What LA Teachers Have Already Won
The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), the city’s teachers union, has now reentered negotiations with a school board chastened by a strike that has shown the movement’s political power in massive demonstrations with community members and parents.
Los Angeles teachers have become a beacon for the rest of organized labor.
The energy of the “Red for Ed” teacher walkouts last spring in West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, and elsewhere was channeled into electoral activity by both the AFT and NEA, with an unrelenting refrain that achieving the demands that had led angry teachers in those states to strike could only be made by electing friendly politicians. UTLA’s strike has shown, as did Red for Ed walkouts and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) 2012 strike, how mobilizations and direct action nurtured with an eye to building community and parent support are far more effective than an exclusive focus on electing “friends.”
Though incremental gains may have been possible in recent decades, even with a largely passive membership, a narrow definition of members’ interests to bread-and-butter issues like wages and no more, and a hierarchical organizational structure, teachers unions have been unable to win meaningful economic gains, let alone stanch deteriorating working conditions, for at least a decade. Capitalism has changed, radically; the unions have not. Both Democrats and Republicans have supported policies of austerity like privatization and union-busting, which have led to the well-documented transfer of wealth and power from working people to wealthy elites. The idea that education is a market that has to be opened to profit-making is central to this offensive of wealthy elites to overturn social and political gains of the past fifty years.
The Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) assertion that money does not exist to fund the union’s demands is based not just on the district’s unwillingness to part with its reserve fund of nearly $2 billion but on the false premises of austerity, claiming scarcity for the poor but unlimited resources for CONTINUE READING: What LA Teachers Have Already Won