Union Busting: Providence Going the Way of Wisconsin?
Friday, February 25, 2011
Mayor Angel Taveras is being accused of waging a Wisconsin-style war on workers after firing the nearly two thousand teachers in the city.
Teachers, city councilmen, union officials, and one state senator took issue with terminating the teachers. They said if the city was just worried about the $40 million deficit it is facing in the school budget it simply could have laid off the teachers. Instead, terminating all of them signaled a hidden, anti-union agenda, teachers and union leaders said. (Read more about the school board meeting last night where the terminations were ratified.)
Everyone from a progressive state rep to an education reformer and Tea Party leader warned that the move could cause serious damage to the relationship between the union and the city—and actually set back education reform efforts.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST“It was definitely surprising to me,” said Brian Hull, owner of Rhode Island’s Future, a progressive blog, and the state coordinator of the Rhode Island Progressing Democrats. “I trust Angel Taveras to make a decision but I don’t necessarily know what’s going through his mind right now.”
State Rep Art Handy, D-Cranston, who says he’s been an advocate for Providence schools, said he “worries about the damage” the firings will do to the district and its ability to retain the best teachers.
Steve Smith, the Providence Teachers Union president, and Frank Flynn, president of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, both questioned how Taveras, who is viewed as a progressive Democrat, could possibly be OK with firing all the teachers in the district.
Union president: Taveras like Wisconsin governor
Smith compared the situation to the battle over union rights in Wisconsin. “Maybe he’s chatting with the governor of Wisconsin and he thinks that’s the way to go,” Smith told GoLocalProv. “At least the governor of Wisconsin is being up front. He wants to eliminate collective bargaining rights. He’s not firing anybody. He’s threatening to lay people off, not fire them. There’s a difference.”
Smith said the decision threatened the collective bargaining rights of teachers, who normally would have recall rights if they had been laid off, rather than fired. He said the union will request termination hearings for each of the 1,926 educators who have been let go—and is weighing its legal options as well.
‘A much broader agenda’
Flynn said the terminations were about much more than the budget. “This is a much broader agenda and it’s unfortunate they’re not being up front with the public in revealing exactly what their true motives are,” he said. “It’s a slap in the face of all of the educators who work hard in Providence every day under very difficult conditions … It’s really immoral and unethical.”
At the school board meeting last night, Councilman Sam Zurier strongly denied that there are any ulterior motives to the terminations. He said the comparison to Wisconsin was wrong and that school and city officials were trying to do what they thought was best. “This is not about union-busting,” Zurier said. “It’s not appropriate to question people’s motives.”
The Mayor’s office yesterday declined to comment on the accusations and instead forwarded an e-mail that Taveras sent out to all the teachers.
In his message, Taveras said that the mass dismissal notices had to be sent out to meet a statutory March 1 deadline for letting teachers know about any possible changes to their employment status. Because the city does not know where it will have to make the cuts at this early stage in the budget process, Taveras said dismissing all the teachers gives the city more flexibility down the road.
Senator: There should not be ‘terminations’
But state Senator Frank Ciccone, D-Providence, said the March 1 deadline was never meant to allow a school district to actually fire all the teachers. “The fact that someone used the word ‘terminate,’—I think that’s the wrong term,” Ciccone told GoLocalProv. “But if, in fact, that’s what they wanted to do, that’s going to create a major problem.”
Ciccone, the business manager for a state affiliate of the Laborers International Union, warned that terminations could drive talented teachers to leave the district.
Education reformer: ‘An extremely poor move’
Lisa Blais, an education consultant and a board member of the Rhode Island Tea Party, criticized how the terminations were handled. “I think it was an extremely poor move in terms of any kind of respect for labor relations,” Blais told GoLocalProv.
She said the union has been working with the district to build a better relationship and reform schools. “The last kind of thing you want to do is pull the carpet out from the leader of the union who’s saying that’s his goal,” Blais said. “You just don’t do that.” She said the city should have at least reached out to Smith before announcing its decision instead of keeping him out of the loop.
“Unless you’re in an all-out war and you want to take each other out, you just don’t do that,” Blais said.
Smith (pictured above right) said the union has proved in the past that it supports education reform. He said the union approved new hiring practices and teacher evaluations and stuck its neck out when it backed the Race to the Top—when most teacher unions would not. And the union also turned traditional labor management concepts like seniority upside down, according to Smith.
“The Providence teachers’ union and I personally believed that we had entered a new era of labor relations where both sides put students first and where cooperation and collaboration, tough negotiations and discussions had replaced antagonism and distrust,” Smith said. “Boy was I wrong.”
Republican official: Taveras needs to act more like us
Taveras did get some defense from an unlikely quarter yesterday. “Even progressives like Angel Taveras are waking up to the damage they’ve done and they’re going to have to start acting more like Republicans if they want to fix the problem,” said Travis Rowley, chairman of the Young Republicans.
But he remained skeptical that the firings would lead to any serious budget cuts. “For a progressive to actually make the necessary cuts…. we’ll believe it when we see it,” Rowley added. “Right now it’s just a symbolic gesture.”
