Teachers should be defended as bosses attacks on them heat up.

Left: 400,000 teachers on strike in UK 2008

The employers and their media are continuing to launch a vicious assault on teachers. Teachers are not alone by any means but they are an important target as the main teachers Union, the NEA is the largest Union in the country and teachers, although underpaid and overworked like most workers, have some strong job protections. The employers want to do to the NEA what it has done to autoworkers and the UAW.

The media reveals today that disciplined teachers are “Paid to sit, do nothing.” These are teachers who are under investigation for one reason or another. They can spend this time “playing scrabble, surfing the Internet, or just staring at the wall.” I am getting angry just writing this. They can “practice, Yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues, pretty much anything but schoolwork.” The author adds.

The cost of paying these teachers while the investigations take place is some $65 million a year, the article points out. And the blame naturally is the Union, the fact that the teachers have organized to protect themselves from being treated like a shoe or car or any other commodity in the marketplace; they have dared to form combinations to protect their interests as workers. That includes the interests of the children of society.

Teachers are on the whole a most dedicated group of workers. They work long hours, much of them at home. They contribute a lot of their own money for the needs of our children as trillions are handed over to bankers, moneylenders and other leeches on society.

There are too many statistics showing where the wealth is in society for me to use more of them here but even if the cost is $65 million a year; this is nothing compared to what the private equity thieves took home, for really not working. In 2006 alone the top 25 of them earned $15 billion.

This assault on a Union, its members (they want to privatize education) and their limited security and power on the job should be met with fierce resistance. Unfortunately, the heads of the entire trade Union movement in the US accept that they have to collaborate with the employers and offer only more concessions. The employers do not fear them.

In the Bay Area, the Union leadership representing the subway workers (BART) is asking for a contract extension in the hopes the economy picks up in a year. This is their strategy for avoiding concessions. Of course, they’ll say that this is what the members want but will have put forward no alternative and how to win it.

But the bosses are relentless, they have learned through experience that the Union officials will not fight, will not mobilize the power of Labor and go on the offensive----the have only one tactic, retreat; they differ only on the pace of retreat. The transit workers have the power to shut down the entire Bay Area. With a strategy that demanded more jobs, a higher minimum wage, cheaper fares an end to concession, in other words, that was aimed at the working class as whole, the offensive of big business could be driven back and a movement started that would be an example for workers throughout the country. The Union leaders are afraid of this too.

This capitulation by the trade Union leadership in the face of a massive assault on worker’s rights and living standards is what is delaying the resistance movement.
But a leadership that seems entrenched in times of relative calm but has gone long passed its expiration date, will, like rotten fruit, fall to the ground at the slightest breeze.

It’s our job to provide a good gale and some new fruit.