In a sharp turnaround Randi’s Election Committee did an about face and “allowed” union election campaign literature to be mailed out by the union to members’ home addresses.
At the Executive Board meeting January 9th both Randi and her Unity Party supporters vehemently claimed that the United States Labor Law known as Landrum-Griffin did not provide that campaign literature could be mailed to members’ home addresses by either the U.S. Postal Service or via email. This claim was made in the face of statements made by ICE Executive Board reps James Eterno and Jeff Kaufman. ICE Reps were also accused of not knowing Labor Law.
At the next Executive Board meeting on January 29th Randi’s Election Committee submitted an “amendment” which provides for our right to send this literature but only by US mail. No apologies were offered.
We will pursue our right to use the Union’s email list but it is encouraging to know that at least someone in Randi’s group knows the law.
28 comments:
You are waiting for an apology from Randi for being wrong on election rules> Better wait for hell to freeze over for that one. Randi will admit that mistake when Bush admits that invading Iraq might not have been such a good idea. They both can be as arrogant as they like because the voters won't throw them out. Maybe UFT voters will get smart and vote against Randi.
Ignorance of the Law is no excuse.
Randi Weingarten was at the AFT convention in Vegas for a week with her top aide Maureen Salter who is not an AFT delegate. Before she left, she declared to staffers, "We are at war with Bloomberg." But as one wag said, "We have no troops or ammunition or machinery or war plan or rations. But, man, can we write press releases."
Randi didn't know the law... and she's a lawyer?
You were saying:
New York Daily News -
Pass Spitzer, fail Klein
BY RANDI WEINGARTEN
Sunday, February 4th, 2007
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/494452p-416516c.html
Gov. Spitzer's far-reaching education plan is already being spun as a victory for some and a defeat for others. While I disagree with some aspects, the truth is the governor has done something very important: He has effectively blown the whistle on the education wars. That stands in stark contrast to the confrontational approach consistently taken by New York City's schools chancellor, Joel Klein.
Spitzer's reforms provide a powerful example of the importance of listening to stakeholders, relying on proven policy and pushing for strong and fair accountability measures - backed up with the tools and funding necessary to help educators meet the high standards we all want.
First, the governor has put settling the long-running Campaign for Fiscal Equity case within sight. The $3.2 billion in state school funding he has proposed over the next four years (not including the city's share) is well above the $2 billion court-ordered minimum. And we should welcome the fact that he wants to tie that money to proven reforms - like lowering class sizes, providing for universal prekindergarten and improving teacher training.
All this is in stark contrast to the path chosen by Chancellor Klein. Spitzer uses accountability as a tool. Klein uses it as a weapon.
For instance, Spitzer's plan would hold everyone from chancellors and superintendents on down accountable, while the chancellor's new reorganization of the city's schools transfers all responsibility for education onto principals and teachers, yet fails to give them the resources and professional latitude necessary to meet their responsibilities.
Gov. Spitzer's plan requires schools to choose from a short list of proven reforms. Chancellor Klein's plan upends the school structure for the third time in five years - on the gamble that it will improve student outcomes. Gov. Spitzer's plan is focused on what happens in the classroom; to me, Chancellor Klein's plan looks simply like another organizational chart.
And then there is the key difference in approach when it comes to getting the most help to the neediest children. The governor proposes reworking a complicated funding formula in order to deliver additional resources to all our schoolchildren. In contrast, Chancellor Klein wants to shift to an untested funding scheme that purports to having a set amount of money follow each child, but actually will destabilize good schools that have more experienced staffs.
After the November election, Spitzer solicited input from teachers, parents, principals, administrators, researchers and others to try to find solutions that would have the best chance to help our kids succeed. Chancellor Klein has repeatedly shut parents, teachers and other stakeholders out of his consultations, opting instead for a top-down approach that puts structure ahead of instruction.
Of course, we have some concerns with the governor's plan. We believe he ought to have placed a stronger emphasis on investing in class-size reduction - giving it the same high priority as expanding prekindergarten programs to all 4-year-olds. And we don't support giving another entity - in this case Chancellor Klein - authority to approve charter schools, as Spitzer would allow. SUNY and the Board of Regents, the current chartering authorities, have strict standards; if the chancellor wants more charters, he should go through the same process as the rest of us.
But all in all, Gov. Spitzer has laid down an important marker in the education debate. Without saying so, he has effectively called for a ceasefire in the education wars, reminding us all that the best solutions for our kids aren't Democratic or Republican, they just need to be proven to work and backed up by the investment necessary to see them succeed. It's that simple.
Weingarten is president of the United Federation of Teachers.
our real enemy is:
New York Daily News -
The bus stops here, Mike
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/494447p-416511c.html
Sunday, February 4th, 2007
As school leaders who have made "accountability" their watchword, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein came up miles short in their handling of the great bus bungle. It took all week before the mayor conceded what thousands of parents knew: He coulda and shoulda done better.
What started as a well-intentioned plan to cut costs by streamlining routes and enforcing eligibility rules ended up a great big botch, with kids being put on buses before dawn, 5-year-olds being issued MetroCards for mass transit, siblings in the same schools being assigned to different buses and buses arriving at school well after classes had started.
The number of complaint calls fell through Friday, possibly indicating service had gotten smoother, but the damage was done. By ordering route changes midyear - without a dry run, without full public warning - and then by failing to quickly acknowledge that some things were going haywire, the mayor and Klein put themselves where they should never be - across a great divide from parents.
There may be a computer somewhere smart enough to redesign a system for transporting 84,000 kids on 2,040 routes to 1,400 schools so it becomes cost-efficient - while pleasing all parents. But lacking such a laptop, Bloomberg and Klein made a fundamental error in communication.
In the runup to the changes, they could have held a full-dress press conference to explain that pupil transportation costs have soared to roughly $1 billion, that the aim was to shift money into the classroom and that a small portion of the costs stemmed from driving ineligible students.
Most important, they could have issued clear warnings that the changes would result in some snafus, and they could have kept parents abreast of developments. Their failure to do so played into the hands of entrenched interests girding to fight Bloomberg and Klein's ambitious reforms.
With no persuasive arguments, opponents resort to caricaturing the mayor and chancellor as anti-parent autocrats. The great school-bus bungle played right into that stereotype.
Also appearing in today's Daily News is an article by United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who is fighting fiercely for greater school control. It belongs in the paper because, by virtue of her position, it is inherently newsworthy. It is also a stellar example of the demonization of Klein, at its core inherently unfair.
Weingarten creates the impression that Gov. Spitzer and Klein are at odds on school reform. In truth, the governor and the chancellor have parallel plans that hold teachers and principals accountable. Yet according to Weingarten, Spitzer is entirely good, while Klein is thoroughly bad. She writes that Spitzer views accountability as a "tool" while Klein uses it as a "weapon," leaving out that both men plan to track student performance and to act when schools or principals fail to deliver, and that both would require teachers to demonstrate competence before winning lifetime tenure.
In fact, the only real distinction between them is that Klein will hold Weingarten's members to account. So she paints him as a man enamored of "risky" budgeting that will "destabilize" successful schools. Hogwash. The only thing at risk under Klein's plan is teachers' ability to cluster in the least-challenging schools.
The approaching accountability will likely bring more such attacks as defenders of the status quo campaign for parental support. That's why, in the spirit of full accountability, Bloomberg and Klein must go out of their way to assure parents they learned painful lessons in the bus fiasco - and will never fail a similar test again.
Why isn't your website updated? It has stuff from 2005!?!
You have struck a chord. Arrogance is often displayed at the Executive Board, and no apologies are ever offered.
I am certain this blog discussion will now be monopolozied by Unity hacks trying to discredit anyone exposing the truth, as is shown by the post above.
Was there an apology at tonight's executive board?
What a classic SLUSH position...
You get what you ask for, and still complain.
Even when Unity is proven to be totally wrong, they still attack ICE.
Unity exposed again for its incompetence, and it sends the hacks over here to blame you.
Just saw Kit's video. When are you guys going to link to it here? Vote ICE-TJC!
While you guys obsess over union leadership, Klein is burning the schools down.
Under the guise of the rights of dissent (oh! we have a right to dissent!) you r object is not dissent but destabilization, radicalism, destruction of one union for the sake of some ideological burst of glory.
You are stupid enough to do Klein’s work.
You create discontent and you feed on anger. You do not have the strategic, complex minds of leaders.
You would lead us over a cliff. And if our members think that doing 37.5 is “over a cliff,” they ain’t seen nothing yet – but they will if you take the reigns.
Subject: [ice-mail] Meet Kit Wainer video: http://www.elfrank.com/Kit
Date: Thursday, February 08, 2007 9:44 PM
Meet Kit Wainer: http://www.elfrank.com/Kit
Feel free to pass the link along and include it in campaign literature.
We will stand up for the rights of teachers, not for double pensions and easy money for ourselves.
ICE-TJC couldn't do any worse than Randi.
Your video fails to mention your own failures -- in particular that you couldn't even convince a 300 member negotiating committee that your ideas were better, even though the committee was open to anyone who wanted to join and you had an open forum, and , so you claim, teachers who sympathized with your point of view.
And yet, you think by getting into office based on anger and fear, you will convince the entire membership to take to the streets and then through their militancy you would convince the city to -- what? Suddenly realize that teachers are right?
Transit shut down the city and what good did that do? You think anyone cares if you shut down the schools that service poor kids?
Had the union followed you, we’d be without a contract right now, or with a weaker one.
Militancy is for Bush. I’d rather not start a war unless I have a plan once I get in.
Do you think DC 37 would have been able to raise the pattern to what it was if Transit didn't go on strike? It's time for all of us to take the risk and stand up for ourselves. Vote ICE-TJC
Transit workers got the same deal that they got at the end of the strike when the arbitrators ruled. Turning it down did nothing to diminish it. Striking definitely forced management to up the offer. In fact, just the threat of a strike compelled them to increase the offer.
Times on the Transit strike:
"The union shut down the transit system after rejecting the transportation authority's demand for a major concession: that newly hired workers have a less generous pension plan than current workers. The union persuaded the authority to drop that demand, but in return the union agreed to another concession: the 1.5 percent contribution toward health premiums."
Yipeee!!! Not to mention the two days of pay lost for every day out on strike.
Not to mention that (unlike teachers) the transit workers had not been facing a toxic political environment -- there was no Eva Moskowitz, there was no Klein, there was no one getting articles in the paper saying that because transit workers had seniority rights, the trains were failing all across NYC.
Everyone wanted our contract broken.
No one cared about theirs.
All anyone wanted from the transit was that the trains.
And not to mention that transit shut down the city and businesses lost money; where as all we can shut are schools for poor kids that no one cares about anyway.
They got next to nothing. We'd have gotten nothing at all, and then some.
Times on the Transit strike:
"The union shut down the transit system after rejecting the transportation authority's demand for a major concession: that newly hired workers have a less generous pension plan than current workers. The union persuaded the authority to drop that demand, but in return the union agreed to another concession: the 1.5 percent contribution toward health premiums."
Yipeee!!! Not to mention the two days of pay lost for every day out on strike.
Not to mention that (unlike teachers) no one besides their own bosses was after the transit workers' protections (and really not even them). There was no nationwide/citywide drumbeat making the claim the the failure of trains was the fault of a contract. There was no Eva Moskowitz, there was no Klein, there were no public or political entities waving their contract around month after month, hearing after hearing, newspaper article after newspaper article -- claiming that it ought to be shredded step to stern.
Everyone wanted our contract broken.
No one cared about theirs.
All anyone besides the bosses ever wanted from the transit was that the trains.
And, finally, not to mention that transit shut down the city and businesses lost money; where as all we can shut are schools for poor kids that no one cares about anyway.
They got next to nothing. We'd have gotten nothing at all, and then some.
Science Sam-
The papers didn't think the Transit strike helped. What a shock? If it was such a bad deal that they didn't have when their election took place, then why did Roger Toussaint get reelected? Please don't tell me that he got less than half the vote because some of the opposition was more militant than Roger!
In vintage Unity style, Sam does not address the issue that a realistic threat of a strike forced management to up its offer and instead he goes back and talks about how being an impotent union is a good thing because nobody loves us. If we had a realistic strike threat in 2005, we would not have given away the store for increases that didn't keep up with inflation.
Scinece Sam is wrong as usual. Of course, he doesn't say anything about the original article.
Let's hear Randi or any of the Unity people say this: "Randi was wrong." You can do it Sam if you just try hard enough.
Oops, sorry I messed up the last comment. Randi will not say she was wrong. So we hope Sam will say it. "Randi was wrong."
What should she say she is wrong about? Be without a contract like CSA? Go out on strike like TWU and come up with thte same deal before the strike as they had after the strike? Better yet, we don't deserve the 40% increase in our salaries like everyone else has gotten throughout the US.
Randi should stand up for our rights instead of giving them away for peanuts. 40% since 1999 isn't that much as it will last until 2009. Check out 1999 prices and look at them now. I gather they will be higher two years from now.
Deal with the reality that a credible threat of a strike forced NYC Transit to up their offer to the TWU. If we had a real strike threat, we would have gotten a better deal. Had we allied with the TWU, there would have been no stopping us. Being a timid union is not the way to go.
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