The Collective Of Strike Perspectives
Hollywood paints a rather simple picture of strikes. There are good guys and bad guys. Workers and non-workers.
But the imminent teacher’s strike here in LA is complicated. For one thing, it’s a public service union. So the owners are a complicated notion. The boss of public school teachers are we the people, tax payers: Us. And yet across the table from the bargaining teachers is “Los Angeles Unified School District”. LAUSD is a public agency bargaining on behalf of: Us. Or at least it’s supposed to be. The current Superintendent is not an educator, he’s a professional money manager, expert in finessing trickeries of the stock market. His business is to leverage money to make more of it.
So there’s a lot that is confusing about the layout of this strike. For one thing, public employees are set against public servants. That leaves the public stuck in the middle: Us.
As if it were proper to envision this as a black-white setup, what we have here is (group M (“management”)) folks negotiating with tax payer’s money against (group W (“workers”)) those hired by we the tax-payers. Taking orders from Group M is an intervening, quasi-management group: school administrators – Principals, District Brass, Administrative support-staff. Their hands are not directly on the purse-strings – that would be the bailiwick of elected school board members who vote on a potential contract, and their appointed Superintendent (hedge fund one-time whiz kid Beutner) who negotiates it. But administrators are not UTLA members (they have their own union: AALA). Many, though not all, administrators come up from teacher-land – or at least once did. As of late, many have been trained through a different trajectory, the Eli Broad Institute. Gates has put his thumb on the scale too. There is an ideological management-factory CONTINUE READING: The Collective Of Strike Perspectives – redqueeninla