I’m running statewide as an IEA delegate. I’m an IEA-builder.

IEA President Cinda Klickna stood in the lobby of the delegate hotel at the NEA RA in Washington D.C. two years ago and told me, “You know, some people think you’re anti-union.”

It wasn’t really a question.

It was ironic because we were having a conversation in which I was asking the leadership to support a New Business Item of mine supporting the Chicago Teachers Union in their negotiations with Rahm Emanuel. An NBI that later passed unanimously in a voice vote of the 10,000 delegates to our national convention.

Former IEA President Bob Haisman writes emails to retirees and IEA leaders claiming I am anti-union and an IEA-hater.

None of that is true. I’m an IEA member who is running as a retired delegate to the IEA Representative Assembly to be held in March. Only retired members can vote for a retired delegate and it is a statewide election.

I am number 5 on the ballot that will be mailed out in a view weeks and must be returned by the first week in December.

Most elections in the IEA have little substance. Since state leaders are elected by less than a thousand delegates, long-time office holders are difficult to successfully challenge, even if you are critical of their polices. Rank and file members can’t vote for state leaders. Only delegates can.

Critics get characterized as having a personal grudge. And frankly, a lot of the time it is mainly about who you know and who you like personally.

I am running to be a delegate as a critic of current leadership.

It’s not personal.

I’m running against their willingness to compromise our constitutionally protected COLAs .

I’m running against their cooperation with passing Senate Bill 7 and the teacher evaluation plan called PERA.

I am running as a union guy and an IEA-builder.

A small group of us just created a fifty-member retired chapter out of the Skokie office in an area that has hundreds of IEA members and hasn’t had a chapter of IEA Retired for as long as anyone can recall.

We did it in just six months.

Not everyone in our new Skokie Organization of Retired Educators IEA Retired (S.O.R.E.) agrees with all or even some of my criticisms of the IEA leadership. But we have been able to build the union together were nothing existed before.

Last Friday we confronted pension bomber Skokie Senator Dan Biss at his Skokie office.

My views and my attempts to inform have been on display on this blog every day. I was President of my local for ten years. We went on strike and won in 2003.

If you support that kind of representation mark your ballot and tell your friends.

Tell them there’s a union guy, a critic of current leadership and an IEA-builder running as a Retired delegate to the IEA RA.