Sacramento Teachers On Strike

Teachers and school workers rally in Sacramento, California. (Ian Lee / Jolie Media)

 

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired.

GED/HEO

 

Sacramento (CA) teachers, members of the Sacramento City Teachers Association, are on strike demanding pay that “….reflects the cost of living under inflation, more support for students, and the preservation of their health care plan.”

 

 Along with full-time teachers,  The SCTA represents, “… all part-time teachers and substitutes, adult education, special education, pre-school and children’s centers, school counselors, psychologists, nurses, social workers, librarians and many others in the Sacramento City Unified School District”, according to its website.

 

The demands are not new in the labor movement. The reality though, is that some of the wage gains made in the labor upsurge that has occurred during the pandemic have already been eaten up by inflation. And as far as health care is concerned, we are beyond the period where we can make any significant gains in health care, most union battles on this up to now have been defensive ones, maintaining what we already have. The demand has to be a national health care system not one controlled by insurance companies for profit, what amounts to a sickness industrial complex

 

I am a retired public utility worker with a defined benefit retirement plan and, by most US standards had an exemplary health care plan.  The defined benefit retirement has been almost eradicated in most US workplaces replaced with a stock market-oriented plan. Also, I retired at 54 and now you have to be 67; we are going backwards. And like nurses, teachers are in the forefront of the assault on workers in the US. The time when nurses and teachers considered themselves to be “professionals” rather than workers is long gone. Both these professions have been proletarianized.

 

In the video that accompanied this article on the strike, from Jacobin, one teacher says that we need smaller class sizes. This is nothing new. Not only is it virtually impossible for teachers to achieve the best results in a public-school classroom with 30 or more students and having to deal with all the social issues that come in to this workplace, the politicians of both parties are waging a campaign of school closures. These school closures naturally affect the poor and, in particular families of color.

 

Charter schools, the pathway to privatization, are on the increase. At the Democratic Party state Convention earlier this month, charter school proponents were involved in drawing up the party platform according to one education blogger who writes:

At the eleventh hour, following an eleven-hour meeting finalizing draft proposalsfor updating the 2022 CADEM platform, it came to light that one of its 23 platform “planks”, that of Education, had been tampered with by charter school (CS) industry insiders.

 

The Democratic Party will not defend public education yet the entire leadership of organized labor, including the NEA and CTA are wedded to it.

 

I know readers might be tired of me raising this important point. But the CTA leadership stresses that the CTA is, “The unified voice of educators in California’s public schools and colleges, CTA is a powerful and passionate advocate for students and public education.”

 

It’s good to be passionate and it’s good to advocate for anything we believe in, but to be powerful means something different. Workers’ power lies in our ability to withdraw our labor power. It is not appealing to this or that big business politician or writing to the Dear Abby column. It means stopping the economy or a section of it from functioning. This power in the last analysis is all we have. The bosses have capital, the media, the police, the justice system and the state but we have the numbers.

Labor history in the US is a rich and militant history of heroism and sacrifice. Yes, it also has its negative side, racism, sexism, xenophobia and all the other strategists that the bosses’ have used to undermine our unity and power, but we need to learn the lessons of the positive aspects of US labor history.

 

The reality is that if we stay united on a class basis as workers, if we see that our material interests are all the same, whether our wages are paid by Tesla or the state, we can win. And this mean organized and unorganized. It is not the fault of the unorganized or the 86% of US workers that are outside the ranks of organized labor. It is the fault of the leadership of organized labor.

 

The teachers are members of the Sacramento City Teachers Association (SCTA) affiliated to the state CTA (California Teachers Association) with some 310,000 members. The CTA is also an affiliate of the largest union in the US the National Education Association (NEA) with 3 million members.

 

California is also a unionized state with 2 million workers affiliated to the California Labor Federation which is the state arm of the AFL-CIO. The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor AFL-CIO has more than 800,000 workers affiliated to it and the docks of the entire West Coast of the US are organized. The same with the East Coast. How can anyone claim we are week with that amount of members in crucial industries?

 

Just as an example, the ILWU contract is up in July 2022, this workforce is also under attack. There are contracts up all over the place and organizing drives taking place throughout the US. All of these struggles have to be brought together. We have power, we just have to use it. The ILWU slogan is “An injury to one is an Injury to All” The employers have the same slogan and take it to heart. Does three reader really believe that Michelle Obama hugs George W Bush and claims he is her friend and partner in crime because she likes him? I very much doubt it, they understand the importance of class solidarity and so should we.

 

The problem is not that workers are weak here, it is that the heads of organized labor refuse to mobilize the potential power of the organized workers and hit the bosses where it hurts most, profits. This failure is what drives workers to the right and away from our traditional organizations.

 

In the Sacramento strike, close to eighteen hundred classified school staff — including “bus drivers, cafeteria workers, yard monitors, and custodians — represented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021 are also striking.” This is a positive development and such solidarity has to be expanded throughout the labor movement and in to working class communities.

 

The labor officialdom will whine about the law and that we have to abide by the law. The only force in US society that cares about obeying laws when they want something is the present trade union hierarchy, except when it comes to suppressing the rights of their own members of course. Of course we have to consider the law and the consequences. But we have to mobilize the forces, enough of them, to negate this power. The problem is that the trade union heirarchy stars from a defeatist position. It’s like a boxer deciding it’s best not to hit the opponent otherwise they might hit back. The object is to counter our opponent’s offensive.

 

The US labor movement was built not by obeying laws but by mobilizing to challenge them. The laws of capitalist society are not written for workers they are written to defend capital; they will always use the law against us; they have shot and deported us in the past. Lawyers never built the labor movement, ordinary workers did and the rest of us benefited from it. In fact, it is the future generations that benefit from labor or any other social struggles more than those that engage in them. I have a good life here in the United States because people I never knew fought for it.

 

I am not a dreamer. Of course, the present leadership of CTA, NEA and the entire labor movement will not engage in this battle for our futures, and it’s not because they are criminals or corrupt in the way that we normally use those terms. They are bankrupt ideologically. They view the world the same way the boss does. The boss has the right to make profit no matter what. The boss has the right to own the factory. The bosses have the right to do with labor what they wish. When capitalism goes in to crisis they move to bail it out and we suffer the consequences.

 

We have what we have today, and we are getting less of it, because workers from all backgrounds, not just labor but those oppressed and marginalized peoples who suffered additional assaults in a racist and exploitive society rejected the status quo.

 

The SCTA leadership says that the teachers are on an open-ended strike. This is very similar to what we hear from the leadership and their army of full-time staff in all these disputes, “we will be here for as long as it takes” (full time staff and officials don’t lose money in these strikes normally.). I do not mean any disrespect here but this sort of rhetoric doesn’t phase the bosses. Workers can’t be on picket lines forever and they know it. One of the first communications we got from our employer when we struck was that our health insurance ended at the end of the month. That’s why they oppose a public health system.

 

We are in a favorable period and we have seen strikes like the one at Volvo and the bakery and Nabisco strike where workers held firm. We should also remind ourselves that in 2018-19, teachers struck in right to work states and made major gains, and they did so in opposition to their own leaders. This was possible because in these strikes, the labor hierarchy was weak or non-existent. No union can win alone, isolated facing the courts the cops, and what are at times global corporations.

 

I share the numbers (the members) and the important role organized labor (unorganized too) plays in the national economy. Without us, nothing works. But we have to reject the policies and strategy of the present leadership that have failed us for decades. It means a battle with them, we cannot avoid this. It means replacing them or leading where we can with demands that meet our needs not what is acceptable to the bosses or their politicians.