[Educationforall] Article: Head of US teachers’ union decries danger of “revolution”

Thu Jul 7 18:24:07 UTC 2011

Possible discussion article for the next meeting.
-Norissa

" Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who addressed the 2010 AFT national
convention, has given the union millions of dollars. In return, the AFT has
helped implement joint labor-management “teacher effectiveness” projects
across the country, which include performance-based “merit” pay and other
tools to further victimize teachers.......*To say that the AFT is in the
pocket of the corporate and financial aristocracy in the United States is no
figure of speech. Having seen the loss of dues income—resulting from their
complicity in the destruction of hundreds of thousands of teachers’ jobs—the
union executives have secured new sources of revenue from billionaire
opponents of public education. In return, the AFT has assumed the role of a
labor syndicate, disciplining teachers, opposing any struggle, and
guaranteeing school districts and charter schools a supply of highly
exploited, cheap labor."
*

Head of US teachers’ union decries danger of “revolution” By Walter Gilberti
and Jerry White
21 June 2011

Earlier this month, the president of the American Federation of Teachers
(AFT), Randi Weingarten, visited Detroit to meet with local union officials.
The AFT-affiliated Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT) has increasingly
faced opposition by teachers for its complicity in the destruction of their
jobs and living standards and in plans to privatize the public schools.

DFT President Keith Johnson, who barely won reelection in a January vote
that was widely believed to be rigged, worked closely with Weingarten,
then-Detroit schools Financial Manager Robert Bobb and Detroit Mayor Bing to
ram through a contract in 2009 that cut teachers’ pay by $10,000, destroyed
seniority and tenure protections, and integrated the DFT into the process of
firing so-called “underperforming” teachers.

Like Johnson, Weingarten is a thoroughly discredited figure. She has
collaborated with the Obama administration’s attack on public education on a
national scale and overseen the destruction of the gains won by educators
over decades of struggle. She has cultivated the closest of ties with the
bitterest opponents of public education.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who addressed the 2010 AFT national
convention, has given the union millions of dollars. In return, the AFT has
helped implement joint labor-management “teacher effectiveness” projects
across the country, which include performance-based “merit” pay and other
tools to further victimize teachers.

At a meeting of roughly 100 school-level building representatives at the DFT
headquarters, Johnson introduced Weingarten with the comment, “We are a
school district and profession in crisis.”

The AFT leader began her comments with a demagogic attack on “anti-union,
anti-teacher, anti-government people [who] are attacking public education by
dividing, dehumanizing, delegitimizing and de-funding.” The union, she said,
was the “force against the power of evil” and the only organization that
“fights at the bargaining table and the ballot box.”

Her remarks were aimed at presenting the Republicans as the sole opponents
of public education, while whitewashing the role of the Obama administration
and the Democrats. The AFT backs the Democrats at the ballot box not because
they defend teachers. They do not. The AFT does so because the Democrats
carry out their anti-teacher attacks with the assistance of the unions,
thereby preserving the institutional and financial interests of union
executives like Weingarten and Johnson.

The AFT president soon got around to her most important point: the attack on
public education was provoking massive opposition in the working class,
which could escalate into a threat to the entire corporate and political
order.

Weingarten said she did not want a “Les Mis strategy” or “to see kids
fighting a revolution.” The AFT, she said, knew “the right way to fight,”
pointing to the 2009 contract in Detroit as the “foundation to stop this
attack.”

In the context of the bitter struggle to defend education that teachers,
parents and youth confront, Weingarten’s reference to “revolution” and “Les
Mis”—the award-winning musical based on the famous work *Les Miserables* by
19th century French novelist Victor Hugo—is telling.

Hugo’s work tells the story of the initial revolutionary struggles of the
French working class, lower-middle classes and urban poor in the 1830s
against the retrenchment of monarchial rule following the disintegration of
Napoleonic Europe. It focuses on the life of Jean Valjean—a laborer
imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread who ends up fighting on
the barricades during the June 1832 rebellion in Paris.

In her association of the current struggle with these earlier revolutionary
upheavals in Europe, Weingarten expresses fear of the growing radicalization
of teachers and other sections of the working class. She is aware of what is
being said by teachers and workers--the disappointment and anger over Obama
and his complete support for Wall Street. The words “capitalism,”
“revolution,” even “socialism” are increasingly heard. Workers see the
upheavals in Egypt, Greece, or Wisconsin, for that matter, and express
solidarity and a desire to emulate these struggles.

The metaphor of the street barricade--which commonly divided the
revolutionary elements from the forces of reaction in so many struggles
throughout 19th century Europe—is particularly apt. Weingarten is well aware
that in the coming upheavals she and her fellow labor executives will be
with the ruling elite on the other side of the barricades.

Like other officials within the AFL-CIO hierarchy, Weingarten is part of an
increasingly wealthy upper-middle class stratum whose incomes are out of the
reach of ordinary teachers. According to the *Wall Street Journal*,
Weingarten received total compensation of more than $600,000 for 2010,
including $194,188 accrued from New York City’s United Federation of
Teachers before she left to become president of the AFT. Her counterpart in
the National Education Association, Dennis Van Roekel, received $397,721 in
salary and benefits.

These sums were amassed while the unions signed contracts robbing underpaid
teachers of thousands of dollars each year and sanctioned the destruction of
their jobs. At the same time, the union officials sit on corporate and
political boards where they aid and abet corporate interests and the Obama
administration in the destruction of public education.

During the course of the Detroit meeting, one building representative asked
Weingarten why the AFT accepted $6.3 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, which, under the name of school “reform,” was spearheading the
attack on teachers and the spread of charter schools.

Weingarten’s answer should be posted above every under-served and
overcrowded classroom in the Detroit Public Schools: “I am proud of getting
money from Gates,” she said. “The more money we get from Gates, the less we
take from union members. I refuse to be demonized by billionaires. If they
want to give us money--fine.”

To say that the AFT is in the pocket of the corporate and financial
aristocracy in the United States is no figure of speech. Having seen the
loss of dues income—resulting from their complicity in the destruction of
hundreds of thousands of teachers’ jobs—the union executives have secured
new sources of revenue from billionaire opponents of public education. In
return, the AFT has assumed the role of a labor syndicate, disciplining
teachers, opposing any struggle, and guaranteeing school districts and
charter schools a supply of highly exploited, cheap labor.

At the height of the mass demonstrations of workers and students in
Wisconsin earlier this year, Weingarten was attending a conference with
Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, charter schools advocates and
billionaire foundation representatives in Denver, Colorado. The topics of
discussion centered on how best to institute Obama’s “Race to the Top”
education agenda and insure the removal of the “incompetent” teachers
supposedly infesting the education system.

Weingarten’s praise for Gates was apparently too much even for the generally
friendly crowd of DFT representatives. Replying to a few moans and groans
from the audience, Weingarten pointed to Johnson and said, “Don’t call this
man a sellout or me a sellout. We can’t win by screaming--I’ve fought
Giuliani and Bloomberg--we’re in a different time now.”

In her 14 years as president of the UFT in New York, Weingarten collaborated
with the mayor’s office. Nevertheless, her reference to “a different time
now” makes it clear that the union executives have thrown in their lot
entirely with the corporate and political enemies of public education,
asking only that they be made junior partners.

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