CFT fights back

AFT state affiliate joins with other unions to stop the 'governator's' agenda

If California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was looking for a fight, he found it.

Public employees across the state have responded to Schwarzenegger’s broadside on public employees and the institutions they serve with an aggressive, coordinated grass-roots outreach and lobbying effort.

Through meetings with individual legislators, through rallies and demonstrations, through leafleting at shopping centers and other public places, AFT members across the Golden State are standing up for their rights and for the rights of those they serve in schools and universities.

At issue are Schwarzenegger’s unprecedented efforts in the Legislature and through a series of planned ballot initiatives that would end guaranteed pensions for teachers and public employees, remove a voter-approved “floor” for school and college funding, and institute a fuzzy merit pay system that would lock teachers into probationary status for five years. The governor’s agenda also would ramp up efforts to privatize services in K-14 districts and colleges and impose crippling limits on how public employees can participate in political dialogue through their unions.

Clearly, Schwarzenegger is feeling the heat from Californians who oppose these measures. Recently, he anounced he would pull his pension ballot initiative—but also signaled that a “new and improved” plan to privatize pensions would be crafted and reintroduced.

“He is still determined to eliminate the security of our defined-benefit pensions,” warns California Federation of Teachers president Mary Bergan, who is also an AFT vice president. “We can smile for a moment, but we can’t relax our efforts.”

Crisscrossing the nation in recent weeks to raise money for his agenda, the governor makes no bones about how ambitious this attack on public employees really is. “As California goes, so goes the rest of the nation,” he told one group of wealthy supporters at an East Coast fundraiser, while just outside, hundreds of teachers, fire-

fighters, nurses and other union activists demonstrated against the event and the “Schwarzenation” of America.

Closer to home, the governor’s attacks on public education and public employees took center stage at the CFT convention March 18-20 in Manhattan Beach, where delegates approved an increase in per capita payments to help the state federation mount a fierce response. The CFT and its affiliates are working with a large coalition of public employee unions in an ambitious campaign to educate and mobilize union households and ordinary citizens.

“We will leave this convention united in our resolve to defeat our enemies and make California a better place for our families and for the public we serve,” said Bergan.

In a show of determination and unity, hundreds of chanting and sign-carrying delegates filed out of the convention hotel and marched to a nearby shopping center, where petitions supporting Schwarzenegger’s reactionary ballot measures were being circulated. The union activists passed out leaflets urging voters not to sign the petitions and received expressions of support in return.

It was the most visible evidence of AFT members mobilizing against the ballot initiatives, but certainly not the only one. A recent rally by the Morgan Hill (Calif.) Federation of Teachers against the ballot initiatives drew heavy participation from the 450 teachers, nurses and librarians the local represents. Interest is so keen that members have been showing up at union offices asking for anti-ballot leaflets whenever they see petition signature-gatherers in their neighborhoods.

Schwarzenegger “likes to say that the CFT and other labor unions are ‘special interest groups,’” AFT secretary-treasurer Nat LaCour noted in his address at the CFT convention. “Well, here’s a little piece of news for the governor: Labor unions are made up of people who work for a living. And the CFT is made up of people who work in colleges and universities, high schools, middle schools and elementary schools.

“Governor Schwarzenegger, that’s our ‘special interest group,’ and we’re very proud of it.”