Delegates hear of ‘dangerous’ budget cuts and vote to oppose them

President's report

Calling the Albany budget crisis and its threat to rob city schools of as much as $600 million in state aid “the most dangerous thing this union has faced in 30 years,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the April 21 Delegate Assembly that members had to redouble their efforts to get the message out to elected officials that “children can’t be made to pay for the mistakes of Wall Street.”

He urged delegates to ask members to “continue using faxes, phones, e-mails. It can’t stop, because nobody but us is putting up that fight. It has to be the will of this union. Every member has to understand that we are — bottom line — the ones who protect the schools.”

Mulgrew also said the union “has to go after the Department of Education” for its mismanagement and extravagant no-bid contracts. Union research, based on Freedom of Information Act inquiries, “shows that central doubled its high-paid staff in eight years,” Mulgrew said.

In the matter of the chancellor’s efforts to eliminate seniority in layoffs, Mulgrew argued that it’s a diversion, that nobody should be laid off and that the way to prevent layoffs is to properly fund the schools.

“We’re fighting and putting all our energy into seeing that there are no layoffs and that every member stays on the job,” he said. He accused the chancellor of trying to split the union by turning newer teachers against more senior teachers and also trying to pit parents against the union.

On the national scene, he complimented the UFT retirees for pressuring the Florida governor to veto a bill that would have put teachers on yearly contracts, with renewals based on students’ test scores, but warned that the fact that both legislative houses passed the bill in the first place did not bode well.

He suggested that the large number of New Jersey school district budget rejections were the outcome of the governor’s effort to “blame the school-funding shortfall on teachers who are greedy and don’t like kids” after they nixed his demand for a wage freeze. (The governor, after slashing state aid, had urged residents not to let districts make up the difference by raising local property taxes.)

The president also asked every delegate to understand that the recently ratified Washington (D.C.) Teachers Union contract did not introduce new layoff provisions, as advertised; those, he said, were approved eight years ago, “and they completely destabilized the work force, causing a loss of 50 percent of new teachers in their first two years.”

In other news, the president announced that oral arguments in the city’s appeal of the court decision overturning its closing of 19 city schools (as a result of a suit brought by the UFT, the NAACP and others) will be heard on May 13.

Finally, he reported no movement toward a negotiated contract after the first state mediation session; a second session was being planned.

Mulgrew closed by urging members to take part in the April 29 “Make Wall Street Pay” demonstration sponsored by the AFL-CIO, which argued that the financial sector’s record profits and all-time-high bonuses last year — the products of the federal bailout — should go to helping working people, too.

Resolutions

Delegates unanimously passed a resolution, introduced by Treasurer Mel Aaronson, committing the union, in the face of harsh spending cuts proposed by both houses of the state Legislature, to oppose any budget that would “result in higher class sizes, fewer resources and supports for schools, staff layoffs, delayed school maintenance and repairs, and other service and program cuts.”

The resolution opposed any layoffs and called on the UFT to “join with other education advocates in calling upon the governor and state Legislature to approve “a fair budget that protects education funding and provides adequate resources for schools to work toward academic improvement.” UFT Treasurer Mel Aaronson introduces a resolution to oppose spending cuts that would “result in higher class sizes, fewer resources and supports for schools, staff layoffs, delayed school maintenance and repairs, and other service and program cuts.”

It also pledged delegates to “continue mobilizing members, write letters, send faxes, visit elected officials and [engage in] any other action necessary to stop the budget cuts.”

Another resolution that passed unanimously was put forward from the floor for discussion immediately by Executive Board member Michael Shulman. That resolution supported Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin’s Senate bill that would provide $23 billion in federal dollars to help avert layoffs of public school educators due to state budget shortfalls.

The item was approved for discussion but there wasn’t enough time to vote on it. Moved to next month’s agenda were seven other resolutions already approved by the Executive Board.

Motions failing included one put forward for May’s DA by Clara Barton HS delegate Joan Heymont that called for the total withdrawal of U.S and U.N. troops in Haiti, and an end to what Heymont charged was oppression of Haitian citizens by their own government and the flagrant contravening of existing Haitian labor laws by island employers. Heymont argued that these demands come from the Haitian unions themselves.

Vice President for Academic High Schools Leo Casey responded that the DA should wait until it knew more of the specifics of “how the Haitian unions and the Haitian teachers unions feel about the issues.”

He did urge that the UFT do “diligent work” in ascertaining what the Haitian labor movement is demanding, and — if warranted — that the Executive Board come to the May DA with a proposal based on that work. President Mulgrew encouraged Heymont to be involved in the study and to “work with Leo to get that done.”

Tom Crane, chapter leader at IS 218 in Brooklyn, proposed a resolution to hold, with other city unions, a citywide demonstration against city layoffs and cuts in services. In the debate from the floor, delegate Fred Arcoleo of the HS for Law and Public Service said those issues could be raised at the May 1 rally for labor and immigrant rights, which the UFT had previously endorsed.

While the rally resolution failed, Mulgrew asked Crane to “talk to me afterward, because we’ve got to get something done.”