With the Verizon job action in its eighth day, UFT delegates passed a resolution at their April 20 meeting to support the company’s nearly 40,000 striking workers who are members of the Communication Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. They also passed these other resolutions:

• to support the Los Angeles School District, the unions and “like-minded” advocates in fighting the proposed conversion of half the city’s schools into charters;

• to support the people of Detroit in their fight to restore their school facilities, many of which are crumbling and vermin- and insect-infested, as well as the people of Flint, in their struggle for safe drinking water;

• to fight for probationary teachers who were discontinued and thus stigmatized, often through no fault of their own, to have the opportunities to work in other districts and be treated with respect and dignity; and

• to support the efforts of the AFT and NYSUT to pass the Healthy Workplace bill, a bill in the New York State Legislature that gives employers legal remedies against workplace bullying.

At the monthly Delegate Assembly on April 20, the afternoon following the New York State presidential primaries, UFT President Michael Mulgrew thanked the many UFT members who volunteered for the union’s Hillary Clinton campaign, but then he quickly turned his focus to the battle ahead in November.

“This is going to be one of the nastiest, ugliest campaigns of all time,” he warned. “Now it’s about making sure we take the White House.”

Mulgrew said the new low bar set by Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination could make Ted Cruz and John Kasich look more sympathetic, despite their anti-worker track records. “[Gov. John] Kasich is the nice guy,” he said sarcastically as he reminded the delegates of Kasich’s failed union-busting efforts in Ohio. “This is some heavy-duty stuff.”

The stakes are especially high, he said, because whoever is elected president will probably decide who fills the seat on the U.S. Supreme Court left open by Antonin Scalia’s death in February. With Scalia’s departure, the conservative majority on the court ended. That, Mulgrew said, paved the way for the 4-4 vote in the Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association case, preserving the right of public-sector unions to collect fair-share fees from nonmembers in states that allow these arrangements.

While the Friedrichs decision removes the immediate threat, Mulgrew said, about two-dozen similar cases are now making their way through the lower courts. “There is now a sister of Friedrichs, a bride of Friedrichs and a brother of Friedrichs in the pipeline,” he said.

He said the UFT will continue to be part of the effort to put pressure on U.S. Senate Republicans to “do their jobs” and hold a confirmation hearing and a vote for federal Appellate Court Judge Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s nominee to the bench.

Mulgrew said Obama’s attempt to fill the seat was completely appropriate. “We have a president who was voted in to office twice and his job runs until next January,” Mulgrew said, “Could you imagine if we said, ‘Well, the school year is almost over. The students just took their tests. We’re going to sit it out for the rest of the year’?”

Commenting on the success of UFT lobbying efforts in Albany, Mulgrew called it “the best legislative session we’ve had in eight years.” The union and its allies, he noted, pushed back against about a dozen pro-charter school proposals that state Senate Republicans made a concerted effort to include in the final budget bill.

Another victory, he said, was the $1.4 billion increase — $525 million for New York City — in school aid in the state budget.

Now, he said, chapter leaders and delegates need to make sure their principals spend wisely the additional money that will flow into school budgets. He advised them not to believe principals if they say there is no extra money in their school budgets next year.

He urged delegates and chapter leaders to attend the budget workshops offered through the union’s new Institute of Education and Labor Studies. The ability to understand a school budget, he said, provides the ammunition chapter leaders need to push back against some administrators.

“Once I learned how to read a budget, my principal didn’t know what to do with me,” Mulgrew said, recalling his own experience as a chapter leader.