Weingarten urges delegates to call in their support

April 8, 2005

Opening the convention Thursday night, UFT President Randi Weingarten welcomed delegates to the Big Apple and invited them to help their New York City colleagues -- who have not had a new contract for almost two years -- to bombard the city's non-emergency 311 helpline with phone calls of support.

"Tell them you are shocked, shocked … that your friends and your colleagues, who do so much for the city and its children, don't have a current contract with decent pay and working conditions," Weingarten said.

A bank of telephones for the 311 calls has been set up on the second floor of the Hilton Hotel.

Weingarten said the city's mayor and schools chancellor are seeking to eliminate tenure and other traditional protections for educators.

Moreover, she said, the mayor and chancellor are blaming all of society's ills on the union contract. "(Michael) Bloomberg and (Joel) Klein believe that the union contract is the root of all evil," she said. "We are in a fight that we have not had to fight since the union was born."

Weingarten stunned delegates from around the state with some of the details of micromanagement with which city teachers have had to cope this year. She told them about a principal who dictated how many staples are allowed in bulletin boards.

She also told them about the principal who gave teachers stopwatches so that they would not spend more than the seven to 10 minutes of instruction allowed in the "workshop model" of instruction that has been forced on teachers, whether they think it is appropriate for the subject they are teaching or not. And she told them that, because administrators have driven teachers crazy by insisting that they have rigidly defined word walls, one teacher who had no permanent classroom took to wearing his word wall as a sandwich-board sign around his neck.

Weingarten said that, as part of the contract fight, the UFT is planning a rally at Madison Square Garden on June 1. She called it "the rally of our lives."