Victory: San Diego Charter School Educators Vote Out Teacher Union Bosses
The following article is from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation’s bi-monthly Foundation Action Newsletter, September/October 2023 edition. To view other editions of Foundation Action or to sign up for a free subscription, click here.
SDEA officials stonewalled vote at charter school for years with “blocking charges” and pressure from elected officials
Kristie Chiscano kick-started the first effort at Gompers to remove the SDEA union. She witnessed firsthand that union control was ruining the independent nature of the charter school.
SAN DIEGO, CA – When San Diego Education Association (SDEA) union officials rose to power in 2019 at Gompers Preparatory Academy (GPA), educators and parents were rightfully concerned about what impact it would have on students’ progress and well-being.
Gompers had made an impressive transition to being a union-free charter school in 2005 after years of being plagued by unresponsive union bureaucracies, violence, high teacher turnover, and poor academic achievement. Teachers who feared that union monopoly control would allow such problems to creep back into Gompers quickly began an effort to vote out the union.
“I chose to work at a school that didn’t have a union, and now they’ve come in and they’re running everything about my contract and my work,” Kristie Chiscano, then a Gompers chemistry teacher and proponent of the decertification effort, said at the time.
While union stall tactics derailed Gompers educators’ 2019 effort to oust the union, Gompers educators didn’t give up. A majority of Gompers teachers backed another petition asking the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) for a vote to remove the union in 2023. Now, after years of legal maneuvers from union officials, Gompers educators have successfully ousted the SDEA with free legal aid from the National Right to Work Foundation.
SDEA Officials Used Spurious Charges to Block Earlier Teacher Effort
“There is definitely a lot more joy that’s going to be in classrooms now, instead of a burden with the union,” Cynthia Ornelas, a sixth grade Gompers teacher, told KPBS. “The union was making decisions for us, oh my goodness! We never knew what they were deciding because they didn’t communicate with teachers.”
Gompers teachers’ first effort to eliminate the SDEA union stemmed from an October 2019 petition that had the backing of a significant number of teachers, more than required by state law. However, SDEA union bosses averted the election by filing so-called “blocking charges” containing allegations of employer misconduct.
Union officials often manipulate “blocking charges” at the PERB and other state and federal labor relations agencies to stifle worker attempts to eliminate unpopular union “representation.”
As Foundation attorneys defended Gompers educators’ first petition, they also challenged a regulation requiring PERB agents and attorneys to accept union bosses’ “blocking charge” allegations as true. This regulation almost guarantees union defeat of any worker attempt to vote a union out.
Despite the PERB never holding a hearing into whether SDEA union bosses’ claims had any merit or whether they were related to the workers’ dissatisfaction with the union, PERB officials denied a decertification election to Gompers educators in October 2020.
Aside from legal maneuvers, union officials used intimidation and pressure to avoid being voted out. Chiscano and another Gompers educator filed charges maintaining that SDEA agents targeted them on social media for opposing the union hierarchy. California law makes it illegal for union officials to intimidate or retaliate against employees who exercise their right to refrain from union membership. Union-label California legislator Lorena Gonzalez, then an assemblywoman and now a top California AFL-CIO official, even wrote a screed to Gompers management that attacked the National Right to Work Foundation for simply providing legal aid to Gompers educators.
Teachers’ Long Struggle Exposes Massive Power of CA Public Sector Unions
Gompers educators submitted the March 2023 petition at the earliest time permitted by California labor regulations, which immunize union officials from employee-led decertification efforts for all but a tiny window while union contracts are active. Now, nearly four years after their original effort began, Gompers educators are finally free from union control.
“Gompers educators witnessed that SDEA union officials were not acting in the best interests of the students or the school community at large, and they fought courageously to bring back the independent environment that made Gompers a success,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “However, Gompers teachers shouldn’t have had to fight as long or as hard as they did simply to exercise their rights. No special interest group in California, or in America, should wield this kind of power over teachers and the public education system.
San Diego Charter School Teachers Demand Election to Oust Union Bosses
The following article is from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation’s bi-monthly Foundation Action Newsletter, March/April 2020 edition. To view other editions or to sign up for a free subscription, click here.
Union bosses attempt to block educators from voting to escape controversial union
Dr. Kristie Chiscano, chemistry teacher at GPA, spearheaded the effort for a vote to remove SDEA union bosses from the school. Despite having the signatures of more than enough teachers, union bosses are trying to block the vote.
SAN DIEGO, CA – Teachers at San Diego’s Gompers Preparatory Academy (GPA) have collected enough signatures to trigger a vote to remove the San Diego Education Association (SDEA) union from monopoly bargaining power at the school.
Dr. Kristie Chiscano, a chemistry teacher at the charter school, submitted the decertification petition at the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) with free legal aid from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. However, rather than allow the teachers to vote in a secret ballot election whether to remove the union, SDEA bosses have filed “blocking charges” at the PERB in an attempt to block the election.
Teachers and Parents Oppose Union Power Grab at School
Controversy has surrounded the SDEA’s presence at GPA, as the union installed itself in January 2019 after conducting a “Card Check” drive. In the abuse-prone “Card Check” process, union organizers bypass a secret-ballot election and instead rely on a variety of pressure tactics to get employees to sign union cards that are later counted as “votes” for unionization.
GPA transitioned from being a regular public school to a charter preparatory academy in 2005 as the result of a campaign by parents, teachers, and administrators who believed that school district and union bureaucracies were not serving the students’ interests. Specifically, many in the community felt the old regime was failing to combat gang violence and teacher attrition at the school.
Since the school’s unionization without a secret ballot vote in January 2019, no monopoly bargaining contract has been approved. All the while, GPA parents and educators have accused SDEA agents of sowing division at the school, including by supporting anti-charter school legislation, making unnecessary and disparaging comments to school leadership during bargaining sessions, and plotting to prevent the California NAACP from giving the school’s director, Vincent Riveroll, an award for helping minority students succeed.
“It all changed once the union started,” GPA parent Theressah Rodriguez told the San Diego Union-Tribune about the union in January. “Now, whenever you come in, you feel the hostility.”
Foundation Aids Educators in Filing Popular Petition to Remove Union
Dr. Chiscano, who teaches chemistry to 10th and 11th grade students, began circulating the decertification petition last October. She soon obtained the signatures of well over the number of her fellow educators necessary to trigger a PERB-supervised secret-ballot vote to remove the union. The petition was filed with PERB immediately following the one-year anniversary of the union’s installation, the soonest she could file the petition under California law.
However, last December, union officials preemptively filed a charge at PERB seeking “that the certification year be extended.” That would block the educators’ right to remove the union from their workplace for another year despite no evidence or even an allegation that any educator violated the law. Such “blocking charges” are a tactic union lawyers frequently use to block rank-and-file employees from holding secret-ballot elections that could result in the removal of union officials from power as the employees’ designated monopoly representative.
With an impending legal battle over the union’s attempt to block her decertification petition, Dr. Chiscano turned to the National Right to Work Foundation to challenge this attempt by union officials to stymie her and her coworkers’ right to hold a decertification vote to oust a union they believe lacks the support of a majority of the school’s educators.
“Rather than face a secretballot vote of the rank-and-file educators they claim to represent, SDEA union bosses are resorting to legal trickery to trap teachers in a union they oppose by blocking their right to hold a decertification election,” observed National Right to Work Foundation Vice President Patrick Semmens. “By using these coercive tactics to attempt to trap teachers in union ranks, SDEA union officials do wrong by GPA’s namesake, AFL-CIO union founder Samuel Gompers, who himself urged devotion to ‘the principles of voluntarism’ and reminded all American workers that ‘no lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.’”
