LA Teachers Can Win. West Virginia Did.

LA Teachers Day Two

By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

The LA teachers strike will likely continue through the weekend as bargaining resumed again today (1-17-19) at LA City Hall. There are powerful forces lined up against the teachers and their union. It is even possible that Los Angeles Democratic mayor Eric Garcetti might join in as the mayor’s office is facilitating the meetings. This would mean the school board and the former investment banker chosen to head it will have an added representative at the table.

Along with these forces are billionaires like Eli Broad, a school privateer and ally of former president Obama and his secretary of education Arne Duncan. Broad is worth about $7 billion and is a big fan of charter schools who, along with other billionaires, developed a proposal to turn 50% of LA’s public schools in to charters. This would be the death knell for public education in LA. Both the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation and the Walton family are behind the privatization of public education in the US. The present superintendent of the LA school board is a friend of Eli Broad and himself a former investment banker.

The teachers union is demanding smaller class sizes and more school staffing as well as nurses and social workers as “L.A. Unified has among the highest concentrations of low-income students in the state, with more than 80% living at or below the poverty line.” (LAUSD).  LA is the second largest school district in the country with 600,000 students. The crisis in education, a capitalist crisis, weighs most heavily on poor families and in particular people of color. Latino’s make up a huge portion of the LA school system

The strike comes on the heels of strikes that spread like wildfire through Republican controlled states like West Virginia Kentucky, Oklahoma Arizona and other areas where such actions are illegal. As we have pointed out previously on this blog, the significant victories won in these disputes were due to a great degree to the weakness of the trade union hierarchy in these states which meant they were unable to hold back rank and file militancy and head the conflict off. While the official leadership were helpful once the movement got going, they did not lead it and initially opposed it. No force in society obeys the law like the trade union hierarchy.

The situation is different in California. The National Education Association (NEA) the largest union in the US has some 300,000 members in California and the AFL-CIO has two million workers affiliated to it. As far as the US goes it is a strong union state and the 5^th largest economy in the world. The Los Angeles Labor Council has over 800,000 workers affiliated to it. As its slogan on its website says, “We are a force in Los Angeles”.  It has the potential to be a force I might add and now would be the appropriate time to use it.

While it is fairly well known that the state of public education is dire in southern and Republican states like West Virginia and Kentucky, California, where the Democrats hold sway and is often referred to as a “one party” state, fares no better. California ranked 38th in quality and 21st in safety in a recent study, and state spending on K-12 education still puts it in the bottom 20 percent of all states. It spends a lot more per prisoner than per student. And we might consider that California has about 124 billionaires living here and privatizing public education to them is simply a chance for some capital accumulation; you can never have enough. Them and the other wealthy people in society don’t need public education.

I am not too familiar with the details of how public education is funded here in the US  but today is the fourth day of the strike and only 84,000 of the districts 600,000 students attended according to the media, and when students don’t turn up, a school district loses money. This is the cruel plan pushed by Eli Broad and others as charter schools starve public schools of funds. In Oakland where a teacher’s strike is also looming, 30 percent of schools are now charter schools,  “In 2016-17, charter schools led to a net fiscal shortfall of $57.3 million for the Oakland Unified School District, $65.9 million for the San Diego Unified School  District, and $19.3 million for Santa Clara County’s East Side Union High School District.” Breaking Point: The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts.

It’s hard to say how things are going to end. The LA school district has a $1.9 billion surplus and union officials have used this as a reason why more money can be forthcoming. My personal view is that the leadership of the UTLA and the education unions in general are in a bit of a bind as in states where the devil incarnate, the Republicans rule, and where state law forbids strikes, workers with no or limited union representation won significant victories. In West Virginia, the struggle produced a 5% increase for the strikers (4% above what was offered) and a 5% raise for all state workers. As I cannot resist writing one more time: What better argument for joining a union tops that?

If the battles in California, with such a strong union presence, cannot produce anything better than that it is not the best advertisement for unionization and places the leadership in the line of fire. It will not be a plus on their record.

The problem is that the illegal activity and prominence of rank and file leadership is a bit of a curse for the leadership of organized labor as it is at present. In times like these rather than look to the power of their members and beyond that, the 14 million members of the national trade union movement not to mention our working class communities, they will appeal to “friendly” Democrats to bail them out. This has been a disaster especially as the most likely candidate the union hierarchy will look to for help is another millionaire and now California governor, Gavin Newsome.

As mayor of San Francisco, a pit stop on his way to the governor’s mansion, Newsome did a great job working with the labor officialdom keeping the lid on any militant activity. When the hotel workers locked out the workers after the union struck, Newsome’s contribution to the dispute was, The hotels now have gotten their two weeks in after the two-week strike….fair is fair. As far as I’m concerned you’re even. Now let’s all grow up and get back to work.” “Let’s all grow up”  Read more here.

In the dispute with the city workers, Newsome (labor’s friend) threatened to layoff 1000 city workers who rejected a concessionary contract. The officialdom stepped in claimed their members were "confused" when they rejected concessions and got the concessions passed. Read more here

There is a mood for change here in the US, a serious mood. The situation has not been as favorable as this for some time. We have 800,000 workers who are not receiving pay checks due to the sexual predator’s desire to build a wall along the Rio Grande. There are thousands more who are being furloughed, a euphemism for temporary layoff.  Thousands of TSA members at airports are working without pay and more and more are calling in sick.  We have a crumbling infrastructure as bridges collapse and dams rupture. I just returned from Paradise and witnessed the devastation the largest fire in California caused there due to climate change and neglect. We have the power to stop this nonsense if we use it.

An article in the New Your Times today asked; why are people still going to work.  I read that article and an American Federation of Government union official’s explanation that we love our jobs and care about giving good service, plus we “take and oath”  A union official of the air traffic controllers said that if members walked off the job in protest the union “wouldn’t condone a strike.”.  This is not leadership in wartime. While there is truth that workers care about the people we serve as we are not like Eli Broad, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and other social parasites, nurses care about patients and teachers about students and the bosses play on that human decency. I worked for a water district and the vast majority of people I worked with were proud of their work and wanted to serve the public well. But in the main the federal workers are at work due to state coercion and violence. To break the law can be costly but when we do it en masse it works. No progress is made without breaking anti worker laws. Unions were built that way and the US apartheid system in the south was broken that way.

The US is a very violent society, that is why the working class is slow to move on the one hand and on the other it is because at this point we have leadership that has the same world view as the bosses, we can’t see a way out.  In this present situation with all that is happening, the heads of an organization of 14 million people who potentially can bring the world largest economy to a halt have nothing to say.  A top UAW official was saying in response to the recent announcement of plant closures that his members should write GM and tell them to keep them open. He lives on Sesame Street I think. All that is going on and they are silent and the call for TSA workers to stop working in protest of the shutdown comes form the liberal academic Barbara Ehrenreich. She worked in minimum wage jobs for three months to get a feel of what working in that environment means. She’s a liberal Democrat and author and was active for some time in DSA.  I certainly have more respect for her than the labor hierarchy that actually has the potential to make that happen and abrogates this responsibility.

Hopefully we will have more about the shutdown but I wanted to share some thoughts about the teacher/educators strikes here in Cali.