Proud to Be a Union Member - Finally

Last week I went to my first UFT meeting as a retiree.  Lucky I did, because they handed out badges that looked like this (only round).  After the meeting was over, I walked from 52 Broadway to the World Trade Center, right through the heart of Wall Street,  proudly wearing my badge.  People with expensive suits and ties looked at it, and then looked away.  Once I got into the subway station, other people looked at it, and then at me, and smiled.

Today bloggers are writing about why they support unions.  Why do I support unions?  The answer is:

POWER

If that seems a little rude and crude, please forgive me. I was bullied by a billionaire for nine years. It has changed the "lens" through which I see the world (to use a Bloomburger term).

There are three kinds of power: The power to get, the power to hold, and the power to take away. When Bloomberg came into office in 2002, he gladly would have fired every teacher in the system, converted every public school into a private charter school, and hired only those teachers who were willing to work without a union contract, i.e. low wages and no benefits. The only reason that he wasn't able to do all that was because he didn't have the power. With all his billions, and all his friends' billions, he didn't have more power than the teachers of New York City. We held on and he couldn't take away...

...not all at once, anyway. However little by little, an ounce here, a pound there, he has slipped away with little pieces of power that we thought we could spare. Nine years later, thousands of letters to file, thousands of "U" ratings, thousands of hearings, thousands of dollars in fines, thousands of teachers flung into rubber rooms or into ATR limbo, he is well on his way to reaching the goals he had at the beginning of his reign.

One of the ways that he has made us loosen our hold, has been to shame us and blame us. He accused us of perpetrating a failed system that hurts children's chances of succeeding in life. He blamed us for putting our union benefits ahead of the welfare of our students. According to him, we, the teachers put children last; he, the billionaire, put children first. Our ranks were riddled with incompetents and abusers. He would weed them out and substitute them with "supermen" like himself--only younger. We were lazy, he was hardworking. We were selfish, he was selfless. We were resistant to change, he was the agent of change.

Little by little the abuse took effect. We became apologetic. We began to believe his lies. Perhaps we shouldn't have so much power. Perhaps we shouldn't be so selfish. We pointed fingers at each other.

"You're incompetent and resistant to change!"
"No, you are!"

We pushed our students to do well on his tests to prove to him that we weren't such lazy pieces of Charlie, Roger, Able, Peter.

We gave and we gave and we gave. Giving up power means you lose and someone else gains. You stop holding on and somebody else takes away.

Our union leadership rarely uses the word, "power". I just looked at the latest edition of "New York Teacher," and couldn't find the word anywhere. There is a lot of talk about rights and benefits, sacrifice and solidarity, but not power. Perhaps the word has negative connotations reminding us of those who ruthlessly dominated others--Atila the Hun, Hitler, Stalin--Bullies, despots, tyrants, overlords, slave drivers, etc.

But our power is different. Our power comes from large numbers of people working together in solidarity. It's a democratic power and serves the best interests of the great majority of people. All of Bloomberg's rhetoric about unions being responsible for a failed system is B-U-L-L. He and other billionaires are making the power grab of the century, of the millenium, and they are doing so by dividing us, setting us against each other, and making us ashamed of our power--the power of our union.

That was until Wisconsin. The rallies in Madison were not called by the union leadership. People went out and stood together, joined by a common cause of defending the right of collective bargaining. It is so important to hold on to that right because it gives us power when bargaining with very rich,powerful people and entities who have no problem returning us to the times when these words described the harsh reality of American workers:

Sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go.
I owe my soul to the company store.

There is no need to apologize for having taken power away from those who forced people to live like that. We should be exceedingly proud of workers who joined together to seize power from the rich and give it to the poor. Why would we ever want to go back to the way things were? Would that be putting children first?

Somewhere in my lonely battle with the forces of Bloomberg, I lost my pride as a union member. Thanks, Wisconsin for giving it back to me.

Of Course You Realize, This Means War

2:00 PM

Do something (legal) to demonstrate your solidarity with Madison today.

In Solidarity

Every message I get from the UFT leadership, ends with "In Solidarity" instead of "Sincerely Yours" before a signature.

I never really paid attention to the words. It was a simple formula with which to signal the end to the message--a transition to the signature.

However, Cairo and Madison have taught us all a lesson about the word SOLIDARITY. No convenient link to Wikipedia is necessary for this concept--it is alive and well and evolving.

"Rubber room may not be a bad place for you to reflect, but will be a bad place to feed your fixation."

That was a comment to my post of Saturday, April 25, 2009 titled "Lest we forget". I had just been sent to the Rubber Room on April 6, 2009, and would remain there until I retired on November 17, 2010.  At first I thought that someone from my school--maybe the principal--was the asshole who wrote this comment.  However, knowing the Rubber Room culture as I do, I now suspect it was another Rubber Room detainee.   It is an example of a supreme lack of solidarity.  Nevertheless, the asshole was partially right.  The RR was not a bad place for me to reflect.  Here is a summary of my reflections.

LACK OF SOLIDARITY GOT US INTO THIS PICKLE.  SOLIDARITY WILL GET US OUT.

Actually this is my original "fixation" now indelibly tattooed on my soul forever as a rule to live by.

Now that a film about "banksters" has gotten an Academy Award, and many other people besides me are pointing to billionaires and their corporations as the root of our economic woes, I can now say:

WELCOME TO MY FIXATION, AMERICA.

Billionaires are not heroes.  Billionaires are really good at amassing money and power. That's all they care about.  They don't care about you except for your role in getting them more money and power.  Don't let billionaires near your children.

Large amounts of money and power have been amassed in the hands of less than 1% of the American people.  This tiny minority (the number 400 has been mentioned) now have excessive influence over our elected officials at all levels--from mayors to presidents.  They have managed to control appointments of those officials who are not elected--chancellors, for example.  They control major union officials--Randi Weingarten, for instance.  

I generally oppose an US vs THEM mentality, but in this case, I make an exception.  It's US against 400 people.

"So", you might ask, "Principal Perry, the Bloomburger who persecuted you and sent you to the Rubber Room, is she one of US"?

Yes.  She definitely isn't one of THEM.   As far as the 400 are concerned she is one of THEIRS, never one of THEM.  I agree with the 400.  She is owned.  If they cut her chains, she wouldn't know what to do with herself, because she only knows how to mindlessly follow orders.  That's all she's good at. 

As far as I am concerned, it is a waste of time to focus on those of us who serve the 400.  We've all been there.  We have and still do make decisions based on whether or not it will affect our jobs--because without jobs we don't have homes, food, a college education for our children.  These are the chains that bind us all.

This is where Unions come in.  Our ability to collectively bargain with the 400 takes away from their ability to control us.  They are obviously moving aggressively forward to correct that inconvenient drag on their insatiable drive for more power.

I am sitting here on a rainy day writing my blog. I didn't have to get up, get dressed, and commute to work.  My rent, my food, my clothes, my health care is paid for by my pension and other union benefits negotiated in my contract.  I do not believe for one moment that I would have these things without a union contract. I do not thank Weingarten or Mulgrew, though.  It was negotiated long before they came on the scene because teachers worked in solidarity to establish a union.  

I am able to retire in dignity and relative comfort in spite of the fact that I was branded a BAD TEACHER by a billionaire's mind-slave.

I would like to call on all NYC public school teachers and their union leaders to stop looking for the BAD TEACHERS amongst you.  Stop engaging in the rhetoric invented by the billionaires to destroy solidarity.  Every time you focus on the teacher down the hall who is not quite up to snuff according to you, you are showing a lack of solidarity.  Every time you get together in the teachers' lounge and talk about what a BAD TEACHER so-and-so is, you are engaging in mobbing behavior.  Every time you come together to target a BAD TEACHER you are really just trying to offer up someone to the Bloommonster in hopes that if you feed the Ogre he will go away and leave you alone.  In reality, all he does is get fatter and hungrier.  He'll be back for more.  Whom will you offer up in sacrifice next?

The educational system is sick and corrupt.  It was bad before Bloomberg, and has just gotten worse thanks to him.  If your school were a healthy, organic social unit, where all adults--parents and teachers were working in unity and solidarity to provide the best possible education to the children, there would no such thing as a BAD TEACHER.  

In solidarity,

Moriah

Hal Lanse

I found this story on Betsy Combier's Blog, NYC Rubber Room Reporter.

Hal Lanse would like us to email Mike Mulgrew because he has been suspended without pay or health benefits.  According to law, teachers cannot be suspended without pay until they have a hearing in which  the Department of Education must prove that there is just cause to terminate the teacher.  Until the hearing takes place, and a judgement is given, the DOE must pay the teacher.  If the DOE is allowed to get away with suspending teachers without pay, a dangerous precedent might be established and other teachers might be summarily suspended as well.

Ok.  That is very well and good.  I believe we should act in solidarity.  However, if you read Mr. Lanse's account in his own words, you will find some details that might bother you as much as they  did me (or not).

"I was given no work for two weeks until I fell asleep on a couch."

"I refused to sit in the corner as ordered. My lawyer says this is corporal punishment." 

"I refused, however, when the DOE stooped to ordering me to put paper clips on stacks of papers."

"Last week, my supervisor yelled at me ....I filed a complaint. The DOE refused to log-in the complaint, so I followed the UFT's advice and called the police. "

Hal, we're not in the Rubber Room anymore.  You have just given us an example of the kinds of behavior that people got away with in the Rubber Room and nothing ever happened to them.  People would fall asleep in their chairs.  Nobody cared.  People would get in screaming fights with each other,   They'd get written up,  and absolutely nothing would happen.  People called 911 and filed police reports on other teachers, on security guards, on administrators for the most minor, stupid reasons.    People came to work looking like the homeless, dressed in dirty, worn out old clothes.  Some people smelled.  Others took to smearing the toilet walls with their own feces.  No matter what people did, they were not suspended without pay.

We don't have that kind of protection anymore.  We are in a work environment.  No, we don't have anything to do.  What a terrible waste.  I have a Masters  Degree plus 60 credits in the sciences, but I am doing the work of a file clerk.  Boo Hoo.  I am a 100,000 dollar a year file clerk. Boo Hoo.

That doesn't stop me from trying to look and behave like a professional.  No matter how badly the DOE slavebrains behave, it's no excuse for us to lower our own professional standards.  We need to be better than they are, and we need to organize as a group. 

Now that you are suspended without pay, Hal, you call for an organized action.  You had good reason to do so when your charges were dropped, but you were not placed in a school.  Put out the call:  All "TRC personnel who should be placed in a school, but who are doing nonteaching jobs meet at Joe's Diner on the corner of blank and blank streets."  Meet.  Strategize.  Call for actions that cannot be used to terminate you or suspend you, for now. 

Instead you protested alone, and now you're suspended alone.  And you've opened up a possible precedent for others to be suspended.

Is the Union right?   No.  Is the DOE right?  No. If you want to do something about it, don't fall asleep on a couch.


Oh, yeah.  Mike Mulgrew-- The agreement that you signed with Klein has been violated on so many levels, that it has become totally irrelevant.  If you don't grieve the violations, you are complicit.  Telling us to file grievances when many of us are whistle blowers who are here precisely because we filed grievances just shows what a hypocrite you are.

Caged Monkeys Don't Cooperate Very Well

But who can blame them?