UFT Officials Say No to Budget Cuts Protest
The union bureaucracy would rather protect its authority than consider feedback on its strategy
Since taking office, Mayor Eric Adams has cut at least a billion dollars to public schools at a time when need is high and the money is, indeed, available. The UFT has challenged the Mayor’s cuts, but the union’s reliance on lawsuits and lobbying has left us with little change. At the last meeting of the UFT Executive Board, of which I’m an elected member, I motivated a resolution calling on the union to organize a citywide protest against the cuts. The Mayor is desperate to gut the DOE budget; I think the only way to confront his obsession is by threatening a crisis on his hands. Lawsuits and lobbying don’t pose a threat credible enough as an organized membership prepared to disrupt collectively the status quo. The resolution, however, was rejected unanimously by the Unity caucus members who control the Executive Board and the rest of the union. The reasons given by the officers, who are not full-time teachers, were but different versions of what they left unsaid: It’s for the union bureaucracy to decide the tactics, and these tactics must ultimately leave the bureaucracy’s authority intact. Of course, there are many issues with this strategy known as business unionism; the most immediate among them is that it’ll do little to force the mayor to rescind all his cuts to the DOE budget, never mind increasing it.
When it comes to UFT campaigns, tactics are typically chosen by the officers and are designed to be safe for their interests as an officialdom. This leaves only enough space for members to participate in union activism in an atomized way—at best, as hundreds of chapters that act as one-way conduits of union policy, and at worst, as thousands of individuals acting separately and weakly when they could be stronger together. The resolution I motivated, as modest as it was, evoked a profound denunciation from the officers. One who spoke against it said that resolutions on actions aren’t appropriate, which begs the question of who decides on tactics and their implementation. Another officer claimed that the timing for a citywide protest was bad, as the Mayor had just rescinded his third installment of cuts this year. Of course, this can be an argument in favor of escalating pressure as momentum presumably exists. A third officer celebrated the union’s current strategy and claimed that it’s effective. The implication here is that the cuts aren’t so bad as to warrant a protest, which is not only out of touch with the membership’s experience but is inconsistent with the dire tone on the UFT’s website. Sadly, not even the threat of billions in cuts in a time of financial surplus is enough to embarrass the UFT hierarchy to give up a little authority in re-evaluating its strategy.
According to the mayor’s Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG), his office plans to maintain and augment hundreds of millions of dollars in “savings” in the four subsequent fiscal years. These proposed cuts amount to a threat. As such, it must be met with our own threat, the magnitude of which can only be wrought by members engaged collectively in increasingly disruptive tactics. Lawsuits and lobbying have their place, but so do the rank-and-file, their initiative, and their collective activity.