North Carolina teachers capped off
two months of unprecedented national teacher militancy as they
rallied 20,000 strong at the state capitol on May 16. During their
one-day “sick leave” strike, the teachers closed down 40 local
school districts with one million students.
As with the previous five statewide
teacher strikes in 2018, beginning with West Virginia in March and
continuing in Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado, and Oklahoma, North
Carolina teachers struck in defiance of a state law banning strikes.
Collective bargaining in North
Carolina is similarly outlawed, but as with the
coordinated strikes in other states where legislation
bars teachers from negotiating the terms and conditions of their
employment, teachers are learning that their capacity to improve
their lives and public education derives directly from their
collective, defiant, and statewide power in the streets in alliance
with parents and school workers rather than pursuing negotiations at
isolated local bargaining tables where school boards are increasingly
starved for funds.
Needless to say, no politician,
court, or legislative body chose to enforce these anti-strike laws,
calculating that punishing poor striking teachers and/or their unions
would only deepen their commitment to struggle against, if not defy,
court injunctions until all threatened reprisals were withdrawn. In
short, teacher power rendered reactionary laws in these largely
“right to work for less” states unenforceable, a lesson not lost
on the broader labor movement. That capitalist law is subordinate to
workers’ power remains the central and guiding principle that
brought unions into being in the first place.
To date, every poll recording
public attitudes toward striking teachers today indicates massive
solidarity with these “lawbreakers”—66 percent support teachers
among Republicans, 78 percent among independents, and 90 percent
among Democrats—a broad reflection of the rapidly changing
attitudes among workers more generally in a national context where
broadside attacks on every aspect of working-class life is under
bipartisan attack.
As with the statewide strikes in
this initial wave, North Carolina’s teachers demanded higher
salaries for teaching and non-teaching personnel and
increased funds for public education. Since 2008, North Carolina
teachers’ real wages have fallen 9.4 percent. As with the other
statewide actions, teachers pointed to public statistics
demonstrating that teacher pay and funding for public education over
the past decade has decreased by at least the same 9-10 percent,
while state laws and budget allocations granting tax breaks and other
benefits to the corporate elite and the super rich have increased in
roughly the same proportion.
Another key issue that has become
integral to teachers’ concerns is the growing privatization of
public education in the form of for-profit charter schools, which
further siphon state funds from public education to private
interests. The corporate-led charter school movement, led by
billionaire “charitable” and “public-interest philanthropic”
groups like the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation, has succeeded in
channeling public funds authorized by state legislatures and local
school districts into corporate hands.
Expenditures for charter schools
have doubled over the past decade and today account for nearly seven
percent of state education funding. Driven by the spurious arguments
that public schools are failing due to incompetent teachers, teacher
tenure, and other reactionary notions with racist overtones, the
charter “movement” has proven incapable of presenting significant
evidence that privatized charter schools achieve better results for
students than the public school system, however much the latter has
been starved for funds.
Re-segregation of public schools
Today, the re-segregation of public
education nationwide is an undeniable fact. African-American teacher
Michelle Burton, a librarian in the Durham County, N.C., school
system, stated bluntly, “The children that are coming to [public]
schools now are mainly children of color, black and brown kids. There
is a correlation here. Funding of public education has decreased with
the rise of more children of color going to public schools. This is a
civil rights issue.”
Indeed, it is. Coupled with a major
increase in neighborhood segregation patterns driven by large income
disparities and inadequate funding for poor districts, especially in
large urban centers, as well as charter school entrance requirements
and selection procedures, public schools today are perhaps more
segregated than in 1954 when the Supreme Court’s Brown v. the
Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ended the “separate but
equal” and racist “legal” segregation of that era.
Class-conscious educators are quick to note the deepening “school
to prison” scenario wherein Black and Latino youth from poor and
racist police-oppressed neighborhoods are channeled through depressing
and dilapidated schools into the increasingly privatized for-profit
prison-industrial complex.
Regressive tax schemes
In Arizona, per-student funding has
fallen 13.6 percent since 2008, while corporate tax rates in 2011
alone were cut by 30 percent. Oklahoma legislators approved multiple
rounds of tax cuts for the rich beginning in the mid-2000s, while
reducing per-student funding by 28 percent since the 2008. Teachers
there just won their first raise in 10 years.
In North Carolina, the corporate
tax rate has been trimmed by more than half in the last five years.
In 2013, it was 6.9 percent; this year it is 3 percent, and the
Assembly voted to drop it to 2.5 percent next year. The cuts cost the
state treasury over $600 million a year, which could otherwise be
going to education. Moreover, over half of the tax savings went to
people earning more than $500,000 a year, while working people
received next to nothing.
Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s
Democratic Party governor, presented a plan to “freeze” tax cuts
for corporations and those making above $200,000, while giving
teachers an 8 percent average pay increase, with some receiving
raises as high as 14 percent. “It is tax fairness for teacher pay,”
Cooper said.
Cooper spoke from the platform at
the May 16 march at the capitol, declaring that low teacher pay
was “unacceptable.” A week earlier, Cooper said at a news
conference that teachers “shouldn’t have to take to the streets
to get the respect they earned.”
A year ago, the newly elected
Cooper vetoed the budget bill passed by the North Carolina
General Assembly, stating that the tax cuts it offered wealthy
corporations were too large, and that it did not offer enough to
teachers and state employees. However, the Senate overrode his
veto. This year, on June 1, the Assembly voted to continue to cut
corporate taxes in 2019 but accepted the governor’s proposal for a
raise for teachers. It remains to be seen whether Cooper will veto
the bill.
AFT/NEA leaders focus on electing
Democrats
With mid-term legislative elections
approaching, the North Carolina governor has been more than willing
to assume the role of liberal teacher advocate. He understands that
the teachers’ struggle has given the Democrats a popular issue to
identify with. Yet there’s no doubt the same “liberal,” as with
his posturing counterparts across the country, will find common
ground “across the aisle” with Republicans when push comes to
shove.
It would be a serious mistake for
teachers to bind their struggles to the electoral campaigns of the
Democratic Party—which has betrayed them countless times. It
oversaw much of the massive defunding of education during the Obama
administration.
Unfortunately, the top leaders of
the teachers’ unions have thrown in with the Democrats once again.
As the summer recess begins, leaders of the 1.9 million-member
American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the 3 million-member
National Education Association (NEA) are making plans to enter the
political arena with the objective of electing “liberal”
Democrats who they argue will ensure adequate funding for public
education. Indeed, the two national unions have announced plans to
join together to run some 400 teachers in the upcoming election
cycle, undoubtedly all as Democrats.
Sounding what she perceived as a
necessary radical note, AFT President Randi Weingarten told Raleigh,
N.C., reporters, “I think a lot about the Arab Spring and I think a
lot about Occupy and how you move from this inspiring moment to
enduring change.” She added, “And you have to take the next step
of electing people who believe in these values.”
Weingarten neglected to mention
that the AFT has followed this failed “elect Democrats”
“lesser-evil” imperative since the early 1960s, when it pioneered
the first major teacher collective bargaining contracts in several
major U.S. cities. At that moment in history, in the context of a
U.S. capitalism still flush from its World War II victories and
absolutely dominant in the world economic arena, funds for
public education were readily available. (Need we mention that this
largely imperialist war of conquest cost the lives of 80 million
people worldwide?) During the Vietnam War “guns and butter” era,
funding for public educating tripled while teacher salaries doubled.
(Need we mention that the United States slaughtered 4 million
Vietnamese?)
Over the recent decades, in a world
context in which U.S. and world capitalism are in perpetual crises,
the ruling rich envision no way out other than at the expense of
workers, not to mention via endless wars for plunder and profit and
every form of environmental devastation.
Weingarten’s mentor in the 1970s
and afterward was the reactionary pro-war racist AFT
national president and New York City United Federation
of Teachers Local 2 president Albert Shanker. It was Shanker
who shackled the AFT hand and foot to the very New York State
legislators who approved the infamous Taylor Law, which prohibited
teacher strikes.
Nicknamed the RAT law after its initiators, N.Y.
State Senate and House leaders Nelson Rockefeller and Anthony Travia,
the law, still in effect today, provided for fining striking teachers
in the amount of “overtime in reverse,” that is, the
forced deduction from teacher paychecks of a day and half pay for
every day teachers struck!
Weingarten’s proclamations about
Occupy notwithstanding, the AFT leadership has always supported the
candidates and party of the “one percent.” And it was Obama’s
Democratic party that engineered the wars in the Middle East aimed at
setting back the Arab Spring in order to re-impose the dictatorships
that the Arab Spring mobilizations sought to challenge in Libya and
Egypt.
In the same vein, Lily Eskelsen
GarcĂa, NEA national president, proclaimed her union’s intention
“to mobilize and keep a focus on legislators who are
now backtracking on their promises.” She added, “We won’t
be fooled.”
Her reference here was to state
legislators in Oklahoma who have already repealed taxes on hotel and
motels that were passed to pay for teachers’ raises. In Tucson,
Ariz., teachers are finding out that due to previously unknown state
funding formulas they won’t be receiving the 9 percent raise that
they were promised when they ended their strike.
Important but still limited teacher
victories
Teachers have won some significant
pay raises for themselves and other state employees. They have
solidified support for their cause by championing and winning school
funding increases, but their grievances have not been fully
addressed. Oklahoma passed its first tax hike in 28 years to raise
$450 million in new education funding, but legislators balked at
reinstating a capital gains tax they demanded. Instead, the state
approved new regressive taxes on cigarettes, oil, and gas that
primarily are paid by working people and not the wealthy.
In Arizona, teacher pay will be
raised 20 percent by 2020, but the legislature has refused to restore
school funding to pre-recession levels. The state has yet to come up
with a plan for paying for the raises, and teachers fear that their
pay hikes will accrue from state budget funds earmarked for Medicaid
and other social services accounts.
It is fair to say that round one in
the emerging national battle initiated by outraged and united
teachers has been a resounding but far from definitive victory for
teachers and their allied school workers and students. The coming
school year will reveal whether a class-struggle leadership core will
emerge, crystallize, and make its mark locally and nationally in
the now radicalizing teacher-union movement.
Oakland teachers invite “red
state” allies
A positive indication of a shift in
this direction is the initiative of the leadership of the Oakland
Education Association in Northern California. OEA leaders have set
Saturday, June 9, for a regional teachers’ meeting at Oakland
Technical High School. Entitled “Lessons from the Red State
Rebellion: What Can California Learn?” the free public forum is
co-sponsored by the San Francisco United Educators, the Berkeley and
Richmond teachers’ unions and the community college-based Peralta
Federation of Teachers.
The organizers have secured an
auditorium with a capacity of 800 to hear reports from their teacher
peers in West Virginia, Arizona and Kentucky states where
rank-and-file teachers, including a number of organized socialists,
played a leading role preparing the organizational and political
groundwork in the year leading up to their successful statewide
strikes.
It is no coincidence that the OEA
leadership initiated this meeting. This often militant union has
engaged in five major strikes over the past decades, likely the
largest number in the nation’s history. The June 9 meeting takes
place in the context of the union’s leadership having declared an
impasse in their negotiations with the Oakland Unified School
District, thus opening the door to the possibility of a sixth strike
in the months ahead.
Oakland school funding is usually
near the bottom of national levels; its schools are highly
segregated, its teachers and non-teaching personnel underpaid, while
its administrative staff is swollen with “professionals” who
believe that their already bloated salaries need to keep pace with
the “private sector.”
The direct and organized cross
fertilization of fighting “red state teachers” flush with
important victories with beleaguered “blue state” San Francisco
Bay Area teachers and staff bodes well for future coordinated
California or nationwide struggles, a first in a state whose
Democrats totally dominate the state legislature and endlessly tout
California as “the fifth richest ‘nation’ in the world.” But
California’s Gross Domestic Product aside, the “blue state’s”
educational system ranks among the lowest in student achievement
levels, and its teacher salaries—relative to the cost of living in
the area—are not much different from that of their “red state”
sisters and brothers.
Need for trade-union-based labor
party
Teacher power exercised in the
streets at state and regional levels, if not nationally, coupled with
their independent organization in the political arena through a
fighting trade-union-based labor party inclusive of the broad labor
movement and its allies among the oppressed nationalities, would
represent a historic and permanent gain for working people across the
country. Such a political class break from the twin parties of
capitalist war, racism, and plunder can only emerge from the kind of
fighting formations we have witnessed among teachers over the past
year.
They have taught some invaluable
lessons that will not be lost on the rest of the organized labor
movement and on the yet to be organized militant working-class forces
that will inevitably enter the class-struggle road in the period
ahead.
>> The article above was written by Jeff Mackler.
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