Randi's Teacher Union Day Speech Nov. 6, 2005

Nov 6, 2005 3:37 PM

You all know, we all know we had a very hard fight with the City, we had an agonizing ratification, and we closed a chapter on Thursday — but it would be a real big mistake to say that we closed a book. Because we still have a lot of work to do.

One of the things I thought about over the weekend, and am thinking about today, is, ‘What makes this period of time different than the period of time when our predecessors started this union?’ And that’s what Teacher Union Day is about. It is a celebration of our predecessors, and of what we tried to do to not only to make them proud but to bring the union movement forward.

This week I didn’t do much reading; I was biting my fingernails a lot. But I just read an article in the New York Times magazine over the weekend, which said “We regret to inform you, you no longer have a pension.” Or something that was in the Business section, in the middle of our ratification, that talked about how healthcare reality intrudes: “GM employees confront the way it is now” — co-pays and deductibles and an entirely different way of dealing with retiree health. I started thinking about that and what some of our colleagues in the labor movement did in this contract negotiation when they were confronted with the very same realities. What is the difference between a current union taking from its new employees and cutting their salary over five years versus someone in the UAW looking at what is going on with GM and cutting healthcare benefits for all active employees when they retire. When you take from one to give to the other, it is that same kind of agonizing choice.

And then I thought about what do we do, what have we done and what have our predecessors done in those same situations. And I thought about the Deferral Agreement — remember that other agonizing choice, those of you that were here? In the early 1990’s when 4,000 of our new teachers and paraprofessionals were about to be laid off, what our union did was defer a piece of a raise. In exchange got the mid-winter break – 2 additional days off by the way, but we deferred a piece of that raise to save the jobs of our members. And that ratification was as agonizing as this one and it was also in the sixties [percent range].

And I think about those things, but I also think about one other thing, which is, ‘What makes this time different than those other times?’ In the Deferral Agreement you at least had an employer who cared about the work force. In the sixties you did not have an employer who cared about the work force. Just like in the airline industry, you certainly do not have employers that care about the workforce.

What did we do when we didn’t have an employer who cared about the workforce? What did our predecessors do? It was never a question of whether or not to strike, but only whether or not it was the right circumstances to strike. Not whether or not there was a willingness to strike. No doubt the same issues happened then as now. I don’t think there’s anybody in our membership, ever, who could answer the question in the affirmative when somebody says can they afford to strike. There’s nobody who wants to strike.

The issue for us going forward is simply this: We have to build, just like we had in the 60’s when this union started, and inculcate in our membership and leadership (and many of you sitting in this room are our leadership) a sense that, regardless of the consequences, there has to be a willingness to strike. The only question becomes not whether there is a willingness but whether it will be effective to do a strike in certain situations. Again, not whether there is a willingness, but whether it will be effective.

Because in the situation we find ourselves in right now, let’s take Bloomberg vs. us. Bloomberg could very easily enforce his goals. How? He had an arbitration from the police, a fact-finding decision from the UFT, every single civilian union who had already given concessions in exchange for a raise, and he had, as you all see now, pretty much a sure shot at being re-elected. Bloomberg had it very easy this time because every union that came before and after us had essentially paid for half of their increases through concessions. He could enforce it because people knew he was going to be re-elected.

That is the flip side that I am talking about. What can we do to enforce our will? And that’s why my friends, we can come up with an incredibly ambitious agenda for everything, but at the end of the day — Jeanette DiLorenzo used to tell this story — we had 40,000 teachers and 5,000 went on strike, but that was in 1960. But still, at the end of the day, a labor union has to be willing to go on strike regardless of the consequences, and management must know and understand that willingness.

How do we get there? We have a whole bunch of things to do. We have to have this kind of advocacy on a chapter level, not just on a city level, and a lot of you and the Trachtenberg Awards [winners] are key in terms of this. We have to make sure that we rebuild our chapters in a way to have the kind of advocacy that I just saw, for example, a couple of days ago in District 27, 23, and 19. Advocacy that’s so intense that, after we had a meeting with all the chapter leaders in Region 5 about all the micromanagement that has been going on there, we got, within 24 hours (because the superintendent knew we were serious about it), we got a missive from the superintendent that said, “Henceforth and until further notice stop with all the bulletin board mania.” And I understand, and there are some people from D27 here, that there was dancing in the schools for the first time in a long time, the moment the memorandum hit.

The same thing is going on at Brooklyn Tech. Very, very, very courageous people for the first time have said, ‘We’ll stand together, the entire English Department, and we will finally fight the bullying of the principal and the English AP.” And we will win that battle because the chapter is standing together.

That kind of advocacy is what we need to do. The contract, the white book —which, by the way, will have more pages with this contract, not less — needs to be enforced by advocates at the school level. But the white books — all the white books have more pages to them — it doesn’t act or talk by itself.

1. We need to develop the willingness to strike.

2. Build chapters so that they will have that same kind of willingness on a day to day basis as we are going to have to have in terms of collective bargaining.

3. We have to make sure that this contract is implemented appropriately and fairly. And let me say this. If these guys can’t figure out how to deal with the 37.5 minutes – we ain’t gonna help them get out of their problems. We will help our members if on a school level they want to do things differently, but if Joel Klein or Michael Bloomberg calls me and says, ‘Can you help us out?’ you know what my answer is. Because they gotta earn the respect back, and they gotta earn the trust back. And, they certainly have very little of it right now.

But implementation doesn’t just mean the 37.5 minutes. For example I suspect that after people get their retro in mid-December, that sometime in January a lot of people are going to ask this question: ‘How are we gonna know if there’s a disproportionate number of letters in their files?’ The answer is, they can go to their files and for the first time ever, members will be able to pull letters from their files that are more than 3 years old. So when I talk about implementation, implementation is a lot more than what they want implemented, it is also about what we want implemented.

It’s not all about grievances and consultations. We have to fight for an agenda in the future that’s about our members being more involved and engaged educationally on a school by school level. So, instead of them saying you have to do 4,700 portfolios by the end of the day, we have to develop in terms of our chapters and members, a way to say that is not appropriate educationally on a school level. It’s not appropriate for kids and it’s not appropriate for staff.

That’s part of what respect is. Being respected for the work we do in schools, and that’s how our agenda has to be. It is not simply a consultation; it’s about fighting. We have to fight for smaller class size in all schools in all grades and in all divisions. We have to fight to end social promotion, not just by Saturday or Sunday or Summer school academy. Or pre-k – we’d be in a heck of a lot better shape for kids by the time they got to Junior High School and High School if every 3 and 4 year old had pre-k.

4. Our agenda has to be that kind of advocacy on the City and State [levels]. And I see Bob Jackson is here. There should be no excuses! One of the worst things that happened during this election was what happened to CFE. What happened to any discussion on CFE? Do we no longer need the Campaign for Fiscal Equity because the mayor doesn’t want to take responsibility for not being willing to fight that fight in Albany? We have to be the ones fighting that fight in Albany and here in the City with Bob Jackson.

5. And that also brings me to the 5^th fight — and I saw Bridget and I saw others — which is the political fight. The political and lobbying fight this year cannot just be about 55/25. 55/25 has to be tops on our agenda, but it also has to be about getting those kinds of resources for lower class sizes, for making sure that the SAVE Act gets funded, so that if you want to send a child to an alternative setting, and a principal says there is no place else to go, that there is. And it also has to be a fight — and we can’t be apologetic, nor do I want you to be apologetic — about the Taylor Law and how unfair it is to unions. I don’t care how hard a fight this is, we have to make this fight so our members will have the willingness to fight.

So we have a big agenda that includes creating a willingness to strike, creating real solidarity at activities on a school level, creating a real activity on a political forum, even if we loose those fights, and making sure we do all of this without ceding our roles as educators.

Anyone in your schools who says that the union needs to do this or that, get me their names, telephone number and email addresses! Because those have to be the activist of the future. If we don’t make them our union, then what we are going to have is a union of a thousand activists or two thousand activists and that won’t make a union. Everyone, every single one of the folks that is concerned one way or the other, is to engage them in an aggressive, ambitious agenda about making things better, having the spine to enforce how we make our vision a reality.