Under Klein, over 100 district schools have been closed.

It would be nice if folks operated from a factual basis.

Well, apropos other comments, since you couldn’t figure out what teachers “tithing themselves” meant, it’s to be expected that you don’t know, or more likely refuse to understand, the meaning of “triage.”

Try a dictionary; it’s a useful thing.

You don’t have to ask me why these rich people and other benefactors want to support and work with charter schools. Why don’t you ask the New York Foundling why, in their 150 year or so history, they have never opened a district public school?

Because at their best, charter schools are not simply a form of triage, though I admit I’m not quite sure what you mean by that in this context, but are an avenue for effectively delivering high quality education without the red tape and nonsense that prevents too many hard working, competent principals and teachers in the system from doing their jobs well. Could you imagine an agency such as the Foundling or Children’s Aid Society or the Red Cross trying to implement all of those aspects of the Haven Academy Charter School into a district public school? I think the answer lies in the same reason your rich oligarchs avoid district schools like the plague; the bureaucracy prevents the hard work from filtering down to the kids.

Charters, through increased autonomy paired with increased accountability, cut the red tape.

Your reference to Haven Academy proves the point that opponents of charters schools – who, by the way, oppose them from an institutional and public policy perspective, not opposition to any one particular school, charter parents or teachers – are trying to make above the din of pro-charter propaganda and PR in the mainstream media: that they are creating a separate-and-unequal tier of schools that receive public and private subsidies denied to public school students.

The NY Times article you referred to states that:

– the school has a “support services coordinator” for the at-risk students who attend. It
sounds great: too bad neighborhood public schools are denied similar services. Why
can’t Eli Broad, Bill Gates, the New Schools Venture Funders, et. al. provide that to
the public schools? Where’s your personal outrage over the denial of such services to
public school kids over the decades? Your outrage is highly selective, focusing mostly on
teachers, and dovetails with the anti-teacher propaganda of the past generation.

– according to the Times, the after-school program includes Alvin Ailey Dance, Hip-Hop
dance, African drumming, Violin, voice and academic tutoring. Why is it that charters
get preference for such funding? Aren’t these services that all children could benefit from?

– the school offers evening workshops for parents, a good thing. How about providing it
to everyone who needs it?

– the school provides customized transportation. Nice, if you can get it: unfortunately,
most kids don’t.

No one is contesting the fact that there are good charter schools run by dedicated people (although there are also charters run by incompetents, sociopaths and scammers). That has never been the point, which is that they are at best a diversion from the necessary hard work and expense of educating all children. Instead, they provide life vests for the lucky few.

At their best, charter schools are an unacknowledged form of social and educational triage; at their worst, they are a wedge to privatize the public sphere, destroy the labor standards and professional autonomy that teachers have struggled to achieve over decades, and marketize every last nook and cranny of American life.

By the way, nobody “places” themselves in the upper reaches of the Obama administration. Obama does the placing. And with his revolutionary grassroots fundraising, he is not as beholden to Daddy Warbucks as other politicians.

If you’re worried about Gates and Broad, etc., corporatizing our schools then you have to ask how a school like this one gets caught up in the charter movement: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/education/07foster.html?ref=education. Is this school, and the many others like around the city and the country, just a blip in the charter movement for your corporate raiders? Seems antithetical to their ‘conspiracy’ if you ask me.

In my experience, many charter school teachers have run screaming from the UFT, which they as a polarizing, interfering force rather than a helpful representative.

I know too many teachers who have had issues the UFT didn’t want to deal with for political reasons to think that the UFT is above using its own members as political pawns.

Face it: Largely through its own success, the UFT has morphed from a needed organization providing a revolutionary public service to a mammoth special interest PAC fighting to maintain and grow its political influence by any means necessary.

Your reasoning is faulty. If teacher’s and student’s interests coincide “almost all the time,” then how can it simultaneously be true that the Union’s “reputation lies in the swampy ground of the self-serving and the manipulative.” Unless of course that “bad reputation” might have something to do with the unending 30-year corporate media and PR campaign against it and the public schools.

The UFT has many, many shortcomings, but it is still the only institutional guarantor of teacher’s (and, for the most part, students) interests.

Actually, your final phrase sounds much more like a description of the rhetoric used by charter supporters in Albany this week, as described by a charter school teacher on the Edwize blog.

I’d suggest your check yourself for fleas.

I found a follow up to this article on Alternet: “The lawsuit was ultimately settled or withdrawn on undisclosed terms with no court finding of wrongdoing against Jackson Lewis.” The fact of no wrongdoing by JL sounds specious at best.

After reading this, I’d be more than hesitant to hire JL. Sounds sleazy indeed.

Nationally (and admittedly I don’t know much about unions other than what I learned in school and as a UFT member and my family’s history supporting them vigorously abroad), unions and workers need protections because the balance of power is generally strongly in management’s favor. In New York City, of course those laws still apply, but the UFT has as much or more clout than just about any interest group you’ll find.

The UFT isn’t a group of blue-collar country folk looking to protect their rights. We’re talking about suits with expensive lawyers deciding just which government elections they will decide and which they’ll stay out of. It’s just not the same balance of power. It’s one thing to oppose unfair and abusive labor practices. It’s quite another to block progress and protest sensible expectations (like, say, writing out goals for students) on inane grounds. I don’t deny that sometimes teachers’ needs and students’ needs coincide – in fact that’s true almost all of the time. But all of the above means that to many educators who do care more about kids than adults in schools, the UFT’s reputation lies in the swampy ground of the self-serving and manipulative.

http://www.edwize.org/study-shows-employers-anti-union-behavior-intensifying#more-4472

It is unjust for employers to try to prevent workers from unionizing if the workers choose to do so. Let me repeat: I’m not against unions organizing teachers or anyone else. I am against the oppositional atmosphere that has allowed the UFT to thrive and that the UFT now encourages.

I’m not giving you caricatures, Michael F. I’m giving you real world experiences in schools with high percentages of poor students. I have no doubt that in neighborhoods where schools have been successful in our city, there is a wonderful collaboration going on and the UFT doesn’t stand in the way. Fine. Harmonious relations between management and labor go hand in hand with success.

When the school is bad, lots of things need to change. The principal might be one of them. Some of the teachers might be another. The school culture is usually a major, and difficult, one as well. The UFT seems steadfast in opposing any change to those last two pieces.

December 14, 2004
How Do You Drive Out a Union? South Carolina Factory Provides a Textbook Case
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

SUMTER, S.C. – Tom Brown, the leader of an anti-union campaign at the EnerSys battery factory here, made some surprising admissions in recent testimony about how his campaign had been run and financed.

Mr. Brown, a longtime maintenance man, acknowledged that a mysterious consultant known as Mr. X had advised him on how to oust the union and had helped him write fliers that called the union’s leaders names like “trailer trash,” “Uncle Tom” and “dog woman.” Not only that, Mr. Brown testified that envelopes filled with cash had often been sent to his home. He said he had no idea who had sent them. “I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” he said.

Across the South companies have long used bare-knuckled tactics to fight unions. But now a surprisingly detailed roadmap to such tactics has emerged from an unusual court battle between EnerSys and its law firm over whose wrongdoing – the company’s or its lawyers’ – led to a $7.75 million settlement that EnerSys entered into after federal officials accused it of 120 labor law violations in its seven-year effort to eliminate the union.

The company has accused the firm, Jackson Lewis, of malpractice and of advising it to engage in illegal behavior. The law firm says that EnerSys ignored its sound advice and that the company is trying to avoid paying its legal bill.

The wrangling has cast a spotlight on how the company fired and harassed the union’s top officials and aided Mr. Brown, the anti-union leader, although federal law prohibits companies from financing or otherwise assisting efforts to get rid of a union.

The litigation also highlights a little known but thriving business in which law firms and consultants work with corporations to beat back unionization efforts. Jackson Lewis, a national law firm based in New York, describes itself as “committed to the practice of preventive labor relations.”

“Union membership is declining because employers will stop at nothing to prevent employees from having a union,” said David Bonior, the former Michigan Congressman who is now president of American Rights at Work, an advocacy group fighting violations of workers’ rights. “Unfortunately, 75 percent of employers use union-busting consultants to fight unionization drives.”

Labor experts call the EnerSys case unusual, with federal labor officials accusing the company of firing the top seven union leaders, spying on workers, refusing to bargain and ultimately closing the 500-worker plant to retaliate against the union. Its $7.75 million settlement is evidence of how far the company strayed from the law. But labor experts also say the case opens a window onto some common tactics.

“Jackson Lewis is a key player in the union avoidance industry,” said Fred Feinstein, former general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board. “This kind of aggressive anti-union campaign is not unusual.”

Jackson Lewis says it did nothing wrong.

“Jackson Lewis zealously represents its clients,” Kevin A. Hall, a lawyer representing the firm, said. “In doing so, the firm always honors the letter and the spirit of the law. Jackson Lewis was neither involved in the initial campaign by the union to organize the employees nor involved in any effort to assist the employees to oust the union.” EnerSys refused to comment.

This tale began a decade ago when the International Union of Electrical Workers began rounding up support at the factory, which produced giant batteries to power forklifts and provide backup power to cellphone towers.

The union petitioned for a unionization election when many workers voiced dismay about meager pensions, bullying supervisors, production speedups and safety problems, especially with the high temperatures and lead used in production.

The company, then called Yuasa, hired Jackson Lewis to help mount a last-minute anti-union campaign. The company required employees to listen to speakers saying the union did not want to help workers, but only wanted their dues money. Management posted pictures of tombstones and skulls and crossbones in the cafeteria to warn employees that unionized factories often closed.

But on Feb. 23, 1995, the workers voted 191 to 185 to unionize. Management was livid.

“They said that if the union came in the company was doomed,” Paulette Jackson, a union steward and quality control worker, said. “They fought tooth and nail. They didn’t want a union in the South. Period.”

The company fired Ms. Jackson, accusing her of failing to detect some faulty batteries, but her supervisor later told the National Labor Relations Board that the charges were trumped up.

The company’s tactics led to many tangles with the labor board, which ultimately filed a sweeping complaint against EnerSys, accusing it of 120 violations of federal law, among them wrongly firing Ms. Jackson and other union leaders, assisting the anti-union campaign, improperly withdrawing union recognition and moving production to nonunion plants as retaliation.

As a result of all the litigation – including the battle between the company and its lawyers – detail after detail of what had happened emerged. In a deposition, Darryl Davids, the factory’s director of human resources, testified that John Craig, the company’s president, had once said: “We need to do whatever we’ve got to do to get rid of this union, regardless of what it may cost us.”

After the unionization vote, management refused to negotiate a contract, challenging the union’s victory. After a two-year legal battle, a federal appeals court ruled that the union’s victory was valid and ordered the company to bargain. During those two years, the company refused to grant raises.

Once negotiations began, the company said it faced such hard times, even though the economy was booming, that it would lay off workers unless the union accepted a 10 percent pay cut. Management indicated that a new “gainsharing” plan would offset those cuts by providing bonuses for increased productivity.

Pressured by union leaders from Washington, union officials and workers in Sumter reluctantly approved management’s proposals, they say.

But then the company stunned the workers, cutting most salaries by 16 percent, not 10 percent. Workers complained that the gainsharing bonuses were minuscule, even though productivity had increased.

“They gave us a bum deal on that gainsharing,” said David Bunker, a machine operator whose pay fell to $11.07 an hour from $13.26. “The union was trusting the company to do what is right. That didn’t work.”

The union protested the tiny bonuses, and the dispute went before an arbitrator. After two more years came a final ruling that EnerSys had improperly manipulated the system to give paltry bonuses.

The arbitration’s star witness was a former human resources director, Choice Phillips. Mr. Phillips said the factory’s budget had provided no money for bonuses, indicating that management had never intended to offset the pay cuts.

Mr. Phillips also testified that the plant manager, Doyle Thresher, used to leave cash on a table in his office for Mr. Brown, to help finance the anti-union campaign. The plant manager, Mr. Phillips testified, said the cash was “trash” that Mr. Brown was to pick up.

EnerSys said in legal hearings that Mr. Phillips had been fired for sexual harassment, an allegation he denies. The company won a defamation suit against him, but in November, a federal judge vacated that judgment, concluding that EnerSys had lied when it denied that it had helped the anti-union campaign. Mr. Phillips said he had been dismissed for refusing to participate in the company’s illegal conduct.

“They did everything they could to make the union look bad,” Larry Brown, a union vice president, said.

Many workers became angry with the union over the pay cuts, especially because they received no raises from 1995 to 2001.

The anger fueled the effort to oust the union. Tom Brown organized anti-union meetings, sent mailings to the plant’s 500 workers and asked them to sign cards saying they wanted the union out.

Mr. Brown testified that Mr. X, the company consultant, had given him advice. EnerSys officials later admitted that they had paid the consultant $39,000 to help guide the anti-union campaign. Mr. Brown also acknowledged that company officials had given him stamps for anti-union mailings.

The company also went after union officials directly. In June 2001, EnerSys fired Vincent Gailliard, the union’s president, during an arbitration hearing over the bonuses, accusing him of lying. EnerSys announced that same day that it was withdrawing recognition from the union, asserting that a majority of workers had signed cards saying they no longer wanted a union.

“They figured if they got rid of the leaders, the rest of us would buckle under,” Cathy Moody, another fired union official, said.

The labor board accused EnerSys of fabricating its allegations against Mr. Gailliard, asserting that it fired him to cripple the union and cow workers.

Facing a downturn in orders, EnerSys began several rounds of layoffs in 2001, often giving no advance notice to the union. On Sept. 10, 2001, EnerSys announced it was closing the factory, again giving no notice.

Federal law generally requires that factories give unions notice before large-scale layoffs and plant closings.

Union officials said EnerSys’s tactics were an egregious version of what many corporations do. According to N.L.R.B. statistics, companies illegally retaliate against 20,000 workers a year for supporting a union. And according to a study by Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University, half the companies that face unionization campaigns threaten to close their plants and one fourth fire at least one union supporter to derail the campaigns.

Faced with the sweeping complaint by the N.L.R.B., EnerSys agreed to pay $7.75 million to settle the board’s charges and the union’s lawsuits over the failure to pay bonuses or give notice of the layoffs.

After the settlement, EnerSys sued Jackson Lewis, accusing it of malpractice, including misleading federal investigators, giving illegal assistance to Mr. Brown and engineering “a relentless and unlawful campaign to oust the union.”

“The company gave carte blanche to the law firm – the law firm was pretty much running the plant,” Mr. Gailliard said. “It came back and slapped them in the face, and now they want someone to blame.”

EnerSys said that Jackson Lewis had engaged in malpractice by recommending that the company withdraw union recognition when the firm must have known about the illegal anti-union aid. Federal law bars the withdrawal of union recognition when companies have financed a decertification effort. EnerSys also accused Jackson Lewis of wrongly advising it not to give the union notice of the layoffs and plant closing.

Jackson Lewis has mounted a vigorous defense. It has accused EnerSys of obstructing justice and paying “hush money” to Mr. Brown by placing him in a job with a company that services the shuttered battery factory and by paying his salary there. EnerSys insists that the arrangement was not intended to buy silence.

Jackson Lewis says it consistently gave sound advice.

Mr. Hall, the lawyer representing the firm, said, “Sometimes when clients ignore their attorneys’ advice and end up with disappointing results, especially where legal fees are still outstanding, they deny responsibility for their own conduct and sue their lawyers for malpractice, hoping that the case will settle with a forgiveness of the legal fees.” Jackson Lewis says EnerSys owes it more than $270,000.

Frank Macerato, general counsel for EnerSys, which is based in Reading, Pa., declined comment, saying the company would not discuss matters in litigation.

Today the factory lies quiet, and many workers remain unemployed. Jackie Clemmons, one of the earliest union supporters, said the firings, the lack of raises and the plant closing had all sent a powerful message.

“After all this, I don’t think you could pay the people here to join a union, to mess with a union,” Mr. Clemmons said. “And I don’t believe the union would want to deal with us anymore down here.”

What accusations? I simply pointed out what you said, and its ramifications.

You seem to equate the democratic right of teachers to organize – guaranteed under state and federal law, by the way – with the need to “defend” your school. Did it ever occur to you that the rights of teachers can occasionally coincide with those of students? No, I didn’t think so.

Although your boutique schools are able to cap enrollment and class size due to the indulgence of the Mayor, Chancellor and your corporate patrons, real public schools are not so fortunate. If not for the clause in the UFT contract that limits class size (to still-unacceptably high levels) Klein would put 50 students in a class and point to the resulting dysfunction as another reason to open more charters. Where’s your outrage over that? Wouldn’t even weaker teachers be in a position to improve if a legitimate effort was made to lower class size?

I work in a highly successful, unionized public school where the administration and staff work cooperatively, a far cry from the caricature that forms the basis of your screeds against teachers and the union. I work under a contract that gives my representatives the legal standing to be involved in decision-making, unlike non-union charters where these things, if they exist at all, are at the whim of management and the Board. They can change or eliminate them with the stroke of a pen. Those are not rights, they privileges that can be withdrawn at a moment’s notice without redress. And that’s a big part of what the charter movement is about: re-casting labor relations in the schools, taking away whatever workplace and professional power teachers have won over the years, and placing them in the hands of private entities (closely associated with finance capital, as it happens) that are subject to regulations that are only enforced for political or PR purposes.

I’m not interested in denying anyone their rights, and if our teachers want to unionize I would never stand in their way – but since the UFT specializes in creating on oppositional us-vs.-them workplace, further justifying their need for dues by casting administrators as the evildoers and teachers as the victims in need of defense, I’d look for the best representation possible to make sure that everyone involved knows their rights but also knows their facts. I’d certainly look up Jackson, Lewis, and use whatever funds are at my disposal as an administrator with our board’s permission. If there is truly something amiss about this firm, then we wouldn’t hire them. But I’m not taking your word for it; if I listened to you I would move to Canada because I’m not hearing anything about a corporate takeover of the government up there but it’s all gloom and doom down here.

I think it’s pretty clear this thread has run its course, but the fact remains that you flippantly stated that you’d be sure to look up Jackson, Lewis in the event the teachers at your school tried to organize. That says everything people need to know about you, since they are nationally known as the most anti-labor law firm in the country.

There are labor law firms that represent labor. There are labor law firms that represent management. And then there are labor law firms, like Jackson, Lewis, that specialize in denying people their democratic rights, using the most vicious and under-handed tactics imaginable.
I think it’s also revealing that you equate “defending” your school with hiring a firm like this. And by the way, who’d be paying for their services? The public, or one of your “investors?”

I’d like to thank you for amply demonstrating how, behind all the fatuous talk about “the children,” when push comes to shove you folks are about nothing more than expanding your grip on schools. The more you open your mouth, the more you reveal who you really are, and what your agenda really is.

Thanks again, and see you next time.

I’m retracting my retraction of my quotation marks for “union-busting” Jackson, Lewis. Those were initially YOUR words after all – see your comment above on Feb. 2nd, 10:28 pm.

I think that was Groundhog Day…or are you going to try to mischaracterize that as well?

I hope that the teachers in your school have a better understanding of how to use the Internet for research, because somebody needs to know what and how to teach the students, and the principal clearly doesn’t.