What was Wrong With the UFT Questionnaire?

Your questionnaires were due last week. I hope many of your sent them in. And there is a Negotiating Committee meeting tomorrow. The results have probably been tabulated.

Contract Enforcement

There were questions about teacher’s controling their lesson formats. here were questions about adequate supplies and facilities. here were questions about evaluating administrators. There were a host of other quality of life questions.

There were questions about rights we already have, some explicit. We can’t enforce the current contract? Better language is not going to help.

Asking questions about a new contract is, in many ways, a diversion. Who is protecting our members rights today? Do we have adequate supplies? Are classes rotated? With 6-R shot to hell, are administrative assignments being rotated? Do our chapters meet? When the principal steps over the line, is there a chapter to say “No!” ?

But talk is cheap. A survey is cheap. Building chapters, enforcing the contract, protecting members rights, that’s hard. Protecting new members’ rights?

And the most frustrating part? If we had functioning chapters in every school, the DoE and Bloomberg’s Chancellor would know it. They would not laugh at a strike threat (as they did last time round). Our negotiators are as weak or as powerful as the union – at the central, but much more importantly, at the school level.

Do we really want the lawyers to negotiate for more ‘rights’ that we do not enforce? (Who has removed an old letter from their file?) Or do we want to strengthen the UFT, so our neogiators can be tougher, and so they can get things we can actually enforce?

This union needs to find concrete ways to strengthen itself, from the bottom up. Our leaders need to provide ideas and initiatives for things we can do today.

I don’t mean to say that this is the only problem with the Questionnaire:

Two weeks ago I complained here about it. We have an organization that derives its strength from collective discussion and collective action, yet our leaders were asking us to fill this thing out on summer vacation, alone.

There were other complaints. I got a pair of e-mails from TJC, mostly objecting to leading questions. They worried that certain questions were laying out a strategy for concessionary bargaining. Chaz objected strongly. He was concerned about leading questions, and also about the lack of questions directed to getting back what we lost in the last contract.