Rhyming History

Merchants of Fear Among NYC School Teachers, From the 1950s to Today

A number of years ago, I did an oral history with one of the founders of the UFT, the late George Altomare. George had a long, rich life inside the UFT, and he loved to reminisce about it and talk about the UFT’s history, so there was a lot of copy to edit. {-; But in the process of doing the interview, I discovered interesting pieces of our history that I had not known.

Among other tales, George told me about a man named Emil Tron, who had taught French to Altomare when he was a student at Brooklyn Tech in the 1940s. Their lives would intersect again in subsequent decades, in ways that are a cautionary tale for today’s UFTers.

THE BIRTH OF THE UFT

Here’s the background. Fresh out of City College, in September 1953 Altomare became a middle school Social Studies teacher at Junior High School 126 in Astoria, Queens. There he met two other novice teachers, Al Shanker and Dan Sanders; the three men became quick friends as they confronted an autocratic school administration. Determined that something had to be done about the state of affairs in their school, the trio organized a chapter of the Teachers Guild, the NYC teachers’ union local affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO. In short order, they signed up every teacher in the school.

Together with two men they would meet in the Guild – Dave Selden and Ely Trachtenberg – this trio from JHS 126 became the local’s ‘Young Turks.’ They were in a big hurry to turn what often seemed like a learned debating society into a real union that could win power for NYC public school teachers to better their working and professional lives and to improve the city’s public schools.

But they faced a major hurdle: the city’s teachers were divided among a little more than 100 different organizations, organized along lines of grade level (elementary, middle, and high school teachers), sex, geography (different boroughs and communities), subject matter and license, race and ethnicity, and religious affiliation. Only 2500 of the city’s 50,000 teachers belonged to the Guild. On this terrain, building organizational unity and solidarity among all teachers often seemed like an impossible goal.

In February 1959, the Guild’s Young Turks saw an opening when teachers in the city’s night high schools organized a strike, using mass resignations to circumvent state law prohibiting public sector strikes. The predominantly elementary school Guild volunteered its active support for what would be a victorious strike which successfully doubled the hourly wages of night school teachers. (Shanker took this red Volkswagen mini-bus around the city, providing coffee and hot chocolate to nigh school teachers walking picket lines in the dead of winter.) This support created interest among the militant strike leaders in the High School Teachers Association (HSTA) for unity with the Guild. To make a long story short, within a year the United Federation of Teachers was born.

EMIL TRON AND THE FORCES OF REACTION

There was a holdout faction in the HSTA. Historically, NYC high school teachers had been paid more than elementary school teachers. Not coincidentally, there were many more men among the high school teachers, as elementary school teachers were overwhelmingly women. In 1947, New York State had passed a law which equalized salaries, eliminating the high school differential by raising the salaries of elementary school teachers to the level of the high school teacher salary. A dozen years later, there were still revanchist male high school teachers that sought a restoration of the sexist, two salary Ancien Regime. On principle, the UFT, like the Guild before it, could never agree to such a demand. However, at its founding, the UFT had extended a hand of compromise: it adopted the idea of salary differentials, but for post-secondary degrees and course credits inside of a single salary schedule, where they would be available to all teachers regardless of grade level. (Our current salary schedule is precisely such a system.) Yet the holdouts in the HSTA would brook no compromise.

The leader of the holdout, reactionary faction in HSTA was George Altomare’s old French teacher, Emil Tron, who was then its president.[i] (In an attempt to appeal to middle school teachers, HSTA would soon rename itself the Secondary School Teachers Association, or SSTA.) When the Guild had threatened to call a strike of day school teachers a few months after the night school strike, Tron had broken with the solidarity shown by the Guild in the earlier strike and refused it SSTA support; this slap in the face gave impetus to the militants in the SSTA to leave the organization and join the Guild in the UFT. A matter of months after its formation, the UFT went on strike in November 1960 to force the City to hold an election to establish collective bargaining. In this one day strike, Tron and SSTA had crossed the picket lines. But the strike was nonetheless successful in getting the City to finally hold an election, and in June 1961, NYC public school teachers voted for collective bargaining by a 3 to 1 margin.

Having decided to unionize, teachers now needed to choose who would represent them in collective bargaining. Three organizations competed in an election – the UFT; the Teachers Union (TU), a union that had been thrown out of the AFT in 1941 for being under Communist Party control; and the Teachers Bargaining Organization (TBO), a coalition hastily put together by the NEA which included the rump SSTA and Tron. The TBO ran a fear campaign that accused the UFT of being ‘strike happy’ and promised to never call a strike, but its message fell on deaf ears. In the December 1961 election, the UFT would win overwhelmingly, with 20,045 votes to the TBO’s 9,770 and the TU’s 2,575.

The Tron story continues. In 1962, just as the UFT went on strike to win its first contract, there was an announcement of the formation of a competing City Teachers Association (CTA), affiliated with the NEA; Tron was selected as the President of the CTA, which he billed as a “professional alternative” to the UFT. In 1963, as the UFT was negotiating its second contract and using the threat of a strike as leverage, Tron would look to undercut the union, calling the strike threat “gangster tactics” and “stupid.” The CTA would mail a notice to teachers reminding them of the potential penalties under the law for striking.

Tron would step down from the CTA presidency and then retire in 1967, but his successors in the CTA would continue in this vein. When the UFT went on strike in the fall of 1967, with a major demand being the expansion of an early version of community schools, the More Effective Schools program, the CTA called on its members to cross the picket lines. There was no evidence that NYC school teachers paid heed to what was by now an old CTA refrain. The CTA would linger on for a few more years after 1967, as long as the NEA provided it with resources, but when the NEA pulled the plug, it was done.

In retirement, Tron was on to new adventures, starting an “Association of Retired Teachers” to compete with the UFT Retiree Chapter. Always the star of his own productions, Tron was President once again. (I can’t quite shake an image of Tron as a version of the private detective Jim Rockford, the leading role played by James Garner in the 1970s television series The Rockford Files; Rockford had a little printing machine in his car’s trunk which allowed him to produce different fake business cards as he took on various identities in his investigations.)

And that brings us to the final chapter in the story of Emil Tron and NYC school teachers…

THE 1975 FISCAL CRISIS… AND EMIL TRON

In 1975, the UFT faced one of the greatest challenges in our history, as NYC was hit by a major fiscal crisis. Two years earlier, the U.S. economy had entered into its deepest and longest recession since the end of the Second World War, with a devastating combination of rising unemployment and inflation that had not been experienced in previous economic downturns. By 1975, NYC was experiencing its highest levels of unemployment since the Great Depression, as the national economic downturn was exacerbated in NYC by the loss of manufacturing jobs. (The City was in the midst of a long transition from an industrial economy to a post-industrial knowledge economy dominated by the financial, health care, education, and service sectors.) NYC was not alone: the revenues of state and local governments across the United States had plummeted, and many were also experiencing major fiscal crises.

As the 1975-76 school year started, NYC announced massive budget cuts to public schools, with thousands of layoffs, large increases in class size, and salary freezes. In response, the UFT went on strike. But in a moment when the City was facing a massive shortfall in revenue, a strike provided the union with little to no leverage; after a week, it was called off, without any significant concessions from the City. Worse, NYC was teetering on the edge of defaulting on its financial obligations, including the salaries of municipal employees, and going into bankruptcy. If this occurred, the collective bargaining agreements between the City and its municipal unions would be torn up, with a loss of all the protections in them, salaries would be cut without redress, and the City’s public services would be even more devastated. As bad as the fiscal crisis was – and there is no sugarcoating its deeply negative impact on the social compact of NYC, including its damage to public K-12 and higher education – bankruptcy would have been even more catastrophic.

As NYC’s future hang in the balance, the Teacher Representatives on the Board of the Teacher Retirement System decided, at the urging of the UFT leadership, to invest $150 million of teacher pension funds (over $900 million in 2025 dollars) in municipal bonds that would save the City from bankruptcy. With the benefit of historical hindsight, this decision seems like the obviously right one: it saved the City from economic disaster, stabilized its public schools and other public services, and secured the futures of UFT members. If the City had gone into bankruptcy, there would have been a flood of early retirements from public employees who would otherwise have been laid off, faced intolerable work conditions, or decided to leave a city that was in freefall, creating pension fund instability and worse. Instead, the bonds proved to be an excellent investment, providing the TRS with strong returns. In sum, current UFT members, both active and retired, benefited greatly from that decision.

But in the moment, the decision had more than its share of critics, including those who claimed that the pensions of UFT members were being diminished. One particularly valuable study of the 1975 fiscal crisis, written by Kim Phillips-Fein, bears the title Fear City: in that moment, there was no shortage of fear, or of purveyors of fear. One of those purveyors of fear was Emil Tron, who not only attacked the decision as one which harmed the pensions of retirees, but filed an unsuccessful law suit in federal court seeking to prevent the purchase of the City bonds on the extraordinary theory that they were a violation of his constitutional rights.

RHYMING HISTORY

Does the tale of Tron sound familiar, like another story you have heard recently? The transgressions of solidarity, again and again? The attempts to set union members against each other? The use of fear to divide? The creation of alternative organizations to the union, including an “association” of retirees?

There is an expression among historians, that history does not repeat itself, but it can rhyme. In their latest attempts to create fear and division around the new health care plan for municipal employees adopted yesterday by the Delegate Assembly, the ABC Caucus and Marianne Pizzitola have shown once again that they are the spiritual children of Emil Tron. This history rhymes, as surely as if it were a sonnet.

---

[i] Tron would write to Guild President Charlie Cogen:

In order that there will be no doubt in anyone’s mind about my question, I want to state that as long as I can remember, the Guild has always espoused the cause of single salary for ALL teachers. As long as a single salary has been in effect the High School Teachers Association has always violently opposed it.