President
RANDI WEINGARTEN is the newly elected president of the more than 1.4-million-member American Federation of Teachers, which represents teachers; paraprofessionals and school-related personnel; higher education faculty and staff; nurses and other healthcare professionals; and local, state and federal employees. As an AFT vice president since 1997, she has been involved in every major AFT policy initiative of the last decade. Weingarten also served on the AFT executive committee and the democracy committee, and headed the professional compensation committee. She has acted as an emissary for the national AFT in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Weingarten has been president of the United Federation of Teachers, AFT Local 2, since 1998, representing 110,000 non-supervisory educators in the New York City public school system, as well as home child care providers and other workers in health, law and education.
Weingarten also led New York City’s Municipal Labor Committee (MLC), an umbrella organization for the city's 100-plus public sector unions for 10 years. In that position, which she gave up after being elected AFT president, she coordinated labor negotiations and bargained for benefits on behalf of the unions’ 365,000 members.
Weingarten is known as a reform-minded leader who has demonstrated her commitment to improving schools, hospitals and public institutions for children, families and their communities. She represents the next generation of labor leader, committed to making our public institutions the best they can be, eager to organize new sectors of the workforce, and always seeking to win workers both economic security and a stronger voice in decisions that affect their jobs and the people they serve.
From 1986 to 1998, Weingarten served as counsel to UFT President Sandra Feldman, taking a lead role in contract negotiations and enforcement, and in lawsuits in which the union fought for adequate school funding and building conditions. A teacher of history at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights from 1991 to 1997, Weingarten helped her students win several state and national awards debating constitutional issues.
Elected as the union's assistant secretary in 1995 and as treasurer two years later, she became the UFT president after Feldman became president of the AFT. She was elected to her first full term the following year, and has been re-elected three times since by ratios of more than 3-to-1.
Under Weingarten’s leadership, UFT membership rose by 35 percent to more than 200,000, including 28,000 home-based child care providers for whom she helped win collective bargaining rights in the largest labor organizing drive in New York City in almost half a century. In addition, salaries of UFT-represented public school employees increased by 43 percent under contracts she negotiated between 2002 and 2008.
Weingarten has fought to make sure teachers and school support personnel are treated with respect and dignity, have a voice in the education of their students, and are given the support and resources they need to succeed in the classroom. She sees her role as an advocate for students as well as for union members. Her passion as leader of America’s largest union local has been to make every school a place where parents want to send their children and educators want to work.
Weingarten has led UFT members into areas of reform rarely embraced by more traditional teacher unions. Eager to return the charter school movement to its original purpose of enabling educators to create schools based on classroom-tested best practices, she spearheaded the opening of two union-operated public charter schools, which have significantly outperformed their Brooklyn home district. Last year she partnered with Green Dot schools, which operates unionized charter schools in California, to start a high school in the South Bronx in September 2008.
The UFT, under Weingarten, has worked in close cooperation with parents and community allies to make sure schools are safe and adequately funded. After a 13-year battle, during which Weingarten was arrested for joining a protest at the state capital in Albany, New York State's highest court ordered the state and city to substantially expand aid to New York City’s public schools. The resulting education finance, accountability and instructional reforms championed by the UFT include more funding for services for disadvantaged students and smaller class sizes.
Also during Weingarten’s tenure, the UFT has expanded its outreach to parents and students. Each year the union awards more than $1 million in scholarships to needy high school seniors, and Dial-A-Teacher, its after-school homework-help program, responds to requests in 12 languages from 80,000 students and their parents each year.
Weingarten has led the UFT to become a major provider of professional development services for its members, operating a “UFT University” offering undergraduate, graduate and unaccredited courses for 5,000 teachers and paraprofessionals each year. The UFT’s Teacher Center currently provides coaching, workshops and professional support at 300 sites.
Weingarten holds degrees from Cornell University School of Industrial Relations and the Cardozo School of Law. She worked as a lawyer for the Wall Street firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan from 1983 to 1986. She is an active member of the Democratic National Committee and numerous professional, civic and philanthropic organizations. Born in 1957 and raised in Rockland County, N.Y., Weingarten is currently a resident of Manhattan.
