The president of NYSUT knows where the presidents of local unions are coming from.

"The hardest job in NYSUT is your job — to be a local president," Dick Iannuzzi said Wednesday at the Local and Retiree Council Presidents Conference. The decisions, he said, "are what make you stare at the ceiling at 4 o'clock in the morning."

Iannuzzi looked at leadership from many angles, peppering his address with provocative quotations from political philosophers as diverse as Lyndon Johnson and Bob Dylan. He advocated the use of the various tools available to a local leader, such as Web sites and political voice.

The example of political voice was timely for Iannuzzi, who cited phone calls he had exchanged with legislative leaders over the past 48 hours in firming up an amendment to state tenure law.

The tenure amendment forged in Albany includes a guarantee that the tenure decision would not be "based on student performance data," said Iannuzzi. "What made it an amazing battle was our insistence that this is the way it's going to be."

Without tenure, "I'd be out of a job," said Cortland UT President Lori Megivern. "I've teed off a lot of people." In the last couple of weeks, Megivern had distributed to her members NYSUT e-mails warning of the possibility of bad amendment language inspired by New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. The Cortland members, along with NYSUT members around the state, filled legislators' e-mail queues with more than 9,000 messages, said Executive Vice President Alan Lubin.

Barry Kaufman, a former NYSUT local leader in Poughkeepsie, now the executive assistant to New York State AFL-CIO President Denis Hughes, urged his former colleagues to increase involvement in area labor federations. "One person getting it done is an activist," said Kaufman. "Many getting it done is a movement."

Four hundred local presidents attended, a notable increase from last year, Vice President Maria Neira noted.