AFT president Sandra Feldman has called on the nation to provide the supports needed to guarantee that every child, regardless of family income, enters school prepared to learn and enjoys access to high-quality learning opportunities throughout their school years.

In her keynote address to the union’s QuEST conference in mid-July, Feldman called for a new national commitment, beginning with a fully funded Head Start program, to give all children access to high-quality preschool programs for children ages 3 and older, and targeted initially to lower-income families. She also called for a nationwide commitment to provide full-day kindergarten for all children, and urged states and districts to make an investment in the types of extended-day and extended-year programs that can help students in low-performing schools achieve at higher levels.

These supports, so desperately needed in the nation’s poorest communities, have been given short shrift in the current debate over education reform, Feldman charged. "What goes undiscussed, what lurks in the shadows, is the specter of poverty--the harm and hurt of it--and the Herculean effort poor children and their schools and teachers have to make to prevail over the conditions of their lives."

The first step toward universal preschool access, Feldman said, is to leverage federal, state and local funds to establish a quality system and also to pay the costs for poor families. Second, Feldman called for an expansion of the program by allowing more-advantaged families to participate through sliding-scale fees based on their ability to pay. Key to universal preschool access, Feldman said, is to ensure that Head Start is fully funded "so it not only covers all eligible children but also provides them with a high-quality program, including the health, social services and parent involvement components" featured in the current program.

Courage and discretion marked the yearlong campaign to organize a unit of 66 full- and part-time faculty at the Palmer College of Chiropractic-West in San Jose, Calif. The college is a branch of the main campus in Iowa.

Twelve years ago, faculty made their first attempts at unionizing, remembers Susan St. Claire, a full professor at Palmer, and now president of the PCCW Faculty Federation. The three leaders behind that failed effort ended up losing their jobs. This time, as an officer in the faculty senate, St. Claire joined with other senators who were "tired of whining" about the faculty’s lack of power, says St. Claire. They contacted the AFT, and for more than 18 months they held secret off-campus meetings. At the meetings, they decided to affiliate with the AFT, got fellow faculty to sign cards for an election and filed these cards with the National Labor Relations Board. In short order, the NLRB held the election, and the new union came out into the open on April 11.

At Palmer, raises have been hard to come by, and there is a perception that they are more the result of cronyism than any other measure, St. Claire says. As enrollments at Palmer have declined, the administration has cut back on health benefits to the point where the HMO that serves faculty no longer has doctors available. And that isn’t all. Faculty must sign an annual contract agreeing to abide by the faculty handbook, which can be changed at management’s whim, says St. Claire.

When it negotiates, the union will take up salaries, health benefits and promotions as top faculty priorities. But first, the union has to negotiate release time for its bargaining team. So far, management has been unwilling to grant faculty this leave. "There is no animosity," says St. Claire, "but we’re all learning how to do this."

AFL-CIO president John Sweeney had only praise for the AFT when he addressed 300 higher education unionists in San Francisco last spring. The AFT is setting a new standard in labor organizing, Sweeney said, and unions on college and university campuses are leading the way.

Sweeney announced a string of 2001 AFT election victories that brought more than 4,000 graduate employees, faculty and professional staff under the AFT banner in just one month’s time. Sweeney also lauded AFT president Sandra Feldman for her support of the AFL-CIO program. No leader and no affiliate of the labor body has given more support and leadership, he emphasized. "The AFT is a stand-up union, and Feldman is a stand-up leader."

Sweeney’s keynote speech kicked off the annual meeting of the AFT National Higher Education Issues Conference. Although Sweeney started on a high note, he pointed out that, in fact, the environment for labor and working families in America is not a good one. President Bush is no friend to us, and his first months in office have made that clear. From backpedaling on the environment, rescinding ergonomic protections, dismantling public employee labor/management committees to interfering with good faith bargaining in the pilots’ union negotiations, this administration has shown that its allegiance lies with business first.

Other speakers warmed to the conference theme, "Gathering Steam: Advancing Academic Values, Quality and Professionalism." Elaine Bernard, executive director of the Trade Union Program at Harvard University, delivered the Irwin Polishook Lecture. She focused on three situations that challenge the academic values of educators: free trade agreements, the increasing use and exploitation of part-timers and contingent labor, and the living wage campaigns. She noted that the current neoliberal ideas, which advocate privatization and deregulation, lack consideration of the public good. Faculty and academic staff need to stand ready to protect academic and professional values by opposing these trends that are undermining work.

Other speakers talked about issues related to distance education, part-time organizing, legal challenges, political organizing and federal legislation.