The School District wants teachers and other Philadelphia Federation of Teachers members to take pay cuts as high as 13 percent, work a day that is an hour longer, and then get no raises until 2017, according to documents that union officials have circulated to members and were obtained by the Notebook.
The documents are presented as summaries of the initial proposal the District has put on the table in contract negotiations, which began last week. The teachers’ contract expires this summer.
The summaries say that the District also wants union members to start contributing to their benefit costs. Both the pay cuts and the employee contributions for benefits would range from 5 percent for lower-paid employees to 13 percent for employees earning more than $55,000. In addition to the wage and benefit cuts, the District wants to eliminate the union-run Health & Welfare Fund that provides dental, prescription, and optical coverage, the documents say.
Also, schools will no longer have to have librarians or counselors, teachers lounges will be a thing of the past, there will be no more salary step increases, and future salary increases will be "performance-based" once they kick in 2017.
This is the kind of contract Randi Weingarten and Michael Mulgrew love.
Randi loves this kind of contract because it allows her to jet in and get some of the most odious provisions off the table, leaving the performance-based pay measures, the longer school day, and the end to salary steps.
Those provisions are what Randi likes to call "solution-based unionism concessions."
As for Michael Mulgrew and the UFT leadership, they love this kind of contract too because it means whatever crap they get in NYC, they can point to a place like Philadelphia and say, "Sure what we negotiated sucks, but compared to Philadelphia it scrapes the skies..."
It's bad enough that the oligarchs are in the process of dismantling public education systems in urban areas all over the country.
What's worse is that the union leadership are not trying to stop them and in the case of Randi Weingarten, are actively collaborating with them.
Why haven't the rank and file run Randi Weingarten out of the AFT? She is an OBVIOUS fraud, a tool for the privatizers, just as President Obama is actually a tool for the far right.
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