PSRP leaders tour New Orleans elementary schools

Members of the AFT's PSRP program and policy council spent a day visiting four New Orleans elementary schools during their January meeting in the Big Easy. School visits have become a regular part of the PSRP council’s January meeting. This year, for the first time, the visits focused on school conditions and indoor air quality as well as educational programs. Two members of the AFT’s health and safety program staff accompanied the group and led a discussion the next day on conditions in the schools, which ranged from a brand-new building that opened this school year to a couple that were clearly showing their age.

All of the New Orleans schools the group observed are using Direct Instruction, a highly scripted, call-and-response type of reading program, as the result of the new superintendent’s mandate that all schools adopt intensive research-based approaches. (Success for All is the other program New Orleans schools use.) The discussion of school infrastructure problems was designed to help the council members analyze conditions in their own districts and help bring attention to problems they find. Indoor air quality was one of a number of possible topics for 2004 AFT convention resolutions that the PPC looked at.

Events across country publicize worker rights

AFT affiliates from coast to coast took part in events on Dec. 10 to commemorate International Human Rights Day and boost the union movement’s campaign to ensure every worker’s freedom to form a union.

U.S. laws are not strong enough to prevent employers from routinely abusing workers’ rights. Hart Research reports that 42 million U.S. workers would form a union today if they had a chance, but workers are routinely denied their choice to have a union because employers harass, coerce, intimidate—and even fire—their employees to keep them from exercising their freedom to form a union.

To address this imbalance, the AFT and the labor movement are supporting the Employee Free Choice Act. “Labor unions have led the fight for better wages and working conditions for millions of workers in our country,” says Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), a chief sponsor of the bill. “But too many workers who want to form a union are unable to do so. America’s workers deserve better.”

Dec. 10 was celebrated with rallies, teach-ins, vigils and other events across the country to remind citizens and their elected officials that the right to organize a union is a fundamental, universal human right.