Ten signs your union has been hijacked by crooks
Ten Signs That Your Union Has Been Hijacked by Crooks. (All of which took place in the Chicago Teachers Union by June of 2008)
1. Your Union officers say no copies of their contracts exist. That’s why no one can see them.
2. Your Union president tells you that your Union is not only broke (a $30 million yearly operation), but also at least $3 million in debt as well. She blames all the past presidents (despite inheriting a $5 million surplus when she came into office), and says she accepts some blame for herself as having too trusting a heart.
3. The national Union organization sends officials to the local meetings to cover up the scandal saying everything will be all right and that they can keep the president from going to jail. They will now provide oversight (as obviously she cannot be trusted).
4. Motions that the president doesn’t want (for example, motions against accepting a budget that still keeps hidden the way she is raiding the Union treasury) never win though counts of the votes from the visitors’ gallery looking down on the delegates’ hall show that the motions won.
5. The president often flips the vote count to get what she wants. When she’s really losing (as in an important vote of the House of Delegates to accept the new Union contract), she refuses to call for the No vote.
6. The president makes a “Springer Show” out of the House of Delegates meetings by trying to keep opposition delegates from speaking at the microphones, turning off their mikes, calling their motions out of order, having the sergeants-at-arms intimidate them, even arresting them (especially if they’re the former Union president), or having the police walk them out (say, for counting votes from the balcony). Her people call for the meetings to be adjourned when things get too hot for her, thus the urgency to get to the mikes before this happens.
7. The president works with the Chicago Public Schools officials to fire teachers, saying the Union can fire teachers better. She also makes calls to those in authority who she hopes will call the principals in the schools of Union activists to say that their Union activity on school time needs to be monitored. She has the vice president threatened with arrest for being at a school helping four teachers that the Union has “helped” fire.
8. The president puts blames on the Union delegates and teachers for not organizing the teachers in the charter schools for the Union, though a relative of an important person in the national Union organization has been highly paid to do just that.
9. The president takes no actions against the mass firings of teachers, the closing of public schools, or the increase in the number of non-Union charter schools, and blames the teachers for not doing anything about it.
10. Through some maneuverings of her executive board, the president “fires” the duly elected vice president who has been critical of her (the constitution has no provision for this) after charging him with doing a tiny fraction of what she has been charged with doing. Her charge, among other equally specious charges, is that he misused $6,000 in expense money for dinners (expenses the accountant could easily have challenged and not paid as was usually done) compared to the vice president’s charge (which her executive board dismissed) that she misused $500,000 of the Union moneys for personal expenses). The media enjoys this Union “food fight.”
This article was originally published in the September 2008 print edition of Substance and is reprinted here unedited from its original print version.
