“The
Delegate Assembly shall have the power to legislate all matters except
those pertaining to the admission, suspension or expulsion of members of
this organization.” UFT Constitution – Article VII, Section 6
It is a favorite bon mot of UFT President Michael Mulgrew
that the Delegate Assembly is the highest decision-making body in the
United Federation of Teachers. Unfortunately, there is very little truth
to that phrase. There is also a popular bon mot among
followers of politics in general, that whoever controls the agenda,
controls the debate. That is true in the Congress of the United States,
and it is true in the United Federation of Teachers. Form your own
opinion as to which one is more dysfunctional.
On paper, the Delegate Assembly of the UFT is a body of elected union
representatives that meets monthly during the school year to consider
and debate resolutions on union policy. But in practice, there is little
real debate at UFT Delegate Assemblies. Rather, the Assembly is
structured to function as a rubber-stamp for policies that are
pre-determined by a small group of union officers from the ruling
faction of the UFT. That faction, since the inception of the union sixty
years ago, is the Unity caucus. Union officers from that faction, along
with a few un-elected appointees and a coterie of paid political
consultants, are the people who control the agenda, control the debate,
and determine the policies and positions of the 180,000 member UFT.
How is this control exerted? Look at the agenda of the Delegate
Assembly and you will see that each meeting is divided into five
sections: The President’s Report; Report from the Secretary; the
question period; the motion period, and the resolution period. Each DA
is scheduled to meet for one hour and forty-five minutes. The first two
sections are open ended. They may go on for as long as the President and
the Secretary care to speak. (And the President cares to speak quite a
bit.) The question period is limited to fifteen minutes, and the motion
period is limited to ten minutes. The resolution period is not
time-limited but its length is necessarily determined by the length of
the open-ended periods that precede it.
The President’s Report
Here’s how it works. The President will make his report. Typically,
he will go down a list of current issues that he deems relevant to the
union on the Federal, State, and local levels. He may also use this time
to make personal acknowledgements, invite guest speakers to the podium,
and generally blow some wind. This is where the manipulation of time
begins to come into play. If there are hot-button issues that the
President wants to avoid – as there often are, particularly in a union
election year – he will limit the amount of time that an out-of-favor
faction can be heard by dragging his report on, and on. And on. He has
been known to filibuster for over an hour. This will limit the
resolution period at the end of the meeting, so that only items that
were placed at the top of the agenda by the President’s faction will get
the chance to come up for debate.
Report from the Secretary
The Secretary’s report is usually very brief. It consists of notices
of union events, acknowledgements of dedicated service by union members,
and moments of silence for the deceased – that sort of thing.
The Question Period
Then comes the question period. It is limited to fifteen minutes, and
this is where things can get a little tricky for the Prez. Union
delegates have lots of questions. Some are about narrow, school-specific
issues, and some are about general policy. Some questions are easy, and
some are hard, but each question is, for the most part, of deep concern
to the individual delegate that is asking it. The President wants to
show that he is respectful of the delegates and desperately wants to get
through this 15-minute period without facing any uncomfortable
questions that will cause him to become unnerved. He wants to avoid any
questions that will force him to justify union positions that are
unpopular with the membership. He wants to prevent the opposition from
asking something difficult that might embarrass him or give them
political purchase in an election year. And so, he will employ an
imperfectly choreographed dance in which the speaker’s microphone will
only be handed to the askers of safe, softball questions. The Delegate
Assembly is like a small town. There are a lot of people there, but
everyone knows each other on some level. The President has a good idea
of who is who and knows which questioners to skip over to avoid
controversy and embarrassment. Members of his own faction – with
softball questions in hand – will be sprinkled throughout the hall, so
he’ll have friendly faces to call on if a buffer is needed. It’s not a
perfect system. He doesn’t know everybody, and he does make the
occasional mistake, but he’s usually able to slide through without much
damage. He does from time to time feel obligated to call on an
opposition-identified delegate to display a minimum show of democratic
propriety, but he is an experienced enough politician to be able to
answer most questions with a meaningless word salad, and he knows how to
pivot before a follow-up is asked. If something does slip through that
gives him real discomfort, he may get pissy and chastise the questioner,
which doesn’t look pretty, but that’s who he is. Sometimes he will come
very close to a meltdown, which is entertaining to some, but which
leaves most delegates feeling embarrassed and a little dirty. But time
is on the President’s side. Fifteen minutes ain’t that long of a time,
and the end of the question period is always right around the corner,
offering the President a safe harbor from the gales of debate.
The Motion Period
The motion period is strictly limited to ten minutes. This is the
only time when individual delegates may introduce motions to add items
to the agenda – items that weren’t pre-approved by the Executive Board
in advance of the Assembly. Because the time for motions is so limited
it is easily manipulated by the chair. As in the question period, the
Chair will use its parliamentary discretion to call on familiar,
pre-seeded members of its own faction to introduce safe, time-killing
motions. Typically, and by design, these motions will be for the
addition to the agenda of uncontroversial, non-policy affecting
resolutions. These motions will most often be proclamatory in nature.
They will ask for union strong resolve in support of things
like saving abandoned puppies, or in acknowledgment of the sporty
haircut and jaunty gait of one of the founders of the union. These
motions are intentionally designed to face little opposition in debate
and to use up a lot of time, as they must be introduced, spoken For and Against,
and then placed to a vote. Two of these creampuffs will easily eat up
the entire motion period, which will then close without any members of
the out-of-favor factions having been able to introduce any motions
whatsoever; motions which typically are on the more controversial side
of things and may (shockingly!) involve substantive policy issues that
the ruling faction would rather not discuss.
Robert’s Rules
You can probably see how this agenda structure, this time
manipulation strategy, can be frustrating to those delegates whose
voices are not in favor with the ruling faction. To make a political
point, or a policy point, or any point at all, opposition delegates may
feel compelled to pause the proceedings with a parliamentary inquiry.
The Chair is usually not well prepared for these. Adherence to Robert’s Rules of Order
is not the strong suit of the ruling faction and is a real annoyance to
them, particularly when they are caught being wrong in the
implementation of those rules. But it doesn’t really matter because a
stock response is always at hand. The Chair will simply rule any
inconvenient parliamentary inquiry out of order. And if the inquirer
feels slighted and puts up any kind of a fuss, that is to the advantage
of the Chair, who will then claim the right to deduct that fussy time
from the allotted times for inquiry and debate. (It’s what we in the
trade call a lose-lose.)
Running Out the Clock
Here I’m going to digress for a moment to illustrate a point
regarding the absurdity of the time manipulation strategy employed at
Delegate Assemblies. It happened earlier this school year, last
December, that the President’s report grew so long with his
filibustering effort to run out the clock and prevent the opposition
from speaking, that the adjournment deadline of 6:00pm arrived just as
the resolution period started, thus triggering the automatic end of the
Assembly, and forcing the delegates to sulk from the union hall without
conducting any union business at all! This was especially absurd given
the Unity faction’s current election-year campaign slogan that they “do
the work.” (Which is true if the work is preventing union voices from
being heard, and union work from being done.) The saving grace to the
thudding end of the December DA was that the important union work that
wasn’t accomplished that night was the passing of resolutions in support
of haircuts and puppies (none of whom, fortunately, were hurt in the
making of this farce).
Amendments
There is one other way that delegates have an opportunity to engage
in what passes for debate at Delegate Assemblies, and that is by the
introduction of amendments. Any delegate may make a motion to amend a
resolution that comes to the floor by either striking, adding, or
changing some of the language in the resolution. There is very little
that the chair can do to prevent an amendment from being moved. Once
moved, an amendment must be debated and voted on to determine if it
becomes part of the resolution in question. If an amendment comes from a
delegate of an opposition caucus, the chair will be annoyed. Debate
will be quick. The Chair will call on one speaker For and one speaker Against the amendment. (Or maybe two, three, or four speakers For, or maybe two, three, or four speakers Against, depending on how emphatically the Chair wants the vote to go a particular way.) One of those speakers will invariably be an officer of the union, and whichever side they speak to, For or Against,
will serve as a signal to the ruling faction’s members to vote in step
with the faction’s desires. This Orwellian process, by the way, is
adhered to in all votes that come before the body.
Covid Rules
This year has been a little difficult for the Unity caucus. Because
of temporary Covid rules adapted early on, most delegates are
participating remotely in this year’s hybrid Delegate Assembly. By doing
so, their votes take place anonymously, outside of the watchful eye of
District Reps and union officers. Therefore, members of the Unity caucus
are freer to vote their conscience than they would ordinarily be inside
Shanker Hall. If they were to be seen, under the unflattering glare of
the union hall’s fluorescent lights, to be voting against the tacit or
expressed wishes of their faction, they would be liable to expulsion
from their caucus, and thus implicitly ineligible for all the perks,
large and small, that come with card-carrying membership in that tightly
wrapped club. (These perks include part and full-time union jobs, paid
junkets to labor conventions, weekend trainings at semi-posh hotels, and
lots and lots of free food.) This new-found, hybrid anonymity has
caused an historically great – though still very small in absolute terms
– number of motions to succeed against the wishes of the Unity faction.
When Unity members have a chance to vote their conscience unobserved by
their handlers, they will vote their conscience (and keep their food).
That is why the time manipulation exploits at this year’s Delegate
Assemblies – which have always been a feature of the monthly meetings –
have risen to such absurdly acrobatic and anti-democratic extremes.
The Resolution Period
The final block of time on the DA agenda is the resolution period.
The resolution period is for the deliberation of resolutions which have
been successfully moved for debate. The resolution docket is
pre-populated with items that have been pre-approved by the UFT
Executive Board and added to the agenda in an order determined by… no
one really knows. Maybe by a sub-set of the Executive Board, maybe by an
administrative employee on the 14th floor, or maybe by a random officer
of the union in consultation with a Magic 8 Ball™.
No one really knows. But since the order of business is determined by
the ruling faction, the few resolutions that the out-of-power factions
can sneak through are simply placed at the very bottom of the docket
where they languish unheard and undebated for month, after month, after
month. Nice system, right?
That’s how Delegate Assemblies go, but it doesn’t have to be that
way. Why shouldn’t more debate, more points of view, more small “d”
democracy be welcomed within the UFT? It can be achieved without
election or insurrection. Simply change the structure of the DA agenda
and more union democracy will follow.
Time for a Change
First, time-limit the President’s Report, or move it to the last item
on the agenda, or both. A half-hour should be more than enough for oral
presentation. No one would miss anything. Email the long version of the
report to the delegates or hand out printed versions in the union hall.
While you’re at it, just email the entire report to every rank-and-file
member of the union. Why shouldn’t we all see it? It will be printed in
the official minutes anyway. Then you could schedule five minutes for
the Secretary’s report, twenty minutes for questions, twenty-five
minutes for motions, and twenty-five minutes for resolutions. Even
better, simply extend the meeting to 6:15pm and make the Assembly two
hours in duration (as it once was) and use the extra fifteen minutes for
special presentations or more debate. I don’t think two hours a month
would kill anybody, but it would certainly allow for more debate and
democracy. Also, there should be a transparent, rational, and open
process for adding items to the agenda. It shouldn’t be a mysterious
process and tool of single-faction control. Who knows? Maybe a
resolution to restructure the DA agenda in just such a way is in the
works. Maybe it will come from one of the alternative caucuses, or from
an independent delegate, or from the United for Change coalition that is
running against the Unity caucus in the upcoming UFT election. Ideally,
for the sake of the union, such a resolution would be put forward by
Unity. That would be the right thing to do, because if someone else
tries to do it, it will never see the light of day. Then it will
take an election or an insurrection to bring more democracy to the UFT.
I’m not in favor of insurrections, nor is the UFC, but I know how to
vote, and when I get my ballot in the mail this April, I will check the
slate box for United for Change and know that I did the right thing for
both Union and democracy.
