By: Al Korach

Retired Delegate (former VP teachers pension fund)

What is missing is an honest election by mail ballot not controlled by the CTU's Election Committee. What is needed is some backbone in the dues paying membership that year after year allows this. Who is right? A mail ballot by an outside agency will settle that question once and for all. Let's get this done before the May election.

By: kugler

overcoming fear

Al - the problem is there are thousands of teachers running scared afraid of the union and the board that they will loose their jobs if they speak against the corruption.

some misleading facts about that fear:

1. if you do not stand up for your rights you are actually weaker not safer from job loss or retaliation.

2. filing a formal complaint or advocating for your rights is actually something that can save your job in the long run or at least get you started on the documentation process for a legal case.

3. last why and how could anyone go to work everyday in fear of what might happen if they speak up? that is hazardous to your health. especially against the Union the very people we pay to protect us.

fighting back is refreshing and fun because the creeps will have no where to hide once all the lights are turned on!

John Kugler

Union Member

kuglerjohn@comcast.net

By: George N. Schmidt

Honest elections -- Deborah Lynch, CTPF both held honest elections. Stewart insists on dishonesty.

The four citywide votes that were taken while Deborah Lynch was President of the Chicago Teachers Union (the two contract referenda in late 2003 and the two election votes in May and June 2004) were conducted by the American Arbitration Association, which was hired by CTU to run the voting.

The recent (October, November 2009) elections for pension trustees (teachers, retired teachers) of the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund (CTPF) were run by Election Services Corporation, which was hired by CTPF to make sure its elections were above reproach.

As readers here remember, Nancy Williams, one of Marilyn Stewart's candidates for CTPF trustee, challenged the election of Lois Ashford, who had won by a narrow margin with the support of CORE. On the recount, Ashford gained two votes. The election was that clean and precise, both times it was held.

As we've reported at Substance on the Web and in the pages of Substance (print edition), one of the first things Marilyn Stewart did when she took over the Chicago Teachers Union in August 2004 was purge every union committee of anyone who was not a member of the United Progressive Caucus. Since then, the committees have either been a bad joke (check out security and safety) or worse, a center for massive corruption (Rule-Elections today, now that this debacle is public).

Although I protested Stewart's removal of me from Rule-Elections (and other committees, including security and safety and delegate training), she also ruled that I was not even a union member (!) even though nine months earlier, in January 2004, I had been serving as the secretary of the Rules-Elections Committee. I have an interesting exchange of e-mails with Mark Ochoa (Marilyn's Financial Secretary) to commemorate that dubious moment in CTU history.

Stewart's purge of the union's standing committees (and her abolition of the ad hoc committees that had been established under Deborah Lynch) was part of the centralization of power in the hands of the person who now refers to herself as the "Chief Executive Officer" of the CTU. Once Stewart had established herself as "Chief Executive Officer" with a straight face (and the support of the executives on the so-called "Executive Board"), she then turned over the main powers in the CTU to her "Chief of Staff."

Ironically, some of the people who helped Stewart gather all that dictatorial power into her own hands have since been purged from the union by Stewart, who has been citing her "executive" powers as CTU president, on the one hand, and inventing powers that never before existed for her hand-picked Executive Board, on the other. Ted Dallas is just the most prominent of those people, but not the only one.

Stewart has basically been claiming that a labor union should be run like some Wall Street corporation, and so far she's been getting away with it. She has basically abolished the House of Delegates, simply claiming that she can do whatever she wants through the Executive Board (the ouster of Dallas), by her own whim (the establishment of Fresh Start and the merit pay fiasco), or through the Illinois Federation of Teachers (which as of November 2009 is sponsoring a charter school in Chicago without the idea ever having been proposed to the Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegate!).

Until those underlying corporate models and practices are defeated, and the corporate ideology that makes the president of the union a so-called "Chief Executive Officer" (like the CTU were General Electric or Boeing!), these problems are going to grow. The arguments ("budget") for the recent Stewart positions on the referenda were just the latest silly expression of that kind of thinking. (Stewart has already wasted more than $1 million on lawyers in the past two years, most dramatically in the Dallas ouster and in fighting my wrongful termination lawsuit, which won, as we reported in Substance, in May 2008).

Meanwhile, if anybody can tell the CTU membership who the members of the Rules-Elections Committee are at the present time, it would be helpful. They should be held accountable, both in their own schools and citywide, for what just happened. At the same time, the referenda has to be held over -- under outside supervision -- before the dwindling Stewart administration has any chance at restoring the credibility it began giving up within a month after it took over the CTU in August 2004 and purged the committees one month later. Power is not the same as credibility. And in a union, credibility is more important than dictatorial power, however ludicrous it may at first appear while on parade, for the survival of the union itself.

By: Margaret Wilson

Ex-committee chair

I was one of the members whose committee was dispanded under Stewart without any input from the members of the committee. I had worked hard to get a committee started which would allow members with disabilities to have input but even before dispanding the committee she made it harder for us to do our job. My committee considered it a meeting if we went as a group to the Disability Parade or to testify at a CTA meeting or various other places and Marilyn would only consider it a meeting if we went downtown and sat in the Union office. Shouldn't the Union and its committees be more pro-active?

Marilyn seems to think that the Union is hers instead of the members and that she can make decisions without consulting the members. THIS NEEDS TO CHANGE!!!!!!!! HOPEFULLY IT WILL WITH THE NEXT ELECTION!!!!