Sign Up For Our Newsletter

doom n' gloom from within the NEA

You gotta hand it to Mike Antonucci–he sure knows how to pick his guest bloggers.  This anonymous writer has nothing nice to say about the NEAAFTAFLCIO merger. 

NEA leaders refuse to organize mass actions of teachers, parents, students, and others over issues that clearly tie them all together: class size, books and libraries, free supplies, a just and fair tax system, etc. Indeed, the necessity of the strike weapon even as a vital bargaining chip simply drifted out of NEA leaders’ minds, to the point that there are very few people in NEA, or anywhere in the labor movement, who actually know how to conduct a strike.

It is clear to me that since the rank and file members of NEA rejected the merger with AFT-AFL-CIO, the NEA bosses have worked hard behind closed doors to achieve what they could not win in the open. I feel very strongly that the democracy that once characterized NEA is vanishing fast.

So, unless a rank and file uprising moves to overturn this maneuver, I can easily see NEA slipping fast into the same irrelevance that characterizes the AFL-CIO, following the United Auto Workers, once the most powerful union in the U.S., now having lost a million members, and doing nothing at all as those members still employed kiss away their wages, health benefits and pensions, while the UAW bosses plan their retirements. Today, the only people the AFL-CIO bosses can beat up are their own members.

The AFL-CIO cannot offer solidarity in labor struggles. It never has. Now, with about 1/3 of its membership gone, it cannot offer numbers. It cannot offer political action aid. It cannot even stop its own members from voting for George Bush.

Clearly, education workers and others are going to have to find new forms of organizations, outside the NEA-AFT-AFL-CIO, that can unite those in the community, teachers, parents, and students, in a common struggle for justice.So, this is my small tear shed for what could have been with NEA, and with that pause, I plunge ahead to see what might be in a new organization, with one toe in, and nine toes out, of the fraudulently termed "organized labor movement."

Read the whole thing.