AFT Fights Exploitation of Foreign Teachers
The growing number of overseas-educated teachers in U.S. schools has put many talented educators in classrooms, but the trend also has led to a host of concerns about exploitation, questionable hiring practices and harmful effects in the countries that are losing their most qualified teachers.
An estimated 19,000 migrant teachers work in U.S. schools, according to a recently released report by AFT. ”Importing Educators: Causes and Consequences of International Teacher Recruitment” examines the growing number of allegations that recruiting agencies have intimidated teachers, forced them into housing contracts, misrepresented their pay, charged them exorbitant fees and threatened to pull their visas. These practices continue because the international teacher recruitment industry is almost entirely unregulated, according to teacher union leaders.
AFT Civil Rights Conference: Help Turn America Around
Public school teachers must work hard to make the nation’s schools places where the suffering of the nation’s children is alleviated. In her keynote address to AFT’s Civil, Human and Women’s Rights conference, Oct. 23-25 in Miami, union President Randi Weingarten said teachers can help turn America around by advocating for change inside and outside the classroom.
Building on the conference theme, “Rise, Advocate, Collaborate, Educate: Our Civil Rights,” Weingarten urged the hundreds of union members and allies to fight for health care reform, affordable housing and after-school activities for students, as well as for tools and resources in the classroom.
Said Weingarten:
We know that it takes a village to raise children. We have to pull in partners and fight to ensure that parents and children get the services they need.
D.C. Families, Trumka Demand Respect for Teachers
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Thousands of students, parents, teachers and community members from across Washington, D.C., converged on the district’s Freedom Plaza yesterday afternoon to rally in support of hundreds of laid-off teachers.
Nearly 400 school employees have been laid off as a result of controversial decisions by D.C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee. The layoffs include 229 classroom teachers, many of them veterans. The Washington Teachers’ Union (WTU) has protested the layoffs, saying that many teachers have been targeted for their age and that the firings are poorly timed and an attempt to undermine the teachers’ contract.
At yesterday’s rally, reports Chris Garlock of the Metropolitan Washington Council, D.C. residents and students of all ages spoke out strongly in support of their teachers. It was one of the largest labor rallies in recent memory in the District. At the rally it was announced that a delegation of teachers sought to present to Mayor Adrian Fenty with a statement in opposition to the layoffs, but Fenty’s assistant wouldn’t even come to the door to accept it.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called the firings “a cold hard case of union busting,” and said that union members across the city stand in solidarity with fired teachers:
The labor movement is right here with you. We’ll stand shoulder to shoulder with you for as long as it takes.
Economy Must Be Restructured to Rebuild the Middle Class
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The corporate agenda that has shaped our economic policy for three decades has nearly destroyed the country. The legacy of the Bush administration is one of lost jobs, unaffordable health care, bankrupt state and local governments and almost nonexistent retirement security.
The new president and Congress, who were elected in great part through the work of union members, have taken some important steps to jump start the economy. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has saved or created 1.2 million jobs so far.
The AFL-CIO Convention today examined how to continue turning around America and rebuild the economy. The delegates approved resolutions on a national strategy for moving forward our economic recovery and creating and sustaining good green jobs.
NEA’s Van Roekel: This Is Our Time, This Is Our Opportunity
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The changes in our country since the November elections have been dramatic and union members must be ready to take advantage of the opportunities for working people. In a powerful speech at the AFL-CIO Convention this morning, National Education Association (NEA) President Dennis Van Roekel said this is the time for working families to rebuild America’s working and middle class.
Making those changes requires power and power comes through unity, Van Roekel said.
We must find a way to change the country’s attitude towards the union movement and the middle class. We need the power to act.
Frank McCourt: Inspirational Writer, AFT Member
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Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former New York City teacher Frank McCourt, 78, who died July 19, was one of the world’s “most inspirational writers and teachers,” says AFT President Randi Weingarten.
Frank McCourt saw teaching, storytelling and writing not only as a way out of his unimaginable, poverty-stricken childhood and adolescence, but also as a way to share his life’s lessons.
McCourt, an AFT member, taught social studies and English in the city’s public schools from 1960 to 1987. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1996 memoir, Angela’s Ashes, that detailed his impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland. His 2005 book, Teacher Man, chronicles his teaching career in New York City. Says Weingarten:
Thousands of students benefited from his remarkable ability to help them realize the richness of their own lives, no matter how difficult.
In 1997, McCourt spoke at an AFT conference. McCourt told the educators he knew nothing about teaching when he became a teacher, except what he had picked up from his teachers in Ireland, all “trained by the Marquis de Sade.”
I didn’t know I was learning on the job that first year and later found out I had been learning on the job for 27 years….Norman Mailer said the only way you learn something is by writing about it. The only way I learned anything was by teaching about it.
CWA Delegates Back Employee Free Choice, Health Care and Unity
More than 2,500 members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) delivered a message to their representatives on Capitol Hill yesterday: It’s time to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and real health care reform.
The Capitol Hill lobby day is part of the union’s four-day convention in Washington, D.C., which ends today. Delegates will go back to the Capitol today to join thousands of workers in the mass rally in support of health care reform.
Professional Workers Form Coalition to Protect Public Interest
A coalition of 19 organizations representing professional employees today announced the creation of Professionals for the Public Interest: Associations and Unions Defending Professional Integrity (PftPI) to defend the ability of professionals to do their jobs right, despite outside pressures from bosses, politicians and others.
According to the AFL-CIO Department for Public Employees (DPE), polling over many years has shown that for professionals, the ability to do the job right is a priority as important as, or more important than, compensation and benefits. Professionals choose what they want to do, invest in extensive education and training and value the latitude to meet professional standards.
Yet professionals face extensive financial and political pressures that endanger their ability to turn out quality work and, as a result, endanger the public they serve, DPE says. For example, scientists found that the Bush administration regularly twisted the results of their research to fit a political agenda. Nurses are engaged in ongoing struggles to provide better service by safe staffing, and teachers seek to reduce class sizes.
After Eight Years of Bush, Can OSHA be Fixed?
The Bush administration left a lot of wreckage in its wake. The crumbling economy, the home foreclosure crisis and a broken health care system are getting most of the recent headlines and calls for immediate repair.
But for the men and women who get up and go to work every day—and want to come home alive and without injury—there is something else the Bush administration trashed that needs fixing and fixing fast—the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
Union Leaders Join in White House Meeting on Health Care, Social Security
After eight years with a virtual “Do Not Enter” sign at the White House front door, President Obama has opened 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to leaders, policymakers and advocates of a wide range of views.
Yesterday, union and business leaders, conservative and progressive economists, and think tankers and Democratic and Republican lawmakers came together for a “Fiscal Responsibility Summit.”
At the opening session, Obama unveiled his outline to cut the $1.3 trillion federal deficit he inherited from the Bush administration in half by the end of his term by letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire, reining in tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and drawing down troops in Iraq, among other items.
