. We want working folks everywhere to know: The AFT is the home of the people who make a difference in other people’s lives. We fight for real solutions that make our workplaces and our communities safer, stronger, and more democratic, and we show up when it counts. Together, we can win the future,” Weingarten said.

The Washington Teachers’ Union, which represents educators at District of Columbia Public Schools, applauded the Capital City employees’ vote.

“All staff, whether in regular public schools or charter schools in the private sector, deserve the rights and respect afforded to them through union membership. We are all stronger together, and the WTU looks forward to working in partnership with DC ACTS as it grows with this exciting win at Capital City,” said WTU President Jacqueline Pogue Lyons.

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Unions
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