https://www.facebook.com/kathleen.carroll.267316/posts/pfbid02McwawnMdJrCbucgveTvYXsoVyhVSDX6qRk4pgvG49CcBmVKqJMkhqdYHK6o8cDyGl
City workers push for full pension divestment from Israel after Comptroller caves on bonds
Pension funds still have $285 million tied to country
https://thechiefleader.com/stories/city-workers-push-for-full-pension-divestment-from-israel-after-comptroller-caves-on-bonds,57843
A member …of District Council 37 holds a sign imploring incoming Comptroller Mark Levine not to invest the city's pension funds in Israeli stocks, bonds and companies last year..jpeg
A member of District Council 37 holds a sign imploring incoming Comptroller Mark Levine not to invest the city's pension funds in Israeli stocks, bonds and companies last year.
HARPER FREEMAN/ THE CHIEF
Posted Friday, October 16, 2026 2:51 pm
BY HARPER FREEMAN
City workers who pushed their unions to pass resolutions calling on the city’s pension fund to divest from Israeli stocks and bonds celebrated City Comptroller Mark Levine’s announcement on Wednesday that the city’s five pension funds would not be reinvesting in Israeli bonds. But the workers and pro-Palestinian advocates say they plan to continue pushing Levine to fully divest the over $200 million in investments the city’s five pension funds still hold in Israeli securities and companies.
“It feels like a victory initially,” said Tomasia Kastner, co-chair of City Workers for Palestine, a cross-union, cross-agency organizing group of pro-Palestinian workers who coordinate actions and strategy. “But when you look at the numbers, it no longer feels like a victory. It feels like a punch in the gut after a victory. It feels like one step forward two steps back.”
The pledge Levine made this week marked a reversal from the comptroller who promised on the campaign trail last year to reinvest in Israel after former Comptroller Brad Lander allowed $40 million of the pension system's holdings in Israel to mature and expire.
Levine clarified in a social media post on Thursday that the city’s five funds still hold more than $285 million in investments tied to Israel, mainly through equities that he said are an “important part” of the funds’ portfolio. He said the decision not to reinvest in Israeli bonds was an “ordinary rebalancing and management of a pension portfolio,” and not a political decision.
“At present, a number of challenges, including constraints related to a rules change on our short-term investment desk made by the previous comptroller, prevent us from making direct purchases,” he said.
But supporters of Israel and former Comptroller Scott Stringer criticized Levine’s decision nonetheless, telling the New York Post that his move was, in essence, caving to the two-decade old Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement that seeks to boycott, divest and sanction Israel.
‘More work remains’
City workers have been an active and vocal part of BDS and specifically the movement pushing to divest the city’s pension funds from Israeli companies, stocks and bonds since the genocide in the Gaza Strip began. The Association of Legislative Employees was the first union of city workers to pass a divestment resolution and was followed by Local 3005, Local 1113 and the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY, although PSC’s resolution was later revoked.
Workers have held repeated protests to call for divestment, including just before the start of Levine’s tenure, outside of what soon became his office alongside Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish group that advocates for Palestinians.
Matt Molloy, president of the ALE, said that Levine’s move was a “positive step forward” but said that he must go further.
“More work remains to ensure that our city’s pension funds are fully divested, and we hope this decision is the beginning of that process,” he said.
Evan Rothman, a CUNY graduate student who introduced the divestment resolution that narrowly passed the PSC delegate assembly in early 2025 said Levine’s announcement was a “welcome development” and a “testament to the Palestine solidarity movement’s impact on city politics.”
“It also confirms what New York City public sector unionists have long said: investment in Israeli genocide and apartheid is not just a moral albatross, but a financial one as well,” he said.
Under former Comptroller Lander, the boards of all five of the city’s pension funds voted to divest from Russian securities shortly after that country’s invasion of Ukraine began in early 2022. At the outbreak of war in late February, the funds held $185.9 million in Russian securities.
Lander, who is the Democratic Party’s nominee for New York’s 10th congressional district said in a statement that Levine’s decision on Israeli bonds was the “right move.” He pointed out that the funds hold no other foreign bonds and argued that the decision of previous comptrollers to invest in Israeli bonds was a “political move, not a fiduciary one.”
Since the Islamic militant group Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has killed at least 74,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Around 1,500 of those have been killed since Israel agreed to a ceasefire over a year ago.
Kastner said that City Workers for Palestine would soon meet to discuss their strategy moving forward in response to the union’s announcement. She stressed that workers would keep pushing until the $285 million in Israeli investments are no longer in the city’s portfolio.
“We're just going to stay the course and keep fighting and demanding full divestment,” she said. “We want to continue to create a strategy to fully divest the pension from Israel."
On The Front Lines In France & Italy Of Student Worker Protests With Journalist Phil Pasquini
41 Roseville railyard workers, families sue Union Pacific over cancer, toxic exposure
https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article317655725.html#storylink=cpy
By Madison Smalstig
October 17, 2026 9:00 AM
Union Pacific’s J.R. Davis Yard in Roseville, one of the largest railyards on …the West Coast, is seen in a drone image taken Sept. 30, 2021. Forty-one current and former workers, including 11 who have died, were named in lawsuits filed this week against Union Pacific, alleging that exposure to toxic substances at the railyard caused serious illnesses. Xavier Mascareñas Sacramento Bee file Forty-one current and former workers at Union Pacific’s Roseville railyard, including 11 who have died, were named in six lawsuits filed Wednesday alleging the railroad failed to protect employees from toxic substances that caused cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other serious illnesses. Thirty of the workers are living with illnesses they attributed to workplace exposure, some of which did not develop until after decades of work at the J.R. Davis Yard, said Carisa German-Oden, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs. The families of 11 deceased workers alleged that exposure to asbestos, diesel exhaust, benzene and other hazardous substances contributed to their deaths. The J.R. Davis Yard is “the largest rail yard west of the Rockies,” according to Union Pacific. It is one of the busiest rail terminals on the West Coast and a major hub for Northern California rail traffic. The workers named in the lawsuits were diagnosed with a range of illnesses, including COPD, kidney disease, pulmonary fibrosis, multiple myeloma, leukemia and cancers of the throat and blood. Some began working for Union Pacific as early as the 1950s, in jobs that included track maintenance, signal maintenance, conducting and engineering. About six continued to work for the railroad, German-Oden said. The plaintiffs requested jury trials to determine damages, according to the complaints filed in San Francisco Superior Court. The plaintiffs, represented by the law firms Poolson Oden and Grant & Eisenhofer, alleged that Union Pacific failed to provide adequate protective equipment or warn employees about hazardous exposures. The railroad had known about some of the dangers since the 1930s, German-Oden said. “They’ve known for a long time,” German-Oden said. “What has been clear is that even with that knowledge, they have not you know they did not develop warnings. They didn’t give proper PPE. There was nothing really given to the employees.” Toxic exposure is not unique to the Roseville railyard, German-Oden said. However, the J.R. Davis Yard had been studied more extensively than other rail facilities over the previous three decades. In a 2004 assessment, the California Air Resources Board estimated that locomotives operating at the railyard in 2000 emitted between 22.1 to 25 tons of diesel particulate matter annually within the yard and surrounding areas. The agency used computer modeling to estimate cancer risks for nearby residents, but not for railyard workers. For residents in an area northwest of the locomotive service tracks, the estimated additional cancer risk exceeded 500 cases per million people over 70 years of exposure. Railroad workers generally must seek compensation for job-related injuries through the federal courts under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act rather than through state workers’ compensation. To recover damages, they must establish that negligence by the railroad contributed to their injuries, said Danny Poolson, another attorney involved in the case. “These guys and gals go to a dangerous job every day, work crazy hours, miss tons of family events to provide for them… They put themselves in harm’s way every day, and that protection is not there for them,” Poolson said. The Roseville lawsuits followed similar litigation filed in September by more than 125 railroad workers against Norfolk Southern Railway Co. in Philadelphia, according to a spokesperson for the law firms representing the plaintiffs. Poolson said the immediate goal was to secure compensation for workers and their families. The attorneys also hoped the litigation would lead to changes in workplace safety practices that German-Oden alleged remained dangerous. This story was originally published October 17, 2026 at 9:00 AM with the headline "41 Roseville railyard workers, families sue Union Pacific over cancer, toxic exposure."
Six lawsuits filed Wednesday alleged Union Pacific failed to protect Roseville railyard workers from toxic substances linked to cancer and other…
www.sacbee.comThe Fight To STOP The Cameras & AI Spying On UPS Truck Drivers & Public With IBT100 Wayne Adkins
https://www.facebook.com/collegeinhighschool1/posts/pfbid0R2HUGknLd5UUzfnx42ZSkJxf4RvuDpnNPfQHwLS7EnYLQmGVeGS4CE715XyYdFkYl
My own union leaders from UPTE from the executive committee, removed me as an UPTE delegate in March 2023 to the SF Labor Council for getting into a verbal fight with this piece of shit Zionist at the February 2023 SF Labor Council meeting.
The leadership of the Labor Council had been trying …to get me removed for a while because of the Palestine Resolution that our previous UPTE leadership had passed in 2021 and because I was part of a group of 30 delegates that tried to get one passed at the Labor Council in June 2021.
Some recently elected allies failed to show up at the July 2021 meeting to push this thru.
And seeing this Zionist from lical 87 pretend to “represent” the Latino community and speaking at anti-ICE rallies is really DISGUSTING.
She and Scott Weiner should be thoroughly and publicly SHAMED
Before You Vote on Props “D, E, A, and F
Before You Vote on Props “D, E, A, and F”
What the Board of Supervisor’s Budget and Legislative Analyst Analyst Found — and What It Left Out
Don’t hand over your lunch money to the schoolyard bully! He’ll only …come back wanting more.
Dear Friends,
On July 14, Supervisor Shamann Walton asked the Board’s Budget and Legislative Analyst (BLA) to analyze Mayor Lurie’s three Charter amendments — Propositions D, E, and F — by September 8, so voters could weigh the findings before the November election ballots went out. The BLA missed that deadline by a month. An unfinished, undated draft surfaced September 25, buried in a Board agenda packet. The final report, dated October 8, only became available on October 12 in response to a public records request I had filed. By then, ballots had been in mailboxes for ten days.
BLA reports are policy documents meant to guide development of City policies on behalf of San Francisco residents. Here is what BLA’s final analysis shows, and what it doesn’t.
Proposition D: Shutting Out Grassroots Initiatives
Signatures to qualify a ballot initiative would quadruple, from 10,615 to 42,460. The BLA estimates a grassroots campaign’s cost would rise from about $320,000 to $1.5 million, with paid circulators alone costing over $1 million. The final report even contains a new error, claiming 70 percent of signatures collected are “invalid” when its own text says 70 percent are valid.
Meanwhile, Mayor Lurie’s own three measures — “Propositions D, E, and F” — reached the ballot by signature petition, given the $4.5 million Lurie’s “Clean Up City Hall” campaign committee (funded by billionaires, centimillionaires, and millionaires) spent to collect the necessary number of signatures to qualify for the ballot. Higher thresholds don’t stop big money; they stop everyone else. As of October 16, Lurie’s campaign committee has raised $14 million to pass the three ballot measures, plus another $425,000 seeking to pass “Proposition A.” That excludes the $9.9 million spent in November 2024 trying to pass the exact same “reforms” via the 2024 “Proposition D.” What are these billionaires trying to buy by raising close to $25 million just for the “D-E-A-F” ballot measure reforms package for Mayor Lurie?
Proposition E: Less Oversight of City Contracts
This is the BLA’s analysis report’s best work. Raising the Board of Supervisors contract-approval threshold from $10 million to $25 million would have cut Board review from 304 contracts to 115 between 2023 and 2025, leaving about $2.5 billion in unreviewed contracts.
Board of Supervisors review of contracts caught real problems. It cut a Mid-Market Foundation amendment from $7.7 million to $3.8 million after unnecessary overhead surfaced. It flagged a nonprofit facing insolvency, which had no chief financial officer. That discovery led to an audit that found $5.6 million paid without verifying eligibility.
Below the proposed $25 million contract threshold, the BLA admits: “There is no comparable public process.” The BLA meant that there is no independent review of a given contract proposed by a City Department, and no questions are ever raised in public. That’s because contracts below the threshold line ae approved administratively by the same department that chose the contractor, and only the City Department will manage the contract.
Eliminating public review is the opposite of public transparency, since public review exists precisely because outside eyes catch what Department insiders won’t flag themselves and don’t want you to know. Mayor Lurie and his campaign committee are complicit in trying to eliminate public scrutiny, which will lead to more corruption, not less.
Worse, only the City Administrator could introduce procurement laws if “Prop E” were to pass, which the Board couldn’t amend. New procurement rules would take effect automatically in 60 days unless disapproved, and the Mayor alone could kill one, while the Board would need a majority vote. What replaces Board oversight? In the BLA’s words: “No new oversight or audit mechanism is proposed.” In plain language, that means no substitute for Board of Supervisors review exists in “Proposition E.”
The report headlines $3.8 million to $23 million in procurement “savings.” Those figures are staff time, not cash, built on a cost estimate the BLA itself calls unreliable.
Between its draft and final analysis reports, the BLA also deleted the Human Resources Department’s statement that it knows of five training system contracts, not the 20 Proposition E claims in the legal text of the measure, as a justification and reason to consolidate all City contracting under the City Administrator. Clearly, it was eliminated from the final BLA’s analysis, given a clearly unsupportable false assertion.
Proposition F: More “Unitary Executive” Power to the Mayor
The Mayor could fire 27 of 62 department heads at will, up from five, including the heads of Police, Fire, Public Health, the MTA, the PUC, the Airport, and Recreation and Park. Commissions would need to forward only one candidate, instead of three names on a “short list” from which the Mayor could choose a new Department Head. Nearly all members of Boards, Commissions, and advisory bodies would become removable without cause, as so-called “at will” appointees.
The BLA calls the added cost “modest,” about $268,000 a year if Department Head turnover were to double. That figure spreads three severance payments across all 26 recent departures. But firing power adds involuntary departures, exactly the kind that trigger severance payment awards to Department Heads removed involuntarily. Counted properly, each added firing costs about $117,000, and doubles turnover costs to about $708,000 a year — roughly 2.6 times the BLA’s figure.
Between its draft and final analyses, the BLA deleted its finding that only one of those 26 departures was involuntary, along with research showing new administrations push out senior staff.
Proposition F would also allow an unlimited number of deputy mayors, banned by voters since 1991. Copying Boston’s 14 Deputy Mayors would cost about $4 million a year with benefits. The Planning Department’s own organizational chart cites an anticipated “Charter Reform November 2026” step toward a merged permitting department, even before anyone has voted on “Prop F.”
What the BLA Report Ducked
Walton asked 14 questions. Two were dropped outright and several were narrowed, with no explanation. The final fixed surface errors — wrong dates, impossible numbers, a $1 million misstatement — but left most substantive problems standing. Proposition A, which moves nine commissions out of the Charter, got no BLA analysis at all.
Still, the BLA’s own conclusion states the stakes plainly: These measures trade fewer independent checks for faster executive action handing too much “unitary executive” power to the Mayor, at the cost of vastly reducing Board of Supervisors review and oversight over City contracts, Board control of procurement law, and citizens’ ability to reach the ballot.
A generative AI review of the final BLA report, graded as a policy analysis in a graduate government course, gave it a “C” for responsiveness to Walton’s request, a “D+” as a public service to voters, and a “C–” overall. The generative AI’s low grades were well deserved, given the AI’s overall summary, which reads:
“Many of the impacts appear to affect[democratic City] governance leaving the question of whether clearer executive accountability and faster administrationwarrant fewer independent checks [-and-balances to governance], and [public] oversight, [including] the loss of Board review for a substantial number and dollar value of contracts, the City Administrator's exclusive control over procurement legislation, and the higher bar for citizen [ballot measure] initiatives.”
If you haven’t voted yet, please weigh these facts before you do. And please forward this to anyone who hasn’t mailed in their ballot.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for voting.
Patrick
To see Supervisor’s Walton’s July 14 cost inquiry of Mayor Lurie’s Propositions D, E, and F, the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s draft and final inadequate cost analysis reports, and the two generative AI critique’s of the BLA’s deficient cost analysis, they can be accessed on-line,
The CSU Reaches Tentative Agreement with United Auto Workers
https://www.calstate.edu/csu-system/news/Pages/The-California-State-University-Reaches-Tentative-Agreement-with-United-Auto-Workers-.aspx
10/16/2026
The tentative agreement includes 8% in salary increases plus a one-time… payment for UAW members
csu-statement.jpeg
The California State University (CSU) has reached a tentative agreement with United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4123 that would provide meaningful compensation increases for Unit 11 employees. UAW 4123 represents over 10,000 academic student workers across the CSU system.
Under the tentative agreement, eligible UAW represented employees would receive:
A $3.2 million compensation pool for one-time payments
A 4% salary increase retroactive to July 1, 2026
An additional 4% salary increase effective July 1, 2027
“This agreement demonstrates the shared commitment of both parties to find common ground and take action in the best interests of the CSU’s valued employees,” said CSU Chancellor Mildred García. “While labor negotiations are never easy, they are essential to fairly compensating and supporting our dedicated employees, allowing the CSU to remain fiscally sustainable and ensuring that we stay on a path that advances student success for years to come.”
The agreement comes less than a week after the CSU reached a similar tentative agreement with the Academic Professionals of California.
The CSU remains committed to working with its labor partners to reach agreements that provide competitive compensation and high-quality benefits while supporting students and maintaining the university’s long-term financial sustainability.
For all labor relations updates, visit Labor and Employee Relations | CSU.
The CSU Reaches Tentative Agreement with United Auto Workers
https://www.calstate.edu/csu-system/news/Pages/The-California-State-University-Reaches-Tentative-Agreement-with-United-Auto-Workers-.aspx
10/16/2026
The tentative agreement includes 8% in salary increases plus a one-time …payment for UAW members
csu-statement.jpeg
The California State University (CSU) has reached a tentative agreement with United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4123 that would provide meaningful compensation increases for Unit 11 employees. UAW 4123 represents over 10,000 academic student workers across the CSU system.
Under the tentative agreement, eligible UAW represented employees would receive:
A $3.2 million compensation pool for one-time payments
A 4% salary increase retroactive to July 1, 2026
An additional 4% salary increase effective July 1, 2027
“This agreement demonstrates the shared commitment of both parties to find common ground and take action in the best interests of the CSU’s valued employees,” said CSU Chancellor Mildred García. “While labor negotiations are never easy, they are essential to fairly compensating and supporting our dedicated employees, allowing the CSU to remain fiscally sustainable and ensuring that we stay on a path that advances student success for years to come.”
The agreement comes less than a week after the CSU reached a similar tentative agreement with the Academic Professionals of California.
The CSU remains committed to working with its labor partners to reach agreements that provide competitive compensation and high-quality benefits while supporting students and maintaining the university’s long-term financial sustainability.
For all labor relations updates, visit Labor and Employee Relations | CSU.
‘Digger’: US imperialism is digging our graves
9 October 2026
https://communist.red/digger-us-imperialism-is-digging-our-graves/
Harry Kent Culture and reviews, USA Articles, Issue 57
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ‘Digger’ exposes the madness of US imperialism in its …relative decline — to a mixed reception. Iñárritu brilliantly captures America’s crisis — but, unlike in the film, real-life workers cannot accept this fate, and are rising up all across the world.
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest film, Digger, has been received with controversy, as well as a spate of bad reviews from the bourgeois press. This refreshing, bombastic, and witty satire hinges around the climate crisis, but it goes much further. It lays the blame for the world situation at the feet of US imperialism and its aged, hubristic political representatives.
Digger is deliberately on-the-nose and states its position very clearly.
Digger Rockwell, a ruthless Texan oil baron, is portrayed in a rather absurd manner (but by no means an unbelievable one). This is the capitalist class today: obscenely wealthy, detached, stupid, and egotistical. This class has a contemptuous attitude towards its workers and is far more interested in profit — and, in the case of Digger, the health of his ailing cat — than preventing the destruction of the planet.
Workers on his oil project warn him of impending catastrophe, but Digger ignores their concerns. His workers were (surprise, surprise) right about his shortsighted profiteering. Digger’s arrogance sets off a chain of events that threatens the destruction of Europe and, ultimately, life on earth.
Sick system
The film’s POTUS, played excellently by John Goodman, encapsulates all sides of the American ruling class — a ruthless, sick, dying old man, leading a system in the same state.
The politicians and military chiefs discuss their options, from bombing the problem to smithereens, to blaming it on Russia and China, reflecting the situation we live in today. The US thinks it can bomb its way out of any problem, while constantly trying to blame the crisis on the bogeymen in the East.
Despite bragging about being the world’s biggest military power, the film’s hapless US officials are incapable of solving the crisis that they created, dragging the world down with them. Out of ideas, Digger suggests a mass censorship of social media to get away with their horrendous crimes!
It’s hard not to see a real-life analogy with the war in Iran. This massive military blunder by the USA — in no small way owing to its hubris — is revealing its weakening global position and exacerbating the world crisis.
Fourth wall
The film takes a turn at this point. We are actually watching a play within a film, with all the characters so far being played by actors in rehearsal. These sequences are reminiscent of Iñárritu’s Birdman, and introduce some interesting staging and camera work.
But the main purpose of this — in the style of Bertolt Brecht — is to break the fourth wall. We’re encouraged not to focus on character development, but the political message that the director wants to deliver.
That message is made abundantly clear: American capitalism is destroying the world.
Much has been made of the scene where Digger delivers his fiery monologue. According to most of the bourgeois press, this is the scene where Digger tells us — the audience — that we might hate him for what he did, but we all need him and are all guilty in the climate crisis.
This is a bizarre misreading of the film: Digger explicitly said he is at the European Parliament. Since when were the masses ever invited into this thieves’ kitchen?
No, Digger is actually lecturing the squabbling mess of European leaders. He reminds them that they are all shareholders in his company, that the Europeans are nothing without American oil or US capitalism.
Imperialist decline
Is this not an honest reflection of real life? US imperialism’s war in Ukraine resulted in a cut off of cheap Russian oil and gas to Europe, throwing Europe into an energy crisis.
Since then, the USA has strengthened its energy exports to the bloc — now 14 percent to 15 percent of its total crude, and 60 percent to 65 percent of its LNG imports.
The relative decline of the USA has profound implications for the future of Europe. US imperialism was once able to hold Europe together. Now that its position is threatened by the rise of China and Russia, it’s no longer interested in subsidising Europe. As a result, the European powers can either grovel to the White House, seek alliances with other stronger powers, or go it alone and fight amongst themselves.
It’s true that the film is ultimately putting forward a rather grim perspective. There are no depictions of the masses fighting back against the rotten individuals in power. But it would be false to say that it does not comment on the masses at all.
Film vs reality
The final scene of the film depicts the dystopian life that the embittered masses are now having to live — all for the actions of a hated ruling class and a system in which they had no say. While the film does not depict socialism, it certainly depicts the barbarism that capitalism — if unchallenged — has in store for us.
But, fortunately, we do not live in Iñárritu’s Digger universe. We are living in a world where class struggle is on the order of the day. Even as I write these words, school students across France are attempting to storm heaven, drawing in wider layers of the masses with them.
At the beginning of this year we saw the first shots of the American Revolution, with hundreds of thousands of workers across Minneapolis carrying out a de facto general strike that successfully defeated ICE.
Digger is a fun, entertaining, and daring film in an era of mostly un-daring cinema. The political points that it does put forward are sharp and astute. It faithfully reflects the world situation, which does appear absurd. But it’s not real life.
In real life, the future is communism.
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ‘Digger’ exposes the madness of US imperialism in its relative decline — to a mixed reception. Iñárritu…
communist.redAFT President Weingarten’s AI “safety standard” is a corporatist pact with Microsoft
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/10/17/wwqf-o17.html
Renae Cassimeda
Weingarten, right, at the Pro-Human Assembly on Sept. 15 in Washington, D.C. [Photo: AFT]
Within a single week …last month, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten signed an AI “safety standard” with Microsoft, the company that bankrolls the union’s own AI training academy, and presented it at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington. There she shared a platform with the fascist strategist Steve Bannon and January 6 coup plotter Amy Kremer, alongside Bernie Sanders and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, in a red-brown alliance against artificial intelligence.
Despite Weingarten’s posturing, these two events lay out the union bureaucracy’s corporatist program for AI in the classroom, a partnership with the technology giants and the state, sold to teachers and parents as a defense of children.
On September 9, Weingarten and Microsoft Vice Chair Brad Smith unveiled a standard she called “iron-clad,” with “real teeth.” It is a memorandum of agreement between Microsoft and the AFT’s own National Academy for AI Instruction, which Microsoft funds. No educators within the union voted on this deal or were even consulted.
The agreement bars Microsoft from training its AI models on student and teacher data, yet by its own definitions it excludes general-purpose productivity, collaboration and cloud products, which is to say Microsoft 365, Copilot, Teams and Azure, i.e., the products schools use every day. Districts get its protections only on request, the only party to it on the school’s side is the AFT’s Academy, and it expires in two years. The sharpest prohibitions, against using AI to grade, discipline or monitor students, are aimed at disciplining teachers and impose nothing on Microsoft. In effect, the union bureaucracy has agreed to police its own members on the company’s behalf.
Who pays the AFT?
The National Academy for AI Instruction was launched on July 8, 2025, eight days after Microsoft and OpenAI signed the White House’s “Pledge to America’s Youth.” “We went to them, they didn’t come to us,” Weingarten said. The academy’s five-year budget of $23 million comes from Microsoft ($12.5 million), OpenAI ($10 million) and Anthropic ($500,000), and its goal is to train 400,000 educators on the companies’ products.
The Academy forms one piece of Microsoft Elevate, a $4 billion program through which the company donates its own software and cloud credits to schools, trains and certifies teachers on Copilot, and places its AI in lesson planning and assessment. The aim is to bind a generation of teachers and students to Microsoft’s products. The AFT, alongside the AFL-CIO, serves as Elevate’s labor partner, lending the operation the union’s endorsement. Elevate was announced the week after Microsoft cut 9,000 jobs, amid a data center buildout that will reach some $190 billion this year, an investment the school market is meant to help pay for.
The AFT has played this corporatist role many times before. In 2009 Bill Gates told legislators that the Common Core standards would create “a large uniform base of customers eager to buy products.” The Gates Foundation spent some $200 million promoting them and paid the AFT more than $10 million between 2009 and 2014 to sell them to teachers. The same foundation had already spent $135 million seeding charter schools, including the KIPP and Green Dot chains, and by one estimate the Gates and Walton foundations together were spending more than $500 million a yearon the privatization of public education.
af903644-db5e-4e70-bba3-70ed08bf89a5.jpeg
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Bill Gates at 2010 AFT convention [Photo: Substance News]
Common Core was one arm of a bipartisan assault in which No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top imposed a testing regime designed to brand schools “failing,” close them and hand students to charter operators. At least 4,000 public schools were shuttered between 2009 and 2014 alone. The AFT and NEA acted as accomplices.
The AFT is a corporatist body, fused with management and the state, whose services the technology giants purchase today as the testing industry did before. The companies receive a union seal, a workforce trained on their products and entry to a classroom market worth billions. The apparatus receives millions of dollars and a place inside the arrangement as certifier of “safe” products and enforcer against its own members.
Weingarten’s alarm over the technology is posturing. Her May 27 speech at the National Press Club, in which she called “all this tech” a “huge experiment on kids” and demanded sweeping restrictions on screens and AI, came 10 months after she launched an academy funded by the companies she was denouncing. The alarm serves as a smokescreen for the AFT’s role in subordinating public education to the tech giants. It also legitimizes a far deeper involvement of the state in regulating and monitoring how teachers and students use AI, through “self-policing” arrangements that build in surveillance.
Austerity behind the “bans”
Teacher use of AI is now widespread. Sixty percent used it for their own work in the 2024-25 school year, according to Gallup. At the same time many teachers distrust AI, above all, due to the state and corporations’ harvesting of student data, the surveillance built into classroom software and the prospect that it will be used to replace their jobs. Concern over how the technology is used is legitimate. But the AFT bureaucracy works to channel it into panic over cheating and screen time, and away from the question that decides everything: Who controls the technology?
Under capitalism, as with every new technology, AI is being used to accelerate the attacks on the working class already underway. In the schools that means layoffs, larger classes, curriculum restrictions, surveillance and teachers ordered to do more with less. Restrictions on students’ chatbots will alter neither the direction nor the tempo of this assault, which is far advanced.
More than half of the 50 largest districts are cutting deeply this year and hundreds of schools are closing. Los Angeles, with nearly 6,000 layoffsplanned, has been warned by county officials that it will be unable to make payroll by November 2027. Trump has halved the Education Department’s staff and frozen $7 billion in school funding for weeks last summer. On January 1 the first federal voucher program will take effect, a tax credit for private school tuition that 31 states have joined, intended to deal public education a death blow. The districts announcing AI “bans,” New York City and Los Angeles among them, are carrying out these cuts, and the AFT and NEA have suppressed every serious struggle against them, including canceling the strike of 77,000 Los Angeles educators this spring.
The AFT’s alignment with the far right
This program took Weingarten on September 15 to the Pro-Human Assembly, alongside Bannon and Kremer. She presented the Microsoft deal as the model for what “conservatives and liberals” could achieve “because we don’t have it in law.” She declared that “the American workforce should share in the bounty of America,” a nationalist conception in which workers’ share is fixed by the state and the two capitalist parties, never by workers themselves. She reported the AFT’s meetings with GM, Siemens, Micron and Meta on career “pathways,” programs that feed students into the corporations’ labor pipelines, including war production. She said nothing when Bannon demanded the expulsion of Chinese nationals from American AI laboratories.
What role did the AFT and NEA play in pushing through Common Core and the broader privatization drive against public schools in the 2009-2014 period?
How did the AFT's promotion of school reopening during COVID-19 connect it politically with figures like Jay Bhattacharya and the Great Barrington Declaration?
Beyond education, what examples are there of AI being used internationally to intensify layoffs and surveillance of workers in other industries?
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The bureaucracy’s drive to police a new technology for the state aligns it with the extreme right, as its campaign to reopen schools at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic did. In September 2021 Weingarten co-hosted a town hall with the far-right parents’ group Open Schools USA and Jay Bhattacharya, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for the mass infection of children and healthy adults in pursuit of a mythical “herd immunity.” Trump has since made him director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
By the time of the 2021 town hall, more than 1,000 educators and more than 250 children had died of COVID-19 in the previous school year alone. Thousands more educators and children died as schools were kept open through the waves that followed, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that roughly 1 million American children now live with Long COVID.
Weingarten is a functionary of the capitalist state. She sat on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for 23 years and has served for decades as an agent of American imperialism. She traveled to Israel in December 2023 to lend cover to the Gaza genocide and branded students who protested the genocide “antisemitic.” Her record leaves no room for the claim that children’s safety is her concern.
For workers’ control of AI technologies
The WSWS has characterized AI as augmented intelligence. These systems automate and amplify human intellectual labor, drawing on humanity’s digitized inheritance of writing, science and art, and let workers and youth engage directly with the sum total of human culture as never before.
Educators already use AI to lift the burden of administrative and clerical work and can go much further, building courses to their own pedagogical aims, adapting lessons for students with disabilities and multilingual learners, and designing work that trains young people to question, reason from evidence and argue rather than memorize for a test. It is precisely this potential, the placing of humanity’s accumulated knowledge within reach of every student and worker, that makes the question of who controls it a class question.
None of this is possible so long as the technology is owned by a handful of monopolies and policed by the state and its union partners. Educators must form rank-and-file committees, independent of the union apparatus and both capitalist parties, to decide how AI is used in their classrooms, to oppose every layoff and school closure carried out in its name, and to reject the surveillance built into the corporate products.
The same fight confronts every section of the working class as the corporations deploy AI against jobs and conditions. It requires the expropriation of the technology monopolies and their transformation into public utilities under the democratic control of the working class. The only social force capable of carrying this out is the international working class, and educators must unite across borders through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to carry it forward.
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