Looming Strike for Teachers in Ramona, CA

Teachers in the Ramona school district in San Diego County have overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike. CTA officials say that 99% of the teachers participated in the vote, with 75% voting in favor of a strike. The vote does not mean that a strike will necessarily happen, though. Rather, it is a legal requirement before teachers can actually walk off the job, something their union may ask of them in the near future if negotiations with their district fail.

Negotiations are currently stalled, according to the Ramona Patch, in the wake of recent school board decisions to slash teacher pay by 7.8% this year and 9.4% next year. Donna Braye-Romero, president of the Ramona Teachers Association, said “We don’t want to strike. We’ve never wanted to strike. The district is forcing the situation.”

Of course the district is not actually forcing the teachers to strike—they could just shut up and take it. After all, Superintendent Robert Graeff is saying there isn’t enough money and the county Office of Education won’t approve a budget that is in the red. So from their perspective it is perfectly reasonable to “trim the fat” to balance their budget, a claim that is routinely made by bosses in all industries during tough times to justify layoffs and pay cuts. Indeed, this argument is so “reasonable” that the union itself has accepted it, and even conceded pay cuts for the first year of the new contract. Rather than demanding raises, or least maintaining current salaries, with the money coming from the district’s reserves or from slashed administrators’ salaries, the union is merely asking for “restitution” language in the new contract, according to the Voice of San Diego, so that if more money comes in in the future, the extra would go into teachers’ salaries.

California Teachers Association spokesman Bill Guy believes that the Ramona district is intent on breaking the union. This is very likely true. However, that is not a good reason for accepting the bosses’ claims of poverty at face value or for conceding a significant pay cut, something that may very well weaken the union by driving some teachers out of the district. Requesting “restitution” language is itself a significant concession and contributes to the weakening of the union by showing teachers just how weak and conciliatory their union really is.

On the other hand, if the district does not moderate its aggressive stance (17.2% pay cut over the next two years) teachers will almost certainly walk off the job. The struggle would then be the union’s to “win” or lose. If they do walk out, the union will likely end the strike if the district withdraws its demand for a second year of pay cuts, probably even without the “restitution” language. The union will call it a victory, but the teachers will be working for significantly less money than they were before, with little hope of ever making up what they lost.

Fox Guarding Hen House: Mexican Govt Busts Teachers’ Union Boss for Corruption

The head of the Mexican teachers' union (SNTE), Elba Esther Gordillo, has been arrested for embezzling over $156 million from union funds, according to a recent BBC report. Gordillo allegedly used the funds to purchase private property, private planes and plastic surgery.

If the allegations are true (and there is considerable evidence that they are), this would be an enormous amount of money stolen from the teachers, who earn less than $20,000 per year, on average. However, the prosecution of Gordillo probably has little to do with concern for the plight of the average Mexican teacher, for whom the ruling elite have little compassion (except possibly a few crocodile tears during election time). Rather, it is a strategic move meant to neutralize an individual and an organization that have stood in the way of private financial gain.

Gordillo has been an outspoken critic of the government’s free market reform agenda, thus slowing (ever so slightly) the juggernaut of privatization occurring in Mexico, as in public education systems throughout the world. While Gordillo, like her colleagues in the U.S. and other countries, has been relatively impotent in this endeavor, what little efforts she has made are still considered unacceptable to education profiteers who demand complete unfettered access to education tax dollars.  Her arrest is also likely meant to reduce the political influence of her union (she has repeatedly rallied her 1.5 million members to vote as a bloc and used their dues in political campaigns), and send a message to anyone critical of the government’s privatization agenda.

Had the government truly cared about the wellbeing of its impoverished teachers, it would have prosecuted Gordillo years ago. Indeed, she had repeatedly been accused of fraud and embezzlement over the years, but the government chose to ignore the accusations until now. It is curious that Gordillo was arrested only one day after the government enacted major new reforms to the education system.

According to the union, these new reforms could result in mass layoffs and the further privatization of the Mexican education system. One of the reforms, for example, will require teachers to undergo regular examinations in order to maintain their jobs. Considering that many teachers are poorly trained or under qualified, this clearly could result in massive layoffs.

The new legislation also strips away union influence over hiring and promotions and implements merit-based systems for both. According to Reuters, this was intended to halt a corrupt system in which teaching jobs were passed down through families or sold by the union, while veteran teachers were getting cushy paid positions within the union, calling in substitutes to fill in for them in the classroom, and continuing to receive paychecks for their teaching responsibilities. Gordillo was quoted by Reuters saying “either the government bureaucracy sells them [teaching jobs], or my bureaucracy sells them. . . “

The quality of public education in Mexico is not good. Mexican students perform near the bottom compared with other OECD nations. Reformers blame union corruption for the problem and argue that the new legislation will end this corruption, raise the standards of the teaching profession in Mexico and improve educational outcomes for students. However, without providing good quality free or inexpensive teacher training programs, the new legislation will merely throw people out of work without doing anything to get quality teachers into the classrooms. Furthermore, as in all merit-based programs, even the well-trained, honest teachers who show up every day and do an excellent job will be at risk of losing their jobs if student performance data (which is correlated much more with students’ socioeconomic backgrounds and other outside of school influences than it is with teacher quality) does not improve sufficiently.

Union Membership Lowest in 70 Years, Thanks in Part to Unions

Union membership declined from 11.8% of the workforce in 2011, to 11.3% in 2012, according a recent report by the national Bureau of Labor Statistics and is now the lowest it has been since the 1930s, according to the Washington Post. Union membership peaked in the 1950s at nearly 33% of the total workforce. By 1983, that number had dropped to 20%, and today it is just barely 11%.

Public sector union membership (35.9%) is still significantly higher than private sector union membership (6.6%). However, it also saw the biggest losses in 2012, due largely to state budget cuts and public sector union-busting campaigns and legislation (e.g. Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana).

It is easy to blame the economy and politicians, which is what both the unions and the press have been doing, and these both have played a role, but the unions themselves must also take some of the responsibility for their own demise—a natural consequence of their own misguided objectives, policies and tactics.

Let’s start with a simple tactical mistake: letting employers layoff non-tenured or probationary employees. In a union shop, all workers pay dues and are supposedly represented by the union, even if they are probationary and contractually can be fired at will. Unions have typically taken the stance that this is the boss’ prerogative and that there is nothing the union can do about it. Yet the unions have collected dues from these future laid off employees and led them to believe they were supporting them. This, alone, can have a significant impact on workers’ attitudes about unions, particularly among younger workers who are generally the most recently hired and first to be laid off (why join a union or participate when they will only take your money and abandon you as soon as times get tough).

This is probably one reason why union membership rates are highest among workers aged 55-64 (14.9%) and lowest among youth aged 16-24 (4.2%). Of course older workers are also more likely to have already seen the benefits of a union, either through a well-negotiated contract or by virtue of having worked at both union and nonunion jobs in the past. They are also more likely to have higher pay and better benefits than their younger colleagues, which can drive a wedge between them and undermine solidarity.  This has been exacerbated by the two- and three-tiered contracts that many unions have negotiated with employers in exchange for reduced layoffs and less odious concessions for their veteran members (see UAW discussion below).

Another problem is that despite their increasing use of Facebook and Twitter unions are still organizing like it’s the 1950s. They have not learned how to appeal to younger workers culturally or materially. They presume that all workers have the same simple goals—job protection (whatever the cost), higher wages and benefits—and they fight for these goals in the same traditional ways (bargaining, concessions, lobbying, letter writing, buying politicians). Yet they seldom send out organizers to listen to their members (young and old, alike) and solicit their opinions, desires or strategies.

On a broader scale, the unions, particularly the AFL-CIO, have taken a nationalistic (and naïve) approach to job protection in hopes that their complaints about human rights abuses abroad will keep their jobs from being sent overseas. This has been an utter failure because employers move their operations to wherever they can get the cheapest labor and raw materials, regardless of a country’s human rights records. Indeed, this is often seen as an advantage (i.e., cheap workers who are too terrified of prison or assassination to form a union or make demands on the employer). Thus, if Americans want to prevent their jobs from being exported to other countries, they need to work in solidarity with international unions to win improved wages, benefits and working conditions for the oppressed workers of those countries, bringing the standard of living and cost of labor in those countries more in line with our own.

As I write this, Jorge Parra, a General Motors worker from Columbia (and president of the Association of Injured Workers and Ex-Workers of General Motors), continues his hunger strike at GM Headquarters in Detroit to protest the mass firings of injured GM employees in Columbia (and their continued refusal to allow unions in their Columbian facilities). As noble and courageous as Parra’s protest is (he is on the 55^th day of his hunger strike and extremely weak, while comrades in Columbia are routinely assassinated for union activity), the UAW has only paid lip service solidarity to the Columbian workers. Certainly many rank and file members have come out in support of Parra, but the UAW is not authorizing any sort of job action to get their Columbian colleagues their jobs back. Indeed, the UAW is so terrified of losing domestic jobs to Columbia and other lower wage countries that it negotiated a two-tiered contract with the big three automakers (after they slashed 250,000 jobs and received billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout money) in which new hires are paid less than $15 per hour, less than half the traditional wages of auto workers.

Another broad strategic failure of the unions is their increasing reliance on politics at the expense of organizing and job actions. Supporting candidates and campaigns seems less risky than strikes (e.g., no injunctions, fines, jail time, beatings) and more exciting for the union bosses (e.g., wining and dining with the ruling elite). But it is also a phenomenally expensive longshot gamble that pits unions against billionaire bosses and their Super PACs in hopes of getting their guy elected so he might support one or two initiatives that might help workers a little if they happen to pass. It is an incredibly circuitous and unreliable strategy.

Consider the California Teachers Association, which pumped millions of dollars into Jerry Brown’s campaign for governor (and nearly $212 million on state political campaigns over the last decade). All the teachers got in exchange for their donations, phone-banking and canvassing was a CTA lobbyist on the state school board and a threat by the governor to slash K-12 funding again if California voters didn’t approve a tax hike (Proposition 30). Not surprisingly, voters did approve Prop 30, which held state funding at 2011-2012 levels, but did nothing to restore any of the $20 billion that was slashed from K-12 funding over the past 4 years. As a consequence, schools will not have to lay off any more teachers, but there are still the thousands who were laid off over the past four years who will not be rehired—that is, thousands of former public sector union members, many of who no longer belong to any union (and some, who are no doubt still looking for work).

None of these failures, however, are inconsistent with the social contract that has always existed between unions and employers: the employers’ role is to provide jobs and the unions’ role is to keep employees working and profits rolling in (e.g., make concessions and get a quick contract, avoid strikes at all costs). Granted, the unions have always been the lesser partner in this relationship, their status and power dependent on their usefulness to employers. What we are seeing today with the declining power of unions is employers’ recognition that they no longer need the unions to keep the workers in line.

Gates Buying Candidates for Teachers Unions

United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) just had one of its most contested elections ever for its decision-making body, the House of Representatives. 396 candidates fought for 209 positions, with 100 seats taken by rookie representatives, according to the LA Times. Many of these new delegates were sponsored by outside groups, like Educators 4 Excellence and Teach Plus. Another sponsoring organization, Teachers for a New Unionism, is headed by Mike Stryer, former activist with NewTLA, a conservative opposition movement that formed within UTLA a few years ago.

Each of these groups receives funding from free market education reform nonprofits, including the Gates Foundation and each wants to make the union focus more on the “interests of students” (weakening teachers’ job protections and working conditions). They have also been strong backers of Value Added evaluations and abolishing or weakening seniority.

On the one hand, serious union activists and teachers should be concerned that corporate money is being used to undermine their organizing efforts. On the other hand, this really isn’t anything new. Employers routinely interfere in organizing efforts, harass organizers, punish or fire employees who engage in union activities, and bombard them with misinformation about unions. The bosses just hadn’t been so effective at fielding their own candidates in union elections.

At the same time, UTLA veterans and other union bureaucrats and dinosaurs should consider why so many young teachers are either disillusioned with their unions or allying themselves with corporate Ed Deformers. A union that effectively fights for the interests of all their members should have no problem winning younger teachers over to their side or convincing them of the naiveté and self-destructiveness of these corporate alliances. It is true that UTLA must counter an effective anti-union propaganda machine. However, UTLA, like most other teachers unions, has contributed to its own negative image by making so many compromises with the enemy while doing little to support young teachers, who are often the first to go during layoffs.

11,000 Educators Fired in December

Clean Up Your Act Teachers or You're Out! (Image from Flickr, by  emilydickensonridesabmx)

The Great Recession has been officially over for more than three years, but the plunder of the public sector and middle class wealth continues. According to the Department of Labor, more than 13,000 public sector workers were laid off in December, more than 11,000 of whom were teachers or other school employees (see WSWS).

This is unusual. Typically, teacher layoff notices go out in February or March in anticipation of coming budget shortfalls, giving teachers the summer to look for work (or to be rehired, as often occurs when revenue picks up). Mid-year layoffs are an indication just how desperate many school districts are, with states continuing to have large deficits and the feds continuing to do nothing about it.

Indeed, by ignoring the problem, state and federal governments facilitate the deterioration of public education, making it easier to argue that it is broken beyond repair, or that it can only be repaired through privatization. Since 2008, the private sector has hired about 725,000 new workers, while the public sector has lost almost the same number of jobs (again, see WSWS)—a statistic that is largely due to the divestment of tax dollars from the public sector. Obama, despite receiving early endorsements and massive support from the NEA and AFT, has made no indication that he intends to help struggling school districts.

Many cities are shuttering their schools and selling off their facilities or the operation of their schools to private for-profit education management organizations (EMOs). According to the WSWS, Philadelphia plans to close 36 schools. Detroit has closed dozens of schools over the past few years, with former financial manager Robert Bobb attempting to close half the city’s schools in 2011. Many of the closed schools were sold or rented to private charter school operators. Recently, secret leaked documents revealed that Chicago has been planning to close or consolidate as many as 95 schools, with many of them going to private charter operators. New Orleans already has 70% of its students attending charter schools.

As schools close and teachers are let go, the teachers unions lose members and strength, something they seem unwilling or unable to fight. In fact, the social contract union leaders have made with the bosses to keep their members on the job at all costs (not to mention the no-strike clauses in many of their contracts and state prohibitions against public sector strikes) has effectively stymied the unions and is leading to their own downfall. The laid off teachers, however, are free to sell their labor to the highest bidder—Increasingly nonunionized private charter school operators that pay less and require far more work than the traditional public schools.

Chicago Teachers Strike Ends in Defeat for Teachers and Unions

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) voted today to end their strike. 98% of the 800 delegates voted in favor of ending the strike, according to the New York Times, though the union’s 26,000 members would still have to ratify the new contract, which could take several weeks.

The new contract would give teachers a modest raise and prohibit merit pay, but it would also lengthen the work day by 90 minutes and require that 30% of teachers’ evaluations be based on their students’ test scores. The new contract would also reserve half of new job openings for laid off teachers, but only if they had strong ratings based on these test scores.

Virtually everyone is reveling and calling it a victory for teachers and a defeat for corporate Ed Reform. Mike Klonsky called it a “Big victory for teachers.” His brother, Fred Klonsky, said “Most thought it was a win. Few of those I talked to were satisfied. None thought the strike should continue. All mistrust the Mayor. Most know that the fight doesn’t stop here.”

Am I missing something?

How is it a victory for teachers (or students), or a defeat for the corporate ed reform agenda, to accept that 30% of teacher evaluations will be based on unreliable and inconsistent student test data (see here, here and here)? Considering that student test data, also known as Value Added Measures, or VAM, is almost entirely worthless as a measure of teacher effectiveness, it should not be allowed at all. Furthermore, the 30% rule will only encourage more teaching to the test, dumbing down and narrowing of the curriculum, and laying off of perfectly good teachers because they happen to work in low income schools, where student test scores and gains on those scores tend to be lower.

Likewise, how is it a victory for teachers if only half of new job openings go to laid off teachers and only to those who have high VAM scores? What about the good teachers who were laid off from low income, low performing schools? What about all those current teachers who will be laid off over the next five years as Chicago shuts down another 120 schools and converts 60 more to private charter schools? How is it a victory for the union, if they will lose thousands of members as a result of these layoffs? How is it a defeat for the corporate ed reform agenda when they will get another 60 charter schools and a weakening of the union as a result?

Yes, a prolonged strike would have been difficult to maintain and could have cost the union millions of dollars in fines and legal fees if the injunction sought by Mayor Emanuel were to go through, which it likely would. Yes, it would have been difficult to maintain public support. And yes, according to Illinois state law (SB 7), teachers are forbidden from bargaining anything less than the 30% floor they won for the percentage of their evaluations that will be based on student test scores. So, yes, this 30% is certainly better than 50%.

Nevertheless, SB 7 was an attack on collective bargaining and union power. Therefore, by accepting the 30%, CTU is capitulating to state-mandated restrictions on union activities. For the rest of the nation, the message is clear: Collective bargaining does not have to be banned outright, as it was in Wisconsin. It can simply be so hamstrung by legislatively-imposed pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo (e.g., VAM) that it becomes an impotent and meaningless endeavor.

Ending the strike may have been the most expedient tactic under the current circumstances. It certainly is easier, cheaper and less fraught than continuing to fight. And the teachers did halt some of the most onerous concessions that were being sought. However, the 30% should be seen as a defeat, not only because it will cause many good teachers to receive bad evaluations and potentially lose their jobs, but because it will encourage further legislative and legal attacks on union power.

Report Calls for More Teacher Support and Less Testing

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

If California wants to improve student academic performance, it needs to emphasize recruiting, educating and retaining teachers, according to a new report by a state task force, the Los Angeles Times reported on September 9. The task force also rejected making any links between teacher evaluations and students’ standardized test scores.

This latter finding is particularly salient in light of the recent Chicago teachers’ strike, in which the union (CTU) aggressively resisted attempts by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to require a substantial portion of teachers’ evaluations be based on such test scores. Disturbingly, just days before this study was released, the CTA (the state’s largest teachers union) and state legislators agreed on an evaluation “reform” bill that would require student performance data be used to evaluate teachers. The agreement does not exclude the use of student standardized test scores, though it does give local bargaining units the right to collectively bargain what portion of teachers’ evaluations, if any, will be based on the scores, thus opening the way for many more battles like the one in Chicago.

While the task force’s findings regarding teacher recruitment and training make a lot of sense, the state has been moving in the opposite direction through budget cuts that have forced districts to slash or freeze wages, add furloughs, increase class sizes, decrease benefits, increase workloads, and numerous other “stopgaps.” These may help close budget deficits, but they also reduce the ability to recruit and retain the best quality teachers by deteriorating their working conditions and remuneration.

The Task Force, which was created by Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing, was co-chaired by Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond and included researchers, academics, elected officials, district officials, labor leaders, parents, teachers and principals. Its report repeatedly emphasized that more and better support for teachers was needed throughout their careers, not only to improve their effectiveness, but to decrease attrition and improve recruiting potential. It also called for new laws that would ensure schools have “expert principals who provide support for instruction, time for collaboration and planning, collaborative leadership, reasonable class sizes, a trusting collegial environment and involvement in decision-making at the school.”

Many principals are already doing some of these things. However, the collaboration time is often taken up with unproven snake oil reforms and pet projects of district administrators that are imposed on teachers, rather than allowing teachers themselves to decide how to collaborate. Furthermore, to really be effective, teachers need more than an hour or two per month, which seems to be the norm in the districts that have built-in collaboration time.

Teachers’ Working Conditions are Students’ Learning Conditions

While all of the above factors would dramatically improve the working conditions for teachers, improve their status, and decrease their job stress, they would also vastly improve the quality of education for children. For example, the report called for smaller class sizes, noting this is in the best interests of the students. Fewer students decreases the workload for teachers by decreasing the number of assignments to read and grade, giving them more time to provide meaningful feedback on the ones they do assign. Fewer students allow teachers more time to provide one on one attention to children during class time. Smaller classes are easier to manage, allowing teachers to better monitor and intervene in the case of accidents, injuries, teasing or disruptive behavior, thus improving safety.

Despite these obvious advantages of smaller class sizes, most districts have been increasing class sizes due to budget cuts that have forced them to lay off teachers. Additionally, the task force noted that lower salary school districts had 20% larger class sizes on average than higher salary districts, again highlighting the positive correlation between teachers’ pay and working conditions and students’ learning conditions.

With respect to test scores, the task force was not simply buckling to pressure by teachers unions or the influence of the teachers on the task force. Rather, its report identified studies showing that student test data, when used to evaluate teachers, produce results that “are very unreliable and often inaccurate at the individual teacher level.” Yet when pundits, business leaders, philanthropists and politicians like Obama, Arne Duncan and Rahm Emanuel demand that evaluations include such unreliable or meaningless data, they not only demean teachers and undermine their status as professionals, thus harming districts’ ability to attract and retain the best teachers, but they force districts into the untenable position of having to layoff teachers en masse, thus harming students and districts’ very existence. In Chicago, for example, CTU president Karen Lewis has argued that the new evaluation system Emanuel wants to impose on teachers could result in 6,000 teachers, or 30% of the entire teaching staff, could lose their jobs over the next two years.

Chicago Teachers Vote to Continue Strike

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) House of Delegates voted Sunday to reject the latest contract proposal and continue their strike, in a challenge to both the leadership of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the leadership of their own union, who had negotiated the tentative agreement.

The leadership of CTU is seen by many as a progressive, fighting leadership, willing to go toe to toe with their powerful parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), led by Randi Weingarten, as well as powerful Democratic Party leaders like Rahm Emanuel and even President Obama. Indeed, the CTU leadership challenged all of these individuals with their initial rejection of the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.

Yet their most recent compromise tentative contract agreement with CPS sold their members out by permitting student test data to account for as much as 30% of teachers’ evaluations, the WSWS reported today. Any use of student test data is unacceptable, even as little as 1%, because student test data is an unreliable and inconsistent proxy for teacher ability. It can lead to false positives and false negatives, and result in good teachers getting bad reviews and possibly even laid off as a result.

The tentative agreement also gives principals considerable discretion over hiring, eviscerating recall rights for recently laid off teachers, while also slashing layoff benefits in half. (The details of agreement were released Sunday evening).

Bargaining teams and unions often justify compromises with bosses or legislators that harm former or future employees, arguing that their role is to protect the interests of their existing dues-paying members. Not only does this strategy lack compassion, it is also stupid since it undermines the union’s own power. Thousands more Chicago teachers will be laid off in the next five years under the city’s plan to shut down up to 120 schools, resulting in fewer union members. Of those who get rehired by one of the 60 new privately-run charter schools slated to open in that time, most, if not all, will lose union representation.

In an indication of just how far the CTU leadership is willing to go to end the strike and make peace with the bosses, CTU President Karen Lewis plans to force through another vote on the same tentative agreement this Tuesday, without engaging in any further negotiations with CPS. This implies that she intends to ignore the delegates’ concerns and criticisms of the tentative agreement and pressure them to vote against their members’ own interests. She is counting on mounting criticism by the press and the threat of fines and jail to coerce delegates into accepting a bad deal.

Mayor Emanuel responded to the rejection vote by threatening court action against the teachers. According to the WSWS, he said he would “not stand by while the children of Chicago are played as pawns in an internal dispute within a union,” implying that both CPS and the union leadership are the only reasonable parties in the dispute, while the House of Delegates and general membership are crazy for rejecting the tentative agreement. His threat to obtain a court injunction against the teachers suggests that he has lost faith in CTU President Karen Lewis’ ability to keep her members in line.

Emanuel has called the strike illegal (teachers in Illinois can strike on wage issues, but not evaluations) and a threat to the safety of children. This latter argument is particularly cynical considering the district has done little to repair dilapidated facilities and broken air conditioning or to reduce class sizes to a safe and healthy level. He has overseen and encouraged school closures that have only exacerbated staffing and class size problems, thus jeopardizing the safety of children.

His argument that the strike is illegal is only partly true. They are striking over wages, and they happen to be unwilling to make any compromises on that issue as long as the district plays hardball on other working conditions and safety matters.

The issue of the strike’s legality has much broader significance. The ruling class can take away workers’ rights any time they think they can get away with it, as they did in Wisconsin and continue to attempt throughout the nation. Workers’ power lies entirely in their ability to withhold their labor, not in making alliances and compromises with politicians, particularly considering that the politicians are members of the ruling class and have far more in common with other wealthy members of the ruling elite than they do with workers.

Not long ago, unions had no legal standing and any strike could be declared illegal. Workers were often imprisoned, beaten or killed for participating in strikes, yet they continued to use this tactic and win improvements in working conditions. Workers today have the choice to disobey unjust laws and resist oppressive demands by their bosses or continue to see their wages and working conditions deteriorate.

Unions today, however, have a great distaste for strikes and the risks they entail. There have been very few large teacher strikes in the last few decades. The CTU strike is unique in this respect. Still, the CTU leadership has an interest in ending the strike quickly. The leaders do not want to spend time in jail or receive fines or lose their status and influence. They do not want to challenge unjust laws or corporate giveaways or the district’s “right” to shut down schools and give them away to private charter school operators, even if these undermine the union’s power in the long term. Furthermore, they do not want to burn their bridges with their allies in the Democratic Party or their parent organization, the AFT, even if that means accepting less power as a result of privatization and layoffs.

Chicago Strike Update

Yesterday, the first day of Chicago’s teacher strike, 35,000 teachers and their supporters (including hundreds of students) picketed in front of their schools and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) headquarters. 578 schools held pickets, according to “On The Line,” the CTU’s strike website. Today, CTU asked all members to picket at one of the 144 school sites that CPS is trying to keep open. These sites are being run by people from the district office, with scab support from members of religious organizations.

What are the Issues?

1. The proposed contract put forth by CPS provides a nominal pay increase that does not adequately compensate teachers for the extra work required by the implementation of the Common Core Standards (CCS) and the new evaluation system, let alone cover the cost of inflation. Furthermore, CPS is not offering sufficient teacher training to implement the new curriculum, forcing the teachers to do all the training on their own and at their own expense.
2. A new evaluation system is being imposed from the top down that is based heavily (25%) on student standardized test scores. This system could result in 6,000 layoffs over the next two years, causing a severe teacher shortage and the loss of thousands of excellent teachers.  Student test data correlates very weakly with teacher ability and even then it is only consistent when averaged over three years and only for teachers at the extremes of quality (the very best and the very worst). For the majority of teachers the data is inconsistent and meaningless. If used yearly or every two years it would likewise lead to inaccurate results, causing many good teachers to get bad reviews and some mediocre teachers to get good ones.]
3. The contract provides no additional resources for the health and safety of the children. The board has disregarded teacher concerns about air-conditioning and inadequate staffing levels. It should be remembered that 750 people died from dehydration and heat stroke during the Chicago heat wave of 1988. Some Chicago teachers have documented classroom temperatures soaring into the 90s.
4.  A fair recall procedure needs to be codified in the new contract so that teachers who were laid off over the past few years get rehired to cover the longer school day. CPS imposed a 90 minute longer school day and backed off demands that existing teachers work those extra 90 minutes without compensation. Instead, they agreed to rehire laid off teachers, but have yet to propose a fair and reasonable system for doing this.

Most New Jobs Low Pay, Despite Unions & College Degrees

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Studies indicate that those with college educations are more likely to have jobs and earn more money in those jobs than those who lack a degree. Similarly, union workers tend to earn more than workers in similar jobs who lack union contracts. Yet the majority of jobs lost over the past few years were in the middle range of wages, while most of those added during the recovery have been at the lower end of the income range, according to a new report from the National Employment Law Project, suggesting that neither degrees nor unions provide the same security they did a generation ago.

The report examined 366 different jobs covered by the Labor Department, dividing them into three groups based on average wages. The middle group, which included jobs in manufacturing, construction and information, with wages ranging from $13.84 to $21.13 per hour, accounted for 60% of the job losses between 2008 and 2010, the New York Times reported. These same fields made up only 22% of the job growth, and higher-wage jobs, with wages ranging from $21.14 to $54.55 per hour, made up only 20% of the job growth. The bulk of the job growth during the recovery (58%) has been in the lowest wage occupations (e.g., retail sales and food preparation), with hourly wages ranging from $7.69 to $13.83.

Since 2001, lower-wage job growth has been 8.7%, while mid-wage jobs have declined by 7.3%. According to Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, worker productivity in the U.S. has risen by 80% over the past 40 years, while wages have declined by 11%. This has been a boon to the bosses, who have been able to extract even greater profits from their workers. Greater productivity means more widgets per hour per employee. This would benefit capitalists even without cutting wages. However, they have also downsized, getting fewer employees to produce the same or more widgets, without raising wages, resulting in a downward spiral of both working and living conditions for the majority of American workers.

Over the past 40 years, union membership has declined by 50%. This is part of the problem. Union workers do tend to earn more than their nonunionized counterparts, while regions with high union membership also tend to have higher wages for other workers in the area, even the nonunionized workers. Rising health care costs have taken a cut out of workers’ compensation packages (at least from those who are lucky enough to get health benefits). Outsourcing is another cause of both declining union membership and wages, as workers find themselves accepting lower wages just to keep a local job.

Yet it is not accurate to blame these problems entirely on the capitalist class, though its members are certainly the driving force and sole beneficiaries. The mainstream union leadership has all but given up unions’ two main sources of power—organizing and striking—in exchange for the safer, easier and more comfortable tactics of lobbying and hobnobbing with the bosses and politicians, thus hastening the demise of unions and losses for workers.

The unions have also taken the strategically stupid tactic of valuing job protection/creation over compensation and working conditions, thus contributing to the downward spiral of wages. This was perhaps best exemplified by their Detroit compromise/sellout, in which the UAW accepted a two-tiered wage and benefits package giving new workers salaries that were half what autoworkers had traditionally been earning, all in exchange for an agreement by autoworkers to lay off fewer workers.

While being jobless certainly sucks, having a job that kills or injures or keeps one living in poverty is not much better. Unfortunately, most Americans accept that jobs are the only solution to the problem of feeding and housing ourselves. Thus, when Romney or Obama promise more jobs, people cheer, ignoring the quality of job, whether it is low wage, high stress, degrading to the soul or the environment.

Yet if worker productivity has really increased by 80%, then why not let the workers work 80% less for the same wages or increase their wages by 80%, thus lower the wealth gap or the number of unemployed workers? Certainly not a revolutionary idea (the bosses would still own the means of production and the employees would still be at the mercy of the bosses to keep them on the job and pay them), but one that would be justifiable considering they are the ones whose productivity has increased.

This kind of thinking is alien to both the bosses of the workplaces and the unions. Workers are seen by bosses as a means to an end: pay them $5 for a product or service that can be sold for $20 and pocket the profits. Increased productivity means only one thing to them: they get to pocket even more of the profits.

Bosses and employees truly have no common ground. The bosses have the power to hire and fire, set wages and working conditions, speed up, layoff, shut down and outsource. Employees are dependent on bosses, both to offer jobs in the first place and to pay wages, since the only thing they have to sell is their time and their bodies and minds, and this is the only way they have to put food on the table. So if the boss wants to keep all of the rewards of increased worker productivity, the workers can either accept it and hopefully keep their jobs and current income, or risk being replaced by striking for more.

The union bosses actually have interests more in line with the workplace bosses. Laid off workers do not pay dues, thus cutting into the pool available for the wages and benefits of the union leaders. A strike is risky for the union bosses, not only because the pool of dues paying members could decline, but because the union itself could be cut out of the picture. If they lose the right to collectively bargain, the union leaders could end up unemployed themselves. Thus, protecting jobs and collective bargaining (through lobbying and campaign contributions) become far more important than protecting working conditions and compensation for the workers (through organizing and job actions). The former keeps the union leaders materially comfortable, while the latter is just a lot of work and risk for someone else’s benefit.