Without the union to fight for us, where would we be?
This is my 17th year as a school social worker. I’ve worked per session doing evaluation since 1999. A small district is like a family, and you know everybody in your family. We have a seniority list, so you know who’s more senior than you and who’s not.
In 2007, when I applied to work per session, the people who were more senior than me weren’t working, but I still wasn’t hired. Instead of hiring me, they put other people in. I was told it was because we had combined districts. But the contract doesn’t say we combine districts. The contract and the posting clearly state “district seniority order” — not combined districts. Then it came to my attention that the people being hired were bilingual, yet the cases they were working on were 90 percent monolingual.
I filed a grievance. I went to the city Office of Labor Relations three or four times, and we always lost. Whatever I told them, they had an answer — all these cockamamie reasons. Yet I had all this documentation.
The people at the union know what they’re doing and they thought it was a strong case. They decided to pursue it and take it to arbitration. Just last year, the DOE settled and agreed to pay me $11,000.
Friends who work in the private sector are often worried about things like being arbitrarily replaced. We don’t have to worry about that as long as we have a strong union.
Brenna Mintz is a school social worker at PS 52 in Jamaica, Queens.
.jpeg?auto=webp)
.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)
/1x.jpeg?auto=webp)