NEA Members Voe to

[Rich Gibson <rgibson@pipeline.com>]

ps


my staff friends at the NEA Ra in Orlando say the delegates voted not to 
bring a motion to the floor that would have positioned NEA to oppose the 
oil war by a factor of three or four to one. No discussion. Among 
educators. 9,000 of them in Orlando.

 I guess it is not all that surprising that an ed tech conference here in 
lovely San Diego is drawing 16,000 to 17,000 paying people, and why NEA 
members will soon be swamped by distance learning projects that will make 
the workforce little more then clerks. NEA has no clue.

No discussion. The union that occupies the key point in the US, feeding 
children to the war that causes those youths to fight the enemies of their 
enemies to their death, will not discuss the war.

I should not be surprised. I know NEA better than most. But, appalled is 
too kind to describe this.

 And I am forced to pay them about 700 dollars a year, because they bribed 
Gray Davis and got an agency shop clause............where is Madame Defarge 
now that I need her?

When thousands of state of Mich workers were forced, by our immediate 
supervisors, to join what was in effect a company union, run by upper level 
management (line workers were banned from meetings, etc and supervisors 
told workers we either signed the company union card or they would fire 
us), some of us took action.

Two of us went to the Michigan State Employees Association convention in 
Lansing, the state capital, one year. We took the microphone before the 
convention started and announced that the assembled bosses would be allowed 
to have their meeting that year, but the next year we were going to bring 
five hundred angry workers, beat the hell out of them, and throw them out 
of the room and never let them come back.

The next year, we took about 200 angry workers to their convention, stormed 
the podium at the beginning of the meeting, threw the bosses off the 
platform, announced that any boss in the room after ten minutes would be 
thrown out, gave them time to leave, and we conducted the first meeting of 
our new union.

The bosses sued us. About a year later, the state ruled that the law now 
said that a company union was illegal, and that although we had behaved 
illegally, it would not be possible to remove us from the union, nor from 
the union offices we took.

The law follows political reality.

The plan may be a little ambitious for nea, but the spirit is not. Storming 
the podium would have at least started a discussion

best r