A Letter to the Radical Caucus on the UC Walkouts

December 1, 2009

I am Cal State faculty. San Diego State. Emeritus. That means I continue to serve on committees, get paid, don't teach there, but I am on campus quite a bit. More than I planned.

The CSU system is, according to the chancellor who I interviewed about six years ago, "The workhorse of our two systems, while the UC system is the race horse. We care for them accordingly." That's largely true.

The CSU system has a collective bargaining agreement owned by the California Faculty Association.

I belong to the California Faculty Association which misrepresents and betrays California tenure track and tenured faculty--and some lecturers-- as does every large union in the US.

I am intimately familiar with the working of the National Education Association, having worked for them for a decade. I led strikes, bargained faculty and teacher contracts, was well trained in an era when NEA bore some semblance to a union.

NEA is the primary parent body of CFA.

I covered the recent NEA Representative Assembly in San Diego for Substance News. There, the NEA bosses did nothing but praise the demagogue Obama and be mildly critical of his education agenda: regimented curricula-high-stakes exams-militarization-merit pay--privatized charters-war.

NEA only really opposes merit pay and is likely to sell out on that as well. The coverage is online. Here is one of several articles.

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=775

What happened with the projected furlough in the CSU system?

The union leadership, which has faculty snared with mandatory dues check off, decided to put the question of furloughs, amounting to a 9.2% (close to the 10% pay cut/furlough most state employees got) pay cut for most faculty, to a vote---rather than take a leadership position and simply say to the bosses, "we know concessions don't save jobs. Like giving blood to sharks, concessions only make bosses want more. We are not even going to consider this and if you impose it, we will shut you down, in solidarity with our students whose fees you have raised repeatedly over the last five years."

The CFA hacks should have had a good idea where the vote would go. They didn't put out analysis or advice on the question.

The vote was surprisingly close. I think it was 52 % in favor of furloughs. Many, many sdsu profs are truly disgruntled and angry. But, absent any leadership from the union they are forced to belong to, absent any real union structure, they are rather lost about what to do.

The Sept 24 action may give them some ideas. I hope it does. The Rouge Forum gang will do all we can to build that. I hope it spreads nationwide, k-12 too.

It is simply a fact that the UC system, with AAUP backing, is able to conduct what amounts to this strike because they do not have a union contract which would forbid it. (Unless the union leadership was actually that, and just said, "the only illegal strike is a strike that fails and if you try to enforce this, school will close again.")

The traditional quid pro quo in a union contract is this: Mandatory dues check off for a no-strike clause. The union hacks sell labor to bosses. That is how it works.

As CFA has done nothing to explain the current situation to faculty, it appears to me that it will be easy for administrators to continue to pit faculty vs faculty vs other staff vs students. We shall see.

But the attack on tenured faculty, having watched an injury to one (especially students) go before an injury to all, is indicative of the severity of the real economic and social crisis today.

I am looking at my most recent edition of the "California Educator." It's the magazine for k12 teachers, published by the CTA.

The magazine, 40 pages and glossy, has an entire section on how to cope with the cutbacks. How to get along with forced school transfers, booming class size, wage cuts, etc. "Coping With Changes During Cutbacks."

There is nothing I can find about why things are as they are (war, banksters, capitalism, etc) , how to discover that, or how to develop tactics to fight back. There are a few pages about lobbying, which is directly akin to going to church. That is what nearly every NEA and American Federation of Teachers local is doing now.

There are pockets of resistance. The Rouge Forum, Substance News, SusanOhanian.org, and other groups are fighting back. Oakland, Ca seems to be one NEA local where there is some leadership to resist.

On the whole, NEA and AFT have organized the systematic decay of education in the US, which is not public education, but segregated capitalist schooling.

Yes, CSU locals did hold a few truly pathetic vigils in opposition to the concessions the union hacks foisted on the rank and file. Most of those vigils came after the vote. Who led the vigils?

Well, the featured speaker at SDSU was SDSU President Stephen Weber who has been attacking student life and professors for a decade. He declared, in typical boss/union spirit, "We are all in this together." Applause.

As far as I am concerned, the union hacks are the most vulnerable and closest of workers' enemies. Harsh measure to every one of them who takes on the employers' role and foists concessions on people.

Right now, the AFL-CIO (of which the largest union in the US, NEA, is not a part, but the AFT, which represents many lecturers and adjuncts, is) is meeting in Pittsburgh. The AFL-CIO is near bankruptcy, but the AFL bosses remain quite well paid, retain their notorious imperial connections to the CIA, and systematically sell out workers, using violence when necessary. They have, by the by, largely given up on EFCA, single-payer health care, etc. NEA spent millions of dollars and untold thousands of volunteers hours inveigling people into the hysteria around Obama. So did AFT. Bet your dues they will tell you to go lobby some more. Church.

AFL President John Sweeney will turn over (there will be no real election) his presidency to Rich Trumka, a narcissist of the first order.

Harsh, harsh measures.

The education agenda is a war agenda: http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/workplace/article/view/47

Good luck to us, every one.

r