Written April 30 to Mundo Verde staff and subsequently submitted as Public Comment to the May 2 Board Meeting
Dear family,
During the last couple weeks I’ve talked to many staff members that did not have a lot of the information about what it means to unionize. Many of them have been driven to the position of supporting the desire to unionize because here at Mundo Verde we are family, and family stands together. As they learned about the information (or lack of) however, many of them also started rethinking their position. In our family we also seek information and understanding, and during the last few months we’ve been fed limited and, in some cases, wrong information from only one position of this extremely important decision. The celebration of May Day reminds us of the need to exercise our rights responsibly, those rights that were obtained at the cost of the lives and freedom of many. Unionizing this way and with AFT is not exercising those rights in a way that honors those sacrifices.
Many of us are the teachers we are today thanks to the structures that our school has had. Those structures will be gone if the way we interact with mid and upper leadership is determined and regimented through an AFT contract. This is why many of us who plan on being here for many years to come and work to make Mundo Verde the best it can be for our students and our community are so concerned about the possibility of unionizing with AFT. This is why I’m so concerned that many of the ones spearheading this effort to unionize have already expressed their plans to leave our school as early as next school year. We don’t get to spread misinformation or incomplete information to convince our colleagues, who trust that we are being honest with them, and call it an act of disruption. It is manipulation and deception. When we use manipulation and deception to ambush or confront one of our school leaders who has worked tirelessly this whole year to improve our school and give us more voice, the way some did on April 12th, we are engaging in bullying – it is not an act of disruption.
During the coming weeks we will be asked to make a decision. Our decision will be whether to work together as a real family in an educated and fully informed way, or to destroy a very important part of what Mundo Verde is and stands for. Whether to continue working to improve and grow, or to allow a stranger to walk into our home and impose their agenda onto us. The following paragraphs summarize the disturbing information related to how this process has been carried out and a proposal to form a strong staff-only council that could actually bring about the changes we seek while still remaining true to who we are. Let’s protect our school, let’s protect our home.
Rodrigo A. Salgado, 7-Year-Teacher at Mundo Verde
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Lack of goals: When I was undecided about my position, I asked what the specific goals of the union were. I was told this was something that would be determined later. The fact that we do not have clear goals and priorities tells me we have not done our homework. We have not researched where we will stand with salaries, planning time, time-off, lesson planning, etc. All of these are key points that would be determined through a union contract. Once again exercising our right to unionize in this way does not honor those who sacrificed so much to fight for labor rights in our current context.
The lack of goals and thought behind this move also makes me question the real reason why this is happening. It is my understanding that some people who are spearheading this effort have expressed that they do not believe charter schools should even exist, but that work here because Mundo Verde allows them to do their work from a social justice lens. Mundo Verde is a gem for many of us. It is a home to many of our staff and families. Let’s be clear about this: this position is not trying to improve our school, it is trying to move forward an external agenda from AFT that has nothing to do with how we serve our students or under which working conditions we do so.
Lack of general information: I learned about the intentions of forming a union going public very recently. Since that moment I’ve been asking some questions about general implications and I have several concerns. I asked what the average negotiation time was for an AFT contract, I asked what the average salary improvement has been in AFT’s experience, I asked if we had seen a sample contract that AFT had negotiated, I asked if we had talked to an independent labor lawyer or teachers who have gone through this process. The answers to all of these questions were “I don’t know” initially. I was encouraged to speak with the AFT representative, who also did not give many answers. One of the answers I got was about dues, which was dramatically different from the information that many teachers, including some of the ones spearheading this effort, we able to provide. This tells me our staff has been given deceptive information or has not been given specific information on purpose.
Lack of governance guidelines: Since we were not provided the general information or goals, I asked if we had a clear plan to how decisions would be made. Would it be through majority rule, consensus, a representative system, or any other specific governance system? Once again, this is something that would be supposedly determined at a later time. At Mundo Verde we have a very diverse community, not only demographically speaking but also in terms of working conditions. We have staff working in general education and staff part of the inclusion staff. We have kitchen staff and operations staff. We have day staff and extended day staff that share the same space. We have hourly and salaried employees. Everyone has different priorities and opinions. The idea that we don’t have clear guidelines about how minority opinions and positions would be protected in a supposedly democratic entity is incredibly disturbing. And if last Thursday was any indication about how those spearheading this effort will treat minority positions, in which we were not even allowed to speak or have our questions answered in a very dictatorial and rude way, my concern grows even more. Those of us who had a different opinion or were undecided were also thrown under the bus in a subsequent public communication through half-truths and outright lies about what took place on that day.
Cost and legal fees (for us and for Mundo Verde): The issue of dues is one that has been handled very suspiciously by AFT. Some of the people spearheading this effort told me that dues can be 0% if the salary increase achieved through collective bargaining does not outweigh the regular COLA increase. When I asked the AFT reps about this, and I had to press and ask them this in multiple ways, they told me that it is usually 1% of salaries. Then I come to find out that many teachers and staff at other schools pay a much higher percentage than this.
To this, we also have to add the legal fees that our school would have to incur during negotiation. We have a very small budget in comparison to the kind of money school districts handle. Those school districts can handle the legal fees. In fact, one of the strategies corporate unions such as AFT use to gain a stronger position is to file frivolous grievance after frivolous grievance that our school would have to spend multiple legal hours to solve. Let’s do some quick math on this: 50 grievances filed in a year would, at a 10-legal-hours-per-grievance at a $300 per-hour rate for a lawyer, cost $150,000 (all these calculations are conservative). This is money that would come out from our budget as it is not currently allocated, this is money that we will not get to spend in our staff, our students, our facilities, etc.
Decision to hire AFT as our representative: On top of the unknown cost of hiring them as our legal representative, I am also concerned about the decision to choose to work with AFT. In one of their press releases AFT has stated clearly that they do not support the existence of staff that is as diverse as the one we have at Mundo Verde.
"so that qualified American workers both can have first preference for positions and can be assured they will not be replaced with H-1B workers."
The AFT, she added, "supports stronger language requiring American industries to demonstrate shortages and give priorities to American workers."
Let’s be clear, if AFT had it their way, many of us would not be here today.
Proposal: There are things we need to work on as a school. This is our home and we have been working on improving it since Mundo Verde was founded. What I propose is the formation of a strong staff-only council that has the capacity to research and decide on specific issues that will make our school a better place. This structure would still allow our school to maintain the flexibility it needs to function and continue to innovate. Some may say that leadership would not have to listen to us. This is not true. It is in the best interest of our leadership and in the best interest of the school to listen to well-thought-out and researched unified positions. This structure would not cost the staff dues (which is still unclear how much they would be, but that fluctuate between 1% and 5% of salary in the country) and it would not make our school spend a significant portion of our budget in legal fees. Those are funds we could use to the implementation of the changes we can decide to seek as staff.