Union conventions target GOP for defeat

Teachers vow fight

by Tim Wheeler

This article was reprinted from the August 10, 1996 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

CINCINNATI - With calls for militant defense of public education, 2,600 delegates to the convention of the 900,000-member American Federation of Teachers (AFT) here joined the battle to defeat the Republican extremists in the November elections.

AFT President Albert Shanker, ill with cancer, urged the convention to set up phone banks and door-to-door canvassing for the campaign. He denounced privatization firms like Education Alternative, Inc. (EAI) and school voucher systems.

Shanker assailed the welfare bill awaiting President Clinton's signature. This legislation, he charged, will reduce aid to the poor by $1 billion in both New York and Los Angeles. "It's going to cause an awful lot of anguish," he said.

Shanker also criticized the union's past methods of political action. "Our campaigns have been conducted by a leadership core," he said. "What percentage of our members have been involved? We must use the strength that we have - the strength of our members. I would urge very strongly that you set up phone banks ... We can be most effective face-to-face and with phone banks."

Although the AFT did not endorse John Sweeney in his bid for AFL-CIO president, AFT delegates gave Sweeney a rousing ovation in his call for unity to defeat the ultra-right in November. Sweeney spoke of the "mean streets of Washington D.C - the halls of the United States Congress where the future of our country is bought and sold by day."

Sweeney told of sending an emergency call to affiliates and Central Labor Councils. "And we swarmed Washington with rank and file lobbyists, international union officers. Out in the states and in the districts, we mounted a grassroots blitz with ... volunteers who were generating thousands of phone calls."

The AFT was part of that mobilization, he said, and the result was a minimum wage increase, defeat of a national Right-to-Work (for less) bill, the TEAM act and other anti-labor measures.

Sweeney said organized labor could take some credit for the fact that House Speaker Newt Gingrich and GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole were forced to "crawl back under their rocks" on affirmative action.

But amid the victories, Sweeney said, are the one million poor children left behind by the welfare legislation just passed by Congress. "The House and Senate passed a horrible welfare eradication act, one which President Clinton over our private as well as public pleadings agreed to sign ... So as we celebrate labor's victories, we must not forget the meanness that lives in our nation's capital and across the country ... I pledge to all of you that this fall, we're going to reach down and root out the ugliness that has grabbed hold of our families and our future ..."

Sweeney said Big Business is fighting the AFL-CIO with smear attacks for its TV ads exposing the GOP's drive to destroy Medicare. "'I'm delighted," he said, "to take my place beside all the other targets -the young, the old, the disabled and the poor."

Ellen Lavroff, chair of the AFT's United Action Caucus, hailed Sweeney's call-to-arms and said, Shanker's appeal is "long overdue ... We should go back and support that on a local level. When you talk about mobilizing the rank and file it will take all of us pulling together to achieve it."

Frederick Burton, a 12th grade teacher and executive board member of AFT Local 59 in Minneapolis, told the World he favors merger of the AFT and the National Education Association. "There is power in numbers when we confront the enemies of public education," he said, adding that he was "really moved" by Sweeney's speech.

Keith Geiger, president of the National Education Association, together with a fraternal delegation, were greeted with a standing ovation. The convention approved unanimously a no-raiding agreement that was similarly approved by the NEA's Representative Assembly last month.

The convention approved a strongly worded resolution opposed to privatization and school vouchers. Delegate David Gray said the time had come "to stop bobbing and weaving and backpedaling and stand toe-to-toe and fight and fight and keep fighting until we knock [the school privatizers] out."