More than 1,000 united federation of Teachers (UFT) members packed the street in front of the New York City board of education headquarters in May in the culmination of a campaign to get relief for overworked school secretaries.

Along with the rally, the UFT's secretaries chapter has filed grievances, negotiated to include a workload committee as part of its contract and regularly expressed its concern that members are drowning under crushing workloads. "The job of school secretary has simply become unmanageable," Evelyn Berg, leader of the UFT secretaries chapter, told the rally crowd, "and we need to let the board of education and the chancellor know it."

Berg and the UFT point to a number of factors in the growing workload, among them growing student enrollment (including summer school), more staff, additional special education-related duties formerly done by teachers, new student immunization requirements and more time generating computerized reports. She argues that the school system needs about 5,000 secretaries--rather than the current 3,300Ñto manage its workload.

"I feel that I'm being split 500 ways at one time, and everything had to be completed yesterday," Miguel Negron, a high school secretary in Brooklyn, said in a New York Teacher report on the rally. "I love my job and I'm proud of being a school secretary. I just can't help but feel I could be more efficient if some of the workload were divvied up."

During the rally, which was well attended by other segments of the UFT--such as teachers, guidance counselors and paraprofessionals as well as secretaries--UFT president Randi Weingarten pointed out the importance of union solidarity.

"If you disrespect one of our members, you disrespect all of our members," she said. "Our school secretaries are the salt of the earth. If people in the private sector didn't have proper equipment and workstations they wouldn't stand for it, but we are expected to just take it and do the best we can. It's time for us to get more training, better conditions and more secretaries."