Jerry White: Michigan's New Right-to-Work Law And Bankrupty of Labor Unions

I think that New Yorkers should stop paying dues to Unions until reform leads to protection of rights in collective bargaining and due process hearings. 

 Michigan’s right-to-work law

13 December 2012

LINK

Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder on Tuesday signed into law a so-called “right-to-work” bill, making Michigan the 24^th state in the US to adopt the measure. The law bars labor contracts requiring all workers to pay union dues as a condition of employment. Promoted by right-wing forces, its basic aim is to undermine the ability of workers to collectively fight in defense of their interests in opposition to the employers.

The inability of the United Auto Workers and other unions to mount any serious opposition to the legislation demonstrates the bankruptcy of these organizations. They long ago ceased to fight for the interests of their rank-and-file members or the working class as a whole.

The UAW, the Michigan AFL-CIO, the Michigan Education Association and the other unions are incapable of mobilizing workers. They have spent the last three decades working to suppress and betray workers’ struggles and impose the demands of the corporations for one round of wage and benefit cuts after another. They have collaborated in the closure of plants and mass layoffs, leaving former industrial centers like Detroit devastated and impoverished. The UAW agreed to a six-year strike ban as part of the wage-cutting contract dictated by the Obama’s Auto Task Force in 2009.

The UAW once had over 1 million members and as recently as 2004 had 650,000 on its membership rolls. Today it has a membership of about 380,000.

Workers do not look to these anti-democratic, sclerotic organizations, with their legions of six-figure-salaried officials and joint union-management slush funds, as instruments of struggle. They hold them in deserved contempt.

The executives who run the UAW and the other unions oppose the right-to-work law only because it threatens the flow of dues that sustains their apparatuses. They couldn’t care less about the rights of workers, and are no less hostile to the class struggle than those who pushed the bill through the legislature.

Where do the union dues go? To providing funds for the Democratic Party and the bureaucrats’ own affluent lifestyles. Meanwhile, young workers in UAW plants are forced to work for poverty-level wages of $15 an hour, endure back-breaking speedup, work ten- and even 12-hour days with no overtime pay, and watch as “their” union reps police the shop floor on behalf of the bosses.

With the new law not going into affect until April—and at workplaces only after the expiration of current agreements—the UAW bureaucrats at Solidarity House and officials at union headquarters all over the state will work overtime to push through new concessions contracts to lock in their dues income for the next several years.

Just one day before the passage of the right-to-work law, the UAW hosted President Obama at a Detroit-area factory and cheered his plans to slash and ultimately dismantle Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. In his speech, Obama criticized the right-to-work law on the grounds that the UAW had demonstrated its usefulness by collaborating with the government and the auto companies in slashing wages and benefits and returning the US auto industry to profitability.

The collapse of the trade unions is the outcome of the reactionary political perspective upon which they were based. The UAW arose out of massive struggles in the 1930s, which began with a rebellion against the old labor organizations of the American Federation of Labor.

To establish the new industrial unions, workers had to carry out sit-down strikes and general strikes that paralyzed entire cities. They had to battle company thugs, police and the National Guard—and thousands paid with their lives.

The great tragedy of this movement was that it remained under the control of a right-wing, pro-capitalist bureaucracy, which from the earliest stages worked to subordinate the newly organized unions to the corporations, the Democratic Party and American imperialism. In the 1940s, the socialists and left-wing militants who had led the sit-down strikes were purged from the UAW in the anti-communist witch hunts carried out by the union bureaucrats.

It did not take very long for these organizations to begin their decline, which coincided with the first signs in the 1950s and 1960s of the end of American postwar economic hegemony. By the 1970s and 1980s, the growing global integration of production and finance undercut the nationalist perspective on which they were based.

The unions had no answer to the domination of the world economy by giant corporations, which made it possible for the capitalists to exploit a global labor market and transfer production to low-wage countries. Their only response was to go from pressuring employers to improve the wages and conditions of workers to pressuring the workers to improve the competitiveness of the corporations by means of layoffs, wage cuts and speedup.

The unions repudiated any form of independent struggle and adopted the corporatist policy of union-management “partnership.” This went hand in hand with the promotion of economic nationalism to pit US workers against their class brothers around the world.

The result of this process is the transformation of the unions into labor syndicates. They have become businesses that seek a cut in the profits sweated out of the workers. The UAW is today a major holder of stock in the Big Three automakers. Its income is tied to driving up the profits and stock prices of the companies at the expense of the workers.

What conclusions must be drawn?

It is not a matter of reviving these corrupt and reactionary organizations, as proposed by the various pseudo-left allies of the union bureaucracy such as the International Socialist Organization.

New organizations, rank-and-file committees of struggle independent of the UAW and the other unions and based on an entirely new perspective, must be built. The guiding principle must be the unconditional defense of the jobs, living standards and working conditions of all workers, not what the corporate bosses and their political mouthpieces say they can afford.

Such committees must fight for the full industrial and political mobilization of the working class. They must reject the “Buy American” nationalism of the unions and coordinate their struggles against the global corporations with workers throughout the world.

Most fundamentally, the working class needs a new political perspective and political party. Workers are confronting not just this or that rapacious boss, but an entire economic system in the US and internationally—the capitalist profit system—which, in order to satisfy the needs of the ruling elite, requires the spread of social misery, poverty, war and the most brutal forms of exploitation.

The issue is not fighting for better terms of exploitation, but ending the system that is based on exploitation. In opposition to the two parties of big business, the working class must build its own mass party to fight for the socialist reorganization of economic life on the basis of human need, not the accumulation of private wealth. We urge workers to join and build the Socialist Equality Party as the new, revolutionary leadership of the working class.

Jerry White

Happy Holiday From Betsy Combier

I want to wish everyone who reads my blog a happy, healthy holiday! Take some time to reflect on all the good times and good people you have met over the past year. Leave the trash in the garbage. Pursue justice and not malice.

Facebook friend Bob Kappstatter sent me the link below:

George Carlin wrote:

Isn't it amazing that George Carlin - comedian of the 70's and 80's - could write something so very eloquent...and so very appropriate. 

 
A Message by George Carlin: 

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways ,but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. 

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.

We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've done larger things, but not better things.

We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete...

Remember; spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever.

Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and leave your side.

Remember, to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn't cost a cent.

Remember, to say, 'I love you' to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you.

Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person will not be there again.

Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind.

AND ALWAYS REMEMBER:

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

If you don't share this with anyone....Who cares?

George Carlin

Union-Run Charter School In Fight for Survival

By BETH FERTIG

LINK

When the United Federation of Teachers opened its own charter school in 2005, then-teachers union president Randi Weingarten called it “an oasis.” At a time when privately-run charter schools were springing up all over the city – without unionized teachers – Weingarten wanted to prove that a charter could succeed with the cooperation and expertise of labor.

AFT President Randi Weingarten

But today, the U.F.T. Charter School in East New York finds itself fighting for survival. Just a third of its elementary students were proficient on this year’s reading tests, and the school got a “D” on its annual progress report. It’s also been plagued by high teacher and principal turnover. The State University of New York’s Charter Schools Institute put the school on probation in 2010, by renewing its charter for only three more years instead of five, and will decide in early 2013 whether or not it should close.

With so much at stake, the teachers union led education reporters on a brief tour of the K-12 charter school’s elementary campus Tuesday.

The school looks very much like a typical city public school. It’s co-located in a school building covered with scaffolding. Student work is showcased in the hallways and a bulletin board shows off smiling photos of the students of the month. Students wear uniforms – khaki pants and polo shirts with a U.F.T. star logo.

In a third grade classroom, teachers Niambi Allen and Kathia Darius worked with 26 children, many of them students with disabilities, during a literacy lesson. They were learning how to write persuasive essays by debating a heated topic: whether or not to get a classroom pet.

“What are phrases that opinions start with?” asked Allen, the special education teacher. The students offered the phrases “I believe,” “maybe” and “I think” as ways to write about an opinion.

“Here’s the thing about opinions,” Allen clarified. “Opinions are always going to start with ‘I.’ I think, I believe, I wish.”

Eight year-old Maliah Harris shot up her hand when the teacher asked for transition words. “First, next, last and finally!”

Allen just started working at the school this fall. She said she’s worked as a substitute at many other schools, including private schools, and believes the U.F.T. Charter School knows what it’s doing.

“I think that this school is amazing because there are so many things to help students and intervene if there is a problem,” she said, referring to the use of weekly assessments. She estimated that at least 75 percent of her students are “right where they should be” academically.

“I’ve had far more challenging kids, these guys are awesome,” she said. “It’s unfortunate what the test scores say because it doesn’t really reflect what we do in the classroom.”

The school’s English Language Arts exam scores for grades 3-8 this year were the same as the average for District 19 in Brooklyn: 33 percent reading at or above proficient. Its math scores were slightly lower than the distict-wide average of 43.7 percent at or above proficient.

Elementary school leader Michelle Bodden-White agreed the scores don’t tell the whole story. She’s in her fifth year in charge (the school uses the term “leader” instead of principal) of the elementary school, which spans grades K-5. She was previously Vice President of the teachers union and taught in Brooklyn.

“We have over time seen our scores rise which tells us we were going in the right direction,” she said, referring to the school’s progress reports from the city. She attributed this year’s low scores, partly, to the death of a fifth grade student from meningitis right around the time of the state exams. “The school was devastated,” she said. “He had been here from kindergarten.”

She also described positive changes since she started five years ago. “The teachers really work together weekly,” she said, referring to the regular math and reading assessments. “We’ve put a lot of emphasis on reading non-fiction and responding and understanding informational text because that’s a very big focus of the Common Core.” And each K-3 classroom has two teachers.

In 2010 the U.F.T. brought in Shelia Evans-Tranumn to oversee both the elementary and secondary campuses. Evans-Tranumn is a veteran of the city schools. “There were many problems,” she acknowledged, noting “teacher absences and teachers not focusing during the workday on the work at hand” as well as a “culture of failure” among students and lack of discipline. She said the secondary school campus is located about a mile away in a neighborhood rife with gangs.

But when asked why other charter schools get better results with low-income students at risk, Evans-Tranumn suggested they have some advantages.

“Right now in this building, our level 3 and 4 students are being recruited by other charter schools, out of the fourth grade,” she said. “We don’t go in and rob another school of their top learners. But many charter schools have an aggressive on-the-ground campaign to get the better students.”

Other principals around the city have made similar complaints, but those accusations are tough to prove.

Evans-Tranumn also said struggling students may feel more welcome at her school than in some of the “no excuses” charters, which have rigid disciplinary systems. Whole classrooms are rewarded when students behave well, to encourage cooperation. And Evans-Tranumn said students at the U.F.T. Charter school are rarely suspended.

As in district schools, the U.F.T. Charter promotes students to the next grade with a level 2 on their state exams (just short of proficiency), though it requires them to do extra work. Some of the more demanding charters demand level 3′s. And while those schools often have 9-10 hour school days, the U.F.T. Charter’s day is similar in length to that of regular district schools – while also offering after school support.

SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute is expected to decide in the next month or two on whether the U.F.T. Charter School will be allowed to stay open after June 2013. Critics of the teachers union often point to the school as a sign that the union doesn’t always know the best ways to educate children. Evans-Tranumn acknowledged there were risks when the union opened the charter school. She gave the U.F.T. credit for trying, and for picking such a challenging low-income neighborhood.

“All of us in education can’t just take the easy roads,” she said. “We have to take the hard roads. We have to do what we can to transform schools in our own community, in this state, in this nation.”

Beth Fertig is a senior reporter at WNYC. Follow her on Twitter @bethfertig

David Hedges: Tough on Teachers, Soft on Disruptive Students

 

LINK

The current climate that prevails in the Brooklyn High Schools where I have been assigned on weekly rotations is that principals have an systemic incentive to be tough on teachers, but when it comes to handling students who prevent other students from learning, they are very lenient. 

Why would this be?  Well, the age of the weak principal has been ushered in by the data driven leadership.  It's about getting students to graduate.  Hear now: in olden times the students who couldn't cut it became factory workers, mechanics, or gave their lives to their country.  Then came social promotion.  Now, the students who can't behave themselves get every chance in the book (written, probably, by a well-meaning bleeding heart).  The least well behaved students know that they have the principal by the proverbial balls.  Such students now know that the principals are under pressure to kowtow to them.  "If you fail me you'll get fired," is the standard line I hear.  Another popular refrain is to spread rumors.  Teacher X is a racist.  Sorry to say it, but principals are especially likely to water down requirements, and become very worried about their six-digit salaries being a subject of student approval and review. 

With more teachers leaving than ever, even before their salaries make it worth their while to stick it out the real reason intelligent humans become teachers: summers off, of course.  You need a real purpose to get through 180 days of disrespectful treatment.  (Teachers are bookended daily by being belittled and micromanaged by their supervisors, who are, at least in my case, chronological subordinates).  The cult of disrespect must be very catching, for the students join in and presume to be in league with the administration.  Students who may not know enough to pass a Regents exam, but who sure know their way around litigious language and the finer nuances of blackmail. 

Principals are in a tough place: if they are tough on the disruptive ones, they risk losing their numbers (oh, I mean students), and that fancy salary they get.  They also risk being found out as Tweed-brown-nosers.  The nice-guy syndrome is about the only talent it seems to take to keep a job in management.  At every faculty meeting I attend, the unifying motif is how to increase, not improve, student learning.  A well paid administrator preaches to rookie teachers about how their job is on the line unless more kids pass.  Pavlov's dog has everyone by the collar.  Only on one occasion did I hear a very tough principal say that what he wanted to see in the classroom was more creativity in the lessons.  Data-schmaytta, he said, in so many words.  Data doesn't make you a better teacher: creative lessons are what we need, not more data-crap.  He even shunned Cathy Black when she made one of her ridiculous visits. 

Sadly, most of the teachers who aren't ATRs are so nervous about losing their jobs that they forget that teaching is supposed to be the marriage of duty and inclination.  We aren't circus seals trainers, flinching under the ring master's whip.  We are supposed to be the ones who model thinking beyond the Euclidian world and the carpentered horizon of the box.  Even logic is more beautiful than the kind of obedience and intimidation that passes for leadership in most schools nowadays.  With the loss of the older teacher, whether he or she was good or not, the system loses its conscience.  There is nobody left to contextualize the progress anymore.  Are students any brighter or more compassionate now, or are their test scores modified so they feel better about themselves?  I think the leadership academy may just have gone aground, rather than to a better land of learning.

Is it really worth the money?  (Actually, it's not such a fancy salary: if you work out the arithmetic, hourly wage, that is, their salary is just about what a teacher's is, who is getting top pay.  So why is the DOE paying top dollar for principals who don't have as much experience as their veteran teachers?  Why not ask the guy who runs the show, a member of the one-percent.  Gee, maybe there is a reason why principals are coddling the  disruptive ones- as long as they graduate kids whose maximum wage will be the prevailing minimum wage, there's more profit for the one-percenters, isn't there?

Tribute To The Teachers and Children Killed in Sandy Hook, Conn.

Thank You,Teachers by Chris Clarke
 
Victoria Soto, age 27, apparently died yesterday while trying to get her students into a safer spot in their classroom at Sandy Hook. She stood between the murderer and her students, and he killed her....given the kind of person who chooses to remain in the profession despite all the sacrifice and opprobrium because they want to help kids, Soto’s tragic sacrifice isn’t in the least surprising. It’s what teachers do.

From Betsy Combier

Victoria Soto

Lauren Rousseau

Editor, Parentadvocates.org

The tribute below has expressed the thoughts of so many people - including myself - that I am re-posting here. My heart is torn in pieces over this senseless killing, and I hope that people throughout America can now throw politics out, and deal with getting those individuals in pain and distress the help that they need before something like this happens again.

Betsy Combier

Pictures of many of the shooting victims.

Thank you, teachers
Education by Chris Clarke

Victoria Soto, age 27, apparently died yesterday while trying to get her students into a safer spot in their classroom at Sandy Hook. She stood between the murderer and her students, and he killed her.
This is Soto right here.

(Updated to add: Andrew Revkin shares more on Soto's colleagues Kaitlin Roig and Maryrose Kristopik: "Kaitlin Roig locked her students in the bathroom and kept them safe, while Victoria Soto was trying to do the same when she came face-to-face with the gunman and was shot, execution style. Maryrose Kristopik barricaded her music students in a closet, while the gun man fought to get in." Roig and Kristopik survived, thankfully.)

I spent a little time thinking about Soto and her colleagues this morning. I’ve known quite a few grade school teachers over the years. Until 2009, I was married to one. And I realized as I was thinking about Soto that there’s not a single one of those grade school teachers I’ve known, my ex- emphatically included, who I could imagine doing anything but jumping between the gunman and his or her students.
I know that’s an argument from incredulity. I know teachers are human beings, and human beings freeze up when they’re frightened. But I’ve also seen the sacrifices grade school teachers make on days the media don’t notice. Over and over, day in and day out, with no hope of any relief outside of leaving the job.

And for this they get to be one of the most denigrated groups of professionals in the United States, targeted every single goddamn year for one “reform” after another, vouchers from the fundies and charter schools from the liberals, forced by law to take every spark of individuality and interest out of their curricula and then blamed when their students lose interest, resented their pensions and their health care by people who then blame them when their kids turn out to be apathetic.

Once the media horror dies down about Soto and her co-workers’ sacrifices, I guarantee you this: public school grade school teachers will go right back to being the despised class. “Union thugs.” “With three-month vacations.” “Teaching kids their ABCs.” All the idiotic, ill-informed, right wing anti-intellectual myths will rev up again as if nothing had happened. And in the meantime the people the Fox pundits despise will go on teaching kids to read and do math and treat each other with respect.

In other words, it’s not really that much of a jump to imagine all the teachers I know instinctively taking a bullet to protect their kids. To a first approximation, every single one of them does the same thing every waking moment, giving up their lives by increment to give their students a chance at a better life.

I don’t at all mean to trivialize the sacrifice Soto and her colleagues made by comparing it to, say, having to buy pencils on your own dime because the Republicans cut your district’s budget even further. What I’m saying is that given the kind of peson who chooses to remain in the profession despite all the sacrifice and opprobrium because they want to help kids, Soto’s tragic sacrifice isn’t in the least surprising. It’s what teachers do.

So I just thought I’d take a moment to thank those of you reading this who are, or who have been, grade school teachers for your routine heroism. We don’t recognize it enough.

Let me anticipate a likely semi-trollish objection: yes, there are grade school teachers who should not be teaching. Yes, there are burned out seat warmers. Yes, there are people teaching subjects they’re not really qualified to teach. Yes, there are the occasional people who shouldn’t be around children at all. If our society valued teachers the way teachers as a class deserve, such people wouldn’t be there. The incompetent and the abusive would never make the cut, and the burned-out would be far less burned out.

Victoria Soto: Sandy Hook teacher who wanted to mould young minds
First-grade teacher Soto, who had worked at the school for five years, reportedly died trying to shield her students from harm

A teacher who died trying to protect her children in Sandy Hook school has been described as a dedicated educator who had her dream job.

Victoria Soto, 27, was one of six adults and 20 children killed in the elementary school shooting on Friday.

It is thought Soto died trying to shield her students. According to a cousin, Jim Wiltsie, a police officer, said the family had been told that Soto was attempting to get her class into a closet when the gunman entered the room. "In our eyes, she's a hero," Wiltsie told ABC News.

"She was trying to shield, getting her children into a closet and protect them from harm. And by doing that put herself between the gunman and the children and that is when she was tragically shot and killed."

Wiltsie said the family had taken some comfort in knowing that Soto died while doing a job that she loved.

"Her life dream was to be a teacher and her instincts kicked in when she saw there was harm coming towards her students," he told ABC News, adding: "She lost her life doing what she loved. She loved her kids. Her goal in life was to be a teacher to mould young minds."

Her desire to educate started at an early age, those close to the teacher said. As well as teaching first grade, Soto was also studying for a master's degree in special education at Southern Connecticut State University. She graduated from Eastern Connecticut State University with an elementary education and history degree. "I have a passion for learning," she wrote on her online teacher's page.

Soto listed her passions outside school as spending time with family members, along with her dog, a black Labrador named Roxie. Soto had been at the school for five years, first as an intern, then as a classroom teacher.

"I look forward to an amazing year in the first grade with my amazing students of room 10!" she wrote.