If UFT Unity Gets a Do-over, I Want One Too

Unity demands a revote on a contract it lost.

I’m told that UFT leadership says it received over a hundred emails asking for a re-do of the OT-PT contract. Therefore, it’s making noise about having a new vote. Now, I understand exactly how they feel. It sucks to lose. I’ve run for union office a number of times, and lost more times than I won.

Of course, I’m not part of the privileged, elite, invitation-only Unity Caucus. When I lose an election, it’s simply lost. When I was elected chapter leader, some funny things happened. Two of the three people I nominated for delegates, on the very same page, did not appear on our ballot. We ended up with too few delegates. When I complained, a member of Unity Caucus told me if we had to do the election over, we’d have to do mine as well. Having just worked very hard to defeat three opponents, I passed on that.

Our Unity chapter leader then asked us who would like to run, at a chapter meeting. The two candidates I’d nominated stood, and no one else did. He said they were now delegates. Days later, he said they were not. There needed to be an election, he said. I nominated two candidates, the ones I’d nominated when I first ran.

When the ballot came up, it had the name of one member who shared my last name. It had the name of another who was my best friend at the time. I questioned both, and neither had asked to run. It also contained friends of the outgoing CL, and one member who had family in Unity. That member confided to me he had no interest in being a delegate, but he just wanted to go to union conventions for free. (Who doesn’t want to have a dedicated representative like that?)

I ran hard, via word of mouth, leafleting, and running around to every department in our building. We won the two seats we targeted, but had to go through a lot of wholly unnecessary red tape.

Unity doesn’t like to lose elections, and again, I understand. However, when a contract is voted down, it’s their job to go back and negotiate something members can support. Unity doesn’t agree with this, of course, What they seem to think is they need to re-do the election until they get the result they want.

There’s some history here. Shortly after I first began teaching (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) there was an election for high school Vice-President, and Unity (gasp!) lost. This was unheard of. How could this happen? New Action’s Michael Shulman, evidently, was elected. There must have been some mistake.

I don’t recall what the grounds were, but Unity re-did the election. I can only suppose they rallied their troops and told them to get out and vote. I was too busy being a chronically overwhelmed new teacher to pay much attention. I voted for Michael Shulman, again. I didn’t know who Unity was, who New Action was, or who Shulman was, but I perceived them as the underdog and was inclined to support them.

Michael Shulman and New Action won the re-do with a higher margin. Of course, by then Shulman had missed a bunch of his term, waiting for the new election. But Unity was still not happy with this result.

Now, when you’re corrupt and determined to win elections, even though the voters don’t support you, there are a number of approaches you can take. In Florida, when voters decided ex-prisoners should vote, the legislature found ways around it.

Stacey Abrams has made a virtual career out of fighting voter suppression. And perish forbid you should offer water to Georgia voters stuck in deliberately long lines.

Those are just a few examples of voter suppression in our country. The idea, basically, is when voters don’t choose you, you need to choose the voters. And no one does this better than the Unity Caucus.

After putting up with the indignity of an opposition VP for high schools, Unity Caucus proposed that all VPs be elected by all teachers. Since elementary and middle schools were reliably in the Unity column, this basically guaranteed that high school teachers would never be able to pick their own VP again. In the last election, for example, Jonathan Halabi won the majority among HS teachers. Yet Jonathan never got to be VP. He’s just another lowly blogger like me.

NY has been a pretty blue state for some time now. If UFT Unity were in charge of NY State voting, and didn’t like the whole blue thing, here is what they would do—they would get Texas and Oklahoma to help us vote. That’s essentially what they did to high school teachers.

As for the contract, I voted no. There were a few reasons why. One was that the raises were sub-inflationary. I can’t really vote for that. The other was I have no idea what side deals the Unity Caucus made about our health care. I supported the 2018 contract. I had no idea about the health givebacks Unity made. I don’t trust them anymore. (And no, I’m not going out to demonstrate for sub-inflationary contracts with unpredictable health cutbacks either.)

So if you’re going to do a revote for the OT/PT chapter because of a hundred emails, I can get another hundred people to email complaints about the teacher contract. That’s a preposterous standard to overturn the will of rank and file, of course. If they win with this tactic, they’ll say, “You see? It’s what they really wanted.”

That’s not true, even if Unity manages to intimidate enough people to vote yes. When Michael Bloomberg wanted a third term, he bought off a bunch of his BFFs in the city council and made a special rule just for that term. Then, the man went and bought himself another term. But voters twice affirmed term limits. That meant they did not want someone with too much power to be able to do that.

And the OT/PT chapter doesn’t want it either. That, in fact, was why they voted NO.

But if Unity pushes this nonsense, I demand equal rights. It’s anti-democratic for Unity to push through do-overs for election results they don’t like. It’s moral bankruptcy on par with all political hacks who try to rig elections.

Next year they’ll face the retirees, who have thus far been successful in battling UFT Unity’s outrageous sellout to inferior corporate health care. (Donate to that fight right here.) How will Unity try to hobble that election?

Time will tell. For now, if Unity cared a whit about fairness or democracy, either everyone would get a do-over, or no one would.