Possible discussion article for the next meeting. <br>-Norissa<br><br><br>" 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.......<b>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."<br></b><br><br><br><br><div id="content"><h2>Head of US teachers’ union decries danger of “revolution”</h2> <h5>By Walter Gilberti and Jerry White <br>21 June 2011</h5> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>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 <em>Les Miserables</em> by 19<sup>th</sup> century French novelist Victor Hugo—is telling.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <em>Wall Street Journal</em>,
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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.”</p> <p>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.</p>
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