Unions – Page 5 – artdiamondblog.com

Some New York Public School Teachers Still Well Paid to Do Busy Work

(p. A1) For her first assignment of the school year, Verona Gill, a $100,000-a-year special education teacher whom the city is trying to fire, sat around education offices in Lower Manhattan for two weeks, waiting to be told what to do.

For her second assignment, she was sent to a district office in the Bronx and told to hand out language exams to anyone who came to pick them up. Few did.

Now, Ms. Gill reports to a cubicle in Downtown Brooklyn with a broken computer and waits for it to be fixed. Periodically, her supervisor comes by to tell her she is still working on the problem. It has been this way since Oct. 8.

“I have no projects to do, so I sit there until 2:50 p.m. — that’s six hours and 50 minutes,” the official length of the teacher workday, she said. “And then I swipe out.”

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg closed the notorious reassignment centers known as rubber rooms this year, he and the city’s teachers’ union announced triumphantly that one of the most obvious sources of (p. A3) waste in the school system — $30 million a year in salaries being paid to educators caught up in the glacial legal process required to fire them — was no more.

No longer would hundreds of teachers accused of wrongdoing or incompetence, like Ms. Gill, clock in and out of trailers or windowless rooms for years, doing nothing more than snoozing or reading newspapers, griping or teaching one another tai chi. Instead, their cases would be sped up, and in the meantime they would be put to work.

While hundreds of teachers have had their cases resolved, for many of those still waiting, the definition of “work” has turned out to be a loose one. Some are now doing basic tasks, like light filing, paper-clipping, tracking down student information on a computer or using 25-foot tape measures to determine the dimensions of entire school buildings. Others sit without work in unadorned cubicles or at out-of-the-way conference tables.

For the full story, see:
SHARON OTTERMAN. “For New York, Teachers Still in Idle Limbo.” The New York Times (Weds., December 8, 2010): A1 & A3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated December 7, 2010 and has the title “New York Teachers Still in Idle Limbo.”)

UFT “Trying to Deny Poor Parents Choice for Their Children”

Madeleine Sackler. Source of image: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) ‘What’s funny,” says Madeleine Sackler, “is that I’m not really a political person.” Yet the petite 27-year-old is the force behind “The Lottery”–an explosive new documentary about the battle over the future of public education opening nationwide this Tuesday.

In the spring of 2008, Ms. Sackler, then a freelance film editor, caught a segment on the local news about New York’s biggest lottery. It wasn’t the Powerball. It was a chance for 475 lucky kids to get into one of the city’s best charter schools (publicly funded schools that aren’t subject to union rules).

“I was blown away by the number of parents that were there,” Ms. Sackler tells me over coffee on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, recalling the thousands of people packed into the Harlem Armory that day for the drawing. “I wanted to know why so many parents were entering their kids into the lottery and what it would mean for them.” And so Ms. Sackler did what any aspiring filmmaker would do: She grabbed her camera.
. . .
But on the way to making the film she imagined, she “stumbled on this political mayhem–really like a turf war about the future of public education.” Or more accurately, she happened upon a raucous protest outside of a failing public school in which Harlem Success, already filled to capacity, had requested space.
“We drove by that protest,” Ms. Sackler recalls. “We were on our way to another interview and we jumped out of the van and started filming.” There she discovered that the majority of those protesting the proliferation of charter schools were not even from the neighborhood. They’d come from the Bronx and Queens.
“They all said ‘We’re not allowed to talk to you. We’re just here to support the parents.'” But there were only two parents there, says Ms. Sackler, and both were members of Acorn. And so, “after not a lot of digging,” she discovered that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) had paid Acorn, the controversial community organizing group, “half a million dollars for the year.” (It cost less to make the film.)
Finding out that the teachers union had hired a rent-a-mob to protest on its behalf was “the turn for us in the process.” That story–of self-interested adults trying to deny poor parents choice for their children–provided an answer to Ms. Sackler’s fundamental question: “If there are these high-performing schools that are closing the achievement gap, why aren’t there more of them?”

For the full interview, see:
BARI WEISS. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; Storming the School Barricades; A new documentary by a 27-year-old filmmaker could change the national debate about public education.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., JUNE 5, 2010): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the first paragraph quoted above has slightly different wording in the online version than the print version; the second paragraph quoted is the same in both.)

Public Employees’ Union Was Biggest Spender in 2010 Election

(p. A1) The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees is now the biggest outside spender of the 2010 elections, thanks to an 11th-hour effort to boost Democrats that has vaulted the public-sector union ahead of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO and a flock of new Republican groups in campaign spending.

The 1.6 million-member AFSCME is spending a total of $87.5 million on the elections after tapping into a $16 million emergency account to help fortify the Democrats’ hold on Congress. Last week, AFSCME dug deeper, taking out a $2 million loan to fund its push. The group is spending money on television advertisements, phone calls, campaign mailings and other political efforts, helped by a Supreme Court decision that loosened restrictions on campaign spending.
“We’re the big dog,” said Larry Scanlon, the head of AFSCME’s political operations. “But we don’t like to brag.”

For the full story, see:
BRODY MULLINS And JOHN D. MCKINNON. “Campaign’s Big Spender; Public-Employees Union Now Leads All Groups in Independent Election Outlays.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., OCTOBER 22, 2010): A1 & A4.

Arne Duncan on “Waiting for Superman” and Teachers’ Unions

Arne Duncan. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 26) Have you seen the new film “Waiting for Superman,” a documentary opening this week that makes public education in this country seem totally dysfunctional?
I did. I think it’s going to help the country to understand the tremendous sense of urgency that I feel. We have parents who know their child is getting a subpar education. That is devastating to them and ultimately it’s devastating to our country.
The film blames teachers’ unions for the failure of public schools because the unions have made it almost impossible to fire lazy teachers. Are you against teachers’ unions?
Of course not. I’m a big fan of Randi’s.

Randi Weingarten, of the American Federation of Teachers? The film depicts her as a villain.
I think Randi is providing some courageous leadership and is actually taking some heat internally in the union because she said publicly that the union shouldn’t be protecting bad teachers.

For the full interview, see:
DEBORAH SOLOMON. “Questions for Arne Duncan; The School of Hard Drives.” The New York Times, Magazine Section (Sun., September 17, 2010): 26.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated September 16, 2010.)

Brit Papers Survived Due to “the Gratifying Defeat of the Luddite Unions by Rupert Murdoch”

“Evans says: “Ultimately, Mrs Thatcher was the reason I was fired, because I attacked her so much.” Source of caption and photo: online version of The Independent on Sunday article quoted and cited below.

(p. 12) As a condition of acquiring both The Times and The Sunday Times in early 1981, Murdoch promised that the independence of each would be protected by a board of directors, and made other solemn guarantees.

“On this basis,” Evans wrote in Good Times, Bad Times, “I accepted Rupert Murdoch’s invitation to edit The Times on February 17 1981. My ambition,” he admitted, “got the better of my judgement.” Every assurance regarding editorial independence, he added, was blithely disregarded.
On 9 March 1982, the day after he’d come back from burying his father at Bluebell Wood cemetery in Prestatyn, Harold Evans was sacked.
“Ultimately,” he says, “Mrs Thatcher was the reason I was fired. Because I was attacking her so much. When she started to dismantle the British economy, the most cogent critic of that policy which led, OK, to… a lot of things… was The Sunday Times. I wrote 70 per cent of that criticism myself. When I became editor of The Times, I continued to criticise monetarism. But I could still see some of the good things about her.”
“Just remind us?”
“I’m thinking – and you probably won’t agree with this because I sense that you’re a firm supporter of the NUJ [National Union of Journalists] – mainly of her dealings with the unions.”
“How do you feel about her now?”
“I think she is a very brave woman.”
“Hitler was brave.”
“Yes, but… she was right about terrorism. She was right about the IRA.”
“Do you think Britain would be a better place if she’d never existed?”
“No. I think Britain benefited from her having been there. Britain was becoming so arthritic with labour restrictions.”
“Good Times, Bad Times is an unforgiving portrait of Rupert Murdoch.”
. . .
(p. 13) [Evans] has called Rupert Murdoch elitist, anti-democratic, and asserted that the Australian cares nothing about the opinion of others, so long as his business expands. This is the same man who refers to “the gratifying defeat of the Luddite unions by Rupert Murdoch”.
. . .
“So how do you feel about the Murdoch empire now?”
Evans pauses. “I’m not that familiar with the British… OK. Let’s take an alternative scenario. Murdoch never arrives. I manage to take control of The Sunday Times with the management buyout. Then I get defeated by the unions. The Independent wouldn’t be here. Rival papers survived because they got the technology. Thanks to Murdoch.”

For the full interview, see:
Robert Chalmers, Interviewer. “Harold Evans: ‘All I tried to do was shed a little light’.” The Independent on Sunday (Sun., June 13, 2010): 8 & 10-13.
(Note: free-standing ellipsis, between paragraphs, added; internal ellipses in original; italics in original; bracketed name added in place of “he.”)

U.S. Jobs Lost Due to Law Restricting Mexican Truck Drivers

“Carbonless paper comes off a coating machine at Appleton Papers in March. Mexican tariffs have hit sales.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A5) APPLETON, Wis.–Congress’s vote last year to keep Mexican truck drivers south of the border was good news for DuWayne Marshall.

Mr. Marshall, 49 years old, owns a truck and hauls loads all over the U.S. from his home in Wisconsin. “Why should I have to compete against Third World drivers within my own borders?” Mr. Marshall asked during a break on a run to San Diego. “By closing down the borders, we are saving American jobs.”
Elizabeth Villagomez, 38, isn’t so sure. A single mother of two teens, she has worked at a paper plant in this community near Green Bay for 15 years. After the Mexican government retaliated against the trucking ban by slapping $2 billion in tariffs on U.S. paper, produce and other goods, orders plunged and managers began slashing shifts and overtime for the unionized work force.
“The company has done all it can to cut costs,” Ms. Villagomez said. “I’m at the bottom of the list if they have layoffs. It’s kind of scary, not knowing if you’re going to have a job.”
. . .
At Appleton Papers Inc., the fight over who can drive a truck across a border 1,600 miles away has translated into falling wages and rising anxiety.
Rick Bahr, head of the United Steelworkers union local that represents more than 500 employees at the Appleton plant, said six shifts have already been cut, cutting down on overtime.
“The battle ends up union versus union, truckers versus the paper workers,” Mr. Bahr said. The national steelworkers’ union has been supporting the Teamsters on the issue of Mexican trucks in the U.S.
Nearly half the company’s revenue, about $420 million last year, comes from carbonless paper sales. Its largest foreign customer is Mexico. After Mexico put a 10% tariff on carbonless paper, revenue from Mexico fell to $37 million in 2009 from $46 million in 2008.
Now, more Mexican customers say they will look for alternative suppliers to avoid having to bear part of the tariff costs. Just last month a major customer told Appleton it was going to get its carbonless paper from a European producer.
Even before the tariffs were imposed, the company had seen business hit by the economic slowdown and had cut its work force in 2008 and stopped other benefits, such as reimbursing tuition and matching workers’ contributions to their 401K retirement plans. Company officials said it was hard to quantify what part of the business downturn could be blamed directly on the tariffs, but they noted that Appleton sold 18% fewer tons of carbonless paper in the U.S. last year, compared with 2008. The number of tons sold to Mexican customers was down 24%.
Inside the plant, the machine that coats 4,000-pound rolls of paper to make it carbonless was idle one recent afternoon. Once run 24 hours a day, it is now used only half that time.
Kevin Bunnow, 50, a 33-year veteran of the plant, said the reduction in shifts had meant a wage cut of several thousand dollars last year.
“When elephants fight, the grass loses,” he said. “It didn’t take me long to realize, we’re the grass.”

For the full story, see:
GARY FIELDS. “Trade Dispute Divides Workers; It’s ‘Union vs. Union’ as Ban on Mexican Trucks Cheers Drivers, Triggers Cut in Hours at Paper Plant.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., April 6, 2010): A5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Largest Decline in Private Sector Union Members in 25 Years

(p. A3) Organized labor lost 10% of its members in the private sector last year, the largest decline in more than 25 years. The drop is on par with the fall in total employment but threatens to significantly limit labor’s ability to influence elections and legislation.

On Friday, the Labor Department reported private-sector unions lost 834,000 members, bringing membership down to 7.2% of the private-sector work force, from 7.6% the year before. The broader drop in U.S. employment and a small gain by public-sector unions helped keep the total share of union membership flat at 12.3% in 2009. In the early 1980s, unions represented 20% of workers.

For the full story, see:
KRIS MAHER. “Union Membership Declines by 10%.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., January 23, 2010): A3.
(Note: the online version of the article has the slightly different title “Union Membership Drops 10%.”)

Like Cesar Chavez, Union Intimidates Its Own Members

“Amelia Frank-Vitale, a former union organizer, said the practice of pink sheeting sent her into therapy.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) After six years working in the laundry of a Miami hotel, Julia Rivera was thrilled when her union tapped her to become a full-time union organizer.

But her excitement soon turned to outrage.
Ms. Rivera said her supervisors at Unite Here, the hotel and restaurant workers’ union, repeatedly pressed her to reveal highly personal information, getting her to divulge that her father had sexually abused her.
Later, she said, her supervisors ordered her to recount her tale of abuse again and again to workers they were trying to unionize at Tampa International Airport, convinced that Ms. Rivera’s story would move them, making them more likely to join the union.
“I was scared not to do what they said,” said Ms. Rivera, adding that she resented being pressured to disclose intimate information and then speak about it in public. “To me, it was sick. It was horrible.”
Ms. Rivera and other current and former Unite Here organizers are speaking out against what they say is a longstanding practice in which Unite Here officials pressured subordinates to disclose sensitive personal information — for example, that their mother was an alcoholic or that they were fighting with their spouse.
More than a dozen organizers said in interviews that they had often been pressured to detail such personal anguish — sometimes under the threat of dismissal from their union positions — and that their supervisors later used the information to press them to comply with their orders.
“It’s extremely cultlike and extremely manipulative,” said Amelia Frank-Vitale, a Yale graduate and former hotel union organizer who said these practices drove her to see a therapist.
Several organizers grew incensed when they discovered that details of their history had been put into the union’s database so that supervisors could use that information to manipulate them.
“This information is extremely personal,” said Matthew Edwards, an organizer who had disclosed that he was from a broken home and was overweight when young. “It is catalogued and shared throughout the whole organizing department.”
. . .
(p. B5) Several organizers likened pink sheeting to a practice that Cesar Chavez, former president of the United Farm Workers, used when he embraced a mind-control practice developed by Synanon, a drug rehabilitation center founded in Santa Monica, Calif. Union staff members were systematically subjected to intense, prolonged verbal abuse in an effort to break them down and assure loyalty.
. . .
Ms. Frank-Vitale, now a graduate student at American University, says she is still haunted by memories of pink sheeting.
“One night my supervisor pushed me and pushed me, and I started talking about being an overweight woman in America, what that was like in high school, that it was very difficult for me,” she said. “I felt kind of violated.”

For the full story, see:
STEVEN GREENHOUSE. “Some Organizers Protest Their Union’s Tactics.” The New York Times (Thurs., November 19, 2009): B1 & B5.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated November 18, 2009.)
(Note: ellipses added.)

Calderón’s Decision Is Bigger than Reagan’s Firing of Air Traffic Controllers

“The Mexican Union of Electricians protests the government’s decision to liquidate the state-owned electricity company in Mexico City.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A19) Eight days ago, just after midnight on a Sunday morning, Mexican President Felipe Calderón instructed federal police to take over the operations of the state-owned electricity monopoly, Luz y Fuerza del Centro (LyFC), which serves Mexico City and parts of surrounding states. The company’s assets will stay in the hands of the government but will now be run by the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), a national state-owned utility and the major supplier of LyFC’s energy.

The net effect of the move is to dethrone 42,000 members of the Mexican Union of Electricians, which had won benefits over the decades to make Big Three auto workers in Detroit blush. When the liquidation is complete, it is expected that the company will employ about 8,000. To appreciate the magnitude of Mr. Calderón’s decision, think of Ronald Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers–only bigger. As one internationally renowned Mexican economist remarked on Sunday, it is “the most important act of government in 20 years.”

For the full commentary, see:
MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY. “Mexico’s Calderón Takes on Big Labor; Its state-owned electricity company was bleeding the national treasury dry.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., October 19, 2009): A19.

Powerful Rail Unions Defend Specious Disability Claims

“LAX REGULATIONS; One examination in 1997 found that 97 percent of workers who applied for disability benefits from the Railroad Retirement Board were approved. Despite decades of efforts to re-evaluate the standards, the rate is as high or higher today.” Source of photo and caption: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) After learning that most of her career employees were retiring early and getting disability payments, the Long Island Rail Road’s president, Helena E. Williams, set out in October to learn more about the obscure federal agency in Chicago that was dispensing the money, a quarter of a billion dollars since 2000.

But when Ms. Williams asked to attend the next meeting of the agency — the federal Railroad Retirement Board, rail workers’ version of Social Security — she got a surprise.
The board, with about $34 billion in assets, had not met formally in nearly two years, and no new meeting was scheduled. The three board members, all full-time presidential appointees, rarely met even in private, employees of the agency say.
Operating out of public view, with little scrutiny from Congress and even from its former inspector general, the retirement board has become the agency that cannot say no, last year approving virtually every single disability application it received — almost 98 percent. It did not matter where rail employees lived or where they worked.
An examination of the board by The New York Times, including dozens of interviews and a review of government records, found a disability program plagued by labor-management infighting, weak standards and a failure to use tests that could better weed out specious disability claims.
. . .
(p. A25) More than a half-dozen state and federal agencies are now investigating the retirement board’s disability payments to former L.I.R.R. employees. In September, two days after The Times published the results of an eight-month investigation that documented those disability payments, federal agents raided the board’s Long Island office.
The L.I.R.R.’s disability rate, which since 2000 has ranged between 93 percent and 97 percent for retired career employees, is three to four times that of the average railroad. Workers at other railroads get disabilities just as easily, but they file for them less often because, unlike L.I.R.R. employees, they cannot retire early with a private pension plan to supplement their disability pay.
. . .
The rail unions, which have remained powerful even as the nation’s labor movement has ebbed, have aggressively defended their interests at the retirement board. Management has largely avoided a showdown, choosing to spend its political capital in other areas, including contract issues, according to current and former board officials.
“The unions have been successful not only in getting a separate system, but keeping it,” said Robert S. Kaufman, a former director of retirement claims for the board.

For the full story, see:
WALT BOGDANICH and NICHOLAS PHILLIPS. “The Railroad Disability Board That Couldn’t Say No.” The New York Times (Mon., December 15, 2008): A1 & A25.
(Note: ellipses added; the online version of the title leaves out the word “Railroad.”)

Source of time-line graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

French Labor Holds Management Hostage—Literally

“French Caterpillar executive Nicolas Polutnik, center, with workers after his release Wednesday.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) PARIS — Of the 22,000 workers Caterpillar Inc. plans to lay off this year, the French ones have perhaps the most radical tactic for negotiating their severance deals.

In an aggressive, and peculiarly French, negotiating strategy, they held their managers hostage. The workers detained the director of their plant and four other managers for about 24 hours this week. Workers released them only after the company agreed to resume talks with unions and a government mediator on how to improve compensation for workers who are being laid off.
. . .
Jérôme Pélisse, a sociologist, surveyed 3,000 companies in 2004 and found that 18 of them had experienced an executive detention in the prior three years.

For the full story, see:
DAVID GAUTHIER-VILLARS and LEILA ABBOUD. “In France, the Bosses Can Become Hostages.” Wall Street Journal (Fri., APRIL 3, 2009): B1 & B5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)