NEA Sheds Crocodile Tears for the Poor

President Obama has sent his budget plan to Congress, hoping to appease Republicans by slashing $400 billion from Medicare and other health programs (according to NEA Today) and cutting cost of living increases for Social Security recipients. Not surprisingly, Republicans are saying this isn’t enough and they have no intention of supporting any tax hikes, whatsoever. Some pundits are referring to the process as Obama negotiating with himself.

Needless to say, the cuts will hurt seniors and the poor the most (but on the brighter side, the wealthy will be able to continue to enjoying record low tax rates and subsidies for their businesses). These cuts could also have a trickle-down effect on schools. By stripping away some of the safety net for poor families, children will inevitably feel some of the cuts, which could lead to increases in malnutrition, untreated medical conditions, premature births, stress and elevated levels of cortisol, and other factors that can impair cognitive development, memory and learning.

National Educators Association (NEA) President Dennis Van Roekel criticized the plan, saying:

“Right now the focus should be on protecting and increasing benefits for our seniors, not pulling the rug out from under them . . . Social Security belongs to the people who have worked hard all their lives, contributed to the program, and relied on the promise that they and their family will be able to collect benefits that accurately reflect the cost of living when they retire. . . Any budget proposal must be balanced and fair by demanding more of the wealthiest and corporations while staying true to our nation’s commitment to seniors and those most in need.”

These comments are little more than crocodile tears coming from a man who earns close to $400,000 per year in salary and benefits and who will likely be set for life with a comfortable retirement, thanks to his members’ dues. While he may in fact feel sympathy for the poor and seniors, he is completely unwilling to do anything about it besides making a few impotent complaints—and certainly nothing that might jeopardize his income, status or personal freedom.

If NEA was a fighting union, if it really gave a damned about the wellbeing of America’s poor families and children (or simply wanted to see significant gains in educational outcomes), it would mobilize its hundreds of thousands of members to protest the entire budget debate vigorously, with direct action, civil disobedience and even strikes. The NEA is the largest union in the country. It has vast resources and could have significant influence on policy if it were to move away from its unreliable and weak strategy of lobbying and campaign financing and start exercising its true power: its members’ ability to withhold their labor.

One reason why the NEA will not do this is because it does not want to offend its darling in the White House. Despite the fact that Obama has done nothing to reduce the damage caused by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and actually worsened it with his Race to the Top (RttT), he continues to pay lip service to the notion of improving public education (which seems to be sufficient to mollify many on the left). In fairness, his budget proposal does include an additional $75 billion to fund pre-school for all low- to moderate-income 4-year-olds. Yet for many middle class families, the only preschool options available are expensive private schools that suck up large portions of their disposable income. Obama’s budget will provide no relief for these families. More to the point, since we know that pre-K programs have significant benefits for children’s long-term academic success, why not extend the existing free public education system to include all children, starting at the pre-K level? This would have the additional benefit of allowing many parents to get back to work without having to lose a large chunk of their income to overpriced private preschools.

Van Roekel is also probably pleased with the supposed billions of dollars that will go toward education jobs to replace those lost due to the sequester cuts. However, jobs, in and of themselves, are nothing to support, particularly if those jobs are for low pay, with poor benefits and unreasonable demands or lack security. Why not increase unemployment benefits, welfare and other safety net programs to a level that provides all Americans with material security and comfort until they get back on their feet, instead of continuing with the cynical and punitive system that provides only a fraction of what one needs to survive and only for a timeframe that is insufficient for finding another decent job?

Additionally, why strive for putting teachers back in front of 30-40 kids per classroom, which is all that will happen with Obama’s proposal? Why not demand sufficient funding to bring all high school classes in the country down to 20 students per teacher, and the lower grade levels down to 10 or 15 students per teacher? This would not only create a lot of jobs, but it would provide teachers sufficient time to attend to the individual and diverse needs of their students; identify physical, emotional or academic problems before they spiral out of control; and provide more engaging, student-centered, inquiry-based lessons and rely less on canned curriculum, bubble in tests and rote memorization.

Weingarten Takes a Dive for Capitalism

Last week, Valarie Strauss (Answer Sheet) interviewed American Federation of Teachers (AFT) boss Randi Weingarten about why she went to Philadelphia and got arrested. Weingarten correctly noted that the people of Philadelphia, who had asked for a one-year moratorium on school closures, have been repeatedly ignored by the mayor. She also correctly pointed out that the push to close the schools is largely the initiative of the mayor, the city’s School Reform Commission (SRC) and an outside consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group (BCG). “When the powers that be ignore you, and dismiss you,” she told Strauss, “then you have no other choice than to resort to civil disobedience to confront an immoral act.”

The problem is that there is nothing immoral about it. While the majority of schools to be closed are in low income communities of color, the motivation to close them is not wicked, sinful, nor is the goal to harm poor black kids. Rather, the proponents are capitalists exploiting an essentially legal method to crush the Philadelphia teachers union and transfer public K-12 tax dollars to private charters and online schools. Calling it an immoral act merely obfuscates the financial motives (and legal methods) behind it, undermining teachers’, parents’ and students’ ability to successfully resist it.

Another problem is that a single arrest at one high profile public meeting is essentially just a publicity stunt. It is not an organized or effective strategy for reversing a large-scale public giveaway to private business.

One justification for the closures is the school district’s perennial budget problems. Yet the district voted to spend $1.4 million to hire BCG, according to Workers World. BCG Partner Sanjeev Midha is a trustee for KIPP Philadelphia (an online charter school) and BCG members serve on numerous other KIPP boards, as well. Not surprisingly, BCG promotes online education and stands to profit handsomely from the closures by offering online courses to students displaced by the closures.

Other BCG alumni include Mitt Romney, Benjamin Netanyahu, hedge fund manager John Paulson, and GE CEO Jeff Immelt, as well as hedge fund manager and Democrats for Education Reform[er] Whitney Tilson—all cheerleaders for charter schools and teachers’ union-busting. SRC members include Feather Houstoun, a former president of the William Penn Foundation (which donated additional money to hire BCG) and Pedro Ramos, who currently sits on the board of the United Way (which also coughed up funds to hire BCG).

BCG was also hired by the Transition Planning Committee (TPC) of Memphis to oversee their mass transfer of students out of the public school system and into private charter schools and has been involved in the post-Katrina plundering of the New Orleans school system, as well as pro-charter and anti-teachers’ union activities in Cleveland, Seattle, Chicago and Dallas. According to Diane Ravitch, their goal in Memphis is to increase charter enrollment from 4% to 19% of all students by 2016, which will effectively transfer $212 million from the public school budget to private charter schools.

Union-Sanctioned Union-Busting

If the school closures go through, the district will lose dozens union jobs. According, to National Educators Association president Dennis Van Roekel, the NEA, alone, has lost 150,000 unionized teaching jobs over the last three years. The AFT has lost thousands, more. If Weingarten wants to save her own job (and her more than $600,000 per year income) she needs to maintain membership levels, not let them shrink further. However, to do this requires mobilizing Philadelphia’s teachers, who are affiliated with the AFT, to do far more than protest at school board meetings. They need to engage in concerted and ongoing job actions and civil disobedience, something neither Weingarten nor any other major union leader wants to do.

The paradox is that while union bosses depend on their members’ dues to pay their salaries, they depend on the good graces of the ruling elite to exist in the first place, graces that have been granted to them in exchange for keeping the system running smoothly. The quid pro quo is that if they keep their members quiescent and on the job, the unions are tolerated and minor concessions are sometimes granted them. The bosses will even tolerate the occasional angry rant, arrest or otherwise uncivilized act by union leaders if it helps them to keep the rabble in line. Consequently, union leaders have been relying more and more on legal and political action than on strikes and other job actions, a strategy that has, at best, merely kept the decline in union membership from occurring any faster than it has. An occasional high profile arrest, while doing nothing to improve teachers’ job security, working conditions or compensation, does help boost union bosses’ street credibility by making them look like tough, self-sacrificing fighters, rather than parasites.

 
In order to keep members in line (and maintain the good graces of the ruling elite), union leaders need to convince the rank and file that alternatives to strikes and other job actions will be effective. In the case of the Wisconsin state house occupation, the unions argued that they could best reverse their state’s union-busting legislation at the ballot box and convinced everyone to go home.

In the case of Philadelphia’s school closings, Weingarten has similarly distorted the issue, ignoring the impact on job security and collective bargaining power and focusing on political corruption. She described events in Philadelphia as a strong “statement” that the mayor, governor and SRC are not on the side of the people. In other words, the school closures are an attack on democracy (an immoral act?)—a politically popular concept that is likely to appeal to community members’ sense of patriotism, but not one that is likely to save teachers’ jobs or stop the closures. Indeed, if the problem is merely the product of bad politics, as she has implied, then the solution is supposedly to fight back in the political arena, thus squelching any movement for workplace actions.

Why Weingarten Got Arrested

This week, Valarie Strauss (Answer Sheet) interviewed American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten about why she went to Philadelphia and got arrested. Weingarten correctly noted that the people of Philadelphia, who had asked for a one-year moratorium on school closures, have been repeatedly ignored by the mayor. She also correctly pointed out that the push to close the schools is largely the initiative of the mayor, governor, the city’s School Reform Commission (SRC) and an outside consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group (BCG). “When the powers that be ignore you, and dismiss you,” she told Strauss, “then you have no other choice than to resort to civil disobedience to confront an immoral act.”

What Weingarten did not say was why they want to close dozens of schools (i.e., open up space for private charter schools to set up shop) or whether she was planning on engaging in ongoing civil disobedience to achieve her goals. The fact is that a single arrest at one high profile public meeting is nothing more than a publicity stunt. It is not an organized or effective strategy for reversing a large-scale public giveaway to private business.

One justification for the closures is the school district’s perennial budget problems. Yet the district voted to spend $1.4 million to hire BCG, according to Workers World. BCG Partner Sanjeev Midha is a trustee for KIPP Philadelphia (an online charter school). Not surprisingly, BCG promotes online education. Other BCG alumni include Mitt Romney, Benjamin Netanyahu, hedge fund manager John Paulson, and GE CEO Jeff Immelt. SRC members include Feather Houstoun, a former president of the William Penn Foundation (which donated additional money to hire BCG) and Pedro Ramos, who currently sits on the board of the United Way (which also coughed up funds to hire BCG).

If the school closures go through, the district will lose dozens union jobs. According, to National Educators Association president Dennis Van Roekel, the NEA, alone, has lost 150,000 unionized teaching jobs over the last three years. The AFT has no doubt lost thousands, as well. If Weingarten wants to save her own job (and her more than $600,000 per year income) she needs to maintain membership levels, not let them shrink further. However, to do this requires mobilizing Philadelphia’s teachers, who are affiliated with the AFT, to do far more than protest at school board meetings. They need to engage in concerted and ongoing job actions and civil disobedience, something neither Weingarten nor any other major union leader wants to do.

The paradox is that while union bosses depend on their members’ dues to pay their salaries, they depend on the good graces of the ruling elite to exist at all, graces that have been granted to them in exchange for keeping the system running smoothly. The quid pro quo is that if they keep their members quiescent and on the job, the unions are tolerated and minor concessions are sometimes granted them. The bosses will even tolerate the occasional angry rant, arrest or otherwise uncivilized act by union leaders if it helps them to keep the rabble in line. Consequently, union leaders have been relying more and more on legal and political action than on strikes and other job actions, a strategy that has, at best, merely kept the decline in union membership from occurring any faster than it has.

 
Weingarten described her action in Philadelphia as a strong “statement” that the mayor, governor and SRC are not on the side of the people. In other words, the school closures are an attack on democracy, which is a politically popular concept, but not one that is likely to save teachers’ jobs. If the problem is merely the product of bad politics, as she has implied, then the solution is supposedly to fight back in the political arena, thus squelching any movement for workplace actions. 

Ultimately, Weingarten's got arrested because she needed to look tough to her constituents. It was a relatively painless and cheap way to win points among parents and teachers, but not an effective strategy for ending the school closures or saving union jobs.

Class War: Union Bosses vs Public Sector Workers

 (Image by Sue Peacock)

While Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has been doing everything in his power to destroy the public sector unions, the leaders of those unions have been doing everything in their power to comply, including selling out their own members, in a desperate attempt to preserve their six-figure incomes. They have been madly pushing through contracts that cut workers’ pay and benefits in hopes of beating a deadline that would preserve their right to continue automatically collecting dues from paychecks. According to the WSWS, the average Wisconsin public sector worker will lose $4,000 per year as a result of the cuts.

The WSWS has just published some of these union bosses’ salaries. Their large incomes relative to those of their members should lay to rest the delusion that they share the interests of their union members. The average Wisconsin public sector worker earns only $51,000 per year (not counting the $4,000 cut), while their union leaders earn in excess of $100,000 each, not counting the thousands more many receive in perks and other benefits.

• Marty Beil, Wisconsin Public Employees Union (WPEU) executive director, $162,000 in 2008
• Rick Badger, Wisconsin AFSCME executive, $133,000 in 2009
• Gerald McEntee, national president of AFSCME, $480,000 in 2009
• Mary Bell, Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), $173,466 in 2008
• Dan Burkahlter, WEAC’s Chief Executive, $242,807,
• Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association (NEA), $397,721 in salary and benefits.
• Rose Ann De Moro, executive director of National Nurses United, $293,000 per year.
• Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO President, $283,340 last year
• Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president, $620,000 from two jobs in the same union.
• AFT has nearly 100 officials who earned over $400,000 each

WSWS correctly points out that Wisconsin’s public sector union bosses served as the ruling elite’s bulldogs by demanding that all workers return to work after Republicans pushed through a modified version of the union busting bill. This version of the bill slashed workers’ pay and benefits and cut funding for social programs, but left intact collective bargaining and the automatic payroll dues collection (the only issues that affect the union bosses’ salaries). The union bosses argued that they could best continue the fight through the election process.

This has been the historic role of union bosses: to serve as capitalism’s enforcers. Their financial interests are so much more closely tied with those of the ruling elite that they routinely sell out their members in order to protect their own status and income. The tragedy and irony is that Walker had done more to organize and mobilize workers than any union boss has done in generations and the unions wasted the opportunity. Tens of thousands of workers were in the streets, skipping work in a de facto strike, occupying buildings, and they were willing to continue to doing so. The momentum and sentiment were there. People were talking about a General Strike. All the unions had to do was provide the support. Instead, they allied themselves with the class enemy of the workers and crushed the movement.

The lesson is that class conscious union activists and organizers need to do a much better job organizing from the ground up, not only in opposition to the bosses and politicians, but in opposition to our own union leadership.