The Covid Select Committee Missed the Mark
Here's what they *should* have asked Randi Weingarten
Eileen Chollett is a parent in Fairfax County, Virginia, whom we met last month during our DC Fly-in with Rational Ground.
She posted the analysis below on Twitter and we knew we had to share it with you (with her permission, of course). Here’s hoping the Covid Select committee heeds Eileen’s call and brings Randi Weingarten (and Becky Pringle) in for an encore performance.
Randi Weingarten’s prepared statement can be found here and watched here.
- Natalya and Dana
Man, @COVIDSelect really missed the mark today. The AFT's trigger for closing schools wasn't the part they put in the CDC guidance about new variants. It was the part they put in to force schools to give teachers at "higher risk" virtual teaching as an ADA accommodation.
From the February 12, 2021 K-12 CDC guidance, "At all levels of community transmission, employers should provide reassignment, remote work, or other options for staff who have documented high-risk conditions or who are at increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19...
"...to limit the risk of workplace exposure. When these conditions are disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act, employers must provide reasonable accommodation subject to undue hardship...."
"...These options should likewise be extended to staff who have a household member with a high-risk condition or who are at increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19."
Now, the AFT has claimed that this accommodation was simply compassion and common sense, and without it, teachers going through chemo would have been forced back to work and thence their deaths. I have to go off on a bit of a diversion to explain why that's not the case.
The Family and Medical Leave Act (federal law) allows any US worker to take up to three months of UNPAID job-protected leave because of their medical condition or the medical condition of their family member. Let me emphasize the key word again: UNPAID.
So teachers who were truly vulnerable had the same option available to them as did any essential worker who was truly vulnerable - stay home without pay. Unpleasant, and the US social safety net sucks, but that's the system.
If instead you're given an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act, you get PAID your full salary. Paying people who need disability accommodations less than non-disabled workers is illegal discrimination.
(The ADA doesn't require an employer to give an employee an accommodation because of a household member's disability, so the inclusion of that in the CDC's school COVID guidance is a bit of legal sophistry.)
However, the ADA doesn't require employers to give accommodations if the employee is unable to perform the "essential functions" of the job because of their disability. E.g., the ADA doesn't entitle a Blind worker to a job as a taxi driver.
Spotted the AFT's game yet? When they had the CDC put in remote work as an ADA accommodation for teachers, the AFT was getting the CDC to say that physical presence in the classroom isn't an essential function of the teaching job.
You might be thinking "So what if a few cancer-stricken teachers got to stay home? That seems fair and reasonable!" Oh no. It's not a few. Here's the CDC's list of conditions that put people at higher risk of COVID-19.
That list includes...
- People with anxiety, depression, or ADHD.
- People who are overweight or have high blood pressure.
- People who ever smoked.
- People from racial or ethnic minority groups.
- People with high blood pressure.
i.e., almost everyone in the US population.
And if you don't qualify, all you have to do is smoke a single cigar and you qualify.
In short, the AFT's virtual-teaching-as-ADA-accommodation addition was a license for EVERY SINGLE MEMBER of the AFT to refuse to come into work in person FOREVER ("at all levels of community transmission", including zero).
I live in Virginia, where it's illegal for public workers to strike. But it's not illegal for public school teachers to file for ADA accommodations en masse. Retaliating against people for asking for accommodations is disability discrimination.
To sum up this absurdly long thread so far, the AFT managed to get an organized labor superweapon into the CDC K-12 COVID guidance - legal (and sympathetic) cover for PAID illegal work stoppages.
Dear reader, you may be thinking that this dastardly plan is pretty brilliant, and Randi Weingarten doesn't seem bright enough to come up with it. You are correct.
The superweapon was the brainchild of one of the AFT's local affiliates, the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers.
On June 25, 2020, the Fairfax County school staff unions demanded that all-virtual learning continue into the fall, and urged their members "to clearly state their preference for continued virtual learning". Fairfax County Public Schools said no. web.archive.org/web/2020093019…
A few days later, FCFT released their "11 Pillars of a Safe Reopening" in response to FCPS's refusal . The 11 pillars are the full COVIDian smorgasbord of demands: contact tracing, testing, N95 masks, 6 feet of distancing. The superweapon is number 2.
FCFT's 11 Pillars of a Safe Reopening | FCFThttps://www.fcft.org/safe-reopening
Union members responded to the call by filing ADA accommodation requests by the thousands. In summer and fall 2020, one in eight Fairfax County teachers filed for virtual teaching under the ADA. It was an 8000% increase from the previous year's requests. go.boarddocs.com/vsba/fairfax/B…
The cowardly superintendent responded to this illegal work stoppage by reversing course and giving in to the union demands for all virtual school. Students in Fairfax County wouldn't be back in school in person 5 days a week until August 2021, 17 months after schools had closed.
The superintendent admitted publicly on August 18, 2020 that the school system and the county could partner to offer in-school "learning support" for $1,472 per month but not free school b/c of the FCFT's superweapon.
@RepDLesko, don't you have subpoena power? Now that the whole story is laid out in detail for you, go subpoena stuff, please.
Eileen Chollett is a parent in Fairfax County, Virginia Follow her on Twitter @EileenChollet
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Well, not exactly ... the mark was eugenics ... they partially hit it