{"id":12643,"date":"2018-07-25T14:13:29","date_gmt":"2018-07-25T14:13:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=12643"},"modified":"2018-10-14T20:57:50","modified_gmt":"2018-10-14T20:57:50","slug":"lessons-of-the-red-republican-states-teacher-strikes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2018\/07\/25\/lessons-of-the-red-republican-states-teacher-strikes\/","title":{"rendered":"LESSONS OF THE RED (REPUBLICAN) STATES TEACHER STRIKES"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Chester has sent in this article form Jack Gerson, a teacher activist on California, about the teacher strikes in\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

West Virginia, Kentucky and Arizona.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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LESSONS OF THE RED (REPUBLICAN) STATES TEACHER STRIKE<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Striking teachers in West Virginia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Last Saturday (June 9), I attended the \u201cLessons of the Red States Teacher Strikes\u201d forum featuring teacher leaders of the mass education strikes in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Arizona. The forum, held in Oakland, California at a local public high school (Oakland Tech) was organized by the Oakland teachers\u2019 union and co-sponsored by the San Francisco, Berkeley and Richmond (California) teachers\u2019 unions. Here are my impressions and observations about this event.<\/p>\n

1. The speakers were inspiring, individually and collectively. The women \u2013 all four are women \u2013 were courageous, resolute, and brilliant organizers. Most readers will probably already know this from the widespread coverage of the red state strikes. If not, I think that this summary, brief as it is, will make this clear.<\/p>\n

2. The stated aim of the event was to learn how the red state organizers had carried out the most impressive labor actions in decades despite what had hitherto been considered insurmountable obstacles \u2013 weak state unions, anti-strike legislation, lack of collective bargaining, no dues check-off \u2013 and to build on these to launch coordinated local and \/ or statewide actions in California. The organizers had anticipated filling Oakland Tech\u2019s 800-seat auditorium and hoped for a large turnout from younger teachers and community, based on the overwhelmingly positive response to the red state strikes. But only somewhere between 200 and 300 showed up, very few under 50 years old. The majority were veteran Bay Area leftists.<\/p>\n

3. In any event, the talks by the red state teacher leaders were inspirational as well as educational. They each talked about how they were able overcome anti-strike legislation and build mass strikes despite the weakness of state and local unions. In all three states \u2013 West Virginia, Kentucky, Arizona (and I believe that this was true in Oklahoma and North Carolina too) \u2013 the organizers worked outside of the formal union structures, using social media to reach out to, and build networks of, initially hundreds, then thousands, and now tens of thousands (For example: ongoing networks of 24,000 in West Virginia, and of 55,000 in Arizona.) Although the core of these organizations are schoolworkers and have developed networks of school leaders at the local and school levels, they don\u2019t restrict their membership to teachers: The networks include both union members and non-members; public school teachers and charter school teachers; certificated staff (teachers) and classified staff (clericals, janitors, food service workers, etc.). They don\u2019t restrict themselves to traditional union issues, or even to strictly educational issues \u2013 for example, the West Virginia teachers demanded and won a 5% across the board pay increase for all West Virginia public employees, not just teachers, while one of the key issues taken up by the Kentucky movement is how to address gang violence.<\/p>\n

In these ways, these organizations are breaking out of the insularity, conservatism, and bureaucratic inertia of virtually the entire union leadership at national, state, and even local levels. It\u2019s reminiscent of Occupy in Fall 2011; of the Spring 2011 Oakland bank campaign (where Oakland teachers and community allies campaigned to \u201cBail Out Schools Not Banks and End Foreclosures\u201d, culminating in occupation of Wells Fargo\u2019s downtown Oakland branch, where seven teachers were arrested (I was one of those seven); of the June \/ July 2012 sit-in to protest school closures at Oakland\u2019s Lakeview Elementary, organized by teachers, parents, and community. (For those who remember, it\u2019s reminiscent of the \u201cstruggle group\u201d concept in the old IS circa 1970, which was counterposed to the traditional rank and file union caucus approach.) Importantly: it\u2019s not just posing the need for teacher unions to \u201creach out to the community\u201d, but rather the need for alternative forms of organization that can work inside and outside the union, uniting union members with non-members and with the community around demands that cut across traditional parochial \/ insular lines. But apparently local teacher union leaders are not taking away this lesson (for example, Oakland teacher union president-elect Keith Brown, who chaired the June 9 forum, began his concluding remarks by observing that the key lesson to be learned from the speakers is that \u201cwe need to reach out to the community\u201d. I barely was able to restrain myself from yelling out \u201cOh come on Keith, you\u2019ve known that all along.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Rather, to reemphasize at the risk of redundancy: the key lesson here is the importance of building what could be called \u201cclasswide organizations\u201d \u2013 organizations that operate inside and outside the workplace, that include union members and non-members, teachers and non-teachers; that take up educational and non-educational issues (e.g., environmental issues); etc.<\/p>\n

An equally important lesson is to not be constrained by the fear of strikes being labeled \u201cillegal\u201d. If the organization is strong enough, with enough support among school workers and enough support in the community, the courts and the legislature are likely to fold \u2013 as they did in the red state strikes.<\/p>\n

4. I think that the very weakness of their unions was a key to the strikes\u2019 success. In states where teacher unions are strong, dues checkoff is used to build full-time, often highly paid, central union staff whose world view is closer to that of management than it is to the everyday worker. The officials and staffers far more often than not act as a brake on struggle, urging and when they can imposing a passive, legalistic strategy (at best). Case in point, the 3-million-member National Education Association (NEA) and its largest affiliate, the 300,000-plus member California Teachers Association (CTA). CTA has used dues check-off (\u201cthe agency shop\u201d) to funnel the bulk of member dues to its highly paid and privileged staff and officers. The hundreds of CTA staffers are paid nearly double the salaries of classroom teachers. For decades, they, argued that \u201cwe\u2019re too weak\u201d to organize effectively against charter schools; that we have to \u201ccollaborate\u201d with big business and with school management; that strikes can\u2019t win, so we have to \u201ccompromise\u201d (read: agree to rotten contracts), etc. They stacked the deck, taking the lead in negotiating contracts that expire at different times in different districts, and then turning around and arguing that coordinated strikes are a non-starter because contracts expire at different times. Militants who argued for even building local strikes were labeled \u201cstrike-happy\u201d. Most \u201cprogressives\u201d and \u201cprogressive caucuses\u201d fell in line. A few examples:<\/p>\n

\u2022 CTA pulled the plug on its 2003 initiative to reform California Proposition 13 to tax corporate property more heavily (they caved to pressure from the Chamber of Commerce, who behind the scenes threatened to go after dues check-off).<\/p>\n

\u2022 CTA staff and the Oakland teacher union president meekly and unilaterally called off a strike with a bad, last-minute deal in spring 2006. Four years later, CTA staff and a different OEA president postponed striking for months, and then limited it to one day with no followup (despite its being over 90% effective, and despite the school district having imposed rotten terms on the union.)<\/p>\n

\u2022 The \u201cprogressive\u201d leadership of the Los Angeles teachers union called off a walkout of tens of thousands of teachers when a judge issued an injunction with fines of $1 million \/ day if they struck.<\/p>\n

\u2022 In 2009, CTA sent staff from district to district, warning local unions to accept downsizing, including layoffs, in order to \u201cprotect our contractual gains\u201d \u2013 i.e., wages and benefits.
\nThe red state strikes show that there\u2019s another way, a better way: organize to fight, for a classwide fight, an inclusive fight around classwide demands, rather than meek, legalistic acquiescence.<\/p>\n

5. Two more points:<\/p>\n

a. Mass media contrasts teacher salaries in California with those in the red states and implies \u2013 or states outright \u2013 that strikes occurred in those states because teacher pay was so low. But when adjusted for inflation, average pay in California is not much higher than in, say, West Virginia \u2013 and average pay in several large urban districts (e.g., Oakland) is actually lower than the average in the red states. Moreover, the red state strikes were not just about teacher pay: a key unifying demand was more money for education. The mass media implies that California and other \u201cblue\u201d states put much more money per capita into education than the red states. Not so. California, despite having the fifth largest economy in the world (behind only China, the U.S., Germany and Japan) is 41st of the 50 states in education spending per capita \u2013 well behind, for example, West Virginia.<\/p>\n

b. The red state strikes blow apart the \u201clesser evil\u201d argument in multiple ways: First, many strikers actually were \/ are Trump supporters, and see him as shaking up the status quo that has brought them lower wages, insecurity, raised their rents, taken away their homes, left their family members jobless and their children with poor prospects. Second, in blue states like California, the Democrats \u2013 far from being the opponents of privatization, charter schools and downsizing that they\u2019ve been made out to be in the mass media, have been its advocates.
\nTake the example of Oakland, where I taught and was active in the teacher union. For the past 20 years, Oakland has been ground zero in the assault on public education. In 2003, the state put the Oakland public schools in receivership, a move orchestrated by Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad (supported by his billionaire friends Reed Hastings and John Doerr) and his long-time ally, then- Oakland mayor and now California governor Jerry Brown. Broad, Bill Gates and company turned the Oakland schools into a laboratory for privatization: under the state takeover enrolment in charter schools more than quadrupled while enrollment in public schools fell by one-third; the state moved in ostensibly because of a $37 million budget deficit, and left seven years later after tripling it \u2013 turning it into a $110 million debt, which to this day the state insists that the district must repay in full with interest; more than half the schools in Oakland were closed or reorganized, the libraries were shut down in nearly all middle schools and in several high schools, custodial workers were laid off, etc. Under the state takeover, Oakland had per capita double the rate of outsourcing to private contractors and double the administrative overhead of the average California school district.<\/p>\n

While Oakland was a laboratory, the Democrats nearly everywhere supported the policies of downsizing, charter schools, test-based accountability, school closures, outsourcing, and privatization. The assault on public education was bipartisan \u2013 its most ardent advocates included Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and California Congressman George Miller (the two leading proponents of the No Child Left Behind legislation), and President Barack Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also important to consider that in the \u201cred states\u201d Republican legislators responded to mass pressure by at least partially caving, fearing that they\u2019d lose their jobs and their legislative majorities in the next elections. But in \u201cblue\u201d California, the Republican Party has nearly collapsed in the most populous parts of the state. The Democrats have lockdown control of the state legislature as well as the governor, and they have little fear of losing same. So they feel little constraint to do more than pay lip service to education, and can be expected to continue the same policies that they have for decades: providing inadequate funding for education (again: California ranks 41st of the 50 states in that regard); supporting charter schools (or whatever comes down the pipe in place of charter schools, should the bloom come off that rose); supporting test-based accountability (or whatever repressive variant comes down that pipe); supporting state takeovers of local school districts, thus taking control out of the hands of the public (just as charter schools do \u2013 charter schools receive public funding but are privately controlled). Is it any wonder that so many working class folks have been repelled by the Democrats\u2019 austere neoliberalism, and that at least some have turned to Trump?<\/p>\n

6. Problems: Where do the red state strike organizers go from here? They know that they need to consolidate their gains and to spread them nationally. But who can they reach out to? They look to who they see \u2013 ostensible \u201cprogressive\u201d locals, like Oakland and San Francisco and Los Angeles. But the teacher leaders in the sponsoring locals have a past and present connection to CTA and its policies. And their own records.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to see things as they really are. That can be a downer. So far too often, far too many leftists act as cheerleaders and, willfully or not, wind up contorting and distorting facts to fit their desires. Thus, Jeff Mackler, national secretary of the group Socialist Action, recently wrote an article hailing the Oakland teachers\u2019 union (OEA) as the most militant teacher union in the country, saying that the union has launched five strikes over \u201cthe past decades\u201d. Well, yes \u2013 if you go back far enough. But over the past 22 years, OEA has gone out for exactly one day, and the OEA officers and CTA staff resisted even that.<\/p>\n

And OEA has been far from the worst \u2013 inadequate as it\u2019s been, it\u2019s still far better than most. Now, I don\u2019t want to write off the newly elected OEA leadership out of hand. But they \u2013 and the other local union officials \u2013 are not going to act much differently than in the past UNLESS there\u2019s an eruption from below. We certainly shouldn\u2019t look to CTA or NEA or AFT to take the lead. Quite the opposite, as we\u2019ve argued above. And I\u2019m not hopeful about the local leaders, either. Maybe some will be on the right side \u2013 but I think that if that happens, it will be because they will be reacting to motion from below, not taking the lead in unleashing it.<\/p>\n

7. Meanwhile: How to proceed in places like Oakland, where the teacher union has been out of contract since last June. And in other California school districts \u2013 especially large urbans.<\/p>\n

First: Build a network, if possible with contacts in every school in your district. This has been a foundation for building towards strikes in the past: in Chicago in 2012; in Arizona earlier this year; etc. In the past, this has been best done by releasing several teachers from classroom duties temporarily to go from school to school, holding school meetings, making contacts, identifying teachers who can act as shop stewards \/ representatives for their schools, etc. Based on the red state teacher experiences, this probably ought to be combined with social media outreach.<\/p>\n

Second: Don\u2019t base everything on waiting for the state and local union leaderships to act. As one of the red state teacher leaders said on Saturday, \u201cThey\u2019re not our bosses. We\u2019re their bosses.\u201d Outline steps towards building a strike \u2013 including building a network with contacts in as many schools as possible, and reach out beyond union lines to non-members, teachers in other districts, classified schoolworkers, community members, etc. Reach out beyond narrow bread and butter issues, and even beyond simply educational issues. And be ready for state, national, and local leaders to get in the way, unless \/ until you\u2019ve built sufficient strength. For example, they may say that coordinated strikes would be illegal when many districts are still bound by contractual no-strike clauses (CTA, NEA, AFT, etc. have for decades had a passive, legalistic approach. That\u2019s why there have been hardly any teacher strikes in California over the past twenty years. To repeat a point made earlier: Oakland, hailed as a model of teacher militancy by some \u201cprogressives\u201d, has struck for exactly one day since 1996.)<\/p>\n

8. Finally, it\u2019s time to draw some hard conclusions about the state of the unions, and not just teacher unions. For decades, the unions have operated on the \u201cteam concept\u201d \u2013 collaboration with management and the state. The international union leaderships have, for the most part, supported \u2013 even participated in \u2013 U.S. imperialism\u2019s exploitative international policies. At home, they have urged labor peace, acquiescing meekly to the bosses while turning a mailed fist towards rank and file militants. AFT President Randy Weingarten states this clearly in an open appeal to the ruling class to take the side of union leadership on the impending Janus court case, which if it carries would outlaw dues checkoff. Weingarten said:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe funders backing the Janus case and the Supreme Court justices who want to eliminate collective bargaining with the hope that such a move would silence workers need only to look at West Virginia for what will happen if they get their way. A loss of collective bargaining would lead to more activism and political action, not less. Collective bargaining exists as a way for workers and employers to peacefully solve labor relations.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a pretty clear statement of class collaboration, isn\u2019t it? Weingarten says to the ruling class: \u201cLook out below. We union bureaucrats are what\u2019s standing between you and the wrath of the masses.\u201d In that regard, we should recall that the storied labor mass militancy of the 1930s was largely carried out, successfully, without collective bargaining and often \u201cillegally\u201d. And now the same is true for the red state teacher strikes. That should at least give us pause, and cause to think further about the deal that brought about labor peace at the end of the 1930s, exchanging collective bargaining and a piece of the pie for no-strike contracts, no-strike pledges, and permanent state intervention and regulation of labor.<\/p>\n

Dues checkoff is double edged: the Janus case is part of a virulent right wing attempt to destroy unions, period. And this is something that we all need to oppose. But we need to be aware that if Janus is defeated, the union leaderships will continue with their course of using members\u2019 dues to strengthen their bureaucratic stranglehold and to try to keep their foot on the neck of potential militant struggle. I think that the red state teacher strikes, and particularly their alternative forms of organizing and organization, inside and outside the unions, and their classwide membership and demands, poses an important alternative model. It\u2019s one that we need to try to work with and deepen. We need to all look at ways to broaden and sustain such a model \u2013 hitherto, the model has been inspiring during the upsurge (e.g., the first few months of Occupy) but has not endured. Unions, on the other hand, have been able to consolidate the gains won in strikes and other contract struggles \u2013 but have done so by strengthening a central bureaucracy and by more and more collaborating with management and integrating with the state.<\/p>\n

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_________<\/p>\n

also see:-<\/p>\n

THE CHICAGO TEACHERS STRIKE<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n