Build Community Support for Issues, Then Bargain Them
WEAC members must work to build strong community support for a broad
range of issues related to public education and working conditions,
then take those issues to the bargaining table, WEAC Executive Director
Michael Butera said.
"It is not enough to write a proposal and send it across the table,"
Butera said at the Statewide Bargaining Conference Saturday (November
6, 1999).
"We must organize our members and communities to support these
objectives before we place them on the table, and we must do this year
round, not just during the actual negotiating process.
"We cannot just hope for community support; we must build and
organize community support."
That is one of the objectives of WEAC's Great
Schools project, he noted.
The conference for teacher and support staff negotiators focused largely
on labor-management partnerships and bargaining for Great Schools.
Butera said members need to be militant and zealous but, "We need
an offensive not built of hate and despair but of hope, facts, vision."
He said educators need to build new partners - "not just the moms
and dads of our students, but seniors and yuppies that have no children
in our classrooms."
"We must reach out so others can reach in," he said. "All
of our technical bargaining skills at the table cannot affect the outcome
as much as an organized, politically motivated citizenry."
Older educators should take pride in their successes of the past, he
said. But we also need to adapt to the very different interests and
needs of our younger membership.
"The things that we grew up with, the things that people of my
generation wanted and believed in and fought for, while still important
and still an item for which we should be proud ... are they the items
that must be put forward in the new bargains?
"Our members deserve our best thinking, not about what we did
in the past or the problems that we faced in the past, but the issues
that face them today and in the future," Butera said.
"The things we've gained, the enormous changes that have come
about in our day-to-day work, mostly through the hard work of collective
bargainers and political activists, are not issues that will excite
or expand our solidarity with one another in the same way it once did,"
Butera said.
Butera urged negotiators to bring "a new level of thinking"
to the bargaining table. That includes examining new issues such as
school safety and discipline, distance learning, and professional development
- and exploring new solutions, such as innovative inservice programs,
business partnerships, and even alternative forms of compensation.
"We must rethink not our basic values and principles but our methods,
our practice, our set of tools to achieve our mission," he said.
"We must organize with the public for children in order to share
more fully in the bounty of a new economy. This will be hard work. It
will be Great Schools work."
Posted November 6, 1999