With honorable intentions, Dem Club President Tom Camarella brought to the microphone David El Fattal, an assistant superintendent for the School District, and David Mielke, president of the Teachers Union.
How Do You Spell Love?
As an aside, when hardcore Democrats convene, love is not always in bloom.
For example, the evening’s other guest speaker, Assemblyman Jerome Horton of Inglewood, carefully and repeatedly called What’s-His-Name in the White House “the worst President in history.” Mr. Horton said he was proud to pin the tail on the donkey without mentioning his target by name.
That was the environment that Mr. El Fattal walked into.
Any night of the week, the Mielke-El Fattal duel would qualify as the best show in town.
Rarely are the curtains drawn back on labor talks, exposing to the public the seamy underside of contract negotiations as protracted as these are.
The two sides are knotted in disagreement over the vexing subject of retiree health benefits for teachers to be hired after July 1.
Unaffordable, says the School District, citing the soaring cost of benefits and an inability for employers to keep pace.
Unacceptable, says the Union. It’s a deal-breaker because benefits are mandatory.
Mr. Mielke argued strenuously that should this condition stand, “Culver City will be put at a huge disadvantage.” The District, he said, no longer would be able to attract quality educators.
To underline his assertion, Mr. Mielke attached a personal exclamation point: “If I were told this District did not offer benefits, I would not work here.”
As thefrontpageonline.com reported earlier this week, the Teachers Union has turned down the District’s latest offer, a five percent raise covering last school year and this school year.
On Monday, April 17, Mr. El Fattal, Mr. Mielke and their teams will sit down with a mediator to seek settlement.
That may portend days or weeks of meetings, and it may not. “I hope we can reach agreement on April 17,” Mr. El Fattal said yesterday morning.
In his five-minute presentation, the assistant superintendent hammered at the most familiar theme in contemporary labor contract talks — the maintenance of benefits for current employees but elimination of them for future hires.
Calmly, Mr. El Fattal attempted to reason out his theory with a Democratic audience that was plainly — perhaps unanimously — at odds with him.
Sounding a call heard across the land, “times have changed,” he iterated and reiterated. Change is a neutral value, he suggested, not necessarily a disaster or a triumph. Change is neither more nor less than a difference from what used to be.
The Way Things Were
Mr. El Fattal cited numerous examples of concepts once thought to be irreplaceable that have been updated or altogether routed. The black and white televisions of his youth have been replaced by color sets. The manual changing of television stations has been supplanted by remotes.
More on point for the subject of the evening, he discussed scenarios involving his father, his wife and his daughter. At seventy-two years old, his father, a former RTD driver, has been comfortably retired for twenty years, since the youthful age of fifty-two. He receives full benefits. Mr. El Fattal’s wife retired two years ago after thirty years of service with a large corporation — full benefits.
By chilling contrast, his daughter, who turns twenty-two years old in two weeks, works for a large health care organization in San Diego. True to the financial reality of these times, he said, her employer does not offer health benefits.
Unsurprisingly, the two antagonists held conflicting views when inspecting two sides of one coin.
Among the many societal changes of the last generation, said Mr. El Fattal, is teacher salaries.
Contrary to Teachers Union claims, he said that a number of School District employees are generously rewarded. Did you know, he asked the audience, that two teachers made more than $100,000 last year — $100, 743 and $100, 343?
Eight make between $91,000 and $99,000, he said. The thirty best-paid teachers in the Distract made more than $80,000 apiece.
No one in the crowd seemed surprised or impressed.
Their guy, Mr. Mielke, countered with a laundry list of salary rankings purporting to show that Culver City’s salary schedule rated down around the ankles.
Although voices never elevated, faces did not redden, and veins, discreetly, remained out of sight, feelings did flare. The two warriors played an old Jewish game, pitch-and-kvetch, with teacher salaries.
Mr. Mielke made no attempt to disguise his mission. “We are here to ask for your help,” was his opening volley.
He might not have needed to add one more breath to gain a later-in-the-evening display of outward loyalty from the newest papa in the room, Darryl Cherness, immediate past president of the Dems.
Mr. Mielke led off with his best number, declaring that the salary level of teachers in Culver City rated forty-sixth on a list of forty-seven Los Angeles area school districts.
He said that the maximum top base pay of $74,760 for Culver City teachers and the rookie salary of $38,000 come in well below an acceptable level.
No one on the premises dreamed that this crowd needed to be prompted when it came to pledging their fealty. Mr. Mielke, however, was not taking chances. Periodically, in the tradition of successful union leaders, he dropped in tickle lines — such as “there has been an outpouring of support for teachers” — to remind his audience that they weren’t alone in this campaign. They would be joining an ever-widening movement.
Addressing the most pro-union audience this side of the Teamsters, Mr. Mielke also inserted the following rallying cry, with an accent on unity:
“Part of belonging to a union means all pulling together.”
Nothing is unusual about the fact that the roughly three hundred and sixty teachers in the School District have been working without a contract since the start of the last school year. By the count of some teachers, they have not had a pay raise in five years.
After Mr. El Fattal and Mr. Mielke retired their verbal swords, they took separate paths. The teacher returned to his seat and the administrator immediately departed the room.
For Mr. El Fattal, that probably was a proper denouement given what happened as soon as the door was closed behind him.
Enthusiastically, Mr. Cherness, seated in a back row, rose to his feet and tendered a motion of support for the teachers’ side. It passed without a trace of resistance. It only would have failed if Saddam had escaped and showed up in Culver City.
Postscript
Term-limited out after three two-year terms in the State Assembly, the dapper Mr. Horton was a spirited opening act.
Facing a Republican threat that he labeled “a real danger” to the Democrats’ domination in Sacramento, he delivered an urgent admonition to his fellow party members.
“Make sure you stay united, focused and organized,” Mr. Horton said.
Among the warning signs he has espied, he said that voter registration, disturbingly, is up in two categories, Republicans and Decline to State. Democratic registration, by contrast, was flat.
Mr. Horton, with a Christian Father of the Year award on his resume, is running for a seat on the state Board of Equalization.