NEW YORK CITY, June 16—“Worker unity is stronger than any law!” This was one Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member’s message during a recent UFT (United Federation of Teachers) town hall about Union misleader Michael Mulgrew and KKKop-Mayor Eric Adams’ new tentative agreement (TA) contract for UFT members. A group of comrades joined other education workers to sharpen the criticism of the contract proposal and make plans to fight back. Capitalist education will never meet the needs of working-class educators or students. It is designed to train young people to be exploited in the workforce or serve as cannon fodder in the next imperialist war.
Instead of seeing ourselves as pawns in the bosses’ profit game, imagine a mobilized working class confronting the city bosses and demanding what we need. Instead of waiting for the union to negotiate our demands away, we could be building a revolutionary movement to wrest power away from the bosses ourselves. A hundred thousand working-class educators, over a million working-class students, and add their working-class families: WE ARE MIGHTY!
Union misleaders are class collaborators: “Fair Deals” impossible under capitalism
While UFT leadership is trying to pressure workers to vote yes on the proposal, dangling so-called “raises” and “bonuses” in our faces and threatening the possibility of an even worse deal if we don’t go along for the ride, we must be clear on the truth: The contract proposal is nothing other than a viciously racist attack on educators, students, and their families. It does nothing to address the recent underhanded assault on workers’ healthcare (see box) or the overcrowded classrooms, woefully inadequate mental health services, and rampant racist segregation that systematically deprive primarily Black and Latin students. Instead, it serves to further divide teachers and families and placate education workers into accepting a raw deal.
Throughout the nearly year-long contract struggle, UFT leaders have exposed themselves as lying, racist, class-collaborators. Mulgrew may brag about his 500-member negotiating committee, but the UFT’s function, like that of all unions, is to make a deal it can “sell” to its members. They can have 500 or even 1000 members on the “negotiating committee” and congratulate us on our “hard work” and “activism,” but the fact is, this contract is a result of backroom deals with the city, being sprung on us at the last minute and rushed to a vote during the last two weeks of the school year.
This is the role of unions under capitalism: keep the workers in line and “manage” the class struggle for the bosses, as well as push them to vote for the Big Fascists’ pro-Wall St./U.S. imperialist agenda. To accomplish this, they bribe, sweet talk, deceive, manipulate, obstruct, divert, pacify, steamroll, threaten, and try to wear us out until we capitulate. But communists in PLP and many of our class sister and brother educators are saying NO!
Bosses’ contracts and laws serve only the ruling class
The contract does nothing to address students' abysmal learning conditions. Mulgrew’s claim that new state laws will protect smaller class sizes is a proven lie. Not only does the recently passed law allow for numerous exceptions–including lack of space, “over-enrolled” programs, a shortage of licensed teachers, and schools in “severe economic distress"–but the bosses already break their own laws whenever it suits their interests. One school’s administrators recently packed 42 kids (8 more than the current law) into a PLP teacher’s classes. Only when the comrade united with other teachers and fought back did the local bosses take measures to reduce the class size. Meanwhile, thousands of other NYC students are forced to remain in overcrowded classrooms.
The ruling class knows that teacher-student-parent unity could threaten to destroy them. That's why they do everything they can to sow divisions. The TA would also phase in new forms of remote work that will further isolate students, educators, and families. One change will deemphasize parent engagement time and parent-teacher conferences, potentially making them fully remote. This will make it more difficult for teachers to build meaningful relationships with families. A major expansion of virtual learning included in the contract proposal opens the door to use more online programs instead of real instruction, further decaying the quality of education for hundreds of thousands of students and contributing to the racist fast-foodification of learning, while also paving the way for larger class sizes.
Even on its face, the proposed pay “raises” do not even keep up with inflation and are actually a pay cut. Even worse, there continue to be union educators like paraprofessionals, mainly Black and Latin, who are making nowhere near enough money to survive in the city. Many of these educators are forced to take on second jobs or choose between basic needs like food and rent.
Can’t get mired in dead-end reforms; fight for communist revolution!
MORE (Movement of Rank and File Educators) is one opposition caucus in the union that has raised criticisms of UFT leadership, taking a “social justice” stance that includes pro-student positions against “racial segregation” and spotlights the interests of the mostly Black and Latin paraprofessionals and other non-teaching titles that the city has already tried to outsource. Although MORE has provided some useful inside information and caught the union leadership in their duplicity (doubletalk) multiple times, their criticisms of the contract abandon their most powerful antiracist arguments.
Educators and students in Oakland launched a more pro-student mass struggle when they went on strike in May with a list of “common good” demands (see CHALLENGE, 6/21). Strikers demanded not only better pay for teachers, but also increased staffing for school nurses, librarians, and counselors, as well as school building improvements and the opening of unused school properties to unhoused and housing insecure students. While this struggle has the potential to build class consciousness, it still relies on the limitations of reform. Educators, students, and their families need MORE than that!
That’s exactly the problem with fighting only for reforms. As long as we are fighting over crumbs, we will be missing the big picture: the need to unite with our students and their families to take on the whole capitalist system. Workers need STATE POWER!
As the U.S. bosses prepare for world war with China, they are pushing the working class to make even more sacrifices to preserve U.S. imperialist power. This means worsening conditions in schools, as well as pay cuts and cuts to healthcare for workers across the board. The working class has no choice but to fight for a completely new system: communism. We need a revolutionary communist party, PLP, to get there.
We communists plan to continue fighting tooth and nail alongside our students and their families, as well as struggling with our fellow educators over our revolutionary line, helping to advance the class struggle for workers’ needs and build workers’ unity. We need to continue to work inside groups like MORE to better mobilize workers for the many fights ahead.
Labor misleaders sellout NYC workers
In 2018, the New York City Municipal Labor Committee (MLC)—a coalition of labor unions representing some 390,000 city workers—made an unprecedented backroom deal that assaulted workers’ health care. The leadership of the unions in the MLC collectively agreed (without any union members’ approval or input) to save the city $1.1 billion dollars from 2019-2021 and then $600 million per year, in perpetuity (permanently)! As part of that deal, this year city bosses and the unions are jointly forcing retirees to join a misleadingly named “Medicare Advantage” plan instead of their previous healthcare plans. Medicare Advantage is a private Preferred Provider (PPO) program run by Aetna that will place limits on which doctors workers can see, forcing them to get pre-approvals, and may restrict available treatments. Lower quality healthcare plans are now forecast for next year for all active members of MLC unions.