ILO Court: NY Taylor Law Violates Worker Rights - Why Won't City Unions Use Ruling?

As noted on August 15, 2012 in Labor Press, an outfit sponsored by several New York unions, the International Labor Organization ruled in November 2011 that New York's Taylor Law, with its punishing fines, violated internationally recognized rights of the 2005 striking Transit Workers Union.
In Marc Bussanich's "ILO Decision May Offer Opportunity for City Labor"> he reported:

A November 2011 International Labor Organization decision ruled, after the Transport Workers Union Local 100 filed a complaint with the ILO in November 2009 after the union struck in December 2005 and was heavily fined, that New York’s Taylor Law banning and penalizing public worker strikes violates fundamental workers’ rights protected by international law. With 200,000 city public workers without contracts, in some cases over five years, the ILO decision would seem to have presented the city’s public sector unions the economic leverage they have desperately needed to win new contracts.

But why will New York City's municipal unions not consider the value of the strike?
A United Federation of Teachers vice-president is on record for chiding some UFT dissidents for their stating the great value of striking.

But why will not the UFT consider that American labor's great gains were achieved because trade unions exercised the option of striking?

What gave us the weekend? The eight hour day? The lunch break? For many of the advances, state and federal law did, but honest historians will recognize that the advances were gained because in the climate of the time strikes were frequent and they demanded that companies and governments bargain respectfully. (Granted, this has often been without respect, as the exceptional US record of employer and governmental violence against strikers will attest.)

If strikes themselves did not accomplish these accomplishments, the threat of them and the building of worker consciousness spurred governments to listen to the lobbying of union representatives in the halls of government.

The profoundly weakened condition of the New York City teacher, with the comprehensive, systematic harassment, weak give-back contracts, and absence of a contract since 2009 are all living testimony to the effect of foreswearing the use of a strike, or any mass action in relation to work-place conditions.

Alas, the problems in New York are not exceptional. One Chicago teacher, Kenzo Shibata, wrote recently in the Huffington Post, "There may be only one way for educators to regain respect in the workplace -- a strike."

(The condition of teachers being at the end of their rope is why the Chicago Teachers Union is considering a strike. A Chicago Teachers Union member will speak next week at a MORE event in NY on the issues the CTU teachers are facing.)

Assailed Teacher: NYC Teachers Want MORE

The blog "Assailed Teacher," has written a powerful piece, accompanying a new United Federation of Teachers caucus' mission statement. (The Movement of Rank and File Educators, "M.O.R.E.," has formed as an alternative to the Unity caucus which has total dominance over the UFT.)

"New York City and its Teachers Want MORE" The blogger has written some incisive comments accompanying each of the agenda points appearing in the MORE caucus mission statement, challenging a different course from that which the dominating Unity caucus has pursued.

The new caucus mission statement and Assailed Teacher's critique, too valuable to edit down, appears thusly:

New York City’s teacher union, the United Federation of Teachers, has been dominated by a caucus known as Unity. This was the caucus formed by Albert Shanker that rolled all of the old, independent teacher unions in NYC into one (hence the name, “Unity”).

And Unity has had a stranglehold on the UFT since Shanker. The UFT is the largest single chapter of the American Federation of Teachers and, it is commonly assumed, as the UFT goes, so does the AFT.

Randi Weingarten’s tenure as UFT president reflects what Unity’s strategy has been for the past 30 years. She took the lead when the teacher-bashing campaign started kicking into high gear. Bloomberg and Klein were floating the meme that teachers were overpaid union bums whose bloated pensions were burdening government coffers. They had fresh ideas for “reform” and bums like Randi were barriers to “progress”.

Instead of fighting Bloom-Klein head-on, she decided to compromise with them on the 2005 contract, giving them much of what they wanted. It is this contract that created the Absent Teacher Reserve crisis and denuded the tenure rights that Shanker had helped institute decades earlier. In short, Unity in 2005 backpedaled on what Unity throughout the 1970s had gained.

Randi is not stupid. She did this because the atmosphere in 2005 was toxic for teachers, much like it is now. The union she led was the bad guy in the public’s mind. Giving back many of the hard-fought rights of teachers might help rehabilitate the reputation of the union, Randi must have thought. At the very least, it would cause the reformers to call off their attack dogs in the media.

Well, none of that happened. Randi gave back those rights and the attacks merely intensified. Meanwhile, Randi catapulted to the leadership of the AFT. I believe she now has her eyes on national office, maybe Secretary of Education. If Obama is inclined to dump Arne Duncan in his second term, who better to mollify the teachers’ unions than Randi? After all, they will not be able to criticize his Race to the Top program if one of their own is on the inside. Although, it is not like the AFT or the NEA have been overly critical of RTTT as it is.

This explains why Randi was recently quoted praising Joel Klein as a man of “integrity”. She seems to feel bad that Joel Klein’s parent company is embroiled in a wire-tapping scandal. “It can’t be fun for him” she explained in a Clinton-esque display of feeling other people’s pain.

Can she feel the pain of all the teachers who are suffering under a contract she negotiated seven years ago?

So, while I recognize that it was the UFT and Unity that had earned the few rights we have left as NYC teachers, I also recognize that it was Unity who gave most of them back. As symbolized by Randi, Unity will do what is good for Unity.

I have been in contact with teachers in urban school districts across the country and they all sing the same song about their unions: they are collaborators in education deform. Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark and all points in between have produced teachers who feel sold out by their unions.

We might not mind so much if there was some give-and-take. Randi collaborated to improve the union’s image, not to mention her own, but it has not stopped the screws from being put to us in the court of public opinion. Randi still comes off as a shrill union hack on the television screen and teachers are still lazy bums living high on the hog.

Then the Chicago teachers made their move. They deposed their collaborator caucus and replace it with the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators. They got rid of all the bloated union salaries at the top; the sinecures occupied by burnouts who have not taught since the Reagan Era. Maybe this is why they are now able to stockpile money to prepare to sustain their members in the case of a strike?

More importantly, they have drawn a line in the sand against their dictator mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, and his Bloomberg-esque plans for ed reform. They have learned that collaboration gets teachers nowhere. Now is the time for resistance.

It is time for teachers in America’s first city to take cues from the second city.

That is why the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators has been formed. Caucus elections are coming up within the next year. There will be a new box to check, next to which will be the acronym MORE.

NYC teachers, when the new evaluation system gets put into place by the start of 2014, the one that will determine your career and the future of your students by value-added, high-stakes testing; the one that will force you out of the system with virtually no due process if the results of those tests are found lacking; the one that will have principals check little boxes on observation reports which judge you on your bulletin boards and the way you dress; never forget who negotiated that system: Unity.

It was Unity whose brass sat in a smoke-filled room with ed deform officials for days hammering out that system. It was Unity who then turned to us and promoted it as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Their line was, “if you think this is bad, you should see what they’re doing in Tennessee.” In other words, this is the best we could hope for in the age of ed deform. In other words, we collaborated so as not to look like barriers to “progress”. In other words, it was Unity business as usual, the same business that saw Randi sell us out in 2005.

Contrast this to MORE. MORE represents that era, hopefully not too far in the future, when people’s patience with “compromise” comes to an end. Compromise has been the Trojan Horse that has destroyed public education over the past 10 years.

No more Trojan Horses. It is time for us to launch a thousand ships against education reform instead.

Or, for now, we will settle for 9:

MISSION STATEMENT (as adopted April 21, 2012)

A – Who we are and why we are forming

1. We are members of the UFT and members of school communities and their allies.

In other words, this is MORE than a caucus. It is a movement in which everyone who has a stake in public education is welcome.

2. We insist on receiving professional dignity and respect, and we insist on a strong, democratic union emerging from an educated and active rank and file. We oppose the lack of democracy and one-party state that has governed our union for half a century. It has conceded to our adversaries’ agendas and has collaborated with their attacks on us, leading to the terrible situation we find ourselves in.

Unity domination means collaboration. This collaboration has been carried out by Unity in an undemocratic way in order to achieve undemocratic ends. It is perfectly in step with the corporate coup that has seized this country over the past three decades. MORE is perfectly in step with the coming backlash against this corporate coup.

3. We insist on a better educational environment for ourselves and for the students whose lives we touch. Because of this resolve, we have established the MORE Caucus, which will educate, organize and mobilize the UFT membership.

Teachers, through the denuding of tenure and the exaltation of high-stakes testing, have been silenced. This has hampered our ability to speak up for the children, mostly poor and minority, who we teach. In an era when third world poverty is becoming the norm in America’s inner-cities, this is a scary prospect, one that must be resisted at all costs.

B – For an improved contract

4. It is time to end the UFT’s concession to the language and assumptions of the so-called reformers and the wave of concessions and givebacks that result from conceding these assumptions. We must be prepared to take collective action, if necessary, in defense of our interests, and to achieve a decent contract.

No more Randi Weingartens who, because she has an eye on national office, shares in the data-driven discourse that frames all the discussion around education. Instead of self-aggrandizers who use the union platform to enrich their prospects for power, we need a union that believes that what happens to one of us happens to all of us. Instead of corporate unionism that celebrates individual gain, we want MORE social justice unionism that celebrates solidarity,

5. We seek a contract with retroactive pay, that is not obtained by selling off what few protections remain. We insist on defending tenure, due process rights, pensions, and an immediate end to the arbitrary denial of tenure to probationary teachers. We oppose any teacher evaluations based on standardized tests.

When Randi gave away many of our rights in 2005, she tried to soften the blow by saying that we had received raises. Yet, these were merely cost of living increases that we had been forgoing for years. There was a time when COLA was just part of the deal and did not have to be bought by giving up something of ours. It was an abandonment of one of the hallmarks of public-sector unionism.

And these give-backs put us under the thumb of administrators, from principals on up to the mayor, so that they could lay the ground work for corporate ed deform: ending tenure, perpetual probation for new teachers and high-stakes testing.

C – For quality curricula

6. We stand for a union that recognizes that teacher working conditions are student learning conditions and that, after parents, teachers are best situated to understand the needs of young people.

In the world of education reform, non-educators like Andrew Rotherham and Salman Khan are looked to as experts. People from elite universities who have never taught a day in their lives or spent an hour in an inner-city area have set the standard for what poor children should be learning.

Teaching is a profession to which people dedicate their lives, at least this is how it should be. Just like you would not take medicine that an economist prescribes for you, children should not have to attend schools where the major policies are determined by educrats with no education experience at all.

7. We insist that high stakes tests no longer deprive New York City’s children of exposure to foreign language, science, social studies and the arts. We insist that curricula taught in our schools be mindful and respectful of the needs and backgrounds of our students, that they nurture in them the potential for active, reflective citizenship, and is committed to racial and gender equity, democracy and economic justice.

High-stakes testing is for public school students. Those are the students that just so happen to be disproportionately poor and minority. Staking everything on exams for a limited number of subjects limits the curriculum. Art, history and English are fading away because math and science are seen as the subjects that will “prepare kids for the 21st century”.

The result of this is that the poorest students will never be exposed to the subjects that would cause them to think critically about the world around them, especially the world of oppression and poverty in which they remain mired. Narrowing the curriculum narrows the horizons of children and is a perfect recipe for the perpetuation of what can be deemed a lumpenproletariat.

D – Our communities, our schools

8. We reject the corporate takeover of the public schools, and the wave of school closures in the city, which have particularly affected poor communities with high proportions of people of color. We insist on a moratorium on the opening of new charter schools. We seek to end the cuts to education which have led to increasing class sizes as well as inadequate social, health, guidance personnel and services.

Most of the school closings past, present and future have been accompanied by more charter school co-locations. This means that buildings that were once totally dedicated to public schooling are being eroded away to make room for corporate charters. At the same time that public schools are seeing their budgets slashed and vital programs jettisoned, more and more public funding has been made available to charter schools. When you consider that charters skim the best public school students of a community and are able to expel the ones that give them the most problems, it means that more resources are going to kids that do not need it as much as the kids from whom they are being taken.

This is the latest form of segregation. Charters segregate based on family background and ability within communities that are already segregated by race. It is hyper-segregation.

9. The schools should be the people’s schools. We stand for democratic governance and popular control of our school system that fully reflects the needs, aspirations and diversity of those who make up its parent and student body. Mayoral control, which is inherently undemocratic, must be abolished, and be replaced by an elected people’s board of education which represents the interests of teachers, students, parents, and community.

The people who sing the praises of school “choice” are the same people who applaud big city mayors around the country who dissolve popularly elected school boards in favor of corporate-style, CEO management from the top. It is telling how the whole movement for “choice” has seen a new generation of educational leaders who exercise more power over public education now than at any other point in our history. When is the last time any Secretary of Education exercised as much power as Arne Duncan?

The term “choice” is a subterfuge that masks the fascistic manner in which education reform has been instituted.

MORE is where the real education reform is.

Window on Weingarten's, Mulgrew's treatment of UFT reporter Jim Callaghan

In the course of reading GothamSchool's review of Steven Brill's "Class Warfare," we read some testimony into the context of the United Federation of Teacher's firing of Jim Callaghan. This summer is the one-year anniversary of the dismissal of one very intrepid reporter for the UFT's "New York Teacher", a reporter who was distinguished in tackling many important, unaddressed issues in New York City schools and teachers' rights. (Readers will remember that Callaghan's articles were removed from the New York Teacher online archive.)

What follows are key quotes from the discussion at the GothamSchools site. (Minor format edits, added):

For her own personal and political reasons, Weingarten  allowed the rubber roomers to languish for years because she refused to  file grievances when Bloomberg and Klein violated the contract which calls for the D.O.E. to file charges within six months. Everything else she and Mulgrew say is rubbish- they are the Vichy leaders of the UFT After much fanfare, she ditched the rubber roomers , preventing writers at the Weingarten Times (formerly known as the NY Teacher) from doing dozens of exposes. what happened to the three people [writers] assigned to the rubber rooms?
-I was fired in August 2010- in the middle of trying to organize a union for union writers which Mulgrew said would happen over his dead body---  after 13 years at the union during which time Weingarten called me: the conscience of the union; her ace investigative reporter; one of the best historians in New York; her co-revolutionary. -Betsy Combier was fired in June 2010.-Ron Issac spends his days whining that he has nothing to do- at $70,000 per year plus his DOE pension). Issac told Weingarten this three years ago- I was there -yet she defended her tyrannical  editor Deidre McFadyen in harassing Ron and myself. ..why would Weingarten hire someone and then give him no work?
Clearly, Weingarten wasn't serious about  justice for the rubber roomers. It was one big farce. Not one suggestion- out of dozens---  I made to her, and staff directors Ellie Engler, LeRoy Barr and Garry Sprung was ever followed up. Weingarten  had Barr remove me from a rubber room while I was in the middle of a story that the security guards were shaking down our members.  Her Brooklyn Borough Rep Howie Schoor was sending copies of my emails I sent to him - I have them- to D.O.E.! I did one major rubber room story in October, 2007- and that was it for almost three more years! Is that the mark of a serious union leader?
Of course, Weingarten was distracted. She was also busy cleaning up her own mess by hiring Combier after she filed freedom of information requests for the time records for one of Weingarten's closest friends in the union. D.O.E. sent copies of the FOIL [Freedom of Information Law] requests to Weingarten. Within weeks, Adam Ross, lawyer for the UFT, was writing to Combier - I have the letters- offering her a job... Her confidentiality agreement is bigger than a Manhattan phone book. Prior to her hiring, I was told in writing that I was not allowed to even talk to Combier! 
As for Klein, Weingarten talked to me on the steps  at PS 45 in Staten Island  the day after the story broke that Klein was keeping "files" on her and others. I told her to FOIL them. She never did. Why?  And she told me that Klein had previously leaked her personnel file to Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice, who was writing a  story challenging the way she qualified for a D.O.E.  pension.
Much later, she emailed me that David Hickey, the CFO of the union whose main job is harassing UFT workers, (except his "favorites" )  accused me of leaking her pension file to Barrett- which I had no access to! In a sarcastic tone,  she emailed me that she knew I would never do that.....her email- which I have- said Barrett obtained her file "illegally," but she refused to ask for a [Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard J.] Condon inquiry or to refer it to the District Attorney. I demanded that Hickey put up or shut up and then Randi accused me of being "defensive."
She also accused Barrett of "sneaking around"- in broad daylight-  her country  house in Amagannset talking to her neighbors; she claimed she was going to "out" her- a preposterous notion. In retrospect, what she clearly was worried about was that she was claiming to  be "working" at her country house which is how she collected $160,000 in unused vacation and sick time over a 24 year period- breaking Cal Ripken's record with plenty to spare.
The deal in the Communications Department, always with a wink and a nod, was to make sure she always got one fax  for every day  she was out there so she could claim she was working!  We all laughed- wouldn't we all like to be working from home in Amagansett. (Always a good hearted soul, Weingarten refused  to allow her editor  to work from home after she gave birth.) Weingarten  always had tools-legal ones and media- to defend herself, especially with the Klein "private files" but never did. After all this, woud'nt you too invite your tormentor to your 50th birthday party where UFT vendors were "encouraged" to buy ads in the Journal that made her sound like Norma Rae, Mother Theresa, Eleanor Roosevelt and Mother Jones all wrapped into one body? Well, there was Klein at the bash, yukkng it up with his supposed enemies! and why would she always sussssshhh the 3,000 UFT members  at The Spring Conference when Klein was booed and hissed? Instead of truly fighting Bloomberg and Klein  she was  guilty of the larger moral crime-  denying so many members [rubber roomers] the right to representation. She was as much a part of the cover up of corruption at DOE as anyone.................only Mulgrew, her hand picked fake tough guy - is worse.
There are so many cover ups to write about- including one where I had-and have-  a tape of a Klein confidante violating the HIPPA law by telling a writer on the phone and in an email that a teacher was  crazy and had been deemed so by D.O.E. doctors. Weingarten took that out of the lead of my story and told me to lose the tape. I also have the original  email -for when Weingarten starts her "woe is me" persona. Weingarten also emailed a UFT official that "maybe this is the time for (the Klein confidante)  her to step up," meaning to play ball when the union wanted jobs for their cronies. Weingarten saved her ass from being fired and expected her quo for the quid. Stay tuned, lots more about how Weingarten and Mulgrew have thrown teachers over the side, including with the "PIP Plus" sell out  , where teachers are being fired by the boat load- with the union leaders as part of the shanda [scandal]. Oh, in case we forget, she scurried out of town after lying to her Unity Caucus members that Bloomberg (using public funds as a bribe) promised her  an eight per cent raise over two years but only if we knifed Bill Thompson in the 2009 mayoral race.  We did knife  him and it's two years later and no contract! 
Jim Callaghan

Yes it's the real Jim Callaghan.... There are'nt enough cemeteries in this town to dig up all the bodies of corruption, malfeasance, nepotism, shady deals, booze fests and collaborationists who cheat the members so they can advance themselves, family members, mistresses, boyfriends, girlfriends.... Some literary agents have told me I might have to make it fiction because no one will believe it......
The day after I was fired, Mulgrew offered me a bribe-----he would use the members dues to silence me if I signed a non-disparagement agreement in return for free health insurance for life.....if I live to be 100, that would have cost the members $540,000! All so I would keep quiet and betray the members who paid my salary for 13 years to fight for them with D.O.E. and corrupt union officials like Mulgrew and Weingarten...the bribe was offered on Friday morning, august 13, after Mulgrew the fake tough guy found out I was going on Fox News that afternoon.....I told him to shove his hush money... the question for reporters and union members is what mulgrew fears so much that he would attempt to bribe me? Unless I wind up like Ted Maritas----- Google him,------ the rest of the country will find out how bad Weingarten and Mulgrew [are] and how sadistic their mostly white $190,000 per year enforcers are... I am open to suggestions for my book title....

It was hardly everything.......I would guess there are another 350 pages more........I left with 48 boxes of emails, reports, thank you notes from uft officials, including the founders of the union, hundreds of notebooks full of stories of teachers who were railroaded by Weingarten and Mulgrew and abandoned by so called journalists like deidre mcfadyen and Larry miraldi who went along with the UFT cover-ups of how our members were being sent to the end of their stellar careers....I left with logs and journals I kept and notations in my calendar of every major scam going on...

I was told to investigate PAVE academy which took over space in P.S. 15 in Red Hook.....Mulgrew then told me he was pulling the plug on my story because Bloomberg called him in a rage, telling him that the father of PAVE'S founder was a close friend of his named Julian Robertson, a billionaire hedge fund manager listed by Forbes as the 155th richest man in America, one spot ahead of David Rockefeller.... PAVE hadn't filed their 990 forms with the IRS but Bloomberg gave the school $35 million----our money----so the kid could build a new school in an under-utilized district....

[The main skeleton that was in the Klein files on Weingarten was that Weingarten actually had the very limited classroom experience of three years for a union president. The skeleton is here The above passages sound wild to outsiders, but awareness of the system shows that these things are going on in the DOE and the UFT.]

Walcott's thin resume, padded by Bloomberg in the way Unity did for Weingarten

Those in the know are aware of how former United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten had hardly the resume one would expect for showing experience as a teacher. Remember that her teaching program was part time in her early years.
(From Wikipedia):

From 1991 until 1994 she taught on per diem basis 122 days over the period at Clara Barton High School in Crown Heights. In fall of 1994 she taught history full-time at the school. By 1995, after six months of full-time teaching, Weingarten was elected Assistant Secretary of the UFT. She continued full-time teaching, from 1995 to 1997.

As legal counsel to the outgoing UFT president Sandra Feldman, she was being groomed for her position.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg made the case for Walcott by puffing up limited experience as thorough experience.
Yet, he has far thinner experience in education than Weingarten.
Looking at Bloomberg's text form of Walcott's curriculum vitae, in an appeal to out-going New York State Education Commissioner David Steiner,
the one thing that stands out is that prior to his tenure as deputy mayor, the one thing that is apparent is that Walcott was restless, not staying with a position for any fixed period.

BLOOMBERG'S INFLATING OF WALCOTT'S THIN JOB CREDENTIALS
Most glaring is how Bloomberg puffed up Walcott's hop-scotch time employed with children.
He worked for only one and a half years with children at the private, 90-seat Amistad Child Care Center in South Jamaica. Bloomberg distorted Walcott's position: he said that Walcott worked as a kindergarten teacher at Amistad. However, the center is a child care center, not a school, and the institution is for pre-kindergarten children (Bloomberg, thus, deceived us on two counts, by calling him a teacher and by implying that he worked with kindergarten-aged children).

And remember that state law requires the chancellor to have training in education supervision. Walcott lacks that; his training was in teaching and social work, not supervision.