Out With the Old

In with ABC

Last March, I was invited to a meeting. People there were discussing the possibility of running Amy Arundell for President of the UFT. To me, it seemed too good to be true. I was quite surprised that anyone who’d been so involved with leadership would stand up against Unity. And I know Amy. She’s the hardest working UFT person I’ve ever encountered, and among the most knowledgeable. (If there’s anything she doesn’t know, she knows someone who does.)

Though meetings continued, I dropped out for a while. I spoke with Norm Scott and Daniel Alicea from time to time, and they clued me in. While I was gone, MORE continued to attend. They delayed progress for months while trying to decide, Hamlet-style, whether to run, or run with us, or not.

At some point, I drifted back to ABC and was surprised by the ease I had fitting in. There was no drama. Everything and everyone was forward-looking. Unlike many meetings I’d attended, there was no hidden or borderline incomprehensible agenda. We were going to fight Unity and take back our union. I was all in.

Not everyone was, though. While I was gone, ABC had made an agreement to unite with the caucuses. Someone proposed an equal four-way split between MORE, New Action, Retiree Advocate and ABC. MORE rejected it, demanding a higher percentage.

I’m told, along with New Action and Retiree Advocate (at the time, at least), ABC declined, and I can’t say I regret it. I have extensive experience with MORE, documented here, and here’s an excerpt I find particularly relevant:

I'm chapter leader of a large school, and I represent 300 people. I don't have the luxury of examining whether they are left wing, right wing, or dual-winged, I represent absolutely every member, regardless of political inclination. That's what a union does, but that's not what MORE does.

Of course MORE is entitled to their positions, whatever they may be. However, that by no means suggests they’re representative of UFT at large. That’s one reason I’m very happy to be affiliated with ABC and bread and butter issues, the things that unite rather than divide us. I have my own opinions, but in a sorely polarized society, they’re not the way we strengthen and mobilize our union.

MORE, as I referenced in this piece, insisted on a “steering committee.” This committee, for some reason, had to control everything. MORE was very upset, for example, when I introduced a class-size resolution at UFT Executive Board, I ran it by a class-size expert rather than their steering committee.

MORE’s Arise coalition also has a steering committee. Here’s a graphic someone sent me:

Note that final decisions are voted on by the steering committee. ABC envisioned sub-groups, like HS teachers, selecting their own candidates. After much drama with the caucuses, ABC decided to go our own way.

I’m wary of a group that leaves ultimate power in the hands of a very small group. We have that with Unity, and how has that worked out?

I’m also increasingly weary of comments that ABC needs to unite with the caucuses. For months, I’ve largely ignored them. But hey, if my commenters want to know, it’s no big secret. I have extensive experience with these caucuses, and I’m now convinced they are impractical, thing of the past. And frankly, I look upon them with no nostalgia whatsoever.

I embraced opposition to the Unity Caucus as far back as 2005. The year I became chapter leader, I was running with ICE, probably as a convention delegate. At chapter leader training, I mentioned that to one of the people I met, and he told me, “Oh, they just oppose everything.” That was the Unity line about us. But we certainly opposed that awful contract.

Opposing Unity was frustrating because a nominal opposition caucus, New Action, was aligned with Unity. They had some deal in which they endorsed the Unity presidential candidate. In exchange, they were cross-endorsed for Executive Board seats and got union jobs. I was pretty excited when Mulgrew pulled their gigs and they decided to run with us.

This brings me to the caucus pattern. They get together for a spell to run, they win a little, they lose a lot, but drift apart, only to reunite (or not) next election cycle. But clearly, there’s no common purpose, or we wouldn’t need to rinse and repeat so frequently.

When I returned to ABC, it appeared New Action had agreed to a deal that somehow reconciled with MORE, leaving us out. I got on the phone with their leaders and tried to persuade them to reconsider. Obviously, I was not successful. I did spend hours trying to salvage a deal, though.

After that, of course, eleven of the 300 people who were elected with Retiree Advocate decided to form an alliance with MORE. That left 288 of those of us who ran with RA without a vote.

Too bad for us, I guess.

At least three of the 11 RA members who granted themselves voting privileges were also in New Action. Two of the three concurrent New Action/ Retiree Advocate members who deemed themselves vote-worthy are now running for officer positions. Perhaps it’s a coincidence. Regardless, I’ve had it with blatantly undemocratic practices.

Around that time, from what I could glean, the allied caucuses expected us to crawl away and die. They underestimated us. It’s not in our nature to do things like that. I know some people in Retiree Advocate pretty well, they know some of us, and it’s shocking they’d assume we’d do that. That’s exceedingly bad judgment.

They presented us with some proposals. We could have between zero and eight members on various portions of slates. Maybe it was even the graphic above. Now we could have agreed to that, and gotten zero representation—after all, the agreement allowed for it. Accepting such an agreement would have been exceedingly bad judgment on our part.

Many of us, in fact, were accustomed to having zero representation in many or most areas of our union. Why exactly did we want to support anyone who proposed more of the same? Now of course, they could have provided us more than zero representation. (That said, while Blanche Du Bois may be content to rely on the kindness of strangers, I’m not.)

We continued to organize, and activated a whole lot of members who hadn’t been all that active before. We recruited members who’d been part of every existing caucus, but mostly we recruited from schools.

Like our union, we are diverse, and the beliefs that hold us together are those that support both working and retired members.

Michael Mulgrew can get up and take positions on congestion pricing or where the city should build casinos. He can unilaterally determine to dump all retirees into Medicare Advantage, or pose largely unaffordable charges to those who’d like to retain it. He can agree to cut in-service health care by 10%, and he can do all these things without consulting actual members. (He can even form some health committee to make future bad decisions so as to shift blame from himself.)

Unity can continue to send out the same dozen staffers to political events and pretend that represents member engagement. They can nominate loyalty-oath signers to run for city council. The other caucuses can get together, pull apart, get together, pull apart, keep doing the same things forever and hope for the best.

Of course, MORE can take political action on whatever they wish. I don’t follow them closely, and I can’t say what they’ve been doing these last few years. It makes little difference to me.

We have a new idea, an idea that ought not to be new at all—a bottom-up union that takes direction from membership. It’s unacceptable that 75% of us don’t participate at all and can’t even be bothered to vote. It’s unacceptable that our union insists on voting by mail even as few members have reason to visit a mailbox.

What’s absolutely unacceptable is deliberately shutting out member voice. Caucuses have been doing that for decades. This cycle is no exception.

It’s nice that caucuses pretend not to hate one another for a few months every three years. It’s great that they manage to pull together and pretend they haven’t got irreconcilable differences. Still, we can do better. Our union can’t be about the storied history of some caucus or other, let alone preservation of power at any cost.

Our union has to be about serving the members. That’s ABC’s goal.

No one can serve members better than our presidential candidate Amy Arundell, finally free of caucus binds.

We have it in our hands to bring a new vision to our union, the vision we should always have had. We have it in our hands to activate our sleepy membership.

We have an opportunity to welcome A BETTER CONTRACT with both the city and our union. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been waiting a long time for this. Let’s change things this May!