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Class struggles: The UFT story, part 9
In the fall of 1961 a column appeared in the UFT’s newspaper, The United Teacher, under the byline: Albert Gordon. The writer, a social studies teacher from Brooklyn’s Samuel Tilden HS, told of his arrest the previous summer and his month-long...
Class struggles: The UFT story, part 8
Not far from the UFT’s Park Avenue South headquarters, Al Shanker sits stiffly in the study of his apartment. Physically, he’s not himself.
Class struggles: The UFT story, part 7
Roger Parente still gets up early. Only these days it’s to get in a game of tennis before the stifling mid-day heat of the Southern California desert sets in. Approaching 70, Parente is surprised how well a decade of retirement has agreed with him...
Class struggles: The UFT story, part 6
For Milton Pincus, the decision to call off the November 7th strike in return for Mayor Robert Wagner’s promise of a fact-finding committee loaded with the leading lights of the city’s labor movement, was a no-brainer. From where he stood — outside...
Class struggles: The UFT story
This award-winning series of articles by Jack Schierenbeck originally appeared in the New York Teacher in 1996 and 1997.
Class struggles: The UFT story, part 5
Nat Levine will never forget the time his principal made the mistake of tangling with a young union organizer.
Class struggles: The UFT story, part 4
Within months of the end of World War II the country was convulsed in the greatest wave of strikes in its history, before or since. With the memory of the Great Depression still fresh in their minds, many workers saw the huge post-war layoffs as a...
Class struggles: The UFT story, part 3
The Big Bang theory may be right about the origin of the universe, but it isn’t much help when it comes to explaining the making of a union. Like other unions, the UFT didn’t just explode onto the scene in 1960.
Class struggles: The UFT story, part 2
Ever the agent provocateur, Al Shanker reminded the large UFT Teacher Union Day audience last fall that in the 1950s there was no shortage of naysayers who said teachers would never get their act together: “Can teachers ever be organized? Well, no...
Class struggles: The UFT story, part 1
The UFT turns 36 this year [1996]. As unions go, that makes us a fairly new kid on the block. But the reality is that our labor roots stretch back to 1916 and that most of our founding mothers and fathers have either retired or passed on. Even those...