[Mid-October 2005 special pension issue of Substance, Page Four] By Deborah Lynch

I’m sure that the accusations, innuendoes and outright lies make it difficult for members to sort out fact from fiction. While many of the issues seem petty now that so many problems are arising in the schools, one of the most important benefits we won during the last contract negotiations has now been given back by the Stewart administration, in collaboration with the Board. Here’s the real deal on the 5+5 benefit that my team and I negotiated to benefit more than 4,000 members at the eleventh hour of bargaining.
 

It was literally the eleventh hour (about 3:00 a.m.) of bargaining. We had gone back to the table and succeeded in negotiating an annual bonus for ESPs, additional sick days for senior teachers, a moratorium on high school advisories, and $2 million additional for K-1 class size reductions (money not yet spent, by the way).

That wasn’t enough. The PACT team insisted that we needed an agreement on 5+5. This was, in fact, the only night Mr. Duncan showed up for negotiations and he finally agreed to support 5+5 legislation. This was the final agreement of negotiations. It was a provision critical to the members’ acceptance of the agreement and, in effect, averted a strike.

The attached letter [on the following page] indicates the language of the agreement we reached during collective bargaining. This is codified in Article 12-1 of our Agreement. In it, Chicago Board of Education’s Chief Negotiator James Franzcek states:

“This letter confirms our agreement regarding 5+5 legislation. The Board agrees that, as part of Section 12-1 of our collective bargaining agreement, the Board and the Union will work together to facilitate the passage of legislation in the areas described therein and, in addition, to facilitate the passage of legislation for 5+5 early retirement, early retirement without discount or other appropriate early retirement legislation for teachers covered by the collective bargaining agreement.”

The Joint Union-Board Commission began meeting in the Winter of 2004 and met on at least a dozen occasions between January and June. In addition to 5+5, the Board had agreed to work on funding for the Pension Fund (a bill agreed to by Chicago Board of Education, Chicago Teachers Union and Chicago Teachers Pension Fund). We had a class action grievance against them for not doing it during the UPC/Reece years.

Other major items included class size reduction (a bill already passed out of committee) and modifications to NCLB.

The parties agreed to work on 5+5 in the first year and pensionability in the second year. The Commission’s meetings were characterized by CTU providing figures from the Board’s (and Pension Board’s) own actuaries on the savings it would realize with the passage of 5+5 over the next twenty to thirty years. It only made sense. Allowing 4,000 senior (and more expensive) teachers — two thousand per year, over two years, was the estimate — to retire and replacing them with new teachers would save money.

Each meeting was characterized by Board representatives providing reasons why they couldn’t support 5+5. The actuaries did the numbers in a variety of different ways in an effort to address their concerns. Representatives of the Pension Fund attended several of the meetings and indicated support for a 5+5. We even explored the costs and savings of a 3+3. CPS Budget Director John Majorca continued to stonewall the Union. We complained to Duncan, who attended a few of the meetings with his financial hatchet man David Vitale. At one of these meetings, the CTU team walked out on Duncan and Vitale, accusing them of refusing to bargain in good faith and wasting our time. At no point during the months of meetings (always demanded by the CTU), did the Board representatives present any alternative 5+5 plan. They did nothing but object to every plan or idea presented by the CTU.

CTU had also lobbied for 5+5 in Springfield. Everyone knows that the only way pension legislation can get passed is if the Union, the Board of Education, and the Pension Fund are all in agreement on it. The Pension Fund had given us its support. We had the Board’s written agreement and met with Speaker Madigan, who assured us that the minute he had the Board’s approval on a bill, he would advance it. When Madigan called Duncan for his position, Duncan said “No.” He broke his word, violated the terms of our contract, and betrayed 4,000 union members.

Thus it was that in June of 2004, at the end of the legislative session, I filed a class action grievance against CPS on behalf of all CTU members, but especially the 4,000 CTU members who would have been eligible for 5+5.

As if one betrayal wasn’t enough, the “Old/New” Reece/Stewart administration betrayed CTU members again. After a bitter election dispute, the appointed officers decided to drop our grievance. They received the response to our grievance in September. Not surprisingly, it had been denied at the first level, by the Director of the Office of Labor and Employee Relations. She found that “no violation of the contract had occurred.” According to the grievance procedure, the grievance could have been appealed to the Chief Executive Officer, and subsequently to arbitration, a potential third step.

The Union has an obligation to its members, under the duty of fair representation, to conduct a good faith investigation to determine whether a grievance claim has merit. Usual considerations in decisions about taking a grievance forward to the next level include: perceived merit; likelihood of success; cost; and possible benefit to the membership. At no time did anyone from the Stewart/UPC team try to contact any of the 8 PACT bargaining members about this grievance. No one from the Stewart/UPC administration had any knowledge of the discussions in negotiations or in the Commission meetings. Obviously, they didn’t care. They dropped the grievance.

Nor did they not report the result of the grievance until forced to by questions from delegates at the November 2004 House of Delegates’ meetings. When asked about the grievance, Stewart representatives ridiculed (and continue to ridicule) the grievance as “weak”, stated that it had no merit, and continued their relentless personal attacks on the Lynch/PACT team. (I ask any member, particularly if you are one of the 4,000 who could benefit from 5+5, to reread the Franczek letter and ask whether this grievance had merit.)

We are now in the third year of a four-year contract. There is no 5+5 (or equivalent) in sight, and the Stewart/UPC team stated as recently as the September 2005 House of Delegates meeting that “we will not see a 5+5 in the next few years.” They let Duncan and CPS off the hook on our grievance. In so doing, have jeopardized the other legislative items in Article 12-1 of the contract. They have given up hope of ever achieving it. To achieve it, via our current contract, violates their standard operating procedure, which is to trash — not defend and enforce — the agreement. For the cost of a 37-cent stamp, they could have at least sent it up to the next grievance level. What were they — are they — afraid of?

A union member’s recourse, if he or she believes the union in not acting is good faith, is the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board (IELRB). I subsequently filed an unfair labor practice against the Stewart team with the IELRB in March, 2005. My complaint was that this team refused to take this class action grievance to the next step for political reasons. I provided the history of the grievance and evidence of their political animus (e.g., disparaging letters to members’ homes; articles in the Union Teacher with complete falsehoods; statements Stewart and her team made in the House of Delegates’ meetings; and attacks in UPC literature passed out to delegates and sent to schools.)

My charge to the IELRB was not on the merits of the grievance. The IELRB does not have the power to determine merit. (That should have been for the next level of the grievance and/or arbitration, but Stewart ended those options for CTU members.) It is very difficult to meet the standard of proving political motives in an unfair labor practice charge, but I thought that the hostility and personal animus of their statements and actions were worth a try. The IELRB ruled that the law gives a union the right to make a determination on a grievance and dismissed the charge in May, 2005. I appealed that decision in June and have heard nothing yet on that appeal.

Despite a year of personal attacks, attempts at character assassination, and a bizarre false arrest at the June 2005 House of Delegates meeting, CTU high school delegates elected me to a vacant High School seat on the CTU Executive Board. At my first House meeting as a High School Functional Vice President in September, I made a motion to re-file the class action grievance on 5+5. After several attempts to rule my motion out of order or to refer it to some UPC-dominated committee where it would die, I insisted that it was a legitimate motion and the House of Delegates should decide whether it wanted to consider the motion then instead. The House overruled a move to send it to a committee and voted to hear and discuss the motion that night.

No delegate spoke in opposition to re-filing this motion. Yet when the delegates voted in a voice vote, Stewart claimed she could not tell if the motion passed. She told the delegates to stand and vote. Everyone thought that the motion passed, based on the number of Delegates who stood and voted yes. (All of the UPC Delegates stood to vote “NO’, however — including all of the UPC Candidates for Pension Trustee). Stewart then announced that the 5+5 motion lost. The House went into an uproar. (Later those counting in the balcony testified that the vote had been flipped, that the “yes” votes were indeed in the majority.) Calls for a roll call vote were completely ignored, as UPC delegates moved to adjourn the meeting. Delegates who had seen what happened first hand were shocked.

Subsequent material from the Stewart/UPC team (e.g., the Chicago Union Teacher and the resurrected one-page “Union News”) has tried to intentionally mislead members into thinking the IELRB had dismissed the 5+5 grievance. The IELRB ruled only that we didn’t prove that they refused to continue the grievance for political reasons, not whether the grievance had merit. CTU members will have to decide for themselves whether or not, based on what Duncan and Company agreed to in order to get a contract and avoid a strike, the grievance had merit. Then they have to decide whether the group the AFT appointed to office (with 1000 unaccounted-for ballots in a race called by 550 votes) is the group they trust to achieve a 5+5 — or anything else — for them. �