Something for Nothing

Nice if you can get it, and that's precisely what Mayor4Life Bloomberg is demanding from city workers. Basically, you give me 30 million a month, more than I would have saved by firing all those teachers, and I won't fire all those teachers.

Yet nowhere in the article does it mention the actual emergency which necessitated all those firings, to wit, a 3.2 billion dollar surplus. Last year, you probably recall, the mayor dropped the firings by unilaterally canceling the 8% pattern raise all other city workers got for teachers. I'm still not clear how that's okay with PERB, which insists on the pattern for all whenever it's such a stinker no one wants it. In 2005 the UFT agreed to draconian concessions to get a compensation increase that didn't even keep up with cost of living.

The real problem is this--if we give Bloomberg that money, it will not be enough, just as unilaterally canceling teacher raises was not enough. Next year, there will be another crisis. Perhaps the surplus will only be one or two billion, and we'll really need to cut back.  Bloomberg will roll out the LIFO nonsense again, and do his darndest to circumvent the contract he and the Tweedies agreed to. He'll find some other stooge in the Senate to demand we kill seniority protections only for teachers, and only for teachers in New York City, and he'll claim that's the magic bullet to force the improvements he hasn't been able to make over this long, long decade.

Do we want to even consider giving Bloomberg this money? Only if we can preclude a repeat of all this nonsense next year, and the year after. Bloomberg needs a face-saving out for his idiotic and longstanding contention that teachers need to be fired.  That's why it's a good thing they haven't given it up yet.

Let's make him pay dearly for any way out, and let's not give him another in come next year.

To PERB or Not To PERB?

One of my favorite bloggers, Mr. Accountable Talk, is a tad cynical over the decision of UFT President Michael Mulgrew to seek authority to declare an impasse. After all, PERB has screwed us before, and more or less nailed us to the wall in 2005. So why should we go back?

Well, one of the ways PERB screwed us was by tying us to the pattern, insisting it be followed even though it was crap and teachers were woefully underpaid. In order to make teachers semi-woefully underpaid, we gave back every gain we'd made in my twenty years teaching and then some. And somehow, 60% of voting teachers approved this stinker, giving us side-benefits like the ATR brigade and the 37.5 minute class (the one that is not a class).

So here's the question--will PERB, in these trying economic times, stand by their decision to go with the pattern? Or will they say these times are tough, we can't do it, and basically screw us coming and going? Gotham Schools had some encouraging words:

If the mediation fails, then the fact-finding process would begin — something that the union isn’t exactly looking to avoid, as fact-finding commissions in years past have recommended wage increases and prevented the city from laying off teachers who are excessed and can’t find new positions.

But what is it purveyors of mutual funds are always saying--past gains are no guarantee of future performance. Gotham quotes Peter Goodman, who held some position (sorry, I don't know which) with the UFT:

“There’s no downside and it shows his members that he’s doing something.”

But doing something is not necessarily enough, if you ask me. It's of rather more importance to do something worthwhile. And Goodman, on his own site, just wrote a piece questioning whether the city could offer raises in a time of budget cuts. After having taken zeroes during the dot com boom, after having been told we're married to the pattern, and after having worked three jobs for most of my career, it's hard for me to muster sympathy for cries of poverty from the richest man in New York City.

If PERB has integrity, an impasse is a good move. If they don't, we're in for a tough lesson, to wit, that they screw us no matter what.

Does the UFT know what it's doing, or is this yet another doomed crapshoot?