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Chapter leaders told: All jobs safe
Sep 25, 2008 10:34 AM
Chapter leaders Ann Marie Hurt of PS/IS 328, Brooklyn, and Martin McKeown of PS 143, Queens, ask questions at the meeting.
Hundreds of chapter leaders turned out on Sept. 15 for a “nuts and bolts” citywide chapter leader meeting at UFT headquarters where they were briefed on the union’s major initiatives and asked questions about parking problems and other issues that had arisen in the first weeks of the school year.
In her opening report, UFT President Randi Weingarten promised that the union would focus on ATRs (Absent Teacher Reserves) in the same way it “relentlessly” tackled the concerns of educators languishing in rubber rooms during the previous school year. Our goal in addition to job security, she said, is to “make sure those who want permanent assignments teaching can have them.”
Then she turned to the tumultuous events on Wall Street that week and their potential impact on UFTers.
“What we are living through is historically unprecedented and certainly we have not seen this kind of volatility in the stock market since 1929 and 1930,” Weingarten said. “The bursting housing bubble and subprime lending crisis are triggering a crisis in all of the credit markets. You have this shaking out of greed and stupidity and unregulated markets.”
Pensions, health benefits safe
She pledged to fight “to make sure that our pensions are protected, our health benefits are protected, and that there is rock-solid job security at a time like this. And we have to fight like hell against budget cuts.”
Weingarten moved to reassure chapter leaders that members’ pensions were not at risk. She pointed out that public pensions, unlike those in the private sector, were secure. “The New York State constitution says, ‘Pensions can neither be diminished nor impaired,’” she said. “That means that public pensions are a first obligation.”
She also noted that the City Comptroller had reported that just a small portion of the city pension funds’ portfolio was invested in Lehman Brothers, which declared bankruptcy on Sept. 15.
The union’s basic health benefits are also safe, Weingarten said, thanks to an “automatic escalator clause” that the union first negotiated in the 1980s to protect members from the volatility in health care costs. That clause, she explained, requires the city to increase its health care contributions to HIP and other public employee health insurers when HIP needs additional funds to maintain the same level of health benefits to city employees.
On the impending change in the HIP-GHI health organization from nonprofit to for-profit status — which some fear will lead to increased costs and decreased quality of care — Weingarten reported that the union and its allies on the Municipal Labor Committee are “working with the state insurance commissioner to ensure there is affordable, quality health care provided.”
On job security during the economic decline, she noted that the job security clause that the union negotiated in 2005 was “sacrosanct.”
“Nobody can be laid off unless there is a financial emergency called in the city of New York,” she said. She doubted given the need for stability at this moment that the politically dexterous Mayor Bloomberg would issue such a pronouncement.
Appeal for Obama
Warning that the presidential race was very tight, Weingarten called on the chapter leaders to focus on electing Obama and increasing pro-union majorities in both houses of Congress.
“On the issues, between Barack Obama and John McCain, it’s not even close whether it’s health care, the economy or education,” Weingarten said.
On merit pay, “although Obama does give us pause,” she acknowledged, his education plan was far superior to McCain’s, which she said could be summed up as vouchers and get tough on teachers.
Even on differentiated pay, she added, Obama strikes the right note, pledging to do plans with teachers, not to them.
Weingarten also stressed the importance of electing a union-friendly president and Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would even the playing field between unions and employers in organizing campaigns.
“The United States will not be a place hospitable to working people unless more of them are in unions,” she said.
About New York City’s strong labor movement, she said,“We are in a bubble compared to where many of our education colleagues are in the rest of the country.”
She urged the chapter leaders to recruit members for the phone banks and for the bus trips that the UFT is organizing for labor walks in the battleground state of Pennsylvania every Saturday between Oct. 4 and Election Day.
“The stakes here are huge,” she said. “If we do our work, we can go from ‘if we win’ to ‘when we win.’”
