CONTRIBUTE TO UFT SOLIDARITY LEGAL DEFENSE FUND

UFT Solidarity has retained a top flight education lawyer. Solidarity is planning to sue NYC-DOE, looking for an injunction to prevent NYC public school buildings from opening because they aren't safe in a pandemic.

Attorneys charge for their valuable time so Solidarity set up the Solidarity Legal Defense Fund. They have raised over $4,300 in just a few days. The goal is $5,000 to cover the costs of getting this legal action going.

If UFT Solidarity was running the UFT, this would not cost anything to individual members but Unity has an iron grip on UFT power and won't let go. The membership at large would need to rise up to take back the union. Mulgrew and his Unity followers have indicated they would only sue to close individual school buildings, not the entire system.

I contributed to the Solidarity Legal Defense Fund although I will not personally benefit. I think the lawsuit to shut all of the buildings down is a bit of a longshot however pooling resources for a collective lawsuit is a step in the right direction of involving the UFT membership in actions.

I hope this builds to members en masse being willing to take direct action by working to rule by following the DOE guidance doing a health check each morning and not reporting to a school if UFTers have any possible COVID-19 symptoms like a runny nose or a headache. No staff=no school.

New Zealand, one of the world's success stories in fighting COVID-19, didn't have any new cases for 102 days. They've had a setback in August. Once they had a cluster of new cases, they locked down Aukland and shut most schools. They had nine new cases today in the entire country. NYC on Monday, with not quite twice as many people compared to New Zealand (about 8 million NYC-5 million NZ), had 284 new cases Monday.

This is from CNN:

The swift action taken by many Asia-Pacific governments in response to the new wave of cases, while perhaps giving a skewed impression of how drastic the situation is, is precisely how to get things back under control. And while going from zero to a few dozen cases may sometimes look like a "big surge," as Trump described New Zealand's latest outbreak, for many people, it remains far preferable to staying consistent at tens of thousands of daily infections.

Up to you ladies and gentemen: You can follow Trump, Cuomo and deBlasio and just go back to school buildings. You can look to Mulgrew to declare certain schools unsafe but go into all the others. The predictable results will more than likely be new infections. Or, you can fight collectively by taking a first step by contributing to the Solidarity Legal Defense Fund now and then working to rule if necessary next month if the DOE-city don't listen to reason and go all remote.