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1) NEA Looking to Play Larger Role
in U.S. Presidential Primaries. The National
Education Association is considering holding a U.S. Presidential nominating
convention for its activists in 2007. Delegates to the convention would be
given the choice of recommending a candidate from one, both, or neither of
the major political parties.
The idea arose from the union's
experience in the 2004 election, when the California Teachers Association,
among others, recommended Howard Dean in the Democratic primary, while
Michigan Education Association President Lu Battaglieri personally endorsed
John Kerry, and NEA remained neutral until Kerry won the nomination. The
union hopes to hold the convention no later than October 2007, before the
Iowa caucus in January 2008.
The union's Representative Assembly in
July 2008 will still vote up or down on NEA's recommendation in the general
election.
The delegates to the nominating
convention will be limited to the NEA board of directors and members of the
union's PAC Council, which includes the state affiliate presidents and the
leaders of various NEA special interest caucuses. NEA expects this will
total some 370 participants.
According to the current plan, the
convention "should be open to the media and, space permitting, to NEA
members and their families."
Presidential candidates will be allowed
to address the delegates, then field questions.
2) Union Membership Rate Drops Again
in 2005.
Bureau of Labor
Statistics figures for 2005 showed a slight drop in the percentage of
American workers who belong to labor unions. BLS reported the percentage as
12.5, which is the same as it was in 2004, but extending the number of
decimal places shows a drop from 12.52 percent in 2004 to 12.46 percent in
2005.
Intercepts has some interesting figures computed from the BLS data,
but here are a few more:
* We are fast approaching the day when
there will be more public sector union members than private sector union
members. Of the 15,685,000 union members in the United States, only 52.6
percent work in the private sector. The number of local government employees
(teachers, police officers, firefighters) who belong to a union grew by
106,000 in 2005 – more than doubling the union membership growth in the
entire American private sector.
* Public education employees make up
about 21 percent of all union members in the United States.
* The future looks bleak. The highest
unionization percentages are found with workers 45 years of age and older.
Among all workers between the ages of 25 and 34, only 10.7 percent are
unionized.
3) No Chance of NEA Joining Change
to Win. Last summer there were a lot of uninformed
rumors of NEA considering joining Change to Win, the coalition of labor
unions that left the AFL-CIO. EIA
shot them down then, even though Change to Win officials were meeting
with NEA, and have continued to do so.
The emergence of Change to Win has given
NEA an opportunity in the wider world of organized labor. NEA has been shut
out of direct membership in AFL-CIO's central labor councils and other
umbrella groups because it didn't belong to the federation, while AFT did.
Now that Change to Win and AFL-CIO have come to a new agreement about
non-AFL-CIO unions participating in those bodies, the door is opened for NEA
to join them, too.
NEA leadership is working on an
agreement with both AFL-CIO and Change to Win that would allow NEA
participation on central labor councils, and create jurisdictional
boundaries and no-raid agreements, but would not require that NEA enter into
any affiliation with either of the two national labor federations.
Such an arrangement would seem to be
tailor-made for NEA, allowing it involvement in Big Labor conversations
without alienating its own large anti-AFL-CIO-affiliation constituencies.
The only potential monkey wrench might be the payment of dues to such
councils, but EIA suspects NEA will leave the money matters for local and
state affiliates to decide on their own.
4) NEA: Champion of Collective
Thinking. EIA isn't a big fan of mission
statements, strategic conferences or organizational vision documents. So
when I heard the news several months back that NEA was working on defining
its core values for the future, and calling the effort NEA Tomorrow, it
merely caused me to roll my eyes. And, having read the most recent draft of
said mission statement, my reaction is the same.
But let's give credit where credit is
due. The slogan that accompanies NEA Tomorrow is "Creating our future
together through collective thinking and conversation."
My view is that "collective thinking" is
an oxymoron, and that conversation in the midst of it is pointless, but can
there be any doubt that NEA prizes collective thinking above all other
things? Congratulations, NEA, for creating a slogan that describes your very
essence.
5) Walnut Valley Union Denies Almost
Everything. The Walnut Valley Educators
Association (WVEA) issued a second statement in response to the
vandalism of school board members' homes last week.
"Let me first say, that the WVEA
Leadership, Negotiations or Crisis Teams neither planned, participated
in, orchestrated, encouraged or was involved in any way with these acts
of vandalism," wrote WVEA President Jim Faren (emphasis in original). He
added, "We must take a stand against vandalism directed at our own Board and
administrators, but at the same time remain united because of these false
allegations. The Board's emotional response has allowed this situation to
spiral out of control."
I, for one, believe Faren. It is
unlikely that the union's leadership would concoct such a transparent attack
on board members. What is less believable is that neither Faren nor other
union officials have any idea who was responsible, especially in light of
what he said at the board meeting that preceded the vandalism.
"WVEA will continue to
impress upon our members rational and positive behavior during this
campaign," Faren said. "But what individual groups or individuals may do
could be out of our control."
Faren was remarkably prescient. The least he can do is explain to the
authorities what led him to issue such a warning, and which individuals he
had in mind when he issued it.
6) Union Merger in Massachusetts Not
Feasible. Last May, delegates of the Massachusetts
Teachers Association (MTA) approved a new business item calling on the
organization to study the feasibility of merging with the Massachusetts
Federation of Teachers. After a series of procedural actions, the union's
board concluded last month that such a merger was not feasible. MTA was one
of the ringleaders of the opposition to the national NEA-AFT merger attempt
in 1998.
7) Check Intercepts First!
As EIA's burgeoning blog,
Intercepts, enters its sixth month of operation, it isn't entirely
clear how much overlap there is between readers of the weekly e-mail
Communiqué and daily readers of Intercepts. However, in the past
few weeks several readers have wondered why certain stories did not appear
in the Communiqué when, in fact, they had appeared in Intercepts.
So I thought I would take this
opportunity to explain how I am trying to organize things. In the future, I
would like Intercepts to be the home of all the daily newsworthy
items, and the Communiqué to be the weekly home of EIA's original
reporting, with as little overlap of stories as possible.
In terms of content, this would mean the
Communiqué would end up with fewer, though longer, stories. In terms
of your reading habits, it would mean e-mail subscribers might have to start
checking Intercepts, or subscribing to Intercepts via RSS
feed, to receive a full load of EIA reporting. I believe this is a better
approach than having the Communiqué become a weekly digest of stories
that have already appeared in Intercepts.
So bear with me as I try to find a
suitable middle ground between the information revolution and ingrained
habit patterns. Your comments, as always, are welcome.
8) Quote of the Week.
"I realize, of course, that not all members
of the Chicago Teachers Union are Democrats, and it certainly is not my
desire as an editor to produce a newspaper that is nothing more than a
pipeline for one political party's message. However, it sometimes is hard to
make positive comments about Republican officeholders when writing about the
needs of folks employed in the public schools and who belong to labor
unions. The fact is, most of the true friends of public education and of
organized labor are Democrats." – John A. Ostenburg, editor of
Chicago Union Teacher, the monthly organ of the Chicago Teachers Union.
How many
logical fallacies can you find in this quote? |
