Editorials
Union action: Three success stories
Jan 18, 2007 2:47 PM
1. Advocating for clients
Labor unions exist to fight for the welfare of their members. Salaries, working conditions, due process and all the rest — that’s the bottom line for most unions and why they were formed in the first place: to give workers a fair shake against the enormous and otherwise unfettered power of employers — both private and public.
Yes, it’s the bottom line, but in the case of a union of professionals, like the UFT, it cannot be the be-all and end-all. Our union miust be concerned with the quality of the work our members do for our clients as well as the welfare of their clients — students in the case of educators, patients in the case of nurses.
In fact, given the bean-counting, assembly-line mentality of all too many employers in our fields, it sometimes seems the only people who care about the welfare of their clients are the UFT members who work with patients and students every day.
This unfortunate fact of life is demonstrated again and again by school administrators who focus on what they consider “accountability and costs” at the expense of good pedagogy and hospital administrators who are more concerned about healthy profits than healthy patients. How else to explain Tweed’s recalcitrance in lowering class sizes, as just one example. How else to explain hospital administrators who fight tooth-and-nail against every attempt to shorten the working hours and workloads of nurses.
At the annual Federation of Nurses/UFT conference recently, Special Representative Anne Goldman said, “We don’t have a health care system; we have a sick-care system. We should be responding to people, not pathologies. Instead we’ve got corporate control with little concern for health-care outcomes.”
That’s the unfortunate climate that not only governs working conditions for nurses but governs health conditions for patients. But Goldman went on to point out how much success the UFT nurses have had over the years in pushing management to improve conditions for the benefit not only of the nurses but of the patients. It’s the hard-won contracts that the nurses have negotiated over the years that have provided them an effective “collective voice” and has allowed them to become successful advocates for patients rights.
As the article on page 20 indicates, some of the nurses — those who work for the Visiting Nurse Service of New York and for the Lutheran Medical Center — are in the midst of negotiating new pacts. They will be striving, of course, for gains in salaries and working conditions and staving off the clarion call for benefit reductions. But, being professionals, they will also have their patients in mind.
2. Safety first
“In our schools, discipline is paramount.”
Many members might find that statement more wishful thinking than fact. In many schools, enforcing the school Discipline Code has been so lax that the union revamped its entire safety program this school year in order to create transparency that pressured the Department of Education to get principals to enforce the Discipline Code, to set up SAVE rooms for disruptive students and to suspend students who needed to be taken out of the schools where they were preventing other students from learning.
The UFT set up an online reporting system so members can quickly report safety incidents because in all too many schools the principals were not filing incident reports; apparently, in the climate of fear that pervades the school system, they were afraid their supervisors might think they were not in control of their schools.
So that statement about discipline being paramount, in far too many schools, is not accurate. But at long last there is a glimmer of hope because it is Schools Chancellor Joel Klein who said it. And he said it to principals in a recent Principal’s Weekly online newsletter. While it is not a description of what is, it seems to be an edict about what should be.
As the article on page 4 points out, Klein has become convinced that the schools need to be more active in enforcing the discipline code and in protecting the vast majority of students who want to learn. We believe the change of heart has to be the result of the campaign by UFT members who were increasingly upset by discipline and safety problems that were not being addressed. In fact, Klein noted in his statement that it is educators who have been telling him “a story of how discipline falls by the wayside” so that many schools do not have the “orderly and safe environment every single day” as they should.
Call this an awakening by the chancellor and the alarm was sounded by educators. Bravo to the educators who overcame their belief (legitimately held) that there is no point in bothering to report because nothing will happen. Persistance and transparency does work sometimes. Now, if only the chancellor will listen to them about all the other things they have been saying …
3. A powerful tool
Some school administrators seem to pine for the old days before there were unions so they could just tell the workers to do their bidding and brook no argument. Fortunately, those days are long gone and two recent grievance victories underscore the point. As the story on page 2 explains, despite contract language that could not be more clear, a number of schools in Brooklyn assigned teachers to extended-time groups that exceeded the contractual limits. Article 6 of the contract specifies, “The 37.5 minutes of the extended four (4) days per week shall be used for tutorials, test preparation and/or small group instruction and will have a teacher-student ratio of no more than one to ten.”
The teachers grieved and the union pressed the case to arbitration. It required a huge amount of dedication, perseverance and hard work, because the teachers had to document every instance of a contract violation, keeping track of the dates and the names of all the students involved.
But the hard work paid off — literally, when the arbitrator ruled that the teachers were entitled to be paid the coverage rate for each student they were assigned over the contractual limit. Two teachers were awarded more than $1,000 each.
“The contract is a powerful tool if used effectively — but it doesn’t walk and talk by itself,” UFT President Randi Weingarten commented.
In another case, also in District 32, five schools grieved persistent infringement of prep periods. Again, the contract is specific and states that preps “are to be used for unassigned professional work.” School administrators had, instead, scheduled staff development, various assessments like ECLAS and conferences during teachers’ prep periods. The teachers stood up for their rights to use preps for the work they must do to prepare — and they won.
The contract is a powerful tool!
