After rift with former subsidiary, Ort America now facing internal union fight
Fresh off a battle with its former subsidiary, ORT America, the American fund-raising arm for World ORT, is embroiled in a nasty dispute with its union. Workers have scheduled a lunchtime demonstration for Friday at noon to protest what they are calling an attempt by ORT America management to bust the union.
The organization's executive director, Hope Kessler, and the 20 or so union workers employed by ORT America have been renegotiating a labor contract that expired in February, but the sides are at a stalemate, according to Victoria Mitchell, who has worked as the organization's fund development manager for 21 years and is the president of its union.
"She wants to reduce the rights of the employees and wants to be able to replace an employee with someone not in the union and not in the benefits package," Mitchell said of Kessler. "We are trying to negotiate in good faith. We have never had an issue like this. She wants to do a union bust and that is it. She never worked with a union organization before. She doesn't think we have the right to do anything."
There are several issues at hand, according to Mitchell:
* The union would like management to match up to 4 percent of employees' salaries for the organization's 403B retirement fund. Management is offering 3 percent.
* Management would like to be able to hire three non-union secretaries. Now they have two.
* Management would like to be able to subcontract out work, a traditional sticking point for unions that want to protect their turf and make sure that all money spent on labor stays in house.
* Management submitted three pages of management rights clauses, that according to Mitchell amount to management's desire to be able to fire employees without going through the due process that has traditionally made it very difficult to fire union employees without significant cause.
* ORT America now gives its employees every Jewish holiday off. Management would like to make employees use personal and vacation days for some Jewish holidays.
Mitchell says that the two sides were negotiating in good faith until April 29, when management issued a final offer that they say is non-negotiable. The two sides have a meeting set with an arbitrator sometime in June, but management says it will not budge.
"We have been negotiating in good faith and there has been absolutely no movement on the union side and we put out a final offer and that is our final offer," Kessler said in a statement through a spokeswoman. "We have negotiated in good faith and made a fair and final offer an offer that is fair to our employees as well as our fiduciary responsibilities to ORT America. We agreed to meet with a mediator and have an appointment in June."
Kessler, however, denied that management wanted to reduce the number of Jewish holidays that employees would have off, saying through the spokeswoman, "There will be no reduction in the number of holidays traditionally observed. There is no truth to it."
Insiders say that the union is simply unwieldy and that getting any union member to do any work outside what is explicitly written into the contract as an employee's job responsibility "takes two or three union meetings."
And, they tell the Fundermentalist, the organization, like most non-profits, has to find ways to cut costs now because of the tightening economy – and that the union makes it very difficult to take such steps.
The Fundermentalist finds this little in-house tiff interesting on several levels.
This is yet another battle for ORT America, which along with its parent organization, World ORT, has been in a nasty spat with ORT Israel, its former subsidiary, which split with the organization last year. The World group said that the Israel group was not transparent in how its money was being spent, and the Israel group said that the World group was not giving it enough money in the first place.
That split has left the two groups warring over fund raising-territory as the Israel group attempts to make inroads with donors in Europe and the U.S. and the World group scrambles to create programs in Israel so they can still offer "Israel" to donors. It has manifested in a tug of war over who could use the name ORT to raise money both in Israel – where ORT Israel runs a vast network of vocational schools that are financed primarily by Israel's government – and abroad, where World ORT runs a network of Jewish-based vocational schools around the world.
An Israeli court recently decided that, in Israel at least, ORT Israel owns the name ORT, but that World ORT could use the name to raise money, as long as it uses the full name "World ORT" and does not pass itself off simply as ORT. (I know. It boggles the Fundermentalist's mind as well. But it is a nasty battle.)
On another level, ORT America is a founding member of the District Council 1707, a union for non-profit workers founded in 1932 by the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies.
Just something to note should ORT, traditionally an advocate for workers rights, bust its union.
(Full disclosure: The Fundermentalist is the shop steward at JTA.)
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Whispers of cuts at JDC
The Fundermentalist has heard from reliable sources that the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee could be planning significant layoffs very soon. To be clear, however, this claim has not been confirmed.
The organization, which passed a 2008 budget that included a $9 million shortfall, has been hit hard by the falling dollar.
Costs overseas for services have shot up as foreign currency becomes stronger and the dollar falls, giving the organization less buying power. The JDC's executive director, Steve Schwager, told JTA in December that that could lead to the need to fire staff overseas to keep up with the inflation.
Well it sounds like those cuts may indeed happen, and the cuts may include New York staff as well as those working overseas.
After the JDC held its annual board meetings in New York two weeks ago, the Fundermentalist caught wind that JDC might be laying off up to 60 employees.
But on May 16 a JDC spokesman quashed those rumors. The spokesman did tell the Fundermentalist that the organization had instituted a hiring freeze overseas, but said that layoffs were not forthcoming.
Last week, the rumor of cutbacks resurfaced, with the added caveat that they could happen soon.
JDC spokeswoman Claire Shultz would not confirm or deny the rumor when the Fundermentalist called her on Thursday.
"Every aspect of the organization is being looked at right now," she said, acknowledging the need to deal with the budget crunch. "We are looking at everything now."
As for firings in the near future?
"I don't know where you heard that," she said, adding that the falling dollar is hurting businesses everywhere. "This is a universal issue for profits and non-profits."
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Could a national network of Hebrew College by in the works?
Most likely not, but the idea has at least been floated, according to the man tapped recently as the new head of the Hebrew College in Boston.
Rabbi Daniel Lehmann, told the Fundermentalist today that he recently had a preliminary discussion with an official at the Baltimore Hebrew University about possibly merging the two schools. The idea, he said, sprung from a proposal to create a national Jewish university that he recently received from an official at the Spertus College of Judaica: The Hebrew Teachers Seminary in Cleveland.
The state of Hebrew colleges in general is dismal.
Most of the colleges were founded during the early part of last century as teachers colleges to train Hebrew school teachers back in the day when most American Jewish kids attended the five-day-a-week after-school Judaic pedagogical torture sessions.
But over the past 35 years the likes of BHU in Baltimore, Spertus in Cleveland, the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago, and Gratz College in Philadelphia have faced increasingly stiff competition for students and donors as Jewish studies programs have cropped up at major mainstream universities.
Baltimore, especially, has suffered as the Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore, which was its largest funder, recently stopped the $1 million annual allocation it gave BHU. The board of trustees also forced out its president of seven years because of fund raising trouble, and has had trouble keeping interim presidents as it searches for someone permanent.
One bailout idea, said Lehmann, without getting into specifics, would be to merge all of the Hebrew colleges left standing under one umbrella, because as he said, there is a lot of overlap between the schools.
Lehmann has been a rising star in the Jewish educational world since he became the founding headmaster of the progressive Gann Academy-The New Jewish High School of Greater Boston in 1997, a position he held until last year has a daunting task ahead of him.
(Full disclosure: Before he moved to Boston, Lehmann was the Judaic Studies principal at the Fundermentalist's alma mater, the Beth Tfiloh Community Day School in Baltimore. He is the first rabbi that I knew who listened to the Grateful Dead.)
Hebrew College has a serious budget crunch due largely to its decision to build an 80,000-square-foot campus that pushed the school's annual budget from $1.5 million in 1993 to $17 million in 2006, according to a recent Boston Globe report.
The crunch forced the school to lay off 30 employees in January of 2007, and its enrollment of post-graduate students has dipped to around 200, according to the report that a Hebrew College spokeswoman called "accurate."
Of all the Hebrew colleges, the one in Boston faces expecially stiff competition from the mainstream university world, as Brandeis University, which has a renowned dept of Near Eastern Judaic studies and mega-donors galore pumping tens of millions of dollars into its ever expanding Judaic studies programs, is only a few miles away from the campus.
But it is in a bit better shape than other Hebrew universities, as it has become a central part of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies' decision to revision itself by focusing on Jewish education. The Boston federation and Hebrew College created a Hebrew high school that now has 800 students and is working on creating a middle school.
Its new rabbinical seminary and cantorial school are attracting students from across the country, Lehmann said.
And its Meah adult education program is going national, opening branches in Baltimore, Washington, New York, Philadelphia and Cleveland.
That alone could potentially position Hebrew College – in the Fundermentalist's view – as an excellent central office for a national network of Hebrew universities. In fact, the school has partnered with the BHU on its Meah program there. (Lehmann says that the college sought a similar partnership with Gratz in Philly, but Gratz was not interested. So much for brotherly love.)
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