LA TEACHERS ARE READY TO WALK
EDUCATORS IN United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) voted overwhelmingly in late August to authorize a strike in a vote in which an impressive 83 percent of members cast a ballot.
Now a showdown looms in the coming months between a fired-up union and a labor-hating school superintendent — a showdown that could add important new dimensions to the wave of educators’ strikes that began last spring in West Virginia.
If LA teachers do walk off the job, it will build on the strikes this fall in Washington state to show that the miserable conditions facing teachers and public schools aren’t confined to Southern states run by Republicans, but exist in some of the richest and most Democratic states in the country.
A teachers’ strike would also shine a national spotlight on the network of militants who have won leadership in the UTLA; increase pressure on other “blue state” union leaders to use their resources and legal protections join the rebellion started in states dominated by anti-union Republicans; and expose the ways that even supposedly pro-labor laws are used to keep workers from using their power to strike.
Finally, a UTLA strike would show — just as the 2012 Chicago teachers strike did — the importance of “bargaining for the common good” by taking up issues of racial justice and other community concerns, and linking those to issues of teacher pay, in order to build effective resistance to the divide-and-conquer tactics of those trying to destroy public education.
CALIFORNIA — THE home of the most billionaires in the country, as well as mega-corporations like Apple, Chevron and Disney — also has the nation’s highest poverty rate when cost-of-living is factored in, and ranks 43rd out of the 50 states in per-pupil funding.
More than 80 percent of students in the Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD) live at or below the poverty level. The town that gives us #OscarsSoWhite has a public school system with 90 percent students of colorand class sizes “limits” that can reach 46 for many high school classes.
“My classroom is so crowded with student desks that my students and I sometimes can’t get from one side of the room to the other unless we walk outside and enter through the other door,” UTLA activist Gillian Russom wrote in an article for Socialist Worker earlier this year.
“I teach at a large high school with a sprawling campus which once had 18 Continue Reading: LA teachers are ready to walk | SocialistWorker.org
