Workplace Blog

Dear Friends,

The NEA (largest union in the USA, by far) Representative Assembly opens in the coming week in Philadelphia. More than 10,000 school workers will witness, if not really participate in, what NEA calls the “largest truly democratic body in the USA.”

But not much will happen at this RA, unless delegates take direct action. Rather than presenting a critique of the many crises in North American education (rising segregation, inequality, imperialist wars and the militarization of campuses, the routine racist criminalization of children in urban schools, use of regimented curricula and high-stakes exams as pipelines to war and voluntary servitude, schools as missions for capitalism) NEA’s mis-leaders are going to parade a series of Democratic presidential candidates, each as dedicated as the next to the empire’s wars and exploitation–each determined to retain and expand the essence of the NCLB.

Rather than a powerful plan of direct action uniting students, educators, parents, and community people, action that could demonstrate the central role of school in de-industrialized USA, action that could be sustained no matter what politician betrays working people next, NEA’s leaders will urge school workers to solve our problems at the ballot box, where we will choose who will oppress us least in the next decade.

This makes no sense unless we grasp that the leadership of every major union in the US seeks to fuse unionism with the interests of corporations and the national government, at every level a government clearly just a weapon of the rich. The union leaders do this for a simple reason: they live well off their quisling role, pay at the top of NEA being around $450,000 with plenty of benefits. They can live this well, they know, because they exchange support for the empire’s wars, for example, and support for the persistent degradation of workers’ lives, for the imperial bribe. Every top union leader in the country denies the reason people form unions in the first place: workers and bosses have contradictory interests. And the union bosses get rich off the idea.

A prime example of corrupt teacher union leadership was Florida NEA’s Pat Tornillo, once a darling of the AFT and the Miami teachers’ union. Not only was Tornillo one of the godfathers of “new unionism,” (the unity of union bosses, government leaders, and corporate big-wigs) he was completely corrupt, stealing more than 2.5 million dollars from the education union, living an obviously lavish life that was tolerated for decades by NEA and AFT despite repeated offers of proof of corruption from members and union organizers going back as far as the early 1980’s. AFT has a pattern of corruption that exceeds most unions.

Tornillo, while he was looting a union made up of many members who are so poor they live in house trailers, helped lead the scheme to merge NEA and AFT, not to build educator solidarity, but to fill the AFL-CIO coffers, to feather the beds of labor bosses with teacher dues, and to wipe out what remained of union democracy in NEA. When that failed, Tornillo led the merger of the Florida NEA and AFT. Now the Miami Dade local is mired in debt.

Much earlier, in 1968, Tornillo also managed to take the lead in breaking the largest state wide teachers strike in US history, sending Dade teachers back to work.

Tornillo died on June 24 just after the vile crook got out of jail. No flowers.

NEA will entertain RA delegates with plenty of parties (sponsored by anti-union Target Corp), opportunities to hook up, nice per diems and often some free luggage, but NEA’s anointed leaders will do all they can to prevent the kind of strategic planning that education workers must do if we are to preserve our integrity, our students very lives, and our own livelihoods.

Rouge Forum members will join organizers from other groups at NEA, seeking to build a movement inside and outside NEA. Look for us and sign on. If you see a group storming the podium, help them out; let them speak!

Rouge Forum members played a numerically modest, if leadership, role in the United For Peace and Justice conference in Chicago this past weekend. Here are two sides of the flyers we distributed, urging a serious strategy for peace and justice work.
“Why Are Things As they Are? It’s Class Rule”
http://www.richgibson.com/rouge_forum/ClassRule.pdf
http://www.rohan.sdsu.edu/%7Ergibson/gotwar.pdf

Congratulations and solidarity to the radical leaders of the South African teachers’ unions who helped expose the policies of the Mandella-led African National Congress (Mandella is to the ANC what Tornillo was to AFT) by leading massive nation-wide strikes against the privatizing regime. Hundreds of thousands of South African workers shut down work places for 24 days.

Southern California grocery workers may strike again, as early as this week. Three years ago, the grocery workers carried out the longest and largest strike in the US in the last decade, only to see the strike systematically disorganized and sold out by the leadership of the United Food and Commercial Workers and the Teamsters. Here is a link to the history of that strike.

Rouge Forum members will be joining the picket lines, taking students to participate, and promoting a boycott of Vons, Ralphs, Albertsons, and related company Safeway–and we’ll bring strike literature to the picketers. An injury to one only goes before an injury to all.

We note the recent Supreme Court decisions demonstrate, again, that legal action, like electoral work, is a cul de sac, especially now, as the Supreme Court eradicates what little remains of civil liberties. The current demographics of the Court are especially worth examining.

On Monday, the Supremes voted to silence free speech for students, and to expand the sale of free speech to corporations, a clear indicator of the role of property rights in US jurisprudence.

Here is a current Harpers piece on the purchase of politicians:

For those with long memories, the trial of the Grenada 17 (now 13 as 4 have been released either for time served or humanitarian health reasons) is going on in Grenada now. The seventeen, the last prisoners of the cold war, were jailed and tortured after the illegal invasion of the island in 1983. Since then the political prisoners have turned their 17th century jail into one of the best schools on the island, often producing top scores on British exit exams—to the embarrassment of the US installed puppet government. The 17 made many errors as leaders of the New Jewel Movement, but they did not commit the murders their kangaroo court (judged bribed by the US, as documents released later revealed) convicted them of. We shall see if the retrial, ordered by the British high court, finally brings them relief.