UFT 2025 Opposition Election Update: What are the Possibilities? A slate of people, not caucuses

Can a broad coalition be built without caucuses controlling the process? Let's avoid having a narrow group of people make fundamental decisions.

 

Anonymous comment: Can Unity Be Beaten in 2025 UFT Election? What was right and wrong with the UFC Coalition

Sun Tzu famously said that battles are won or lost before they begin. The general UFT election is now one year away and currently there is NO organized group right now ready to take on Unity. That fact alone is bad enough. The other fact is that another coalition effort will probably face the same challenges it did last time. Add to that, MORE has turned off a lot of rank and file UFT members with their radical/world political agenda that has nothing to do with our working conditions. Unity can be beat but a hardcore force must start NOW. Wednesday, June 26, 2024 at 11:38:00 AM ED

Norm health report: I ate a giant cheeseburger last night. 

 

Norm social report: After a doc appt and breakfast with my cousin visiting from Israel (only family, no political talk) I will head down to 52 to visit Bennett Fischer in the new RTC office on the 17th floor.

Wednesday, July 24

This is a follow-up to my June 26 pre-op post (Can Unity Be Beaten in 2025 UFT Election? What was right and wrong with the UFC Coalition) and I know I repeat myself but time is growing short and attention must be paid.

 

I've helped build 3 opposition caucuses in the UFT over the past 54 years (CSW in the 70s, ICE in the oughts and MORE a dozen years ago). And I was involved in the process of building a coalition of caucuses for the 2022 UFT election campaign (United for Change). 

 

I'm not a fan of the latter process, nor giving relatively few people from the caucus steering committees control. I don't think the steering committees of the caucuses should be the controlling force for this crucial upcoming election, especially since there is wide disparity in the different caucuses' approach. 

 

The landscape has changed in two years. James Eterno is gone and ICE is fundamentally me managing a listserve and getting things posted on the ICE blog occasionally and holding meetings every two months.

With Lydia, the heart and soul of Solidarity, out of the DOE, we have heard little from them. I know they do have a council, but other than that, they have not had any imprint on the UFT.

That leaves New Action and MORE as the caucuses with active UFTers and Retiree Advocate as the remaining members. RA with its big win is now very influential and also reps the biggest block of people in the UFT. 

A new game in town is the Fix Para Pay group that won seats overwhelmingly in the recent election. Paras represent a major block of 27k members in the UFT and a slate in next year's election must include them. If retirees and paras go oppo that is major and puts the 19 functional Ex Bd seats into play.

And there are new players emerging, though I'm not sure where that's going yet.

As for EONYC - the Daniel Alicea operation, he has joined New Action. But The Wire has great outreach and will be influential. Daniel is not limited by New Action in independent activities.

 

The MORE Problem

There are reports that there is a hard core group (a minority at this time) in MORE that doesn't think running in elections is worth the effort and oppose making coalition with groups that are not aligned with their politics. In my last days in MORE in the fall of 2018 when they wanted to run alone (a disaster as I predicted) I proposed they don't run and mess it up for the groups that did want to run. They decided to run a small campaign with the aim of not winning anything and fundamentally shit the bed. MORE learned its lesson and worked with the rest of the oppo in 2022. But who knows where they stand now?

For a deep dive on where MORE might go, read Ryan Bruckenthal May 16 (pre-RA and Para elections) and Peter Lamphere June 23 post election analysis at the MORE blog:

• The Movement of Rank and File Educators and the Case for an Inside/Outside Strategy to Build a Progressive Big Tent Within the UFT

• What could a grassroots UFT election campaign look like?

Both are influential in MORE and seem to favor coalition. Ryan even looks at working with Unity on some issues. I have some positive and negative analysis of both pieces but I'm too busy eating cheeseburgers to dig deep.

 

The problem seems to be how the other oppo people feel about the perception seeping into the rank and file that MORE's politics may be too far off the mainstream and working with them would cost votes: A feeling that MORE has taken its eye off the prize of focusing on the needs of UFT members. (See anon comment leading off this article.)

 

There are still questions over whether MORE will decide to work with others (see below for how that's worked out over the past few years), will go it alone or won't run at all. Frankly, with the big RA and Para election victories, which MORE supported but did not play a major role in, I don't see how they can miss the opportunity to win the overall election next year and thus be left out in the cold.

 

I still see some people compare MORE to CORE in Chicago, which won the union election less than 2 years after its founding. It's hard to believe, but as a founder of MORE, we started meetings to found MORE in 2011 -- MORE is over 13 years old and has no glimmer of winning a UFT election on its own. 

New Action has revived

In the 2019 4 caucus election, New Action finished last behind MORE, was packed with retirees and looked dead in the water. But they began to revive in the 2022 election and with powerhouse people like Nick Bacon and Daniel Alicea and others who have left MORE, New Action is back in the game. And key NA retirees are also involved with Retiree Advocate. What NA has is a very energetic outreach program to CL with a big mailing list covering hundreds of schools.

Retiree Advocate has astounded the UFT world with its recent 63% win in the chapter election, so some think RA holds the cards and the key to the 2025 UFT election. As a core member of the RA Organizing committee, I certainly have influence but I have mixed feelings about retirees playing the major role in a UFT election. We always criticized Unity for using retirees to control the election. But facts are facts. The retiree vote is major. Jonathan did an analysis that showed if retirees voted for us by the same margin in the 2022 election, we would have won by a narrow margin.

Still, I think relying on retirees to carry the day in forming an election slate is the wrong approach. But RA members must have a role but active UFT members must lead the way. But where will they come from? I would ask how many CL and Del to NA and MORE have after the recent chapter elections? I have no answers yet but those numbers would be a key to how much outreach an oppo would have in the schools. (Though in 2022 other than high schools I didn't see much growth in the elem and ms despite the CL in the caucuses.)

 

The UFC process in 2022 was too narrow and restrictive and never figured out how to reach into the rank and file to broaden the coalition. The stagnant vote outcomes in 2022 was proof of this failure. It will take going deeper into schools to shake the tree and build to a victory next year. Thus, I think an open call for people to get involved early might spark a reaction beyond the usual suspects. But the usual suspects may be reluctant to yield control to what might be an unknown mass.

 

Meeting secretly and hammering out a slate and springing it on people seems counterproductive but I don't have a simple alternative. Some way must be found of getting more people beyond the usual suspects involved in the process, necessary to win a resounding victory. RA won the RTC election by getting deep into the non-activist wing to gather 17k votes. Getting 300 people to run was one key factor.

We'd need almost 800 to fill a slate next year. That won't happen without a broad appeal. (Some are saying don't worry about the AFT/NYSUT delegates - let Unity have them. I absolutely disagree. That would be like RA only running officers and letting Unity have the DA.

 

The genesis of UFC for the 2022 UFT election

Just about 3 years ago, private calls went out to all the caucuses or semi-caucuses (New Action, Solidarity, MORE, ICE) and other independent sources (EONYC) to start meeting to form a coalition to run against Unity in the spring of 2022.

Meetings with 2 reps from each group ensued to knock out a platform (relatively easy) and come up with a slate of candidates (hard). And the games ensued with a lot of angst, some blowups and lingering resentment. But once the candidates were settled by early January, the UFC coalition (mostly) came together for the petitioning (which I coordinated - so I saw first hand which individuals in which groups were doing the work). As for the campaign, there was some coordination but the campaign was mostly the same old, same old -- run around the city stuffing leaflets in mail boxes. I'd bet if we did no mass stuffing and just focused on the schools where we had live bodies to get out the vote, we'd do better.

The election outcome with the big win of the 7 high school seats and rising percentages in other divisions were cheered by many in UFC, but not by me as the UFC totals in middle school (under 1000 votes) and elementary schools and probably functional fundamentally matched the MORE/New Action numbers from 2016 - except the retiree numbers which hit 30%. Given the amount of groups and people involved in the UFT effort, I viewed the 2022 election as a dud.

Here were quick takeaways from my May 22, 2022 post:

• Unity got slammed, losing votes in all divisions compared to the past.
• I thought newbie UFCers who actually thought we would win would be crushed - instead many were excited and already talking about 2025.
  
• UFC didn't pick up what Unity dropped (except possibly in retirees and a little bit in high schools), just about matching the 2016 oppo numbers. Beware of those calling this a great victory. At this rate of growth I will be 101 when the oppo wins in 2046.
  
• UFC gained from 2019 oppo disaster and restored a sense of an opposition, getting the most votes the oppo has ever gotten, winning the high schools with 55% and almost winning the middle schools with 44% and closing the gap in elementary and winning 33% overall, the closest in a long time.  Despite the gains, UFC did not get out the vote as well as I expected. I began the campaign thinking we could win all three teaching divisions. While we did get 44% of the teacher vote, that is due mostly to Unity's failure to bring out its vote, not due to UFC getting a big turnout - matching 2016 is still status quo - as is winning the 7 HS Ex Bd as we did in 2016. Let's say UFC could win in 2025 or 2028 -- with these numbers? I'm not sure there is enough of a union underneath to deliver.
  
• Is spending enormous time and money flooding teacher mail boxes with lit - for both Unity and oppo - really worth it. Also - we thought social media would bring out votes -- it didn't. Few will agree with me on these points but I will continue to stand by them. The numbers prove it.
• Possibly the biggest achievement of the 2022 election may be the very existence of a United for Change broad coalition. While formed as a temporary vehicle for this election, there are signs UFC will continue in some form while giving each caucus space to develop. The 7 electeds represent all the groups and the candidates have pledged to continue working together. I love that they come from MORE, Solidarity, New Action, ICE - but also they are broad-minded to see outside their own caucus. Preliminary meetings indicate excitement at working together.
  

Well, I was right on everything but the last point about UFC continuing in some form. Turns out the primary aims of some caucuses (guess which?) was their own growth and development and UFC was forgotten the day after the election. Calls for UFC to meet fell on deaf ears in some quarters - but UFC did continue through the high school reps meeting and communicating - for the first year before things began to fall apart this school year, totally fragmenting the UFC high school reps.

Thousands of UFT members voted for UFC, not for any one caucus. I remind you of the 2019 disaster when 3 caucuses ran independently. So the rank and file want a coalition and are not happy with fragmentation. Caucuses should not get the idea it was them. It was the idea of a united opposition that got these vote.

So only some kind of coalition is necessary. But I do not trust the same process as took place in 2022 - behind closed door secret meetings where each group had veto power - an unworkable situation going forward.

 

So can Humpty Dumpty be put back together again? I say no. We need a new paradigm that is inclusive of people from caucuses but does not give any caucus itself major control of an opposition group. A slate of people, not caucuses.

 

Thus I propose moving towards some ad hoc group of individuals that put something together with people from all the caucuses involved but not slaves to caucus veto or controls. This is not easy because caucuses are so proprietary -- though I feel RA is less so than others.

But say we did cobble together a coalition of sorts, and won, here is a warning:

France’s Left Has a New Star, and a Fresh Crisis

Marine Tondelier, leader of the Green Party, helped bring the left together to win France’s parliamentary elections. Now can she help keep it from falling apart?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/18/world/europe/france-green-party-marine-tondelier.html

 

“Our voters are screaming, ‘Do not betray us!’’’ Ms. Tondelier said in an interview last week in the modest headquarters of the Greens in the 10th District of Paris, an area once known principally for its two big train stations but which has, of late, acquired a hip reputation. “We have to be a government of combat, a government of action, of social justice,” she added. “It won’t be simple, easy, evident or comfortable, but we must make the effort.”

 

the parties of the alliance — the Greens, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the far-left France Unbowed of Jean-Luc Mélenchon — squabble. They have deadlocked over nominations for prime minister, taken to reciprocal insults, broken their promise of unity and generally floundered.

France Unbowed, whose pugnacious Mr. Mélenchon sees himself as the figurehead of the entire French left, has accused the Socialist Party of “vetoing any candidacy from the New Popular Front with the sole aim of imposing its own.” Olivier Faure, the Socialist leader, responded that he did not see “why the word of one should be imposed on all the others.”

All this has been too much for Ms. Tondelier, who by Wednesday was in an incandescent mood in an interview with the France 2 television network. “I am angry, disgusted and fed up,” she said. “And I feel desperate at the spectacle we are offering the French people.”

Every minute of the “ridiculous” internecine fights of the left only “won votes for the National Rally,” she said.

The left’s travails and divisions are nothing new. But for the seven million people who voted in the decisive second round of the election for the New Popular Front, the current disarray is dispiriting. Ten days ago, they danced in the streets. Their hopes were as varied as an improved minimum wage and protection for disappearing bird life in the French countryside.