{"id":13104,"date":"2024-07-01T00:55:32","date_gmt":"2024-07-01T04:55:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=13104"},"modified":"2024-07-09T23:10:12","modified_gmt":"2024-07-10T03:10:12","slug":"uft-retirees-at-the-twilight-of-shankerism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2024\/07\/uft-retirees-at-the-twilight-of-shankerism\/","title":{"rendered":"UFT retirees at the twilight of Shankerism"},"content":{"rendered":"

A<\/span> new turning point is emerging in U.S. labor politics as the Unity Caucus, which governed the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) since its first election in 1962, has experienced its first major defeat. The union\u2019s retiree chapter, made up of around 70,000 members, elected Unity\u2019s opponent, Retiree Advocate<\/a>, as its chapter leaders.<\/p>\n

Unlike other teacher unions, retirees play an exceptional role inside the UFT. Even as schools have deteriorated under neoliberal education reforms supported by Unity leaders, the caucus\u2019s dominance in the retiree chapter sustained its long lasting hegemony. In the union\u2019s 2022<\/a> leadership elections, Unity won 71 percent of the retiree vote. In contrast, in this year\u2019s retiree chapter elections Retiree Advocate won 63 percent against Unity\u2019s 37. This drastic shift was driven by UFT president Michael Mulgrew\u2019s attempts to cut healthcare for retirees by shifting to a Medicare Advantage privatization scheme.<\/p>\n

The retirees’ abandonment of Unity took place alongside a growing movement of paraprofessionals<\/a> fighting for a living wage. The Fix Para Pay<\/a> slate won their election with an even bigger margin than the retirees. These developments indicate a potential for ending Unity\u2019s reign in next year\u2019s union officer elections. A change of leadership inside the UFT could lead to major shifts in its affiliates as the UFT remains the largest local inside the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).<\/p>\n

Unity\u2019s legacy<\/h4>\n

The UFT\u2019s impregnable system of caucus-based domination was built by Albert Shanker after he took over the union in 1964. Through Unity, Shanker shaped the UFT in his own image and moved on to remake the AFT through a series of bureaucratic moves<\/a>, militant business unionism<\/a>, and allying with neoconservatives<\/a>. The caucus and the national network that emerged from it remained the core element of Shanker\u2019s dominance within the AFT. While Shanker died in 1997, his legacy survived through the policies of his handpicked successors, Sandra Feldman and Randi Weingarten, both of whom continued to enable neoliberal school reforms that hurt public schools and teachers.<\/p>\n

In 1975, during New York\u2019s budget crisis, when Shanker was the president of both the UFT and the AFT, the school district laid off tens of thousands of teachers and imposed major cuts on much of the public sector. Shanker was pressured into<\/a> a strike against the cuts but quickly called\u00a0 it off and agreed to bail out the city<\/a> with the union\u2019s pension fund to get teachers rehired. Shanker\u2019s bailing out of teachers with their own pension money in the face of cuts emboldened reactionary forces and contributed to the emergence of neoliberal hegemony that brought more cuts for decades to come.<\/p>\n

Unlike the vast majority of teachers in the United States, Shanker quickly embraced the outlook of the Nation at Risk<\/em> report<\/a> in 1983, which shifted the blame for poor educational performance to teachers and working-class students instead of the injustices in school funding and governance. Shanker was an early proponent of reforms such as school choice, charter schools, standardized testing, merit pay for teachers, and watering down of tenure protections, all of which ended up weakening teacher unions. Shanker supported these reforms under the premise of promoting educational \u201cexcellence.\u201d The emphasis on excellence served to cover up the poverty and de facto racial segregation that remained intact across most of the U.S. education system after the rollback of integration policies in the 1970s.<\/p>\n