The victory by West Virginia teachers in their nine-day
strike for higher wages and more secure health benefits has already inspired
teachers in Oklahoma, Kentucky and other states to consider demanding the same
of their legislators.
The wildcat strike was the latest act of public rebellion
against the powerful forces that have taken over these United
States--Republican legislatures across the land that starve state budgets in
order to feed corporate greed, legislators little more than drones for the Koch
brothers and the bills-writing ALEC organization, propaganda-spewing Fox “News”
and a compliant corporate media that generally ignores worker needs or rights.
Add to that list, of course, the National Rifle Association,
which preaches the 2nd Amendment but is really nothing more than the
lobbying arm of a weapons industry more concerned with profits than the lives
of school children.
The teachers’ strike in West Virginia is indeed viscerally
connected to the public reaction to the horrible shooting at the Majory
Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. That shooting in February
took 17 lives and led to massive protests by students there and across the
country against the NRA-spawned madness of our gun laws.
Across the land, people want to know what has happened to
this country.
Here’s a hint: comments by West Virginia Senator Lynn Arvon,
R-Raleigh, to an aide about the teachers’ strike: “The teachers have to
understand that West Virginia is a red state and the free handouts are over.”
Such is the contempt many of our politicians have for
regular people like teachers, who’ve gone years without pay raises and who see
their pensions and health care plans threatened by legislators who brag about
fiscal accountability yet refuse to collect the taxes rightfully owed by
corporations, politicians whose own accountability is only to the lobbyists who
funnel money into their campaign chests.
Of course, the bipartisan agreement reached by billionaire
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice (he is the richest man in West Virginia) and
state legislators—with the approval of the American Federation of Teachers-West
Virginia and the West Virginia Education Association--to end what was an
illegal strike is clearly aimed to make the teachers “look like the bad guy …
greedy and selfish,” in the words of one teacher quoted by writer Will Morrow
of the World Socialist Website.
The teachers indeed got the 5 percent pay raise they
demanded, a pay raise that extended to other government employees such as
janitors, secretaries and law enforcement officers. However, they failed to get
a tax on energy companies to help fund a health insurance program and got
instead a “task force” to look into various options.
To pay for their pay raise, the legislators vowed to cut
Medicaid, funding aimed at repairing ailing state buildings, and tuition
assistance for students at community and technical colleges. In other words, as
West Virginia Senate Finance Committee Chairman Craig Blair said, “there’s
going to be some pain.”
And don’t kid yourself. Blair, Justice and the rest of the
oligarchy controlling the state fully intend that those suffering from that
pain place the blame on school teachers.
What’s encouraging is that the teachers garnered much public
support during their strike. West Virginians knew their children’s teachers
deserved a pay raise and a securely funded health care plan, and they stood
with them despite a mainstream media that here as in most cases either ignores strikes or
portrays them through the prism of the inconvenience they cause. So-called
“liberal” MSNBC mostly ignored the strike despite its national implications and
continued the network’s confounding obsession with finding a Russian excuse for
Hillary Clinton’s presidential election loss.
Ironically the strike took place as the U.S. Supreme Court
was hearing the so-called “Janus” case aimed at stripping public employee
unions of their ability to collect union dues from non-member employees who
benefit from their collective bargaining efforts. The ruling could have
significant impact on public employee unions across the country.
Back in early 1985, your Labor
South reporter covered the historic 11-week public teacher strike in
Mississippi. Teachers from across the state marched on the state Capitol in
Jackson and finally won a $4,400-over-three-years pay raise agreement. However,
in some ways, it was a Pyrrhic victory because the agreement came with a
no-strike provision that would fine teacher organizations up to $20,000 a day
for future strikes.
As the strike in West Virginia wore on this month, labor
historians from far and wide came to the University of Mississippi to
participate in a symposium on the 1930s organizing efforts of the United
Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America union in the South
and elsewhere.
The union worked hard to organize both farm and factory
workers at the height of the Great Depression but eventually focused on factory
workers due to the legal and other difficulties organizing field workers.
“Strikes by field workers who can’t pay dues is costly and a
problem,” said Jarod Roll of the University of Mississippi.
Field workers were often the most in need of union
protection, yet they weren’t protected by national labor laws (thanks to the
Southern Democrats in Congress) and the seasonal, nomadic nature of their work
as well as their poverty and pitiably low wages made it difficult to organize
them into a union.
(To the right, a Depression-era strike banner from the Southern Tenant Farmers Union on display at the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum in Tyronza, Arkansas)
Still, Roll said, one of the most dynamic labor stories of
the 1930s was that of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, a bi-racial
organization founded in the Arkansas Delta which joined UCAPAWA and which won
key victories against recalcitrant Southern landowners.
Like the SFTU, the school teachers in West Virginia had the
deck stacked against them, but they carried the day even if their victory isn’t
across the board. What they did was send a message across the land that people
are getting sick and tired of what’s happening in this country. They’re ready
to stand up for their rights, and the powers that be better listen.
