It’s good to see that Dan Montgomery, President of the Illinois Federation of Teachers is speaking tomorrow at 4:30 up at Niles North on the pension issue.
I hear he is also going to be speaking the same evening at the forum sponsored by Jobs With Justice out in the western ‘burbs. 6:30 to 8:30 at 374 Commons Drive (I55 and Route 53) in Bolingbrook.
Would that the leadership of the IEA be so visible.
The thing that gets me is that while the IEA suits do so little to mobilize their members, they mobilize their leaders to go after those of us who are out here fighting like hell.
They call us disloyal.
Which is, frankly, an odd choice of words.
At last summer’s NEA RA in DC, IEA President Klickna told me that “many people think you’re anti-union.”
Really? People? Which people?
First, I’m amazed that many people think about me at all. But how did she measure this? Was I the topic of one of the secret polls the leadership alleges they take whenever they want to justify some concession.
After Klickna banned Glen Brown’s petition from the IEA member website – a petition which called for a constitutional solution to the pension issue – I got a good number of emails from IEA leaders (some who made me swear not to mention who they were or what they said). They were unhappy that I compared Klickna’s action to McCarthyism.
The fact is that Glen’s petition was banned, not for what it said, but for who Glen is, what he thinks, and who he hangs out with.
And isn’t that McCarthyism?
With no help from the IEA, the petition is about to hit 5,000 signatures.
The week after the dust-up over the petition, many of us decided that we should organize a call-in to House Speaker Mike Madigan. He had just announced that he was refusing to meet with the coalition of state public employee unions at a pension summit in Burr Ridge.
The campaign was so successful that Madigan’s Springfield office turned off their fax and their phone.
A mass call-in is support of the We Are One coalition. Pretty damn good for people, IEA members all of us, who Klickna claims are anti-union.
Perhaps Klickna is following the example of Louis XIV who declared, “I am the state.”
“I am the union.”
Fred Klonsky 
Wow! What a coincidence!
I am also the union, and I listen to a lot of others who are also the union. Listen is the keyword.
Mention the word LISTEN to Klickna et all. They may not like you saying that. After all, you might give the impression of being anti-hearing.
When I started to ask questions (and filed some papers) about how things operated in my union I also was called anti-union. I believe my actions caused the union to be a better union.