Tuesday, March 07, 2006

ELECTION NOT SELECTION

The following appears in the NY Teacher:
“To be effective,” Weingarten noted in a letter urging members to join the campaign, “we must understand that the union is all of us; it is the members who are the union .… Our goal is to use this bitter recent contract struggle, and the ratification debate that followed, to build a stronger, more unified and more militant union membership that is prepared for the challenges that lie ahead.”
At the first meeting of the volunteers, which was held recently at union headquarters, Weingarten laid out plans for building union activism chapter by chapter and school by school in what she hopes will result in “an intense engagement and involvement of members with each other, with parents and with the community.”
To that end, she suggested a plan to expand the negotiating team to about 300 members who will represent every district and aspect of the educational community at the bargaining table. The new negotiators, in turn, will be responsible for informing and soliciting feedback from the schools that each member will be assigned.
“All too often in the contract ratification debate we heard from members who said they never heard from the union before and the union does not listen to them,” Weingarten said. “This is a way of correcting that to ensure that there exists effective communication back and forth about what’s really going on.”

Our UFT leadership has recently fronted a new militancy, and it seems that our leadership has realized that it is out of touch with the members. It is an astounding admission of failure for the President of our union to say that there are “members who said they never heard from the union before and the union does not listen to them.” Perhaps recognizing the problem is the first step, but will the 300 person negotiating relay team change that? It remains to be seen. But this smacks of the same distraction as the Stossel hype. And are our leaders really so disconnected from us that they don’t know the difficulty of teaching five classes, of coverages, of 6R, of letters in the file from administrators that have taught two years or less, of being trapped in a terrible school with no guarantee of getting out? If they need a relay committee for this knowledge, then apparently so. The power of not teaching five (or more), with a double salary and a double pension, has disconnected them from us. They live as nobility; we live as peasants. Their job seems to have become their own maintenance, not our best interest.

As much as we might like to believe this new attempt at democracy and militancy, it is not without irony when our leaders states:
“we must understand that the union is all of us; it is the members who are the union.” Apparently they just noticed this. Well, we will believe in this new deal when Randi gives the power to elect District Representatives to the members, and not before. They are supposed to represent us, not her.

But that day is not here. There is an opening for a District 20 Representative right now. And as Robert Astrowsky (Brooklyn Borough Representative) writes:

“Per UFT Policy and Executive Board action, all current District Representatives are appointed in place by UFT President Randi Weingarten. Vacancies for the District Representative position will be appointed by the UFT President…” (February 28, 2006).

The union trots out a 300 person relay committee to be told what they should already know. Yet, those that serve us, our
representatives, are appointed for us. And our union claims this is democracy? We get scraps from the table, as they feast on.
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