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Puerto Rico
Day 1 - Teachers meet with SEIU members
Submitted by Mark Brenner on Fri, 06/06/2008 - 11:35pm.
Tonight the Puerto Rican teachers held a "charla" or chat with SEIU members interested in learning more about their struggle, and the conflict between SEIU and their union the FMPR. I couldn't be there but Labor Notes Policy Committee member Steve Early was on the scene. From Steve's reports, the FMPR event sounded about as far from the highly scripted, stage-managed SEIU convention as you could get.
In contrast to the flashing lights, punchy music and telepromters of Andy Stern's SEIU, the FMPR president Rafael Feliciano Hernandez was busy setting up the folding chairs for Monday night's meeting.
( categories: Puerto Rico | SEIU )
Puerto Rican Teachers Challenge the Purple Lockdown
Submitted by Mark Brenner on Sat, 05/31/2008 - 11:53pm.
The Puerto Rican convention center hosting the Service Employees International Union’s big confab is kind of an eerie cross between Superman’s Fortress of Solitude and a prison in some isolated part of rural California.
The entire complex was fenced in or gated off, with police and security guards posted at every entrance. Once you’re inside it’s a little more suave than supermax. There is parking for probably 2,000 cars, but this morning the whole place was empty except for about a dozen buses bringing delegates in from their hotels.
( categories: Puerto Rico | SEIU )
Teachers Strike Stops Classes in Puerto Rico
— José A. Laguarta Ramírez
After 27 months of negotiations, 25,000 teachers marched to the governor’s mansion February 21 chanting, “contract now or we strike!” Photo: Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico
The strike followed 27 months of frustrating negotiations with the Puerto Rican Department of Education. The department failed to offer a collective bargaining counterproposal, skipped 160 of 300 meetings, and issued a series of agency memos unilaterally changing the terms and conditions of employment.
The strike was the first held in defiance of the Puerto Rico Public Sector Labor Relations Act of 1998, also known as “Law 45,” which prohibits public-sector workers from striking. It led to the union’s decertification as the exclusive representative of more than 40,000 teachers and other school employees.
FMPR President Rafael Feliciano told the press that the strike contributed to Governor Aníbal Acevedo’s promise to increase the teachers’ starting salary to $3,000 a month over an eight-year period. Puerto Rican teachers currently earn an annual starting salary of $19,200.
The union, however, remains decertified, while the island’s media reported that the U.S.-based Service Employees union (SEIU) offered support to the governor in preparation for its bid to replace the FMPR as the teachers’ representative. Dennis Rivera, an SEIU vice president, denied the charge.
ROAD TO THE STRIKE
The FMPR struck following a unanimous vote by its general assembly in November, ratifying a vote by union delegates to authorize a strike. During the next two months, the union leadership continued to call on the Department of Education to negotiate in good faith. But department negotiators refused to budge on two key issues: teacher representation on school boards and class sizes. Instead, the employer filed a complaint with regulators to decertify the union for declaring merely its intention to strike. The regulators readily complied.
In response, 25,000 teachers and supporters marched February 17 to the governor’s mansion chanting, “contract now, or we strike!”
When it became clear that the department intended to keep stalling at the negotiating table, Feliciano announced the union’s decision to strike. In the early hours of February 21, teachers and their supporters began to fill picket lines.
FOUNDATION OF SUPPORT
The teachers found they weren’t alone. As strike winds started to blow over a year ago, teachers began to organize local strike committees, composed of teachers, parents, and community members in schools around the island.
A coalition composed of roughly 70 labor, student, and community organizations was formed shortly before the strike. When the teachers walked out, the student councils at three campuses of the University of Puerto Rico each announced 24-hour student stoppages.
At one school located inside a large and well-known public housing project in San Juan, 150 parents organized their own press conference and demonstration in support. At another, students held an impromptu performance lampooning the education secretary and highlighting the terrible conditions in their school. Teachers report they are forced to make do without adequate books, supplies, or toilet paper in bathrooms.
In New York City, a group of activists, including city teachers, organized a support committee and held two demonstrations in front of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Agency offices in Manhattan.
On the first day of the strike, the government declared it to be a failure, claiming more than three-quarters of all teachers had shown up to work.
Union supporters paint a much different picture. Pointing to student attendance estimated by the department itself as low as 21 percent, they claim that mass absences led to the cancellation of classes for the duration of the strike.
The union further said picket lines had been set up at 850 of the 1,500 schools with active participation from one-fifth of the teachers. Total teacher absenteeism was much higher, fluctuating between one-half and two-thirds during the course of the strike.
NOT LICKED YET
After shutting down much of the island’s school system for two weeks, more than 10,000 teachers voted in a union assembly to “suspend” the strike on condition that strikers not face discipline, a demand to which the department consented. The government also agreed to maintain the $250 salary raise it had unilaterally declared in the weeks leading up to the strike, to lobby the legislature for funds to sustain further raises, and not to alter the points to which it had previously agreed at the negotiating table.
Union leaders have declared that they will regroup for the next round of struggle. Because the FMPR has been decertified as the teachers’ representative, the union is reorganizing as what is known in Puerto Rico as a “bona fide association,” non-majority unions without exclusive bargaining rights. Association members can voluntarily request that the employer check off their dues. Thousands of teachers have already signed up to have their dues checked off in favor of the FMPR.
The next step may be a union representation election in which the FMPR would face off against SEIU.
Although Law 45 forbids the leadership of a decertified union from running for a union post—in any labor organization within the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico—FMPR supporters believe that the strike has thrown up a new crop of leaders ready to keep the fight alive.
SEIU to Raid Union Representing 40,000 Teachers in Puerto Rico
— César Rosado Marzán
Dennis Rivera, chair of the national SEIU Healthcare union, announced December 28 that an organization of teachers and school principals in Puerto Rico would affiliate with SEIU and seek to challenge the incumbent Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (FMPR).
In a double blow, Puerto Rico’s Labor Relations Commission decertified FMPR on January 9 after the union’s delegate body voted unanimously to strike. Public sector strikes are illegal on the island.
Puerto Rico’s secretary of education declared that since FMPR was decertified, contract negotiations with the union, which had been ongoing for two years, would cease and elections would be called sometime in the next year. The SEIU affiliate Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (AMPR) will be allowed to contest those elections.
FMPR v. AMPR
FMPR is the exclusive bargaining representative of all 40,000 public school teachers in Puerto Rico. FMPR was organized in the 1960s as a minority union (known in Puerto Rico as a “bonafide association”) of teachers that were seeking a more militant voice in the workplace. The union affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) shortly after it was founded.
Independent unions have denounced SEIU’s raiding as an attack on militant unions and an act of colonialism.
AMPR is Puerto Rico’s oldest educators’ professional association. In its early years, AMPR fought against compulsory English-only education, which was mandated by the U.S.-appointed governors who administered the island from the early 1900s until the 1940s.
In the 1960s, militant teachers declared that AMPR had become a cog of the Popular Democratic Party machine, the political party that created Puerto Rico’s so-called “commonwealth” relationship with the U.S.
They organized FMPR as an independent voice of schoolteachers, and since the 1960s, the unions have squared off as rivals.
AMPR and FMPR in 1999 faced off in the first union election for exclusive representation, a right granted to Puerto Rico’s public sector employees the previous year. FMPR won a landslide victory.
But FMPR suffered a serious setback in 1999 when its health insurance plan went bankrupt, while an increasing share of the teachers’ union dues were going to its international parent, AFT. This crisis led to the election of the dissident caucus, CODEMI (Commitment, Democracy and Militancy) in 2003, which led an effective disaffiliation campaign from AFT and reorganized the newly independent union, in the words of CODEMI, into an “instrument of struggle.”
A POWERFUL LOBBY
Amidst the two-year contract battle, AMPR and SEIU announced their intention to affiliate and seek to represent the island’s public school teachers. According to the AMPR’s leader, Aida Díaz, the AMPR’s affiliation with SEIU is “a great step” because it would help the union obtain “full social security and resources for professional development.” Díaz added that because one-third of all education dollars in Puerto Rico come from the U.S. government, and SEIU is a “powerful lobbying force” in Washington, D.C., the union can better secure funds for its members.
Rivera told the Associated Press that “the $1,600 that teachers currently receive [per month] in the island is tragic and we are committed to struggle to improve the economic and labor conditions of teachers and, generally, improve the education of the country.” Rivera further stated that he could not envision FMPR affiliating with SEIU because FMPR had disaffiliated from AFT.
During the contract fight, the SEIU leadership in Puerto Rico, which leads one union local of cafeteria workers and another of nurses and residents, has not backed FMPR in its struggle.
The FMPR and other independent unions have denounced SEIU’s raiding expedition as an attack on militant unions and an act of colonialism. The electrical workers’ union president, Ricardo Santos—who is also involved in a battle to make the government bargain with his union—publicly demanded that Rivera stay in New York and to leave Puerto Rican unions alone.
