A Conversation Regarding the Leadership and Membership of the Illinois Education Association

Dear Fred, John, and Glen:

Mr. Rogers gave valuable adult lessons to children, parents, teachers, and all of us.

“I like to be told
If it’s going to hurt,
If it’s going to be hard,
If it’s not going to hurt.
I like to be told. I like to be told.”

...Active and retired teachers in Illinois and across the nation are besieged with attacks on basic teacher rights, salaries, working conditions, evaluations based on the scores of classes they never taught and students they never had in class, pillaging earned compensation (present and future pensions), and much more. 

The technical ability to mass communicate today has never been better or easier. Are teachers being told what they need to know by their own leadership?

Illinois and Chicago have two separate teachers’ union leaderships. Chicago has the Chicago Teachers Union led by Karen Lewis. Illinois has the Illinois Education Association led by Cinda Klickna…

With SBI in court, which cuts earned income for retired teachers while continuing to mandate that teachers pay 9.4% and more into a system which is intentionally robbed (underfunded) as a quasi-legalized form of wage theft, Klickna and IEA send automatic updates of member discount coupons for Men’s Wearhouse, Brooks Brothers, Worldwide Golf Shops, IZOD, Under Armour, Texas de Brazil Steakhouse, etc…

Lewis and CTU regularly appear at every venue that gives an opportunity to update members with the truth – good news or bad news. Lewis calls for a fair tax on stocks and futures transactions to pay what is legally owed to the pillaged teacher pension systems. “We don’t have a pension crisis, we have a pension shortfall and a crisis in [legislative/political] leadership.” View and read HERE.

How the producers of the reality TV show Chicagoland attempted to intimidate her into being part of the series. View and read HERE. The racial and political abuses presented in raw power Chicago politics. HERE.

The CTU opposition to Common Core, why Rahm Emanuel and an appointed group of multimillionaires and billionaires who invest and profit from charter schools should not be Chicago’s School Board, what Emanuel’s re-election destroy in public education (HERE) and much more. 

The most recent episode of Klickna and IEA taking actions and keeping members updated was the fiasco of endorsing ($50,000) the recent IL Chair of ALEC Kirk Dillard (R) as a “pro-public education, friend of teachers” gubernatorial candidate even as he spoke to right-wing groups about closing schools, firing teachers, and stealing teacher pensions. Read HERE.

Because IEA leadership has not searched for or created a candidate within the last few decades who is pro-public education, members are fed this political insanity as the old lesser-of-two-evils routine rather than as an example of a lack of effective union leadership. Leadership with long term progressive building skills. 

Even worse, IEA/NEA teachers are now being given silence or updates consisting of store coupons for Men’s Wearhouse and other stuff. This is insulting on more levels than can be expressed in a single blog.

This is NOT an anti-union diatribe. This a demand for real leadership in Illinois. WE NEED TO BE TOLD THE TRUTH IN A TIMELY MANNER.

Ken Previti

Dear Ken:

You have hit on a topic that is guaranteed to get my blood flowing. From my earliest days as a union member and union activist I have fought for the idea that a democratic organization requires that the members have access to information. I guess that is why we became bloggers.

I recall an IEA Representative Assembly a few years back when I and other members proposed establishing an internet-based system that would allow local members to contact each other for the purpose of political action and lobbying.

The leadership put the kibosh on that faster than you could say Ken Swanson. You know how that works, Ken.  When the leadership wants a proposal to die, they put a price tag on the proposal that is so high that the delegates’ only response is to vote it down. However, the leadership’s real purpose is controlling the message.

Member to member contact without going through Government Relations? No way. To me, the issue of the free flow of information and communication between the leadership and the rank-rank-file is but a single part of making our union more democratic and more powerful.

Milwaukee teacher union President Bob Peterson writes in his essay, “A New Teacher Union Movement Rising”: “We promote an organizing model with a strong dose of internal union democracy and increased member participation. This contrasts to a business model that views union membership as an insurance policy where decision-making is concentrated in a small group of elected leaders and/or paid staff.”

 

This is the choice facing active and retired members of the IEA. Do we stay with the old business model? Or do the threats we now face demand an organizing model with internal democracy and the free flow of information?

I don’t think that the old model – which is the IEA’s current model – will get us through the next period.

Do you?

Fred Klonsky

Dear Ken and Fred:

Received your ideas and concerns about union communication and leadership and found myself wondering what the last brontosaurus mused while munching swamp grass a hundred and forty million years ago.  

Of course, Ken, your polemic against the offers of shirts and linens through the IEA internet contact was amusing, and I always did have an appreciation for the calming influence of Mr. Rogers, but the message was pretty clearly non-political, only a membership offer for consumers prior to a holiday.  In fact, it included a click point to refuse receipt of further consumer materials from IEA.  Just click it, Ken.

On the other hand, your and Fred’s concerns certainly mirror my own unsettling thoughts about what is coming and if we (IEA, IFT, and others) are quite prepared.  

Like Wisconsin, we too could be looking at a sea change in leadership very shortly, a continuing fiscal crisis certainly, and a dubious outcome in the court battle over our benefits from pensions we worked for and deserve.

Except for the last item, it appears that neither IEA nor IFT have anticipated any of these issues, and Fred’s reference to the need for a new model is certainly fitting; but if we are to become a leaner and certainly meaner machine like Karen Lewis’ CTU, we’d better start creating and promoting a different kind of active IEA member.  I hear ennui and exasperation from actives, not anger – at least in the suburban areas.  That would need some serious adjustment.  And we’d (retirees too) all better be prepared to do a lot more politically and educationally than we ever have before.   

Union membership is less than it was in 1915 now.  And our numbers are sinking abut as quickly as the Lusitania.  Furthermore, recent drops in public union memberships in Wisconsin and Indiana tell a very dismal tale of what happens when a Rauner-like character gets in the governor’s door.  Have you seen any mobilization to stop that?

I remember a year ago, Will Lovett remarked to a group of retired IEA members that the “very atmosphere” had changed in Springfield; everything had transformed.  This was more than just preparing us for SB2404; it was a truism about how a disappearing power is treated, and the legislators can feel union power and influence fading away.  

Will the old top-down model survive what’s continually coming, ask Fred? 

Not a chance.  

John Dillon

Dear Ken, Fred, and John:

“Are teachers being told what they need to know by their own leadership?”  

Generally speaking, a union (or association) leadership will never reveal the inner workings of its clandestine decision-making process to its membership; nor should it. What cabal will share its secrets anyway, except when it might be deemed necessary to create an illusion of self-restraint and intelligence to mask incompetence or diffidence? Furthermore, keeping union members in metaphoric “darkness” until leadership decides to tell them what they need to know and when to act maintains their mystery and power. 

Conversely, it is prudent for the IEA not to reveal the significant details of the current so-called “pension reform” litigation, and perhaps it is better for most members not “to be told if it’s going to hurt” since many retired and harried IEA members seem to prefer a leadership that allows them to live life without trepidation. 

Although it is often said that “ignorance is bliss,” history reveals quite consistently that what we do not know can “hurt” us, nonetheless. Perhaps this is why some retired and active members of the IEA demand meaningful communication from their leadership.

We can expect Illinois General Assemblies will continue their assaults on our constitutional contract. Senate Bill 1 and several antedated court cases prove chronic attempts at theft. Thus, we need a dynamic leadership with the determination to inspire and to listen to its politically-informed members when fighting against the next assaults upon constitutional rights and benefits and public school teachers. 

This necessitates a current leadership that does not readily condemn differences of opinion from those who might question and challenge the IEA leadership regarding the significant issues confronting all of us. This unfortunate situation has been exacerbated by two IEA ex-presidents who have labeled any disagreements as blatant disloyalties.

As stated by John Stuart Mill: “If a [differing] opinion is right, [leadership and the membership will be] deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, [leadership and the membership will] lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error” (On Liberty). 

According to author and activist Chris Hedges: "Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class struggle and filled with those who sought broad social and political rights for the working class, have been transformed into domesticated partners of the capitalist class. They have been reduced to simple bartering tools.”

glen

Invoking Police Powers by John Dillon

“…In her counter-arguments to Judge Belz, whether historically specious or carefully imbalanced, the Attorney General summons what is always the dogma of police powers: to bring about and assure the greatest good for the greatest number of people. 

“Of course, this is the basis for good government to begin with, and in the case of Illinois, that oath and responsibility has become so hijacked and bastardized that the Attorney General now finds herself in the embarrassing position of calling up the most malevolent of state powers to punish citizens in a specific class to ‘provide for’ others. 

 

“In Illinois this action becomes tantamount to washing away a significant debt by claiming a benefit to the many.  But what may be good to the many is hardly known by Madigan or anyone else.  The many not only includes only public servants.  It may also include family members and dependents.  It might include another person who holds contracts with Illinois who wants to see them regarded with some ethical or moral certainty.  It may include shop owners or purveyors who deal with those whose pension provide income. 

“In fact, the ‘many’ cannot be known.  Even when used freely by an Attorney General. In actuality, the ‘many’ (as one can read over in her arguments) becomes the bottom line for a legislature frantic to avoid a bill of their own making. 

“A state government’s responsibilities include promoting the general welfare and the securing of the inalienable rights of those within its borders.  Make no mistake. Police Powers are exactly the opposite:  A destructive and harsh coercion of a group or class or particular persons in the name of the many.”

from Lisa Madigan Invokes Police Powers: Beginning Considerations

From a Reiterated Commentary regarding Emergency Police Powers on this Blog:

“Emergency does not create power. Emergency does not increase granted power or remove or diminish the restrictions imposed upon power granted or reserved. The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. Its grants of power to the Federal Government and its limitations of the power of the States were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency. What power was thus granted and what limitations were thus imposed are questions which have always been, and always will be, the subject of close examination under our constitutional system” (U.S. Supreme Court, Home Building & Loan Assn. v. Blaisdell, 290 U.S. (1934)).

In regard to the “diminishing or impairing” of a pension clause or contract that protects citizens’ rights, the United States Supreme Court has held “that the court must establish that impairment is reasonable and necessary to serve an important public purpose, such as ‘the remedying of a broad and general social or economic problem.’ To show that a change is necessary, the state must establish that no less drastic modification could have been implemented to accomplish the state’s goal; and that the state could not have achieved its public policy goal without modification” (Education Sector Policy Briefs).

A state’s option to exercise its police or eminent domain powers, however, has seldom been brought to the test for obvious reasons. To declare that Illinois is in an “emergency state,” without attempting revenue restructuring, for instance, will ignite an examination of the ethical and legal motivations of policymakers and whether they attempted to exhaust every alternative available to them for resolving the state’s financial debts before attempting to ignore a constitutional contract.

“[Furthermore], budgetary relief is not a legitimate public purpose; for a severe financial crisis (Great Recession), courts [have been] split [on the issue]. Courts seem to be in consensus that the long-term fiscal health of a pension plan to assure receipt of future benefits is a legitimate public purpose…  If a pension benefit is diminished without ‘offsetting consideration or benefit to plan members,’ [lowering the contribution rate one percent was not a legally negotiated consideration,] courts will typically find ‘substantial impairment’” (Pension Reform, Legal Principles and Consideration).  Once offered, historically and legally, promises that were made need to be kept.

There is no financial "emergency" in Illinois. This is about power and politics, about theft and reneging on a constitutional contract with public employees. There is no justice in diminishing the benefits and rights of public employees and retirees; there is no justice in granting tax breaks for wealthy corporations and, at the same time, legislating cuts to public employees’ constitutionally-guaranteed compensation. It is legally and morally wrong to perpetuate the victimization of public employees and retirees, especially when Illinois legislators give “undeserved weight to highly-organized wealthy interest groups, [those groups] tending to ‘drain politics of its moral and intellectual content’” (Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law).

We might assume the government of Illinois would not want to prove that its contracts are worthless, especially when the “most basic purposes of the impairment [of the contract] clause [Article XIII, Section 5] as well as notions of fairness that transcend the clause itself, point to a simple constitutional principle: government must keep its word” (Tribe).

(The painting is by Pawel Kuczynski)