Thursday, September 3, 2015

NYC Educator on Unity Caucus and Why MORE

We are going to break the Unity wall and they are going to listen to us inside what they believe to be their house.  In truth, it's not their house.  It's our house. And the time for us to use it is long overdue.... Arthur Goldstein, NYC Educator:  The Only Thing Unity Caucus Is Good At
Arthur has a dynamic piece up today - I was in the midst of writing about a similar topic but let's go with excerpts from Arthur's piece where he talks about the opposition.
Unity Caucus has a monopoly on power, the system is designed to maintain said monopoly, and if something shocking occurs, like an opposition figure winning the vice presidency, the system can be tweaked so that it never happens again. So that's just what they do. And if those annoying New Action folks should keep winning, well, you can always make some deal to have them support the sitting UFT President.
That deal, in fact, has fractured the opposition for years. It was genius on the part of then President Randi Weingarten. A fringe benefit was that those New Action members who didn't approve of the unholy alliance with Unity broke away, and formed another caucus, ICE. ICE actually managed to win a few seats on the UFT executive board until Unity tweaked the system so as to co-endorse New Action rather than fail to oppose them. Now if you were to combine the New Action votes with MORE votes, they would have actually defeated Unity last time.

Of course, there are always contingencies, so Randi Weingarten met with a disaffected teacher, and a week later, voila!, there was yet another caucus. Personally, I don't know or care what the intentions of that teacher were. I have reservations about MORE, but they have people I respect enormously and I will support them this election cycle, as I did the last. With them, there's certainly no coincidental meeting and no deal with Weingarten, Unity, or any person or entity that's made deals counter to the interests of teachers.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In the continuing written and verbal destruction of Teacher Unions and their members, some of you are calling for more division ( sorry for the pun) among an already demoralized group. Everyone is aware of those who want to destroy not only us , but other collective bargaining units as well. They will succeed if we continue to war with each other. I think you need to recruit differently. Thanks, Dr. John Marvul.