NYC teachers may toss out union leaders

Ballots are in the mail to the nearly 200,000 members of the United Federation of Teachers in the triennial elections that will determine the leadership of one of the country’s largest local unions. The stakes couldn’t be higher: President Michael Mulgrew is at his weakest ever, after getting his lowest ever vote total in the last election, and losing key chapter elections amongst paraprofessionals and retirees, two historic bulwarks of his internal political party, the Unity Caucus. Since the UFT is by far the largest AFT local, and the elections are winner-take-all, the victorious slate will also win control over a significant bloc of delegates at the national AFT convention, winning influence over national labor politics.

Leading the opposition to Mulgrew and Unity is the ARISE coalition, the Alliance of Retiree and In-Service Educators, formed by a partnership of two long-standing opposition caucuses—MORE (the Movement of Rank and File Educators), and the New Action Caucus—and Retiree Advocate, which won the recent retiree chapter leader elections.  The second, competing, opposition formation is the A Better Contract (ABC) slate, headed by former Unity official Amy Arundell, recently purged from her position as Queens Borough Representative because of her dissident position on the war in Palestine.

The results of the contest are impossible to predict. Because Mulgrew is being challenged by two different slates splitting the opposition vote, this historic opportunity to end the sixty-year Unity reign may be lost. However, it remains possible for one of the new slates to win by a slim margin, especially if ABC manages to win over significant portions of Unity’s vote.

Unity’s decline has accelerated in recent years because of its concessions on health care, as it passed on billions of dollars in health care “cost savings” to members, in exchange for the retroactive pay raises owed to teachers that were withheld by the neoliberal Bloomberg administration. To continue these savings, the leadership forced NYC’s public sector unions to push retirees into a privatized Medicare Advantage program, which would replace traditional Medicare. The ensuing grassroots rebellion led to a two-to-one landslide for Retiree Advocate in the chapter elections, and forced Mulgrew to reverse course and publically repudiate the program.

These recent concessions are only the logical consequence of Unity’s decades-old strategy, which focuses on making alliances with friendly Democratic Party politicians, especially of the centrist wing (the UFT has fiercely opposed DSA’s electoral challenges in the NY State Legislature and even backed the renegade “Independent Democratic Party” senators who caucused with the Republicans in the statehouse). This orientation relies on giving up shop floor power and limiting grievances, in exchange for shallow mobilization (usually limited to staff and Unity caucus members) around occasional legislative or electoral campaigns. Over the years, the union’s presence in the schools has atrophied: a large portion of school locations have no shop steward, or worse, one handpicked by the principal. Even the union’s ability to provide basic “business union” services has weakened: the leadership sits on a nearly billion-dollar surplus in their welfare fund, while benefits erode for dental, eyeglasses, and hearing aids (although they have cynically increased spending as the election approaches). The final nail in Unity’s coffin may end up being a disappointing contract in 2023 that failed to meet increasing inflation or significantly raise the poverty wages earned by the lowest-paid UFT members, paraprofessionals.  Interestingly, 2023 was the first time that, percentage-wise, more paras voted against the contract than teachers. This anticipated the coming victory of the Fix Para Pay slate (though about 70% of paras still voted for the contract).  However, about 75% of members voted for the deal, which speaks to the bureaucracy’s remaining control over large parts of the in-service membership and the lack of class confidence when it comes to fighting the DOE.

Challenging the dead-end orientation of Unity is ARISE, a coalition born out of the successful overturn of UNITY in the retiree chapter last year. ARISE has focused on building an on-the-ground network of activists and hopes to shift the direction of the union regardless of the election outcome. For example, ARISE’s early advocacy for expanding parental leave to twelve weeks (which is already granted to private sector workers in New York State) has led Unity to make the same addition to their platform. The slate is headed by the forceful middle school chapter leader Olivia Swisher, who has organized her colleagues against the destructive pedagogical effects of curriculum mandates and who was a leading advocate for a rank and file perspective on the UFT negotiating committee, pushing for more mobilization and transparency as part of bargaining strategies instead of settling for a below-inflation contract.

Beyond contract organizing, ARISE has also led significant contingents of UFT members in recent marches against the federal government’s attacks on the public sector, showing in practice what its vision of union strength looks like, and has a significant number of chapter leaders and delegates elected to school-based positions on its historically large slate. The coalition is hoping that its each-one-teach-one approach will be able to reach out to broader numbers than have been involved in previous UFT elections. However, the slate is also limited by its lack of racial diversity and heavy geographic concentration in Manhattan and Brooklyn, both of which will weaken its reach.

The other new element in this election (and a logical consequence of Unity’s decline) is the first-ever significant break from within the leadership caucus. Amy Arundell was a well-respected UFT official who was known for supporting school-based organizing and advocating for members more vigorously than many who held positions because of patronage and loyalty. She, nonetheless, has toed the leadership line on key issues during her twenty years as a staffer. This has included aggressive support for a number of concessionary contracts, even yelling at opponents of the 2023 agreement like Swisher in executive board and negotiating committee meetings.

ABC boasts a strong presence on social media, boosted by bloggers and the large education news service The Wire, as well as the moderators of some key Facebook groups. They also have the support of Marianne Pizzitola—not a UFT member, but a key leading activist in the retiree fight against Medicare with a broad retiree audience—as well as the Fix Para Pay Slate, which won the para chapter elections by a two-thirds margin last spring.

ABC has a fairly progressive platform, focusing on economic issues and union democracy. It promises action on key priorities like para pay, fixing the terrible pension tier most younger members are stuck in, and constitutional reforms to improve the school system’s democratic functioning. Their campaign launched early, in November, with a number of well-attended Zoom meetings. Politically, ABC represents a kind of anti-establishment populism and reflects the degree to which people are angry at Mulgrew, and disillusioned from working in neoliberal schools. However, its form also illustrates the weakness of the rank and file organization in the schools and the relative political immaturity of the UFT’s rank and file movement.

Still, it remains to be seen whether ABC’s broad online support will turn into actual ballots mailed in from the schools. Their campaign does not primarily rely on chapter leaders, nor on tested, disciplined, and tightly organized activists from the schools.

Despite Arundell’s own personal left-wing politics on Palestine, as a staffer she has historically toed the leadership position. ABC has steadfastly avoided political issues, has been reluctant to criticize Trump, and clearly tried to attract right-wing members, disaffected with Mulgrew’s leadership, on bread-and-butter issues.  Pizzitola has enthusiastically even compared their campaign to the “bread and butter” strategy of racist AFT founder Samuel Gompers, who deplored the more political and industrial  IWW and other left-led unions of his era.

Worse, ABC has put forward Paul Egan, a disgraced former political director as its candidate for the number two position, UFT Secretary. Egan was fired from the UFT after getting turned in by an ex-girlfriend for having intimate conversations of a personal nature on a union device.  In the course of the election campaign, he has also been accused of sexually harassing subordinates. Finally, Egan is not at all self-critical of his strategy as the union’s top representative in Albany, where he exemplified the union’s “friendly politicians” strategy. Putting such a candidate in charge of the union’s staff (the secretary and staff director roles have historically overlapped) does not reflect well on ABC’s potential decisions if they win leadership.

ABC and ARISE are running on very similar platforms, and the activists who formed both groups spent months in negotiations over the previous fall to try to build a united opposition slate. That process was unfortunately derailed by the rejection of a proposal from the MORE caucus that an executive board slate prioritize current chapter leaders. MORE had held a drawn-out internal debate about whether to run in the elections, which ultimately weakened its bargaining position and made it harder to shape the coalition. But in the end, it was clear that the forces around ABC did not want to cede any control to forces to their left, either during the campaign or after an eventual victory. Over the course of the campaign, their rhetoric (like a promise to minimize firings of union staff if elected) has suggested an orientation around fighting for control over the union bureaucracy, rather than building bottom-up rank and file power.

The unprecedented nature of the election, with two opposition slates both larger than any opposition campaign since the 1980s and a Unity caucus at a historic low point of support and organization, makes the results unpredictable. The most likely, but by no means certain, outcome is a Unity victory, albeit with the smallest margin it has ever seen. Michael Mulgrew is of retirement age and is likely to appoint a successor to revitalize the image of the ruling caucus, which will continue to try to make token efforts at mobilization to maintain some appearance of militancy while continuing to red-bait and vilify its opposition.  If defeated, ABC seems unlikely to hold together, given the absence of a strong organization and their focus on a few individual personalities, especially if they place third. In such a situation, ARISE will be well situated to cohere and continue to push the union to the left and into action, especially with campaigns to fight right-wing attacks on public schools and around the 2027 contract, with major prospects for the 2028 union election. The coalition will need to attract the activists who were inspired by ABC and win them to a longer-term strategy for transforming the union.

If Unity is defeated, it will be nothing less than an earthquake in the U.S. labor movement, similar to the recent defeats of entrenched incumbents in the UAW and Teamsters. Either opposition slate would face serious and immediate tests of rebuilding chapter organizing and delivering on promises in negotiating the next contract, while contending with overwhelming pressures to moderate or move to the right. If Arundell wins, a major question will be how far she is willing to go in changing top down UFT culture and tradition, or simply taking over the existing patronage machine. ARISE and its components will have to play the difficult balancing act of both applauding and pushing change while holding the new leadership accountable. On the other hand, a victorious ARISE would have to quickly prove that left-wing forces are capable of running a massive organization and successfully implement a bottom-up strategy of union organization. Regardless of the outcome, it’s clear that change is afoot within the UFT, and it could only be a matter of time before the teachers’ union joins the UAW and Teamsters in changing guards, with all the contradictions that that entails.