Reportback from UFT Delegate Assembly
UFT Tops Won’t Fight Union-Busting
“Right-to-Work,” Endorse Democrat de Blasio
By Marjorie Stamberg
The February Delegate Assembly of the United Federation of
Teachers was the first since Donald Trump took office. What we got was the
utter paralysis of labor officialdom facing a mortal threat to workers’ rights.
The only answer of our union’s misleaders’ to Republican Donald Trump is to
vote for Democrats, the same party of Wall Street and big business that
spearheaded anti-union, corporate “education reform” for the last eight years.
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| Class Struggle Education Workers march in New York City on May Day 2016 calling to break with the Democrats and build a class-struggle workers party. (CSEW photo) |
When you hear the bureaucrats talk about thinking
“strategically” you know it means they’re not going to do a thing in the here
and now. Asked if the UFT would send buses to Washington to “greet” the new
EdSec, Mulgrew replied they would “wait and see” how DeVos does. His “answer”
to DeVos is a social media campaign for “#PublicSchoolProud.” He also managed
to throw in some praise for Barack Obama’s education “czar” Arnie Duncan, whose
“qualifications”, let me see, were that he was Obama’s pick-up basketball buddy,
and that he had run schools in the interests of Chicago Board of Trade.
Someone asked about what could be done to protect union
gains against national “right-to-work” legislation that Trump has vowed to sign
if passed. Good question. Mulgrew’s answer spoke volumes. Unless there’s a huge
shift, he said, “we are going to become a right-to-work country.” The unions
have their legal beagles thinking on it, and their “strategists.” (There’s that
do-nothing word again.) What the unions do, he said, depends on how it comes
down on the state level. And “elections matter” – i.e., “vote Democrat.” Translated:
the unions have given up on fighting anti-union “right-to-work” laws.
Meanwhile, AFL-CIO leaders are busy playing ball with Trump.
The decline in union membership in recent years
is almost
exclusively due to the passage of these union-busting laws. In New York,
union membership has held steady at around a quarter of all workers.
But in
states that passed laws outlawing the agency shop (where non-members pay
a fee
for representation, as unions must bargain on their behalf), union
membership
has fallen sharply. Unions with lots of assets (like the UFT with its
Wall
Street HQ) may survive. But weaker locals could go under. So what does
the
UFT/AFT propose to do about it? Zero (or, as Mulgrew calls it,
“strategizing.”)
Why? Because they chain workers to the Democrats.
The way to defeat these measures is to use unions’ power.
Shut down the schools and tie up major cities with strike action. Can’t be done?
Union members in Wisconsin did it, against Governor Scott Walker in 2011. Over
100,000 workers in the streets week after week, to the point that the state was
on the verge of a general strike. “How-to” guides were circulating. But that
prospect so scared the “labor statesmen” who sit atop the unions that at the
last minute they called it off. Instead they pushed a recall vote to throw out
the governor and Republican senators. Of course, the recall failed, and union
membership in Wisconsin is now half what it was before.
The thing about union power is you have to use it, or lose
it. If we use it, we can make anti-labor legislation like New York’s no-strike
Taylor Law into confetti. But that requires a union leadership that really is “ready
to rumble” … in reality, not just in tough talk.
So after the president’s report, they again refused to
consider a resolution calling for more union action on behalf of immigrant
students. (The D.A. also refused to do so in January when MORE -- Movement of
Rank and File Educators -- put up a motion, and in December when I presented a
motion for union committees of teachers, students, parents and staff to defend
immigrant and all students.)
So then we get to the piece de resistance: endorsing
Democrat Bill de Blasio for mayor. UFT secretary-treasurer LeRoy Barr presented
the motion, saying the leadership had decided what they really needed was to
nominate a Democrat at this time, de Blasio in particular, and do it early. De
Blasio supported us against the charters, Barr stressed.
After several speakers in favor, I got the floor to speak
against. I said that I wanted to put a minus everywhere Barr put a plus.
“We should not be supporting a Democrat. You all know I’m a socialist, and I think the Democrats and Republicans are twin parties of capitalism. They are twin parties of U.S. imperialism."Let me say first, I think Donald Trump is a racist misogynist pig.[The chair, Mulgrew, interrupts: “Not to the point.”]“Yes it is relevant, because the Democrats are responsible for every imperialist war from Vietnam to the attacks on Yemen. Obama deported 3 million people.“We should not be voting for Democrats or Republicans, we need a workers party. [Heckling and screaming from the crowd]“As for the specifics of de Blasio, he did not support us against the charters. You all know he fell apart in front of [Success Academy CEO] Eva Moskowitz. And he presided over the police acquittal of the chokehold murderers of Eric Garner. [More shouting]“So we need a workers party.”
Mulgrew recused himself from the chair to speak
from the
floor in an impassioned plea for de Blasio. Basically, he said whatever
you
think of his politics, we are now in the fight of our lives for public
education and he is a passionate supporter of public education. He said
that de
Blasio is “going to war” and he is “standing with us as we go to war in
the United States.” Well, there is a war over education going on,
alright. But it’s a class
war, and both parties of the capitalists, Republican and Democrat, are
backing the assault on public schools.
An insufferable Unity Caucus bureaucrat called the
question. Objections from James Eterno who pointed out that there were many
speakers for, only one speaker permitted to speak against. Overruled by Barr.
The vote was taken: there were a handful of “no” votes against endorsing de
Blasio and a sea of hundreds of “yes” votes. For the most part, MORE members
either voted “yes” or abstained.
After the vote, an older black woman chapter leader came
up to me and said thank you for speaking up for Eric Garner. A Latino delegate
from the Bronx expressed appreciation. Another delegate from my school said he
voted “no” because it was too early to endorse. But basically it was the popular
front in action, as only the UFT can do it.
Then Bill de Blasio, who had been waiting in the hallway, was
brought in amid cheers and chants of “four more years.” The mayor thanked us
for the work we do. He talked against privatizers, about how public schools
don’t turn away special ed students or English language learners. De Blasio may
talk the talk, unlike Betsy DeVos who couldn’t tell an ELL from a grizzly bear.
But he walks the walk of capital.
De Blasio isn’t “standing with us,” he’s on the other side
of the class line. While Bloomberg refused to sign union contracts, de Blasio
negotiated the lowest pattern-bargained settlement in years. Where Bloomberg
pushed charters, de Blasio initially made a show of limiting charter expansion
and co-locations, only to buckle when Moskowitz got the backing of fellow
Democrat governor Andrew Cuomo for her charter empire. De Blasio is a throwback
to the old phony “friend of labor” Democrats, while Obama and the Clintons
reveled in the megabucks they got from wooing Wall Street megabankers. But they
are all enemies of workers’ rights and public schools.
This business of endorsing a Democrat early is
the same
ploy they used to back Hillary Clinton early on. The same Clinton who
was on
the board of directors of Walmart and was the lawyer for the Walton
family, big
“edu reformers.” The same Clinton who was the staff counsel for the
National Center on Education and the Economy, a big business group that
wants to cut off
high school at the tenth grade. The same Clinton who partied after
Obama’s
inauguration with Eli Broad, another billionaire edu-deformer. The same
Clinton
who siphoned millions from earthquake relief funds in order to set up a
sweatshop that pays $5 a day to women workers in Haiti.
How did the early endorsement of Hillary Clinton work out
for teachers, or immigrants, or African Americans, workers or women? Not all
that great. Bottom line: you can’t fight the likes of Donald Trump with
Democrats. We need a union leadership that breaks the chains to capital and
undertakes to build a workers party capable of waging and winning class
struggle. Unity, MORE and the rest of the bureaucrats and would-be bureaucrats can’t,
even if the survival of the unions depended on it. And it does.
–Marjorie Stamberg, delegate Pathways
to Graduation, District 79
Class Struggle Education Workers
Class Struggle Education Workers
Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed rather than, as it is at present, an instrument for the disciplining of labor in the interests of capital. See the CSEW program here.