Detroit 'Emergency Manager' ignores negotiation plea, may finish off Detroit Federation of Teachers
The Emergency Financial Manager of the Detroit Public Schools, Roy Roberts, replied to the American Federation of Teachers’ President, Randi Weingarten, and the Detroit Federation of Teachers’ President, Keith Johnson’s request to restore DFT’s collective bargaining rights with a simple, “No,” on Thursday, August 2. Weingarten and Johnson had led a protest march and rally to DPS headquarters on the opening day of the recent AFT convention (as reported earlier at Substance). Although Weingarten created a small spectacle outside Roberts’ office during the AFT convention last week (see Substance’s extensive coverage) when she led a chant of AFT members, “Negotiate! Negotiate!” Roberts was apparently able to ignore the president of the 1.5 million member national union with no cost to himself or those who put him in power.
Detroit's schools' "Emergency Financial Manager" Roy Roberts (above) simply refused to agree with the request by Randi Weingarten and Keith Johnson to negotiate with the Detroit Federation of Teachers. Under Michigan law, he was not required to.So the protests and demand to "Negotiate" were all for naught. Why? Michigan law now offers Roberts dictatorial powers over the Detroit Public Schools, already well on the way to ruin before he arrived more than 18 months ago.
Roberts pointed to the law in denying Weingarten’s cooked up militancy.
This summer, Roberts used the law to fire all of Detroit’s teachers, forcing them to reapply for jobs. At the same time, he suspended the DFT’s agency shop and dues checkoff, meaning the union would have to get school workers to opt in to paying dues, rather than having management automatically collect money for the DFT.
When that happened, according to DFT’s Johnson’s own newspaper, the Detroit Teacher, 86 percent of the work force opted out of the union. Later, a judge issued an injunction, ordering the DPS management to restore dues deductions (the last meaning of the term, “collective bargaining” in Michigan, Wisconsin, and many other states).
The collapse and potential demise of what were once bellwethers of urban education, DPS and the DFT, is now nearly complete. Substance has tracked the history from the 90's Detroit Teachers’ wildcat strike, a courageous effort, perhaps a last gasp, followed by a decade of incompetent and corrupt DFT leadership which, for example, overpaid millions for a new building for union officers–that in a union losing thousands of members each year.
DFT, I believe, engaged in election fraud by denying dissident Steve Conn the presidency (about 300 votes from buildings that many teachers said Conn would win went uncounted), then silenced him by suspending him from membership for nearly touching an AFL-CIO official at a DFT meeting — something so common in the DFT’s historically raucous meetings it should have gone unnoticed. Since then, Johnson ran the DFT and other potential organizers for alternatives walked away, discouraged, while many teachers just quit the system.
Despite the fact that she was speaking on behalf of the 1.5 million members of the AFT, Randi Weingarten (above, chairing a session of the convention) was snubbed by Detroit manager Roy Roberts. Substance photo by Kati Gilson.The DFT’s internal rot paralleled the organized decay of DPS. Taken over twice by the state, the school board run in each instance by suburbanites from the likes of executives from failed auto companies (and one female entrepreneur who was so afraid to come to meetings in Detroit that she was allowed to attend by cell phone — and she could be heard ordering her maid around as the meetings progressed), the takeover boards flatly looted the system, building new schools as the system lost about 10 percent of its students year by year. Other schools were refurbished. The building plans great boons to architects and developers, sucking off Detroit citizens’ bond money, but nothing was done about the racism and exploitation that forged desperate poverty in Detroit — the core of the schools’ problems.
Then, Arne Duncan, education attack dog for the demagogue Obama, called Detroit, "the worst school system in the country." It's a tough competition for the bottom, especially in Michigan, what with Flint, Benton Harbor, and other cities destroyed much like Detroit, but smaller.
Last year, DFT rammed through another of its concession contracts, on the promise that concessions would save jobs — in a state where the United Auto Workers (UAW) is living proof that concessions never save jobs. The concession contract was followed this year by a contract imposed by EFM Roberts.
What is in the contract DFT’s Johnson allowed the EFM to impose on his members? Other than the wage and benefit cuts (on top of last year's 10 percent), the three-year contract says DPS will "make reasonable efforts" at organizing anew class sizes for students in K-12 when they surpass contractual limits.
In grades K-3, the maximum is 25. The new contract, effective July 1, a class would need to reach 41 students before DPS moves to reduce it. For grades four and five, where 30 is the top, it would take 46 kids to spark a response. In grades 6-12, where class sizes were increased to 35, leveling would start when a class reaches SIXTY ONE students. The contract eliminates sick pay cash-out upon retirement and does away with assault pay and cuts maternity leaves as well.
The DFT became, more than a decade ago, the only hope Detroit had. The school workers' union was the only organized force in the city that had the interest, the skills, and the ability to reverse the destruction of the school system. Now even that hope is gone.
DFT and the AFL-CIO’s response to Michigan’s reactionary laws is to try to place a measure on the ballot that would reintroduce collective bargaining (the agency shop, dues income). It is more than possible that the effort to get on the ballot will fail, or worse, that on the ballot, it is voted down, as with Wisconsin–giving the people of Michigan the view that “democracy,” defeated the union.
In fact, unions did not win the right to bargain through voting. They won it by organizing and direct action strikes, as with the Great Flint Strike in Michigan in the 30's (the video, “With Babies and Banners,” a classic on the strike is on-line). That kind of vision, however, is held up in Chicago today, and Oakland, CA, and far too few other places. That’s because all of Big Labor’s officialdom believes they are Partners in Production with employers — true from Weingarten to AFT convention speaker and UAW boss, Bob King, and every labor top in the US.
What those labor officials do, in effect, is to sell the labor of their members, labor peace, to employers, in exchange for dues income that makes the labor bosses fairly wealthy, and keeps the members in line–via the “rule of law,” the contract.
Joel Scott, a former 15-year Cass Tech teacher (one of the two good high schools in the city), said, "Keith and AFT's boss, Randi Weingarten, killed their own golden goose. What were they thinking? They must have known that even the last contract would kill the union, and now this one did. I think they must believe that the end is coming; they'll grab whatever they can, keep deceiving people, and run away at the last moment."
Scott went on, "The real tragedy is for the kids and the rank and file members. Detroit kids will get doubly mis-educated, learn again not to like to learn, and the members are going to lose homes, after all their sacrifices."
During the AFT convention in Detroit, Scott said, "It's a vampire city. All the lights on Warren are off; pitch darkness. (Warren is a major street on the west side). Nobody is going to send their kids to a failed Detroit school. That will be the end of the system. It's done."
"I was staying at a hotel west of Cobo Hall, where the convention was held," said Substance reporter George Schmidt. I had been to Detroit every five or ten years since the 1960s, but this time, during the AFT convention, was the most dramatic for me. The first night I stayed at the Peace and Justice caucus forum until late, and there were no cabs outside Cobo. So I walked the five blocks to my hotel, noticing that just about every building along the way was vacant. The next morning, looking up, I could see vacant downtown buildings ten and more stories high. It was like a dystopian movie... only real and today..."
Schools, everyone from the Skillman Foundation to for-profit reporters to me, knew, are the key to the city's survival. Detroit needed young people with kids, central to recreating the city's tax system, filling the empty homes to overcome the scary crime rate and to make Detroit truly liveable, as it was, a delight, 40 years ago.
Now, two-thirds of the buildings in Detroit, public and private, are vacant.
In the nineties, several literacy studies reported that nearly 50% of Detroiters are functionally illiterate. That is not my experience, not at that level, and having lived there half of my adult life, I say it's a stretch, but I'll agree the educational levels are more than troubling. In many cases, four generations of Detroiters never had a job. Unemployment among city youth is well over 50 percent.
Joel Scott, the Cass Tech teacher mentioned above, said, "They killed democracy in the union; used Conn as a warning to everyone. With democracy gone, the union couldn't have a new, better, idea. People, and enter groups of people, gave up, discouraged, demoralized. Then they just flat out quit. Randi and Keith killed their own milk-cow."
Detroit, the DFT and DPS, and the city itself now stand as examples in the choice at hand: organize social resistance in schools and communities, a la Chicago, or face the rise of barbarism.
Rich Gibson is an emeritus professor at San Diego State University. He is co-founder of the Rouge Forum whose conference will be in Detroit next summer. Rgibson@pipeline.com
Comments:
By: Lee Alexander
Randi Sell Out
Whinegartner is a sellout. She spoke at our Rally and tried to look interested and then hung out with Rahm the following week. Her weak attempt at grandstanding in Detroit was doomed from the start. She is failing at galvanizing the union members, especially since she expects us to follow her blindly. TEACHERS are the union, not political hacks.
By: Susan Zupan
Detroit class sizes = child abuse + fire hazard
These class sizes are institutionalized child abuse! Will they not be in violation of any fire codes with 41 or 46 or 61 students in a classroom?!