What the Market Basket Grocery Strike Can Teach Educators | Life at the Intersections

What the Market Basket Grocery Strike Can Teach Educators | Life at the Intersections:

WHAT THE MARKET BASKET GROCERY STRIKE CAN TEACH EDUCATORS

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014 BRETT DICKERSON

Market Basket strikers – Credit BBC

In just three weeks, employees of Market Basket,  a regional chain of grocery stores based in Massachusetts, pulled off an upset in the world of labor relations: They successfully drove that company’s board of directors to re-hire their loved CEO who had been fired by other distant family members in a boardroom squabble over control of the company.

This successful strike organized by managers, supervisors and workers has much to teach educators about how the power of numbers can offset the power of the rich.

Managers to part-time workers all strike

In these three reports from NPR, The Boston Globe, and the BBC, what we learn about this extraordinary story of labor success has one very large red thread that runs through it.

The newest workers all the way up to the most seasoned supervisors and managers all took part in the action.

The unity and solidarity of the engaged management and the workers created a force that no board of wealthy people could deal with for long. Not only that, the customers were so much in support of the strike, they temporarily stopped shopping there. It didn’t really matter, the shelves were mostly bare anyway.

The fact of the managers and supervisors being involved meant that the company could not do what they usually do which is make the managers work overtime and supervise temps as to what to do. In this case, when the company tried to hire supervisors, no one from top to bottom knew what they were doing.

Educators Learn About Solidarity, Too

This last year my home state of Oklahoma saw an amazing transformation in the politics of education that has similarities to the Market Basket strike.

The so-called “reform” agenda of corporate investor-owned charters is an agenda developed to accuse and discredit public school educators with harsh but inaccurate scrutiny while insisting What the Market Basket Grocery Strike Can Teach Educators | Life at the Intersections: