Board members, Dr. Gándara, colleagues and community members. My name is Roberto Rodriguez and today I’m here as Chair of the SEA Bargaining Team. Our team members include: Chuck Patterson (ORH); Jason Leichter (CVA); Colleen Cooke-Salas (MVM) Martin Casas (ELH) and Katina Rondeau (AVA). I'm here this evening to present our proposal to the Board of Trustees and the community.
You may not know that our by-laws and our responsibility of fair representation requires us to develop our proposal based on input from our unit members. In order to do this we held open hearings, surveyed our members and visited sites in order to get a sense of our members’ priorities. The team took this information and developed the document that has been available both on Board docs and on the SEA Website.
While I won’t read the proposal I will say that It should be of no surprise, after years of stagnant salaries and an increase in out-of-pocket medical costs that salary and medical benefits are our members’ top 2 priorities. What was surprising was that their third priority, class size, was statistically equal in ranking to wages. Three years ago class size was a distant third priority. It’s clear our members are feeling the consequences of an already increased staffing ratio and an ever increasing work load. The rest of our members concerns can be read in our proposal.
We hope that the district will engage in good faith bargaining and that all negotiable items will be resolved at the table. However, it’s difficult to keep hope alive when we receive multiple reports that principals have been asked to create master schedules that don’t respect our MOU and when it took almost a month to receive the districts second interim budget report after it had been filed with the county. We received this document on the Friday before Spring Break. Good faith bargaining demands that current agreements be respected and documents be delivered on time. This has caused an unnecessary delay in our preparation to come to the table. Rest assured that I and my team will never come to the table unprepared. I suggest that as we proceed, that the bargaining process be respected and that we come to the table seeking a fair and equitable agreement.
In closing I will quote the opening paragraph of our proposal which expresses the spirit with which we come to the table:
“The Association recognizes the current state of the economy and the budgetary constraints of all school districts and is willing to collaborate with the district in creating a fair and equitable collective bargaining agreement. Therefore, the Association will protect its core values of sustaining and creating an educational environment that facilitates student learning, instruction, safety, academic integrity, and that provides association unit members a fair and equitable standard of living.”
I urge this board to ensure that all of our current agreements be respected so that we can proceed with contract negotiations in this spirit of collaboration. Finally, in light of the revelations in this afternoon's U-T website, I would suggest that 3 high school social science teachers, a middle school math teacher and 2 alternative Ed teachers hardly merit the expense of a PR firm and a law firm to deal with negotiations. Since our last negotiations we've come to mutually beneficial agreements without outside interventions......Thank you.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
This must not stand
Let's get this straight:
Wall Street financial corporations lent billions to people who they knew couldn't afford to pay back mortgages. Then they packaged these mortgages as mortgage backed securities to investors who thought they were buying Triple A investments bonds; the most secure investment out there.
Then, since they knew those "securities" were all but secure, they bought insurance on these bonds so they could make money on the bad investments they sold to begin with. Honest investors were stuck with bad investments. Once the hundreds of millions of Adjustable Rate Mortgages adjusted, the house of cards began to tumble, and only the initiators of these "derivative investments" were in any place to benefit.
In other words, they made money by charging exorbitant fees on borrowers of Adjustable mortgages; they made money by selling the mortgage backed securities and at the same time shifting the losses to someone else. Then they bought insurance on those bad securities which allowed them to make money once they defaulted.
Once the house of cards fell, the economy collapses into the worst crisis in generations and in the end, these same financial institutions make billions in profits after they received handouts from the federal government because they are "too big to fail." The executives of these corporations end up getting millions in "bonuses" and the perpetrators of the mortgage back securities and derivatives make millions. And NO ONE GOES TO JAIL?
In the aftermath, states are left with huge deficits, the impact on our nation's basic services such as education, is devastating. The only solution that these pseudo-conservative, far right messianic political pawns of Wall Street can come up with, is to continue the devastation of working class americans.
The two institutions that have created some measure of social mobility in this country have been education and labor unions. The increases in state college tuition have put the dream of a college education out of reach for a large portion of our youth. The vilifying of public school teachers and public education as a whole is an ominous shadow looming over our society. The attacks on collective bargaining rights for union members is an assault on working americans. Unions have been at the vanguard of protecting middle class values and a middle class standard of living.
If the events of Wisconsin are allowed to stand, the perfect crime will have been perpetrated. Working class Americans will first have been robbed of their homes, the tax money that they pay will have been used to bail out the companies that robbed them and then the deficits created by the bailouts have been blamed on them. And just in case this wasn’t bad enough, conservatives are attempting to give a death blow by taking away the right to negotiate a decent wage and health benefits. Talk about blaming and punishing the victims.
This must not stand,
Roberto
Wall Street financial corporations lent billions to people who they knew couldn't afford to pay back mortgages. Then they packaged these mortgages as mortgage backed securities to investors who thought they were buying Triple A investments bonds; the most secure investment out there.
Then, since they knew those "securities" were all but secure, they bought insurance on these bonds so they could make money on the bad investments they sold to begin with. Honest investors were stuck with bad investments. Once the hundreds of millions of Adjustable Rate Mortgages adjusted, the house of cards began to tumble, and only the initiators of these "derivative investments" were in any place to benefit.
In other words, they made money by charging exorbitant fees on borrowers of Adjustable mortgages; they made money by selling the mortgage backed securities and at the same time shifting the losses to someone else. Then they bought insurance on those bad securities which allowed them to make money once they defaulted.
Once the house of cards fell, the economy collapses into the worst crisis in generations and in the end, these same financial institutions make billions in profits after they received handouts from the federal government because they are "too big to fail." The executives of these corporations end up getting millions in "bonuses" and the perpetrators of the mortgage back securities and derivatives make millions. And NO ONE GOES TO JAIL?
In the aftermath, states are left with huge deficits, the impact on our nation's basic services such as education, is devastating. The only solution that these pseudo-conservative, far right messianic political pawns of Wall Street can come up with, is to continue the devastation of working class americans.
The two institutions that have created some measure of social mobility in this country have been education and labor unions. The increases in state college tuition have put the dream of a college education out of reach for a large portion of our youth. The vilifying of public school teachers and public education as a whole is an ominous shadow looming over our society. The attacks on collective bargaining rights for union members is an assault on working americans. Unions have been at the vanguard of protecting middle class values and a middle class standard of living.
If the events of Wisconsin are allowed to stand, the perfect crime will have been perpetrated. Working class Americans will first have been robbed of their homes, the tax money that they pay will have been used to bail out the companies that robbed them and then the deficits created by the bailouts have been blamed on them. And just in case this wasn’t bad enough, conservatives are attempting to give a death blow by taking away the right to negotiate a decent wage and health benefits. Talk about blaming and punishing the victims.
This must not stand,
Roberto
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