UFT Election News - March 12, 2007

It is not often that people leave Unity Caucus, which can be compared to black hole where some good people desiring to change the union enter, never to emerge. Once enticed with job opportunities, free trips and other perks, the desire for change seems to go south.

Former Unity Chapter Leader running with ICE
That is why the Jerry Frohnhoeffer's move from Unity to the ICE-TJC slate is so remarkable. Jerry is chapter leader at Aviation HS, one of my favorite schools. He is running for Vocational HS VP against Mike Mulgrew from Unity. You can read his bio at my other blog, Norm's Notes.

Building a viable opposition
I met a new Unity CL recently and he is and has been a critic of Unity and even ran against the Unity CL at his school who was humping the 2005 contract. When he won he looked around for signs there was a viable opposition building. When the vote was taken on the 2006 contract he looked for signs in the vote totals that something had been built since the 2005 contract, and seeing the 90% YES vote decided that Unity was his only option. He hopes to reform them from within. Good luck!

He is wrong about that vote being the key. Many people opposed to Unity voted YES. The building of a viable opposition takes a lot of coalescing of forces to create a political movement. Seeing things evolve over the years there's room for hope. New Action's desertion has left a void in the infrastructure of an opposition. No matter how ineffective they were as an opposition, they did have the ability to get literature out. TJC started building 15 years ago but with New Action still around, the going was slow. Once it was clear they were aligning with Unity TJC began to have much greater success. ICE, starting out 3 years ago also has been building infrastructure and the election process is part of that building effort. No matter what the result in this election, the opposition is not going away. And if we should see the farce of New Action holding 8 Exec Bd seats, Unity 81 and ICE and TJC none, there is no better demonstration of the lack of democracy in the UFT.

Next: New Action History Lesson 1

See you at tonight's UFT Exec Bd meeting. Come on down. I'll be hovering over the ribs.