Organized Labor, LA Teachers Strike Government Shutdown. Opportunity Knocks Again

LA Teachers Rally 1-18-19 (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

It is interesting to read reports of strikes in the capitalist mass media. Yesterday’s LA Times reporting at the end of a week of negotiations and a five day strike by the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) struck an optimistic tone, indicating that a compromise could be reached between the parties. 

As we pointed out earlier, the Superintendent of the LA school board Austin Buetner, is a former investment banker and ally of billionaire Eli Broad who, along with billionaires Bill Gates, the WalMart family and others are leading the privatization assault on public education in the US. The Times writes that Buetner’s “wealthy philanthropic allies” and the “powerful state teachers unions” could use some help from the “outside” referring to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti who is mediating and attempting to bring other government and private entities in to help reach a compromise.

The Times points out that the union team at the table is “thinner” than the school district’s as the union negotiators are also “running the strike”.  If we look at this dispute from a class perspective though, bringing Garcetti in is thinning it further. What we have here is a major clash between capital and labor. Bringing the LA mayor in as a mediator is simply adding to the management team. The same with any state or federal mediators, they are not neutral parties; they are no substitute for working class power.

On capital’s side are the politicians, the police, the courts and the mass media which is sometimes called the MSM or Main Stream Media.  The LA Times is in the last analysis a propaganda outlet for management in these cases. School Superintendent Austen Buetner announced at a press conference Friday that keeping the schools open during the strike is a “solemn duty” and continued, “We have to keep that child safe, We have to give that child an opportunity to learn.… The parent needs to work.”

Buetner is a liar. I could say he is being disingenuous which is the polite way educated people call each other liars, but there’s too much at stake here. Public education is being savaged. The immediate victims are working class children especially the unorganized, the urban schools and inordinately children and families of color, immigrants rural poor etc. The private sector wants to get its grubby little hands on public education for profits and also to control any influence the working class might have over what our children are taught. The Christian right that has a huge influence in US politics is on board with this as well afraid that gays, lesbians, foreigners, and even  Marxists might penetrate the classroom

Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s mayor and Obama pal, Arne Duncan, Barack Obama himself and presidents before him are all on the privatization bandwagon in one way or another. It is the concern for the reaction from the wider working class and organized labor that has restrained them at all.

Charter schools, the first step toward total privatization now enroll 1 in 5 LA students. These schools are non-union and also receive public funds that undermine funding for public schools. With only 85,000 of the districts half a million students attending on Friday, the district lost $18 million that day.

Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, told teachers Friday that they should be prepared to maintain strong picket lines throughout the week and that they have “stunned our naysayers”, according to the Times and he promised that they would negotiate through the weekend to “try to close a deal.”

On the other side, Buetner’s backers “…would question his leadership if he gave away what they considered to be too much in negotiations.”, says the Times. So Buetner is negotiating for billionaires with Garcetti now helping, and the union leaders for the 600, 000 children, 30,00 teachers and other education workers like janitors, cooks, groundskeepers etc. The rank and file know that this is the issue------the future of public education.

What Power Do the Unions Have?

We are always presented with this image of negotiators spending endless hours at the table emerging in the early hours, ties askew, sleepy eyed working to win the best deal for us. I know as I’ve been there more than once and it is a grueling experience and the management will do their best to wear you down in it. That’s their job.  But while the representative at the table is important, it is the organization and power that the ranks have that counts. As one of the foremost bourgeois strategists once said, “Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.”

The unions are powerful, not just the teachers but when we include all of them, and the future of all of them is at stake. A defeat for the education unions would be a defeat for all of us, union and non-union alike, and union leaders always remind us of this during these disputes. But we need more than reminding.

So what shadow can we cast?

From the very beginning, the entire negotiating process is portrayed as a deal, as a compromise process, a “give and take” is how its often described which is a mistake. The bosses’ have no problem only taking which they’ve done since time immemorial and certainly the past decades.

After the rally last Friday, UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl pledged that union negotiators would work through the weekend to try to close a deal the LA Times says. This language is all the language of the salesperson, like Trump’s “Art of the Deal”. Of course when the balance of forces are against you and you have exhausted all avenues you are forced to retreat. An aspect of any offensive has to include the recognition that at times we retreat assuming we have also exhausted all the tactical options we have. But we don’t start there obviously, yet for decades now the strategy of the heads of organized labor at the highest level has been what they sometimes refer to tactical retreats. The entire leadership atop organized labor believes concessions have to be made. The recent educators/teachers strikes in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona just destroyed that strategy.

I am not a teacher or active in a union as a retiree but I went to the UTLA site to check on the updates and see this:

BARGAINING UPDATE: Jan. 19, 2019 — Bargaining continued Friday night and resumed today. We expect to bargain over the weekend, if necessary. No more details can be given since the parties have agreed to confidentiality.

UTLA members should call on their leadership break the confidentiality agreement; it’s not an agreement that works in their favor. I remember having problems with this agreement when I was in my first set of negotiations in 1982. The rank and file must demand that negotiations be open. If that is not possible then there should be rank and file elected observers. But it a trick this so-called “gentleman’s agreement” that what’s said at the table stays there.  The management abides by no such agreement and is never neutral. The mass media is on their side, the TV, the press, the politicians, the police.  No union official should agree to these agreements that keep their members from knowing what is going on. Make all negotiations public.

In the teachers’ disputes earlier this year, all workers in education were included and these disputes were run contrary to everything the existing trade union leadership has done for decades. Charter School teachers were included and had voting rights on decisions as were other non-union personnel. We also have AFL-CIO unions here in California that represent groundskeepers, maintenance and kitchen staff.   Most importantly, these struggles violated laws that would have made a victory almost impossible. Mass violation of anti-union/worker laws are crucial if we are to make serious gains.

There's Never a Better Time. US Workers are Tired of Defeats
The LA and a possible strike by education here in Oakland, are taking place as 800,000 workers are being forced to work without pay due to the government shutdown. There is tremendous support for these workers among the public, not just them but the thousands more that are forced out on temporary layoff.  This shutdown is also disproportionally affecting women and minorities as a result of the Civil Rights movement was increased public sector employment for these sectors of society as it was much easier to continue to discriminate and still is, by private sector employers.

We see businesses offering help to furloughed workers and those workers receiving no pay. The imbecile George H Bush was in a photo op delivering pizza to federal workers and has called for an end to the shutdown. Other sources have called for workers to stop working and pointed to the fact that the TSA workers, very angry at the present, could bring air travel to a halt.

Tragically, the head of the AFL-CIO Richard Trumka and other public sector union leaders offer no serious way forward in this situation. Terrified as they are of their own membership. At a rally of federal workers last week aimed at calming a potential storm, Trumka called on the Trump Administration to “Do your work so we can do ours” One other union leader suggested people take selfies and tweet them in to the cybersphere I guess was the aim. A UAW official suggested similar tactics in response to GM’s announcement it would be shutting plants, he asked members to write to GM. The billionaires just love this.

This is the crises of leadership we face in the labor movement. As I pointed out in an earlier post about this strike, California has two million workers affiliated to the California Labor Federation AFL-CIO. The Labor Federation in LA has 800,000 members.  The NEA to which UTLA and OEA (Oakland) belongs has 300,000 members in California and 3 million nationally. This type of organization united with parents, workers, and the numerous struggles taking place is where our power lies.
Another lesson of the earlier teachers struggles was the infantile bickering and war for jurisdiction between different unions was not present. This is basically the leadership of the various unions competing with each other for revenue in the form of dues money as they see the unions as employment agencies and they the CEO’s.

The previous struggles took to the streets and relied on rank and file working class power.  Please be sure to read How Arizona Teachers Built a Movement it contains valuable information and lessons from that battle.

Also, if you haven’t already done so check out these three videos, short presentations by women involved in the teachers struggles last year.

Kentucky Teachers Stress the Need For Union and Community Links   

West Virginia Teacher Describes Events Leading up to the Strike   

Arizona Teacher Talks About Education and the Recent Strike.

The reality is that the unions are workers organizations. Workers built them through a century or more of heroic struggle. We are obligated to defend them now and expand them. In the eyes of the rank and file member when the class struggle breaks out in to the open, when it comes to seeking allies, it matters not whether another worker is in the AFL-CIO or the NEA, union or non union, native born or immigrant and the old ILWU slogan, An Injury to One is an Injury to All comes alive, takes real meaning, becomes the possession of masses of people.

That this massive potential power exists in LA and its leadership silent makes no sense to the average worker. After I posted an earlier piece making this point a reader asked me why they won’t mobilize this power. I apologize for repeating why I believe this is the case. It is not that they are corrupt in the criminal sense or taking bribes though union officials are certainly not exempt from that in a corrupt society. The main problem is that they have the same world view as the boss. Profits are sacrosanct., the market is god.  Mobilizing this power can only lead to chaos from their point of view and because of this they suppress militant movements from below.

There are 30,000 or so teachers/educators on the streets. These alone would be a formidable force that can be used to leaflet union halls, workplaces, the LA Labor Federation communities calling on all unions to join in this struggle and not limit the call simply to gains in education but the myriad of other issues that millions upon millions of workers are facing from housing to health care, transportation racism, etc. Parents and others can be part of this too. We have the power of numbers, there's more of us than them. Links could easily be built with the federal workers at work and those laid off. A date could be set for a one day general strike in LA and then nationally.

Along with the teachers, there are thousands of activists, socialists, anarchists, and just plain militants who are in and active in unions that should join such a move connecting with workers on the job and pushing their locals to pressure the higher bodies to act and personally leafleting the LA labor Federation. This is the potential power that must be brought to the table as Schultz advises his class colleagues. Even top union officials’ neighborhoods can be leafleted if they fail to act at all. This is a serious class war going on here. The idea that there is no money must be rejected. We know there is money, the problem is it’s not allocated for education and social need.

I was in negotiations in 1997 when a negotiator from the white collar union that was in negotiations at the same time came in to our caucus and asked if we had given the employer the “bottom line” yet. We responded that we don’t give bottom lines because the bottom line is determined by the balance of class forces. 

There is a tremendous anger beneath the surface of US that is more and more bursting in to the open. When it does, it is not always positive, sometimes desperate acts, reactionary acts occur out of frustration, if there is no leadership that can show a way forward. But as we saw with the earlier teachers battles, it is inevitable new leadership will emerge and a new movement is on the horizon.