NYC Educator: Epic Fail at UFT Leadership

NYC Educator: Epic Fail at UFT Leadership:

Epic Fail at UFT Leadership

I've been speaking to heads of other locals, and they're pretty shocked when they hear we've gone over five years without a raise. They tell me if that happened where they are, they'd have been voted out. Of course, where they are, it's not customary for over 80% of their members to sit out elections.

Now of course Unity-New Action stalwarts will say, oh, it's Bloomberg, it's not our fault, what could we do, blah blah blah, but it is in fact, the job of leadership to negotiate contracts, and this they have not done since 2007, if I recall correctly. They said this was the last contract they'd have to negotiate under Bloomberg, and who would've anticipated they'd be correct and sit through his entire third term without getting anything done?

Actually, it's the job of leadership to anticipate such things. When you have a megalomaniac billionaire mayor with no hope of becoming President, someone who will drop 100 million for reelection just as easily as you or I might buy a cup of coffee, you have to wonder what he will do next. Clearly leadership did not anticipate he might just decide to buy himself a third term.

They did have leverage, of course. A UFT rep came to my school and told hundreds of UFT members that leadership was very smart, and made a very strategic decision. There was a new law, they told us, the APPR law that made sure all teachers would be rated by junk