Our friend Bob Shepherd shared this wonderful video of a musical group whose instruments (at least the strings) were made from garbage collected at a landfill in Paraguay. And the group is called the LandFillHarmonic.
Be sure to watch!
The Tennessee Holler asks a pertinent question:
Why did Commissioner of Education Penny Schwinn fail to mention her husband’s employer in her disclosure statement?
The Holler wrote:
This week some eagle-eyed Hollerers pointed out TN Ed Commissioner Penny Schwinn left TNTP, the company where her husband works, off of her source of income disclosure.
She listed it last year, but not this year, despite the fact that he remains on their website as a “Leadership Coach.”
This is especially noteworthy since TNTP was a recipient of an $16 MILLION contract from the Tennessee Education Department, a department Schwinn is in charge of… a fact that was not lost on legislators who raised the “Conflict of Schwinnterest” issue in committee last session.
Was leaving TNTP off the disclosure an oversight on Penny’s part? Was it intentional? Are they no longer married? Is he no longer at the company?
These are questions someone should ask, and we will next time we see her.
It’s worth noting that Schwinn has a history of conflicts of interest and self-dealing. They’ve been hallmarks of her career, showing up in both Delaware and Texas, her stops along the way since starting a charter school in Sacramento. She also ran for school board in Sacramento, where she was supported by Michelle Rhee, whose charters lobbyist organization 50 CAN now is affiliated with charter school lobbyist Victor Evans at Tennessee Can, who is now vocally pushing through the new TISA funding overhaul plan from Governor Lee, even standing with him at press conferences.
Victor does NOT want to talk to us about the connection between Michelle Rhee at his parent company and Schwinn, no matter how hard we try.
There is more. Open the link and follow the story.
The persistent charter school boasting looks empty after years of turmoil. Schools opening and closing, high teacher turnover, unfulfilled promises. Result: California saw a decline in charter enrollment for the first time in three decades.
It’s not for a lack of money to promote charters. The big money is still there. The California Charter Schools Association is still a wealthy and powerful organization.
Something has changed. Could it be that parents are choosing their local public schools?
Jeff Bryant writes here about the decision by the Oakland, California, school board to close a number of schools because of a budget shortfall. Some of these schools were popular Community schools, offering services that benefited children, families, and the community. Bryant shows that the closure of these schools would not solve the budget shortfall.
Many readers of this blog used a Zoom link provided by friends in Oakland to listen to the crucial meeting of the school board when the vote was taken. I listened for four hours, as hundreds of students and parents spoke out against the closure of their beloved school. Not a single student or parent during the four hours I listened supported the closings.
The board was unmoved. Two members—Mike Hutchinson and VanCedric Williams— voted against the closings, but the majority voted yea.
One of those who voted for the closings just announced that she was resigning. Shanthi Gonzalez is not waiting for the next election. She claimed that she was interested only in raising academic quality when she supported closing schools.
Shanthi Gonzales, who represents District 6 on the Oakland Unified School District board, announced Monday that she is stepping down from her position immediately, seven months before her term is set to expire.
In a lengthy public statement published on her blog on Monday morning, Gonzales denounced the increasingly hostile discourse surrounding public education in Oakland, which has led to protests, strikes, and personal insults lobbed at school board members. She also called out the lack of progress the district has made in supporting students’ academic needs, and slammed the Oakland Education Association teachers union and its supporters for resisting moves to improve the quality of schools…
Along with board president Gary Yee, Gonzales introduced a resolution in December for the board to consider closing schools because of deep financial troublesbrought on in part by years of declining enrollment. That resolution led to the board’s February decision to close seven schools over the next two years, and merge or downsize several others. Three of the schools slated for closure, Community Day School, Parker K-8, and Carl B. Munck Elementary School, are in Gonzales’ district. null
Opposition to the district’s closure and consolidation plan has been fierce. In recent months, community members have held marches, two educators have staged a hunger strike, and protesters have rallied outside the homes of Gonzales and other school board members. The Oakland Education Association teachers union staged a one-day strike that effectively shut down classes this past Friday. School board meetings have also been contentious, with regular heckling and disruptions at in-person meetings.
All the members who voted for the closings should be voted out of office.
The two members who opposed the schools’ closings are Mike Hutchinson and VanCedric Williams. They are true leaders.
Mercedes Schneider writes here about the plight of two experienced Black educators who were fired by District of Columbia officials for refusing to adopt a scripted “no excuses” program developed by the Relay “Graduate School of Education.” I put scare quotes around the last four words because Relay is not really a graduate school of any kinds. It was created by a group of charter chains to teach the methods favored by charter schools—strict discipline, no-excuses, and the pedagogical strategies to raise test scores. Unlike real graduate schools, it has no campus, no library, no faculty with earned doctorates, no programs in research and the social sciences.
The educators—one of them a veteran principal—objected to the Relay approach and thought it contributed to the school-to-prison pipeline. They were fired, and they are suing, all out of their own pockets. I will help them as best I can. Tom Ultican write about them here.
Schneider wrote:
Below are excerpts fron a lawsuit put forth by two former employees of DC’s Boone Elementary School, who took issue with DC Public Schools (DCPS) higher admin wishing to impose controversial scripted and harsh practices at the direction of the so-named Relay Graduate School of Education (“graduate school” as a brand name and worth as much as my legally changing my own name to “Mercedes Schneider, MD” to deceptively promote the idea that I practice medicine).
Former Boone principal, Carolyn Jackson-King, repeatedly voiced her concerns about DCPS pooling lower-income, predominately Black schools under the jurisdiction of Relay and the fact that the administrator overseeing this requirement was formerly with “no excuses” KIPP schools (as in highly-scripted conformity at the expense of developing critical thinking and self-value for low-income students). Jackson-King even collected data to support no need for this concocted “Relay remediation” plan for Boone students, to no avail. Within one year, she was brought from being a principal deemed worthy of mentoring others to one released from her duties as principal and given the lowest rating of her career.
Fellow Boone employee and director of strategy and logistics, Marlon Ray, was arguably singled out and punitively required to work in person throughout the pre-vaccination period of COVID and later terminated due to “reduction in force” after he filed a 2020 whistleblower suit with the Office of Inspector General (OIG) about Relay, including contracts and payments under two distinct codings and that did not line up.
Jackson-King and Ray are suing DCPS and requesting a jury trial “to remedy the effects of the illegal conduct described [in the suit]” and to “award damages for back pay and other monetary losses” incurred by DCPS “[having] violated the provisions of District of Columbia law recited [in the suit].”
The lawsuit itself is 35 pages long and is posted at the end of this piece. I wish I could post the entire document as I believe it is worth a full read for its value on many fronts, including how those in education reform are able to all-too-quickly position themselves in upper administration and through their connections promote other entites selling ill-informed ideas that are contrary to sound educational practice; how such education businesses are often particularly positioned to prey on lower income students and students of color; how genuinely concerned, career-invested stakeholders are often wrongfully punished for voicing their concerns and seeking remedy (including being told that the issue should be kept “in house,” a strategy also often employed by domestic abusers), and how the underdog often has to pay out of pocket to seek relief in the courts.
Please continue reading. The educators acted ethically. The district punished them for acting ethically.
It has been widely reported in the media that the Supreme Court intends to overturn Roe v. Wade. A draft decision written by Justice Samuel Alito claims that the 50-year-old decision was wrongly decided. The implications of this decision—if it stands as written—are profound. The Supreme Court decided in 1973 that women had a right to decide what happens to their bodies. This Court is poised to say they do not.
This is Donald Trump’s legacy. This most ignorant of presidents appointed three of the Court’s most conservative justices. All three are Catholics who are staunchly opposed to abortion. they will join with at least two other Catholic justices to overturn Roe. (Neil Gorsuch was born Catholic but apparently is or may be Anglican.) Justice Sonia Sotomayer, who is also Catholic, will not vote for this decision. President Biden, an observant Catholic, opposes this decision and supports women’s rights to control their own body. Nancy Pelosi, another strong Catholic, supports Roe.
As an American, I ask how it is possible that a Court dominated by members of one religion can impose their beliefs on the entire nation? I am beyond outraged by this potential decision. The same decision could also have been written if the Court had a majority of Orthodox Jews, who oppose abortion. That too would be abhorrent.
Women who are not Catholic will be required to bend to the hardcore doctrine of the most ardent Catholics. That includes Protestants, Jews, and moderate Catholics, as well as those of other faiths or none at all.
Several states, anticipating this decision, have passed laws banning abortion after six weeks, before a woman knows she is pregnant. These laws make no exception for women who are victims of incest or rape. The victim must give birth to her rapist’s child. The victim must give birth to the child of her father or brother.
Abortion is a painful decision for most women. It should be their decision, made in consultation with a qualified health-care specialist. The Supreme Court wants the decision made not by those it affects, but by state legislatures. Women who have the money will travel to the states where it is still legal to get an abortion.
Women without the means to travel will seek abortions from back-alley abortionists in unhygienic circumstances. Or they will try to self-abort with wire hangars or other methods that risk their lives. Women will die because of this decision, if it represents the final decision.
Some states are trying to outlaw receiving abortion pills by mail. It’s hard to know how they will enforce this. It’s easy to imagine that the reddest states would devote more resources to stopping abortion than to caring for children after they are born, with medical care, good schools, nutrition, and the other supports they need. The extremists love the unborn more than the born.
Justice Alito says in his draft decision that one reason to overturn Roe is that it is so divisive. If this is the Court’s standard, we can anticipate the rollback of civil rights law, including the Brown decision, gay marriage, and anything else that is too controversial for the “Originalist” majority. (If Amy Coney Barrett were really an Originalist, she would resign at once since the original Constitution said nothing about women having the right to vote or participate in public life).
My own view is that the decision about abortion is private and personal. It should be made by a woman and her doctor. It should occur in a safe and hygienic clinic.
Those who oppose abortion should not have the power to impose their views on women who don’t agree with them. If you don’t believe in abortion, don’t have one. If you need an abortion, that should be your decision, not the Red-state legislatures or the Supreme Court’s ultra-conservative majority.
Choice advocates lure new customers by making false promises, writes Peter Greene in The Progressive.
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times writes here about the defeat of one of President Biden’s most important nominees for the U.S. Labor Department and why it is very bad news indeed for American workers.
David Weil withdrew his name as head of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division on April 7 when it became clear that he would never be confirmed. He was nominated almost a year earlier. Every Republican and three Democratic Senators opposed him: Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Mark Kelly, perhaps hoping to placate conservative voters in Arizona before the November election.
Hiltzik writes:
Having earlier served in the job during the Obama administration, Weil came under ferocious attack by business interests and Republicans from the start, because they knew of his commitment to enforcing the labor laws on the books and the court rulings that have upheld them...
Moreover, Weil’s loss was a blow for Biden, who is certainly the most pro-labor president in decades, perhaps ever.
Weil was superbly qualified to resume leadership of the Wage and Hour Division. He’s an expert in labor law who has served as a professor and dean of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, with a sharp eye for the multitude of ways that employers can cheat and abuse their employees, especially lower-income workers…
Weil’s 2014 book The Fissured Workplace examined the many ways that employers had been abandoning their responsibilities for workers.
As Weil explained to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) during his July 15 confirmation hearing, his aim as administrator, as it was in 2014-2017, would be “strategic enforcement” of labor standards “to make sure we are targeting industries and employers who are really violating the law and who erode those kinds of standards,” while reaching out to employers to make sure they understand their responsibilities.
To Republicans and their patrons in the business community, however, any enforcement of labor law is too much.
They accused him of an “open bias against small business.”
Their evidence was his advocacy of such initiatives as the expansion of overtime rights to more than 4.2 million workers who had been treated as exempt from overtime pay and tightening the classification of employees as independent contractors — the key to the business model of gig firms such as Uber and Lyft.
Weil also expanded the definition of joint employers to impose responsibilities for workplace standards on big companies that sought to shed them through subcontracting and franchise arrangements.
It should be clear that these regulations would all improve pay and working conditions for workers. But they would cost employers, so business painted Weil as the enemy. The posturing by Republican committee members sometimes sounded as though they had received their talking points intravenously from the International Franchise Assn., one of Weil’s principal critics….
As Weil observes, the labor market is one of unequal power in which employers dominate. This observation is not new, leftist or extremist. In the landmark 1937 Supreme Court case known as Parrish, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes (reaching back to an 1898 decision upholding safety rules for mine workers) noted that fear of being fired often forces workers to bow to working conditions they know to be unfair or detrimental to their health.
“The proprietors lay down the rules,” the earlier decision stated, “and the laborers are practically constrained to obey them.” Parrish, which upheld a Washington state minimum wage law, marked a sea change in the court’s approach to labor law. Hughes, by the way, had been placed on the Court by Herbert Hoover.
Weil traces an arc in government-protected worker rights beginning with enactment of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 and especially the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. The latter installed an expansive definition of “employment,” and therefore of worker rights and employer responsibilities, at the heart of federal labor law.
The FLSA made clear, he says, that “government plays a critical role saying, these are baseline rules of the game that can be built upon, whether through unionization or more progressive employers who understand the benefits of treating their workers well” — a foundation created by standards such as the minimum wage and an understanding on when the paid workday starts and stops.
Courts began to narrow the FLSA’s reach within a few years, followed by the Republican Congress, which enacted the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 over a veto by Democratic President Harry Truman.
The 1970s brought about more erosion in the basic understanding of worker rights and employer responsibilities.
“More and more workers were in situations where they were seeing daily violations of these basic rules, from being told you punch in for your time only after you’ve prepared your work station or you punch out before you do clean-up, and you get paid at straight time, not overtime, even after 40 hours” a week, Weil observes.
“If someone had the guts to stand up and say, ‘That’s not right,’ they were fired, in direct violation of the law,” Weil says. “The persistence of those practices create an environment where no one wants to raise their head up and talk about other problems that occur because they see these violations of the most basic rights that workers are supposed to have. Forget about the risk of saying you see a health and safety problem or discrimination, for decades the riskiest thing you could do in an American workplace is to say, ‘I want to have a union here.’
“To me,” he says, “those rights are not exercised if the basic rights are being systematically violated.”
In “The Fissured Workplace,” Weil tracked how employers had been offloading their employees to labor subcontractors, temp agencies and franchisees and redesignating one-time members of their payrolls as independent contractors.
“In 1960,” he wrote, “most hotel employees worked for the brand that appeared over the hotel entrance. Today, more than 80% of staff are employed by hotel franchisees and supervised by separate management companies.”
Not long after his book appeared, the gig platforms such as Uber and Lyft emerged. Weil recognized them as new iterations of an old story.
“When the platform model came out with this whole false narrative that they were providing ‘flexibility’ without all that messy employment stuff, to me the platforms were just another form of fissuring,” Weil says. “Their idea was to control the brand, and completely divorce themselves from those responsibilities.”
In a Los Angeles Times op-ed in 2019, when Uber and Lyft were fighting a California law that would designate their drivers as employees, Weil acknowledged that some companies operated in a gray area where their workers sometimes acted like employees and sometimes like independent contractors.
“Uber and Lyft are not among those close, gray-area cases,” he wrote. “Their status as employers is really quite clear.” (Uber, Lyft and other gig companies spent immense sums to pass Proposition 22, which exempted them from the California law — though the law has been put on hold by a state judge.)
Weil’s position earned him the enmity of the gig companies. They opposed his confirmation through their now-defunct app-based Work Alliance, which tweeted during his Senate hearing that he supported “an outdated workforce model” that was shunned by gig workers who “love their flexibility and independence,” which the companies asserted Weil’s policies would “take away.”
In contrast to the gig firms’ efforts to create a hybrid employment standard that would only make permanent their abusive business models while denying workers basic employment protection, Weil has advocated extending workplace standards to beyond those who are classified as employees.
In a 2020 paper, Weil and labor law expert Tanya Goldman proposed a framework of concentric circles in which basic protections such as freedom from discrimination and retaliation, and the guarantee of safe and healthful working conditions and a minimum wage would be linked to all work, rather than to legal definitions of employment.
Further protections, including the right to overtime pay, unionization and workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance, would belong to a second circle of workers who would be presumed to hold employment status unless their employers could make a hard-and-fast case that they were independent contractors.
A third circle would encompass indisputably independent workers. They still would be entitled to unemployment and workers’ compensation, and could arrange on their own for other benefits such as retirement funding.
The virtue of this concept is that it divorces essential protections from pettifogging debates over the definition of “employee.” Weil acknowledges that some of these changes would require congressional action.
There lies the rub. Weil’s nomination foundered in large part on Senate procedure. The narrowness of the Democratic majority forced delays in a floor vote on his appointment that lasted into this year, when Biden was required to renominate him. By then, the business community had built up a head of steam against his confirmation.
When it became clear that no Republican would vote for him, nor would three Democrats, Weil withdrew his nomination.
“The principal reason they didn’t want me in this role,” Weil says, “is that I had a record of enforcing the law.”
Michael Hiltzik, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, reviews the context of the drive for unions at Starbucks. it’s CEO, billionaire Howard Schultz, wants to portray the far-flung coffee shop empire as worker-friendly, and he is flatly opposed to unions. He insists that the unions bring an adversarial edge and downplays the likelihood that unions would mean higher wages and benefits at the cost of profit margins.
Hiltzik writes:
Many American consumer companies, including Amazon and McDonalds, have been dealing with a surging interest in unionization by their employees, spurred in part by the pandemic-driven recognition that their employers have consistently undervalued their contributions to business success.
But few such union drives are as high-profile as the one at Starbucks. One reason may be the company’s warm and comforting image and its efforts to project a friendly relationship between customers and workers, who are designated in company parlance as “partners.” That’s very much at odds with the image of an employer so cold to the welfare of its workers that they’re spurred to organize.
Another may be the rapidity of the unionization drive’s expansion, which began with pro-union votes at three Buffalo-area stores. Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union that is organizing union votes, says 223 Starbucks locations in 31 states have filed for votes with the NLRB.
That’s a fraction of the roughly 9,000 company-operated stores in the U.S., but reports of new successful votes are streaming in on virtually a daily basis. Five stores in the Richmond, Va., area voted for unions by overwhelming margins on April 19 alone, and workers at the company’s Seattle Reserve Roastery, a flagship tourist draw in Starbucks’ home city, announced a successful vote on April 21.
Workers United says 28 Starbucks stores have now voted to unionize, up from nine that had done so as of April 1.
“Because Starbucks is a front-facing company considered ‘essential,’” Workers United organizing chief Richard Minter says, “the pandemic exacerbated the employer-employee relationship. The partners were left in the crosshairs without the resources necessary to handle what was happening, without the right precautions and protocols that allowed them to feel safe.”
The company has mounted a fierce counterattack against the organizing drive. In videotaped town hall presentations, written communications to workers and managers, and in meetings with workers around the country, Schultz has repeatedly characterized unions as a menace to the company’s economics and future.
“Outside labor unions are attempting to sell a very different view of what Starbucks should be,” he wrote in an open letter posted on the company’s website April 10.
Employees “supporting unionization are colluding with outside union forces,” he wrote. “The critical point is that I do not believe conflict, division and dissension — which has been a focus of union organizing — benefits Starbucks or our partners…”
The union threat, Shultz said in a town hall meeting shortly after his reappointment as CEO, extends beyond Starbucks: “Companies throughout the country [are] being assaulted in many ways by the threat of unionization.”
Starbucks, in an anti-union FAQ posted on its website, warns that “unions get their revenue from dues, which could come out of your pay each week or month.” It says, “unions use dues to pay for their office overhead, staff salaries and other expenses,” though it doesn’t mention the expense of negotiating contracts and enforcing their provisions, which are of course the chief duties of unions.
The company also has hired the law firm of Littler Mendelson, which boasts of its skill at guiding companies “in developing and initiating strategies that lawfully avoid unions.” These include advising management on “precise and compliant messaging to employees … that may include informational signs and posters, home letters, meeting materials, testimonial videos, social media postings, handouts and campaign websites.”
Followers of labor-management relations will recognize that Schultz’s words come directly out of the canonical corporate anti-union playbook:
Paint the unions as “outsiders.” Imply that their only goal is to add members. Say they’ll disrupt the smooth working of the company or even drive it out of business. Say they’ll make it impossible for workers to deal directly with management. Talk about how much money workers will lose to dues…
Starbucks is plainly aware of the complaints about pay and working conditions that are fueling the organizing drive. The company has displayed on its website a poster it says reflects “issues we have been hearing from partners…”
Starbucks is not new to the arena of fraught labor relations. Its animosity toward unions dates back to Schultz’s 1987 acquisition of the company, then a local chain of coffee spots in Seattle. At that time, Starbucks employees were represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Former workers say Schultz promised to honor the UFCW contract but almost immediately tried to renegotiate it.
It’s conceivable that Schultz honestly sees himself as the hand that can improve Starbucks’ relationship with its workers, and that unions will only get in the way. He’s adept at projecting sincerity, as when he says in an employee video of the worker meetings that “it was difficult and emotional at times to hear the challenges and the issues that partners are facing.”
Unlike some other companies, Starbucks has not turned a cold shoulder to unions that have been voted in at its stores; Workers United says the company has begun to meet with union representatives at two of the Buffalo stores that touched off the organizing trend, though they have not reached contracts.
The real question is whether the company will draw the right lessons from the union organizing drive: that unions and management can be partners, not invariably adversaries, that demonizing unions won’t improve labor relations, and that workers’ interest in unionization doesn’t mean they hate the company.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook of The Lever reports that workers at Starbucks are voting to join unions. The Lever is a blog launched by David Sirota, co-author of “Don’t Look Up” and former speechwriter for Senator Bernie Sanders.
Big events continue to happen on the Starbucks Workers United front. On Tuesday, five Starbucks stores in greater Richmond, Virginia, voted to unionize. On Thursday, they won an election at the 100-employee-plus Starbucks Reserve Roastery flagship store in Seattle — one of the largest Starbucks stores to organize so far. Then, on Friday, the shamefully underfunded National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint over Starbucks’ February mass firing of union leaders in Memphis. Then again on Friday, the first Starbucks store in Colorado unionized. Struggling to keep track of it all? Reporters at Law360 developed this tool to track the growth of Starbucks workers’ efforts.
