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Marilyn Stewart tells the press that an "overwhelming majority" of the delegates have voted to approve the contract when no Roll Call vote had been taken and the "No" votes hadn't even been counted.
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Is the video of Marilyn Stewart trying to explain that an "overwhelming majority" of the House of Delegates had voted to approve the proposed contract, when in fact she had refused to allow a roll call vote and had allowed many of her supporters who were not delegates to be counted in the "Yes" vote.
As people now know, despite the Sun-Times report, there was no count of the vote in the House on Friday August 31. Marilyn Stewart's union attorney, Jennifer Poltrock, acting as "parliamentarian", allowed Stewart to declare that the motion had passed when only the "Yes" vote had been taken.
They then went on to convene the press conference that is the subject of this video clip, distributing a press statement saying the House had voted "Yes". The press statement had been produced before any vote was taken.
As you can see from this clip, Stewart's press conference was interrupted by the chanting of the delegates outside, who were protesting the refusal of the union's leaders to do a complete vote count and to allow a Roll Call.
On the most important House of Delegates vote in three years, democracy was cynically undermined at every turn.
The second video in this collection is of the protests in the hallway outside. As you can see from the second video, Marilyn Stewart and her people succeeded in keeping most of the press inside the room and talking about how the contract had been "passed" for about five more minutes.
I went outside and began taking digital photographs outside as soon as I heard the chanting. Although the two CTU "security" people at the door (seen in the second video) tried to keep people from leaving the press conference room (I had to push hard to open the door and get into the hall), eventually, as you can see from the second video (below) all the reporters and camera crews eventually realized that a big part of the story on Friday evening was in the hall.
The pushing at the door, by the way, is between delegate Marlene Slavitt and Larry Poltrock, who is the other union lawyer who was present Friday night. Poltrock's firm (which he heads with his daughter Jennifer) has been getting an undisclosed amount of business as an outside firm representing CTU since Marilyn Stewart was elected and put into office in 2004. Deborah Lynch had stopped all outside legal work at CTU and created a legal department inside the union to save the union money. One of Marilyn Stewart's first acts was to eliminate the union's legal department and turn the legal work, again, over to the Poltrock firm.
