Why parents should support teachers
The strikes of education workers in four states against austerity are of larger significance than just a simple uptick in worker militancy, with implications for reshaping national politics and rethinking a major Supreme Court case.
In California, it’s been more than 40 years since a sustained wave of public employee militancy resulted in collective bargaining laws, public workplace stability and relatively strong education unions. So it might be tempting to understand the teacher strikes across the country as less enlightened states catching up with California.
This view, however, misses the bigger picture: the broad revival of a sense of the common good embodied in public education — twin escalator to the American Dream alongside trade unionism. It reflects the resurgence of progressive political activism following Donald Trump’s election, but also pushes it into previously neglected spheres.
The more than 3 million K-12 public school teachers in this country recognize that whatever modest professional status they might enjoy ultimately relies, counterintuitively, on their collective action as workers, coupled with the public’s recognition of their service to society.
It’s not coincidental that these recent displays of worker organization and power took place in “right-to-work” states, home to low rates of union membership, Republicancontrolled legislatures and abysmally poor funding for education. Even under these conditions, relatively weak education unions — plus social media — provided teachers and parents a place to stand together and deliver their message that enough is enough.
Beneath the surface of these events two issues stand out: How we pay for public education. The small government/low tax ideology, pretending to provide benefits for all through “trickle down economics,” has been revealed as a means to further enrich the already wealthy and destroy the mechanisms of advancement for the rest of us. Up for grabs is whether the nascent education revolt will recognize that the path to adequate funding runs through the method developed in the New Deal and revived as recently as 2012 in California with Proposition 30: progressive tax policy. The assumptions behind Janus vs. AFSCME, a case heard by the Supreme Court in February that questioned whether employees who choose not to join the union in a union shop must pay “fairshare” fees. (The court has not yet ruled.) The well-heeled anti-union forces behind Janus understood the long hiatus of collective worker action as their opportunity to decimate public employee union finances. Their view was that the Abood vs. Detroit Board of Education decision of 1977, determining that all workers in a unionized workplace should pay for union representation, was dead.
That view fails to account for the historical insight at the center of Abood: that collective bargaining means workplace stability through peaceful conflict resolution. The disruptions to business as usual in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona validate the Abood decision by revealing what inevitably happens, sooner or later, in the absence of collective bargaining.
If the Supreme Court conservatives understand what they are looking at, they will reject the arguments of Janus.
If instead they rule as expected to turn public employee collective bargaining states like California into right-to-work states, they may ironically be setting up the opposite of what they think they’re doing: a wave of education worker militancy and a shot in the arm for union power.
The role of parents in these recent events cannot be overestimated. Their solid support of educators’ mass actions — because they know their schools have been systematically starved — has magnified the impact of the strikes. Whether in West Virginia or California, the difference made by a united community can be decisive in raising the bar for pay and educational quality. These forces are already turning their gaze to the November elections.