I was holding this piece off for my Not Eudora column after the election. However, it seems timely:
”Are those Jobs Really Gone?”
When I served on the School Board I had a good object lesson about the perils of shooting your mouth off without knowing the caliber of the ammunition.
Alan Netland, the President of the public employee union, AFSCME, published a column in the Duluth News Tribune alleging that former Duluth School Superintendent Mark Myles had been rewarded for ushering in the new Edison Schools to Duluth by getting a cushy job with the New York company. (In a like vein many folks still believe Keith Dixon got a job with Johnson Controls as a payoff. He didn’t. Dixon “retired” to become a suburban Superintendent in the Twin Cities)
Netland’s gripe was that the new Edison schools would not end up hiring union employees because the Teachers Union had refused to play ball with Edison’s demands. Union jobs would have been important to Alan as he was soon to become the President of the joint body representing all AFL-CIO workers in Duluth. There was just one small problem with Alans column. Its central premise was wrong.
Mark Myles had decided on his own to step down as Superintendent when he realized the School Board was reluctant to back him as far as he wished after he had tangled with the Teachers Union. The DFT was a hairs breadth away from going on strike and some of the Board members, I being one of them, were reluctant to give the Superintendent a big raise with strike fever in the air. It would have been salt on the Edison wound.
There was much speculation about where the ambitious retiring superintendent would land and it did not seem too farfetched to his teacher critics that he would be scooped up by Edison. I heard this many times including from the Teachers Union President Frank Wanner who I was trying to get along with despite his failed attempt to defeat me in my 1999 reelection. I’m a big boy and can dust myself off after a fight. Sure, Frank had pointed his finger at me just before the election and snarled: “you’ll be a target in the next election, Welty.” He couldn’t pull it off but I’m not one to gloat.
Once I heard the rumor from Frank I just figured it was Wanner who put the tobacco in union brother Netlands pipe to smoke. Whoever tipped Netland off should also have warned him that our ex Superintendent was a litigious man. Myles had once taken the School District to Court and won a handsome settlement. Now with a libel in hand Myles set his sights on Alan Netland and the rich unions that Alan represented.
AFSCME didn’t lose the suit. They settled out of court with Myles and gave him a secret payment that Mark never divulged but didn’t mind having folks imagine to be generous. Like me Frank doesn’t always know what he’s talking about. Too bad for AFSCME that Alan Netland hadn’t caught on yet.
So, its my turn to pass on a rumor (not a fact) that may or may not be true. I recently heard from someone who claimed to have overheard a complaint made to Netland that the 600 temporary Red Plan construction jobs had cost 188 permanent DFT (teachers union) jobs. Netland had been big Red Plan booster. How did Netland answer this question? According to the witness Al said, “Are they really gone?”
Netland’s implication was that no teaching positions had really been lost because surrounding schools that took in our refugee students would have hired more teachers. I’m sure that would have been a great consolation to the DFT. A lot of our surrounding districts have no unions.
But then union man Netland may not have been all that loyal to the teacher’s union himself. The witness also told me that Alan sent his own children to the private Marshall School. Unless I am much mistaken there is no teacher’s union at Marshall either.
So much for union solidarity.
