Archives for category: Unions
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Labor Day 2013

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2013 //
28

Today is Labor Day.

Many states bar collective bargaining.

Many have passed laws intended to extinguish or cripple labor unions.

Today, union membership in the United States has fallen to the lowest point in 97 years, according to the New York Times.

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the total number of union members fell by 400,000 last year, to 14.3 million, even though the nation’s overall employment rose by 2.4 million. The percentage of workers in unions fell to 11.3 percent, down from 11.8 percent in 2011, the bureau found in its annual report on union membership. That brought unionization to its lowest level since 1916, when it was 11.2 percent, according to a study by two Rutgers economists, Leo Troy and Neil Sheflin.

Labor specialists cited several reasons for the steep one-year decline in union membership. Among the factors were new laws that rolled back the power of unions in Wisconsin, Indiana and other states, the continued expansion by manufacturers like Boeing and Volkswagen in nonunion states and the growth of sectors like retail and restaurants, where unions have little presence.”

Unions have also been hurt by outsourcing and free trade, which allows manufacturers to move jobs to low-wage countries.

Unions were a major stepping stone into the middle class for many immigrants and poor people, enabling them to have a living wage and decent working conditions.

With the loss of unions has come growing income inequality.

In most states, workers are on their own, with no one to speak up for their interests.

In honor of Labor Day 2013, I am posting some of the most famous labor songs, and you will see them pop up over the next few hours.

They should not be forgotten.

As conditions worsen for working people in the United States, they may be needed again.

 

 

 

Categories Unions

Anthony Cody: Accountability Is Designed to Set Schools Up to Fail

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2013 //
33

In a hard-hitting essay, Anthony Cody describes how accountability has been turned into a weapon to create demoralization, failure, and privatization of public schools.

He reviews the recent fiascos involving Tony Bennett and New York’s Common Core testing.

He notes that both the AFT and the NEA are trying hard to meet the demands of the corporate reformers. Both are trying to help teachers prepare for the Common Core sledge hammer, but Cody says it is a fruitless enterprise. The game is rigged. The reformers’ goal is to generate failure so they can advance privatization.

Cody writes:

“Our response must be, as members of the teaching profession, and as members of the unions that represent educators, to reject as baseless these phony, politically-driven accountability systems. These systems to rate schools based on proficiency rates are really much more accurately reflecting levels of poverty, rather than the quality of teaching in effect. Many of those advocating them are, like Tony Bennett, attempting to promote their own favored competitors, in a race in which they have made themselves the rule-makers and referees.

“When someone sets up a competition that is rigged from the start, our response cannot be to ask for more time to prepare. The answer is to expose the machinery at work behind the scenes, and demand that our schools be accountable not to some state or federal bureaucrat, but to the students and parents of their communities. We will not overcome poverty by firing those who have chosen to work with the poor. Our schools and students need support, not more means by which they can be ranked and rejected. Real support from our unions means educating and organizing members to respond with vigor and pride about our students, our schools, and our work as professionals. Teachers cannot “succeed” under these systems because that is not their design. So rather than trying to prepare for tests many of our schools were never meant to pass, we need to prepare teachers to defend and reclaim their schools, and reject the accountability scam.

Categories Accountability, Florida, Indiana, New York, Testing, Unions

Detroit Emergency Manager: Union Workers Were “Dumb, Lazy, Happy, and Rich”

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2013 //
32

Electablog comments on an interview that Detroit’s emergency manager Kevyn Orr gave to the Wall Street Journal.

Orr said that the union workers who built the city’s great manufacturing base were “dumb, lazy, happy, and rich.”

This, apparently, is what he thinks caused the ruination of Detroit: All those dumb, rich working stiffs in unions.

Nothing about those dumb, rich executives who sat on their fat salaries while Japan designed a better, more fuel-efficient car.

Nothing about the happy, rich corporate executives who outsourced basic industries to low-wage countries.

Electablog says:

“What Mr. Orr seems to forget is that it was the rise of the manufacturing industry in the United States along with the labor unions that created the middle class. The men and women he degrades with this callous statement worked hard every day in the factories that built things in this country. To describe them as dumb, lazy, and rich is beyond absurd and is incredibly insulting. Detroit’s problems don’t stem from union workers being able to make a decent wage with benefits and a pension. This country is strong, both economically and socially, because workers had enough money in their pockets to buy the things they were building.”

 

Categories Detroit, Economy, Unions

Conservative Activists File Lawsuit to Cripple Public Sector Unions

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2013 //
15

Last November, anti-union groups put a measure on the ballot in California called Prop 32, whose purpose was to reduce the political influence of unions by reducing their funding. Prop 32 was soundly defeated, but its proponents are back with a lawsuit to achieve the same purpose. If they win, they could cripple public sector unions across the nation.

This is a major story in the movement to privatize public education, dismantle the teaching profession, and turn schooling into a marketplace.

“In a little-noticed move in April, a conservative legal organization that has pushed to overturn the 1964 Voting Rights Act filed a lawsuit in federal court in Santa Ana that could accomplish in the courts what Prop. 32 couldn’t at the ballot box. The players behind the suit may not be household names but the millionaires and private foundations covering their legal fees represent a familiar klatch of extreme libertarians who, since the 1980s, have been attempting to move the country in a hard-right direction.

“The main plaintiff, the Christian Educators Association International (CEAI), firmly opposes reproductive rights and marriage equality – two of the same movements opposed by Prop. 32′s various backers. CEAI also supports school voucher programs and the teaching of Creationism – also causes championed by some of Prop. 32′s supporters, who saw unions as an obstacle to imposing their political will on California when it came to these and other issues.

“The lawsuit, known as Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, challenges the constitutionality of laws that allow teachers’ unions to collect fees from teachers who don’t want to be members. The lawsuit also seeks to outlaw an automatic payroll deduction process, under which teachers who don’t want a portion of their fees to go for political activities must “opt out” of funding those activities. It claims that California’s “agency shop” law violates the First Amendment by compelling public school teachers to pay fees to teachers unions involved in political activities.”

Categories California, Unions, US Education

Jeff Bezos: Worse Than We Thought

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2013 //
29

Lee Fang, brilliant investigative journalist for The Nation, has looked closely at Jeff Bezos’ interest in education, and the news is bad.

(Fang wrote this classic article about influence-peddling and corruption in the reform movement.)

Bezos is throughly smitten with the idea that the way to improve education is to privatize public schools and to eliminate teachers’ unions.

Fang writes:

—The Bezos Foundation has donated to Education Reform Now, a nonprofit organization that funds attack advertisements against teachers’ unions and other advocacy efforts to promote test-based evaluations of teachers. Education Reform Now also sponsors Democrats for Education Reform.

—The Bezos Foundation provided $500,000 to NBC Universal to sponsor the Education Nation, a media series devoted to debating high-stakes testing, charter schools, and other education reforms.

—The Bezos Foundation provided over $100,000 worth of Amazon stock to the League of Education Voters Foundation to help pass the education reform in Washington State. Last year, the group helped pass I-1240, a ballot measure that created a charter school system in Washington State. In many states, charter schools open the door for privatization by inviting for-profit charter management companies to take over public schools that are ostensibly run by non-profits.

Other education philanthropy supported by the Bezos Foundation include KIPP, Teach for America, and many individual charter schools, including privately funded math and science programs across the country.

On the other hand, Fang writes, the Washington Post had become dependent on the predatory for-profit Kaplan University, and Bezos has enough capital to build a firewall between the Washington Post and that industry.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Unions

Jeff Bezos: Another Billionaire for Privatization of Public Education

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2013 //
28

Last fall, Bill Gates collected $10 million from his friends to push through approval of a referendum to permit privately managed charter schools in Washington State, which voters had turned down three times previously. Among the friends of Bill Gates who helped make charters possible was the Bezos family, the parents of Jeff Bezos.

Jeff Bezos is the founder of amazon.com. He is a billionaire many times over, one of the richest men on the planet.

Yesterday he bought the Washington Post.

An article in the Washington Post today describes his interest in education.

It says:

“Like Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham, Bezos has shown support for efforts to change education policy, including the creation and expansion of public charter schools.

The Bezos Family Foundation — whose board includes Bezos, his parents and other family members — gave more than $11 million in 2011 to an array of national organizations such as Teach for America, Stand for Children and the KIPP Foundation, according to tax filings. The foundation also gave grants to scores of individual schools around the country as well as several charter school chains, including Uncommon Schools, which operates schools in New York and Massachusetts.

Bezos’s parents, Mike and Jackie, were active in a fierce battle last year to allow the creation of public charter schools in Washington state. Washington had been one of a handful of states that did not permit charters, which are publicly funded schools that are privately run and largely without unions. Teachers unions opposed the ballot measure, which narrowly passed with financial backing from Mike and Jackie Bezos as well as Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Netflix founder Reed Hastings.”

In short, Bezos is no friend of public education.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Teach for America TFA, Unions

Walmart Refuses to Pay a Living Wage in DC

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2013 //
51

Walmart, owned by the fabulously wealthy Walton family of Arkansas, has told the city of Washington, DC, that it will not build stores there if the City Council passes a “living wage” bill. The members of the family are billionaires and at the very least multimillionaires.

Walmart wants to pay only the minimum wage of $7.50 an hour. The City Council wants a “living wage” of $12.50 an hour, reflecting the high cost of living in DC.

Walmart says it will abandon DC if required to pay such “high” wages.

Have you seen the ads that Walmart is running on national television that show how their employees are achieving their dreams because of their beneficent employer? On $7.50 an hour?

The Walton Family Foundation is happy to throw millions of dollars into DC charter schools, but not provide a wage that will allow the parents of the children in those schools to make choices about their lives.

Categories Economy, Unions, Walton Foundation

My Friend, Randi Weingarten

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2013 //
272

I have known Randi Weingarten for about 15 years. When I met her, she was president of the UFT in New York City. Over the years, we have shared many important life events, including birthdays, weddings, and funerals.

Randi and I first wrote an article together in 2004. It was a protest against the autocratic way that Michael Bloomberg was running the NYC public schools. The title of the article in the New York Times was “Public Schools, Minus the Public.”

At that time, Randi took a risk joining with me because I was known as an outspoken conservative. But she recognized that I was undergoing a fundamental rethinking of my views. Because I continued to write op-eds and continued to support teachers against the efforts to destroy their professional status, the UFT honored me in 2005 with its prestigious John Dewey award.

Understand that I was still active at the Hoover Institution and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, both leading centers of rightwing thought. I was indeed in transition, in what I eventually understood as a life-changing intellectual crisis. I was trying to define and redefine my perspective on issues I had studied for decades.

Randi must have known I would come through this period of introspection and self-doubt. And I did.

The books I wrote during these years were studiously nonpartisan: “The Language Police,” which criticized censorship of tests and textbooks by both the right and the left (2003); “The English Reader,” an anthology I compiled with my son Michael; “Edspeak,” a glossary of education jargon and buzzwords.

Then in 2010, I published “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,” and fully renounced my conservative alliances, beliefs, and allegiances. Randi gave a book party for me at AFT headquarters in D.C.

The next year, when she invited Bill Gates to speak in Seattle, she also invited me, but I had a previous commitment to speak to legislators in Boston.

She invited me to speak at the AFT convention again in 2012, and I did and received a wonderful reception from the delegates in Detroit.

We don’t agree about every issue. We disagree about the Common Core. She thinks it has great potential, and I am skeptical about its consequences and oppose the undemocratic way in which it was stealthily imposed. Friends can disagree and still be friends.

But our agreements are far larger than our disagreements. Randi was the first one to alert me years ago to the total inappropriateness of the business model in education. She is a lawyer, and she is very smart. Randi was first, in my memory, to talk about “reform fatigue.” She is courageous. When the big “Waiting for Superman” propaganda blitz was unleashed in the fall of 2010, Randi was treated as Public Enemy #1 by the privateers, and she slugged it out with them on national television again and again. That took guts.

Recently, we co-authored a letter to Secretary Duncan urging him to intervene to stop the destruction of public education in Philadelphia.

I have read many comments on the blog that are critical of Randi. I let readers have their say, but this I believe. It serves no purpose for those of us opposed to teacher-bashing and corporate reform to fight among ourselves. We must stand together so that we will one day prevail over those who want to destroy public education and the teaching profession. We can’t win if we are divided. I will do nothing to help those who pursue a strategy of divide and conquer. They want us to fight among ourselves. I won’t help them.

Today, American public education faces an existential threat to its very existence. We all need to work together, argue when we must, but maintain our basic unity against the truly radical, truly reactionary threat of privatization. As a nation, as a democracy, we cannot afford to lose this essential democratizing institution.

Let us join forces, stand together, debate strategy and tactics, but remain united. If we are united, we will win. And make no mistake. I am convinced that we will win.

Categories Personal, Unions

Conservative Groups Launch New Campaign to Cripple Teachers Unions

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2013 //
26

Conservative groups are hoping to cripple teachers’ unions by urging members to “opt out.”

According to the Wall Street Journal blog, “A coalition of 60 groups in 35 states has begun a national campaign to tell workers they have the right to opt out of a labor union, and are providing instructions on how and when to do it.

“The campaign, which launched Sunday, is the brainchild of the Nevada Policy Research Institute, libertarian think tank. The group last year ran a local campaign informing teachers in the Las Vegas area how and when to opt out of the Clark County Education Association, a union affiliate of the larger National Education Association. To opt out, members had to submit a written notice during a two-week window in July, which many did, campaign leaders say.”

A union official in Nevada said: “The real intent of right-wing organizations like NPRI is to strip teachers of their bargaining rights as well as their organization’s political advocacy for public education,” Ms. Elias said.”

Will it improve education if teachers’ unions are destroyed?

Well, let’s see, the nation’s highest performing states–Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut–are highly unionized. Without the collective voice of teachers, it is easy to cut education spending, eliminate the arts, and increase class sizes. Rendering teachers voiceless in their working conditions is not good for students or teachers.

Categories Budget Cuts, Teachers and Teaching, Unions, US Education

L.A.: Why the School Board President Tried to Silence UTLA President

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2013 //
10

A reader who attended the recent Los Angeles school board meeting noticed the effort by a board member to prevent Warren Fletcher, president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, from speaking. The sequence is fascinating and well worth reading (and watching).

 

If you really want to see, in action, Board Member Tamar Galatzan’s (and also Board Member Monica Garcia’s) animus towards teachers’ unions, go to:

lausd.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?clip_id=58

BACKGROUND: the rules and etiquette at LAUSD board meetings has always been to allow the UTLA President to speak on an issue without a speaker card, after the 7 public commenters have finished. Well, this precedent was almost broken at this meeting… almost.

Keep that in mind when you watch this at:

07:30:00

UTLA President Warren Fletcher, always eloquent, knowlegable, and articulate, approaches the mic to talk and Galatzan tries to silence him, and move on to the next phase where Board Members then comment.

Galatzan, who has taken over as presiding chair, is stopped by Fletcher, who asks for his customary time to speak. Incredibly, Galatzan snaps at him, “You do not have a speaker card.” (Mind you, he represents over 35,000 teachers and other educators)

Fletcher: “Excuse me. May I – ”

Galatzan: “Hold on one second. Hold on one second. Seven speakers… you do not have a speaker card.”

Fletcher: “Excuse me. I – ”

Galatzan looks away dismissively from Fletcher, and addresses the other Board members.

Galatzan: (turns away) “Okay, umm, thank you. Questions and comments?”

People in the crowd start shouting objections to Galatzan, and Galatzan responds with condescension.

Galatzan: “I’m sorry. The rules is that we have seven speakers. We’ve heard seven speakers.”
—(fixing her eyes on Fletcher)
“Now, we’re done with Public Comment period. There’s now – ”

The crowd then erupts with shouts “Let him speak!!!”

Galatzan: “There’s now time for the Board Members to comment if they should desire. Do any of my colleagues on the board have any questions of comments on Number 45?”

More objections shouted from the crowd.

Veteran Board member Margueritte Lamotte then chimes in an exasperated tone.

LaMotte: “Can we have not ask for permission for the president to speak?”

The crowd grows louder.

Galatzan: (irritatated, but gives in) “Oh. Go ahead.”

The crowd applauds.

Fletcher: “Thank you, Madame Chair.”

He then proceeds to give Zimmer a run for his money in the speech-making department. Fletcher doesn’t attack Parent Revolution, or anyone from Parent Revolution personally. Wisely, he attacks the law itself, saying correctly that “it guarantees bad outcomes.. ”

Fletcher continues: ” … because this law is built on the premise is that the only way that a school can be improved is when one group of stakeholders starts blaming another group of stakeholders. It is a law based on the idea that we can improve schools by scapegoating… and it is a law that is based on the belief that the only way we can have progress in a school community is if we divide the school in to ‘us’ and ‘them.’ As a 29-year teacher in this district, I can tell you that the parents in this district are being presented with a cruel hoax by this law.

“It is a mechanism to turn ‘hope’ into ‘hate’, and that law is a legal framework to set people against each other. I, as President of UTLA, am proud to say that we reach out to parents, and we set up meetings with parents, and as soon as Parent Trigger is mentioned, suddenly UTLA cannot even get a Civic Center permit. Suddenly, UTLA runs into legal obstacle after legal obstacle. What we are doing is playing ‘adult conflict games,’ and we are fiddling while Rome burns!

“It is important that this school board, and the senior administration and the superintendent of this district obey the law, but it is also important that a framework is developed like in Mr. Zimmer’s motion that this law does not sow hatred, and does not debilitate school communities. To this point, the senior leadership of this district has been, I think, unready to take on the fact that we in Los Angeles bringing groups together, bringing parents, teachers and students and the community and everyone together, and end this sowing of hate!”

… and on he goes.

Watch and listen to Fletcher passionately and brilliantly lay out the truth about this situation, and you’ll see why the corporate-funded, pro-privatization Galatzan fought so hard to keep him speaking.

Categories Los Angeles, Parent trigger, Unions
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »