Rahm vs. Teachers

Before he was elected, Rahm made no secret of his desire to smash the ability of Chicago teachers to have a voice in their workplace. His campaign rhetoric was loaded with anti-union sabre-rattling as well as heaps of praise for privatization/charters. He garnered large swaths of business support with "tough" statements threatening to neutralize the influence of teachers over their own work conditions. His tone was bellicose and uncompromising. This is, after all, the same person who publicly said "fuck the UAW" and called left-leaning supporters of the Democratic Party "fucking morons". So, when you think about it, all of Rahm's anti-teacher baggage was to be expected, given his background in the corporate world and Chicago machine politics. His tenure in the Obama Administration, notable for its glowing embrace and ambitious extension of Bush's failed education policies, did little to assuage fears that Rahm would come down hard on teachers as mayor of Chicago.

But the most recent assault on Chicago teachers is a low blow, even for Rahm.

On labor day, no less, Rahm and Co. engineered a stunt that resulted in 3 CPS schools allegedly voting to waive the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) contract. Rahm (and the virulently anti-union big Chicago media empires like the Tribune) have lauded this as a huge step forward for "school reform". Glowing endorsements of these "courageous" teachers have surfaced all over the business-friendly media landscape in Chicago. What's going on here?

Let me fill you in on the background: The CTU is 30,000 strong, and has a contract with CPS in place which includes a clause that enables particular schools to waive aspects of the contract if the members vote to do so. Rahm ran for mayor pledging to extend the school day in Chicago without paying the teachers a dime for their increased work day. Of course, when workers are unionized into a 30,000 strong union, you can't just push them around the way that charter school administrators push around their non-union personnel. Unions are organs of workplace democracy that give workers a voice and the power to force bosses to listen. So, naturally, Rahm understood that he wouldn't be able to persuade the teachers to increase their work day substantially without paying them for the extra work they'd be doing. He understood that he'd have to ram it down their throats; negotiation, he must have thought, would be a waste of time. Of course, the teachers still have a potent weapon to resist his onslaught: the ability to shut down the entire CPS system with a 30,000-strong teachers strike. So, in the uncompromising, strong-armed manner for which he is infamous, Rahm used his Washington-insider connections to push through a bill in Springfield that legally restricts the right of teachers to go on strike. This doesn't, strictly speaking, mean that the teachers won't still strike; many public sector strikes are technically illegal. But it gives Rahm and his corporate allies yet another weapon in their union-busting arsenal. Succinctly put: Rahm wants to force the teachers to work longer hours for less pay, and, naturally, the teachers want, god forbid, to be compensated for the work that they do. Of course, teachers already do a large amount of uncompensated labor (e.g. grading, lesson-planning, etc.) and many contribute large amounts of their own money in order to purchase necessary school supplies for their students. They're already sacrificing a great deal. If there was a shred of justice in this system, the CPS teachers would first get fully compensated for the unpaid work they're already doing, and only then would a conversation about extending the school day take place.

It is in this context that we must understand Rahm's recent stunt. What happened was that Rahm and his allies engineered a "vote" among teachers at 3 CPS schools to extend the workday and thereby waive the CTU contract. From Rahm's perspective, this is tantamount to "courageous" teachers willingly accepting a lengthening of their workday for the sake of the "greater good". In his ideal world, all of the CTU would simply roll over and work longer hours. This would, of course, fix all of the social ills of our society, and puppy dogs and ice cream would float down from the sky.

Now, aspects of Rahm's position appear to have merit if you know nothing about the political context, or the concrete details of the "votes" (which I'll get to in a moment). And, predictably, this event has been given a context-free, tendentious portrayal in the business-friendly Chicago media. But, situated in the context of a general assault on working class living standards, and a particularly focused and dogged attack on public school teachers, it's clear enough that this is little more than a bid to undermine the CTU's ability to resist the coming onslaught from above. Despite all of the soaring rhetoric about "reform", this move has little to do with improving education as such.

But what about the details of the votes? Every day, more and more damning facts have come to light. First off, CPS had to bribe the teachers in order to get the votes they needed. They offered teachers increased compensation, and in some cases I'm told that teachers were offered iPads and other electronic goodies for their classrooms. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars per school in increased compensation. Of course, this is only 3 out of 600 schools in the system. If CPS has the money to increase compensation no a system-wide scale, why are they crying poor and demanding that teachers accept longer hours for zero pay in the first place? Second, there is also evidence that teachers and other staff were under intense pressure from above to vote the way that they did. In addition, there is reason to think that protocol (as outlined in the legally binding CTU contract) may not have been properly followed, throwing into question the legal basis of the whole stunt.

Still, set that aside. Suppose these 3 schools really did have bottom-up, teacher-driven elections, and suppose that they did vote to extend their workday for increased compensation packages. What would this show?

It's unclear. This only 3 out of 600 schools. That's 0.5% of the CPS system. Since when does a 0.5% vote tally on anything signal a major news event? And if the teachers did willingly accept longer hours for increased pay, doesn't that cast doubt on the whole "work longer, get paid the same" argument put forward by Rahm and his minions? As I said above, if CPS extended the increased compensation on a system-wide scale, they'd already be on their way to giving the teachers what they've asked for in terms of raises and increased pay for increased work hours.

But these facts, inconvenient though they may be for Rahm, aren't going to slow down the assault on teachers. Only increased struggle can stop the onslaught. Sooner or later, Rahm will provoke a showdown in a bid to crush them once and for all. What our side needs to do is prepare patiently for this by building community support, building solidarity among the working class, and educating potential allies about the power politics playing out here. Rahm's aim, itself part of a national (global, in fact) political/economic trend, is to crush the bargaining power of public sector unions in order to push through cuts and austerity. Rahm is merely doing what the Scott Walkers and the Georgios Papandreous of the world have been doing for months. Through Tax Increment Financing schemes (basically huge slushfunds controlled by the mayor that are funded by skimming revenues from property taxes), he's continuing to funnel money to unaccountable corporate firms who need "inducements" and "incentives" to do business in Chicago. But Rahm and the city machine can't be bothered to give the teachers the pay they deserve or treat educators with respect. The priorities are clear.

Should the school day be lengthened in Chicago? Perhaps. It's not the silver bullet that Rahm makes it out to be, and it won't fix the structural social and economic problems that produce educational inequalities in the first place. But maybe it would do a bit of good and add some marginal benefits to the education system in Chicago. I'm not in a position to say one way or the other. But this much is clear: whether not the day should be lengthened should be decision that educators make themselves, democratically, in consultation with community groups and parents. It should not be decreed from on high by political cheerleaders for the privatization and corporatization of education. And should teachers be asked to work longer hours, they absolutely must be compensated for doing so. Moreover, as I say, teacher should get paid for all of the extra labor that they already perform before they are asked to do more uncompensated work. One has only to recall that many Democrats, Obama included, defended the bonuses raked in by bank bailout recipients to see the duplicity at work here. These robber barons, we were told, "earned" every dollar of compensation they received. Without such high pay, the old argument goes, these "exceptionally talented" simply wouldn't work in finance and the company would not be able to compete. The astronomical bonuses were necessary to motivate the "talented rich" to do the great things they do (e.g. like wrecking the global economy for a generation). But, you know, when it comes to rank and file educators, they're overpaid at $40,000/yr and should be worked much harder for less money, and so on...

One final thing. If I hear another oblivious liberal from somewhere outside of Chicago tell me that it "must be cool to have Obama's right hand man as mayor" I think I may have to puke on their shoes. First off, Rahm is a right-winger, even by the tepid standards of the Democratic Party. Second, his old "boss" is just as bad as he is. Here's an excerpt from Obama's Labor Day speech:

"When union workers agree to pay freezes and pay cuts, they're not doing it just to keep their jobs, they're doing it so that their fellow workers, their fellow Americans can keep their jobs."

"When teachers agree to reforms on how schools are run, at the same time they're digging into their pockets for supplies for those kids, they do so because they believe every child can learn. They do it because they know something that those seek to divide us don't understand. We are all in this together. That's why those crowds came out to support you in Madison and Columbus. We are one nation. We are one people. We will rise and we will fall together."

Translation: workers must accept living standard cuts because otherwise "we" (by which he means the government and the ruling class) will be "forced" to lay them off. It's not as if there are any other options here... like taxing the rich, ending the wars, and rebuilding US infrastructure with a major public works plan. Yes, Obama and the ruling class are literally "forced" to either push down living standards or fire workers and drive up unemployment even further.

And how about all of this "we're all in this together" rhetoric? It's funny, it only surfaces when the ruling classes need something from the rest of us. When they're banking, I don't remember them calling me up talking about how we're all in it together as far as the profits are concerned. And I don't recall hearing this "we rise and fall together" line when Obama was extending the Bush tax cuts at the same time that he slashed spending on health care, education and public transportation. If we're "all in this together", why doesn't he shield workers from all cuts by raising the marginal tax rate and ending the costly imperial ventures abroad? Because Obama is for Wall Street, not the jobless. He represents the ruling class, not the people.

Take note here. When it comes to cuts and sacrifices, suddenly "we're" all in it together. Suddenly gaping inequalities, racial hierarchies and oppression all disappear and, for the purposes of distributing sacrifices and burdens amongst the masses, we're one big happy family helping each other out. But when it comes to record profit margins, there is no "we" to speak of. When it's a matter of big private profits, Obama prefers to stick to the Reaganite refrain that the rich deserve their wealth because, well, "they've earned it". He makes sound as if the rest of us, working ever longer hours for stagnant wages to make this society run, are the ones getting a free ride. It's a simple formula: prosperity for the few, austerity for the many. And Democrat and Republican alike endorse it through and through.

Read More...

Summary only...

Does GM have a "Union Problem"?

If only. The UAW is a toothless, invertebrate shell of what it once was. Its leadership is a paradigm example of everything that's wrong with the labor movement: lifeless top-down bureaucratization, collaborationist "business unionism", lack of rank and file organization, etc.

Of course, that's not the way the bourgeois press sees it. No matter how weak, ineffective and powerless the union may have become, it is always the favored bogey man when the auto industry is discussed. This recent NY Times piece is no exception. The basic line argued in the article is that GM is "turning auto making on its head" by producing a sub-compact car, employing fewer workers and paying them half of the union wage. These measures are all billed as progressive and innovative, of course. And, according to the article, they even have the added "benefit" of having won the assent of the UAW who, we're told, is finally willing to "cooperate". Freed from the chains of workplace democracy, GM has finally found a way to spread its wings and do things its own way.

This "progressive" narrative draws on a number of false premises. I'll discuss only two.

The first is that higher wages for auto workers means worse cars (hence why lowering the wages of the workers in the production of the sub-compact car makes for a "better" product). The second is connected to the first: it is implied that the union impedes innovation and hinders the production of world-class cars (hence GM's foray into the hitherto unexplored US sub-compact market was only possible given the newly "cooperative" attitude of the typically stubborn UAW).

The "evidence" typically marshaled in defense of the first premise is that companies other than the Big Three make "better" cars because they aren't handicapped by a union that wins benefits, pensions, and decent wages for its members. This is, of course, false. European car manufacturing is a heavily unionized industry. In Germany, workers are paid more than their counterparts in the US and get 8 weeks paid vacation each year. And French auto workers unions have been known to show a bit of militancy now and again. Likewise, the Japanese auto industry is heavily unionized as well, winning health benefits and decent wages for its members while the owners of Japanese auto firms continue to do quite well. Korean auto workers are also unionized, as you may recall from this struggle a few years back. Note that none of the hacks in the US press who rail against the UAW ever make the argument that European and Japanese automakers are handicapped by their unionized workforces. That's because they aren't. (I note in passing that a similar phenomenon occurs in arguments about education policy, where pro-corporate anti-teacher zealots blame US teachers unions for everything wrong with public education while pointing (often unknowingly) to successful European schools that are, in fact, unionized). That these facts about auto unions elsewhere in the world aren't ever discussed speaks to the distorted picture propagated by our corporate-friendly media.

The second false premise is even more far-fetched than the first. It is more insinuation than cogent argument, since there is no plausible mechanism that could possibly explain how the members of the UAW are directly responsible for investment, design and marketing decisions made by higher ups. As everyone knows, workers don't make those decisions: they do what they're told. As with any other capitalist firm, GM and others are anything but internally democratic. They are hierarchically organized firms, with investors and their surrogates perched at the top, and workers at the bottom. All of the major decisions about investment and production (e.g. whether to close operations, whether to cut back, what to produce and how to market it, etc.) are made by the representatives of the ownership of the corporations in question. Just think about it: when Ralph Nader criticized GM for making unsafe cars in the 60s, it wasn't as if he was indicting the auto workers on the shop floor. He was clearly criticizing those who made the decision to place profit above the needs of human beings, i.e. the owners of the auto corporations. Were the UAW to ask for serious decision-making power in these matters, it would be sharply rebuffed. Yet, despite being denied the power to influence the design of automobile production, auto workers singled out and blamed for the bad design and business decisions made by their employer.

That is, they are blamed for doing things they are denied the power to do. It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" kinda deal. It's nothing more than a lazy externalization of culpability by the capitalists who own the auto industry.

So once you set aside these two false premises underpinning the ruling class narrative about union sabotage, what's left?

Well, for one, we're left with no good argument against the UAW. All we're left with is naked class interests. On the ruling class side, it's obvious why the UAW is "bad". It cuts into profits, it is still strong enough to at least attenuate the rate of exploitation of its workers, and so forth. It would be much better from the perspective of auto Capital if the workers were divided, atomized, and unable to collectively bargain at all, since this would make for much lower wages, no benefits, no pensions, etc. And, of course, every cut to workers pay is an earning for the ownership. Keep in mind we're not talking about folks that are barely making ends meet. We're talking about multi-millionaires fighting tooth and nail to make a couple extra million by screwing workers.

On the working class side, however, the situation is much different. In it's heyday, the UAW was able to set the bar for the entire US working class in terms of wages, benefits, pensions, and job security. Auto workers were able to achieve a modest level of economic security, retire at a reasonable age, and enjoy reasonably good health benefits (though, to be sure, US-style for-profit health insurance is perilous even if you have "good" benefits). Moreover, shop floor safety was dramatically increased while the employer's tyrannical control of time was challenged by workers. From the perspective of any working person, these are all extremely good things to have. Of course, all of these benefits depended upon the strength of the union to exact these compromises from the ownership. None of these gains for workers were won with sweet-talk, moral suasion, or "cooperation". They were won by way of struggle. Thus, when the strength and militancy of the union recedes, so does it's ability to defend the decent wages, benefits, and so on that it won in the past. Thus, we see that the so-called "American Dream" of earning some measure of relative economic security as a worker rests precariously on an unstable compromise between capital and labor.

The same is true of the welfare state writ large: the reformist, Keynesian phase of capitalism that persisted from 1945-1973 was the result of strong labor movements combined with high levels of capital accumulation. When the global economic system went into crisis in the early 1970s, the ruling class pulled out of the compromise and began an all-out broadside against labor in an effort to drive wages down to restore profit rates to pre-crisis levels. Smashing labor was only one prong of this ruling class strategy that would come to be known as "neoliberalism". Other prongs included slashing business regulation, privatization, liberalizing trade, cutting taxes for the rich, smashing the welfare state, and cutting social expenditure.

The bottom line here is this. Capitalist production is production for profit. Not profit for all, but profit for capitalists. Thus, when inevitable contradiction surface (e.g. between the need for stable working-class employment and the ruling class need for high profitability), we shouldn't be surprised. Nor should we assume there are simple solutions that can resolve such contradictions within the basic framework of capitalist production. In such cases we need to think outside the box: What should the basic function of the auto industry be? What should it's basic goals be? Who should get to decide? Any honest appraisal of these questions leads us quickly out of the ideological straitjacket imposed by capitalism. For example, if society has an interest in the production of hybrid buses and wind turbines that can be manufactured by auto workers... and auto workers have an interest in secure employment with decent wages and fair conditions.... why should there be any need for capitalists at all? Why can't society and auto workers decide, together, and without the interference of the vested interests of capitalists, how to move forward in a way that works for all concerned parties? Put in this way, it becomes obvious that the owners are nothing more than tyrannical parasites who perform no useful social function. After all, why couldn't workers elect managers and self-govern production themselves while determining pay-scales collectively through some democratic procedure? Answer: because this means dethroning the capitalists who own the auto industry. And no ruler wants to be removed from their perch- they won't go without a fight, no matter how much everyone else wants them gone.

The moral of the story here can be reduced to a left-wing slogan popularized during May 68 in Paris: "The boss needs you, but you don't need the boss" (see above for the picture).

Read More...

Summary only...

How Billionaires Rule Our Schools

The cost of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy—where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision—investing in education yields great bang for the buck.

Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children (only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field.

Read the rest here.

Read More...

Summary only...

NOT Wating for "Superman"

Here.

Read More...

Summary only...

Must-Read Rip of "Waiting for Superman"

I really encourage everyone to read and widely disseminate the article posted below entitled "The Myth of Charter Schools". Read it here.

The majority of what's out there re: education right now is misinformation, and I think Diane Ravitch is absolutely right that Waiting for "Superman" is a massive P.R. coup for the movement from above to crush public education:

Waiting for “Superman” is the most important public-relations coup that the critics of public education have made so far. Their power is not to be underestimated. For years, right-wing critics demanded vouchers and got nowhere. Now, many of them are watching in amazement as their ineffectual attacks on “government schools” and their advocacy of privately managed schools with public funding have become the received wisdom among liberal elites. Despite their uneven record, charter schools have the enthusiastic endorsement of the Obama administration, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Dell Foundation. In recent months, The New York Times has published three stories about how charter schools have become the favorite cause of hedge fund executives. According to the Times, when Andrew Cuomo wanted to tap into Wall Street money for his gubernatorial campaign, he had to meet with the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a pro-charter group.

Dominated by hedge fund managers who control billions of dollars, DFER has contributed heavily to political candidates for local and state offices who pledge to promote charter schools. (Its efforts to unseat incumbents in three predominantly black State Senate districts in New York City came to nothing; none of its hand-picked candidates received as much as 30 percent of the vote in the primary elections, even with the full-throated endorsement of the city’s tabloids.) Despite the loss of local elections and the defeat of Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty (who had appointed the controversial schools chancellor Michelle Rhee), the combined clout of these groups, plus the enormous power of the federal government and the uncritical support of the major media, presents a serious challenge to the viability and future of public education.

Importantly, we cannot challenge this movement to corporatize education by voting Democrat. The Democrats, as nobody could fail to notice right now, are behind this movement 100%. This is not a hold-over from days of Reagan, Bush, and Gingrich: this is a Democrat project now. Voting isn't going to solve this problem: direct intervention by independent social movements is the only way to alter the political landscape here.

Just ask yourself this: how is our for-profit health care system working out for you? How do all of our "market based", purportedly "efficient" private health insurance solutions sit with you? How well does the for-profit, corporate health insurance industry serve your interests? Any sane person can see that it isn't working, that the system isn't efficient, and that the entities in charge of the system don't serve our interests (in spite of the so-called "reforms" passed last year).

Yet this is precisely the model that Arne Duncan and Obama are pushing in the realm of education. They want to use all of the old top-down, corporate tricks: force workers to speed up, work for less pay, to see fellow individual workers as competitors/threats, to seem themselves as isolated individuals, etc. In short, they want to apply the industrial techniques of for-profit corporations to our education institutions. They, in effect, want to smash the idea of public education entirely. They want to privatize education and allow for-profit businesses and fabulously wealthy individuals to determine the future of U.S. schools. Yet we are made to think that teachers, not these forces of destruction coming from above, are the problem.

What is the motivation for this onslaught on public education? It is clear that their reasons are cynical. Why, after all, should capitalists care about education? We know that the only thing they care about is profits, so that is where we must look if we are to properly interpret their intervention in this issue. As the documentary itself makes clear, and as many are generally aware, there is anxiety among the ruling class about the global competitiveness of the American labor force. That means that capital wants to more effectively churn out units that are useful for maximizing profits: "units" which have certain technical know-how re: math and science. Whereas capital might have been persuaded in earlier epochs to take care of this problem via Keynesian methods of public subsidy, today the ideology and praxis of the ruling class is hard-neoliberal.

We must also note that the powerful entities who see charters as a business opportunity are extremely adamant about further colonizing public education and weakening the union. Another (related and often overlapping) force at work here is the hard-Right, who have been pushing for vouchers and privatization for 30 years. As I note above, this group is by no means confined to the Republican Party. These ideas are now commonplace among the Democrats. And why shouldn't they be? The Democrats are every bit as much of a pro-Wall Street party as the Republicans (the arguments between them these days seem mostly revolve around who is the more competent "true" friend of Wall Street).

And amidst all of these extremely powerful groups and institutions... Guggenheim would have us believe that the only villains are the "overly powerful" teachers themselves. The teachers who are routinely shat upon, under-appreciated, and underpaid to do one of the most important jobs in our entire society.

Make sure to get the word out about the sophistry at work in Waiting for "Superman".

Read More...

Summary only...

The Myth of Charter Schools

Nice rip of "Waiting for Superman" here in the New York Review of Books. The second paragraph makes an obvious point seldom registered in all the hoopla re: this documentary: "[The film] presents the popularized version of an account of American public education that is promoted by some of the nation’s most powerful figures and institutions." In other words, this isn't some novel, "fresh" case for "reform". This is, quite literally, an expression of what the most powerful figures and institutions in the US have to say about education. And one of the few impediments in the way of this enormous "wave" of pressure from above is the American Federation of Teachers. Unsurprisingly, they are the primary target of the film, the so-called villains thwarting "reform". Of course, the article makes far more detailed and nuanced points about the charter school issue. But I think keeping the configuration of power in view here is crucial; and it is completely absent from the way education is being discussed, to the detriment of the vast majority of us.

Read More...

Summary only...

NYTimes to teachers: subordinate yourselves to the "Historic Wave of Change"

I quote:

She has acted out of a fear that teachers’ unions could end up on the wrong side of a historic and inevitable wave of change.

Here's more:

“She has shrewdly recognized that teachers’ unions need to be part of the reform,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, an education research group.

Christopher Cerf, a former deputy schools chancellor in New York City who has sparred with Ms. Weingarten, offered a similar, if more skeptical interpretation.

“The earth moved in a really dramatic way,” he said, “to the point that a very successful strategist like Randi has to know that teacher unionism itself is in jeopardy, perhaps even in mortal jeopardy.”

So here's the argument of this atrocious article:

1. The only way to change or reform schools is to privatize them, bust unions and blame teachers for the social ills of our society.
2. Since teachers' unions disagree, with 1. they must be mercilessly crushed as "opponents of change".
   
3. While you might have thought that the leader of the country's largest teachers' union would disagree with 1. and 2. , in fact she is a "reformer" and appears to be at least minimally rational and "shrewd" enough to recognize that she must keep in step with the blinding light emitted by the "historic waves of change" being pushed through by the likes of "CEO" Arne Duncan.

This is complete bullshit. And the language it uses to make the point is completely batshit insane: "historic and inevitable wave of change"... "movement of the earth"? What's with all of this cosmic imagery? It's almost as though the NYTimes would have us think that the forces scapegoating teachers, smashing public education, and bleeding our schools dry are inevitable forces of nature. Fucking crazy.

As with everything we read in the NYTimes, we need to place all of this bullshit in context. There is a broad attack on public sector employees across the board right now. The attack proceeds by blaming them and making them pay for a crisis that was caused by Corporate America (who, we must recognize, are precisely the folks that are so thrilled about the idea of charter schools, privatized education, "market based" education policy, etc.). The attack on teachers, and thus on one of the most visible and organized public-sector unions, is part of a broader attempt to force austerity on working people in order to make them pay for the crisis. This is just one of the contextual factors left out.

Another is that we've had a neoliberal, market-based education policy has been in place for some time now. As many have pointed out, the Obama administration's education policies have been not only continuous with Bush's NCLB, but, in fact, more stridently Right-wing and anti-union (precisely because the Obama administration has more leeway since progressive groups (wrongly) assume that this administration is less likely to the same things as the Bush administration).

The ideas were cooked up by people who know nothing about education. And the ideas emerge in the context of a global doctrine and political practice, neoliberalism, which holds that we must extend the logic of financial markets to all facets of life. The privatization of education, or more precisely, the corporatization of education, by means of charters is thus part of a larger trend that includes deregulation, tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, union-busting, privatization, destruction of the welfare state, etc. In other words this is all part of the infamous package known as "structural adjustment". As David Harvey has pointed out, that is more or less what the US is undergoing right now (minus the IMF).

What is called "reform" these days in education discourse is, in fact, anything but. It is reactionary. It is part of the destruction of the institution of public education. And if we were taught history in this country at all, we'd know that free public education was something for which we had to fight tooth and nail to win. The powers that be didn't grant it willingly. And when they're holding all of the cards, as they appear to be right now, we shouldn't expect that they'd do anything other than attack it.

Read More...

Summary only...

The King and the CEO

There is an interesting post about the new "Sun King" of education policy in the UK over at Lenin's Tomb.

The US analogue, no doubt, is Arne Duncan, who dubbed himself the "CEO" of Public Schools when he was in Chicago. And his pedigree as CEO is no doubt also based on his expertise in union-busting, cost-cutting, scapegoating and blaming teachers for social ills, etc.

This no doubt explains his embrace of "shock doctrine" neoliberalism when he said of Katrina that it was "the best thing ever to happen to the New Orleans school system".

The "Sun King" in the post above cut his teeth as a big wig in BP. He has no specialized knowledge or experience relevant to education whatsoever. And Arne Duncan, of course, lords over our entire public education system, although he has never spent a day in his life in a public school as a student.

Read More...

Summary only...

We need a new "Marshall Plan" for schools...

...according to the new, progressive, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. I think she's absolutely right. Contrast this with the anti-union austerity pedaled by Democrats in Washington.

Read More...

Summary only...

Say it with me: Irony.

In the post below I referred to the case where two state employees of Utah have leaked detailed information to the media from state records about people they suspect of being "illegal," including names, birth dates, addresses, social security numbers, and due dates of expectant mothers. It's a horrifying case. The otherwise neocon governor of Utah responded surprisingly quickly with a probe into who accessed and leaked the information, immediately firing one suspect and beginning the firing process for the other who has some protections as a permanent employee of the state. The story is shocking and incredibly scary for the 1300 people on that list. Firing and prosecuting the people who compiled and leaked the list will not reverse the violation that has been done to them or undo the fact that they face increased danger at the hands of local hate groups.

But there was one gem of irony in the Salt Lake Tribune's story about that second employee, Teresa Bassett of the Department of Workforce Services, that I just can't resist sharing:

This week, Bassett sought the assistance of the Utah Public Employees Association, the union representing state workers, although she was not a member of the organization.

“Teresa approached me for some advice and I gave her the advice that she probably ought to seek representation by an attorney,” said Dennis Hammer, deputy director of UPEA.

Bassett also asked to join the union, filling out a membership card that Hammer said he would hold onto until the criminal investigation into her activities is complete.

So, an employee of the department of workforce services betrays the very workers she is supposed to have been helping by releasing their private information and making them targets of hate groups, and then when she faces consequences for doing so she turns to the union she has refused to join during her fifteen years of state employment to help bail her out.

Note to Bassett: Worker solidarity. You're doing it wrong.

Read More...

Summary only...

SW on the Central Falls attacks on Teachers

Read about it here.

Read More...

Summary only...

President Barack Reagan... oh, I mean Obama loves busting unions

(via American Leftist) Barack "Hoover" Obama applauds the mass firings of teachers in Rhode Island. Yes, we can (bust teachers unions), evidently.

At least the Republicans don't try sugar-coating the fact that they are pro-Business assholes.

"But deep down, he's really a progressive in his heart of hearts". Yeah, right. And I'm Frank Sinatra.

Read More...

Summary only...

Lee Sustar on The Escalating War Against Public-Sector Unions

Read it here.

Read More...

Summary only...

Current State of the UAW

(via Lee Sustar's article on labor in the newest International Socialist Review)

"It was during that 1930s crisis that the United Auto Workers (UAW) stormed onto the scene with dramatic factory occupations led by communists, socialists, and other radicals. Today’s UAW, though, is a vastly different organization. It has followed its long-established strategy of partnership with employers to an extreme conclusion by becoming, through health-care trust funds, a major shareholder in GM alongside the U.S. government and the majority (55 percent) shareholder in Chrysler. To achieve this bizarre form of employee ownership—the union trust fund will get just one seat on the company board—the union agreed to ban strikes for six years, eliminate work rules negotiated over decades, cut overtime pay, and further concessions.The result of all this is the virtual elimination of the difference between UAW-organized plants and non-union ones. The UAW, which once steadily raised the bar for wages and benefits for the entire U.S. working class, is now leading the way down."

This is indeed a sad state of affairs. It was difficult not to have relatively high hopes months ago in November as a new President and an increased Democrat majority in Congress entered Washington, both of whom touted their resolve to pass EFCA loudly and often. But given the way things have turned out, it's difficult to imagine how much different things would be for labor had Obama and the Democrats lost the election.

Obama has done little to make good on his promises to pass EFCA and his Administration has been more interested in bailing out bankers and placating Capital than in better the condition of working people. Sustar points us to a damning public statement from January in which the Obama Administration bragged that it was tougher on the UAW than the Bush Administration had been. Indeed, it touts the fact that "in virtually every respect, the concessions that the UAW agreed to are more aggressive than what the Bush Administration originally demanded in its loan agreement with GM."

But, of course, Obama is not solely to blame for the demise of what appeared to be an ascendant moment for labor in the US.

As Sustar points out, inter-union clashes coupled with problems in union leadership have been detrimental as well. Arguably, the follies of union leadership are a large reason why EFCA hasn't been passed. The UAW leadership, in particular, seems most in need of indictment at this point. I understand that they are trying to keep GM from going under, but the meagre scraps from the table they've settled for are tantamount to major defeats in the short and long term. Again as (via Sustar's article) former Canadian Auto Workers economist recently wrote: "the UAW's GM membership is down to 64,000 (from 450,000 at the end of the 70s, when major concessions first began to be extracted). If GM is 'successful' in its current restructuring, that will be further reduced to 40,000. Thirty years of concessions and a 90 percent loss in jobs. If ever there was a failing strategy for workers, this was it." And I think Sustar is right on when he argues that the concessions and defeats forced upon the UAW recently are tantamounts to defeats for the entire US working class (and, ipso facto, gains for capitalists).

In more ways than one this purportedly 'new era' in the US is looking more and more like a newly-packaged version of the same old. I don't think the Obama-Hoover comparison is out of place. This is a serious disappointment. It remains to be seen how deep the contituities will go or how apt the analogy will prove to be, but there is little concrete evidence that Obama intends to do anything like what FDR's administration began trying to do in 1933.

At this point, we'll be lucky if the already-compromised 'public option' gets through the filibuster-proof Democratic Congress.

Read More...

Summary only...

Total Workers Win!

(via Lenin's Tomb) I just saw that the workers of Total (a French-owned oil refining company from England) won their dispute with ownership after initiating a wildcat strike. (I also see, via HistoMat, that Ford-Visteon workers also won a huge victory in the U.K. recently).

Reuters reports:

"A dispute involving hundreds of workers who were sacked last week for going on unofficial strike at a French-owned oil refinery in eastern England has been settled, French oil firm Total said on Friday.

The oil firm had said the dispute with some 650 construction workers at the Lindsey refinery, who were sacked for taking the unofficial industrial action, had put major investment into the building of its HDS-3 desulphurisation unit at risk."

Apparently, the capitalists were starting to lose out big (to the tune of 100m euros) because of the strike and decided to cave in to save their investments. They reinstated a ton of workers they'd previously been trying to lay off. And had it not been for solidarity efforts (workers in other industries walked out of their jobs in support), courage, and ambition of the workers, we can be sure that Total would have broken the strike and not thought twice about laying even more workers off due to their militancy.

We need to see more of this in the United States. The victory in Chicago at Republic Windows and Doors was inspiring, and these actions have always (historically speaking) tended to snowball and build on each other.

What's crazy is that in the United States, wildcat strikes (like the ones deployed by Total workers) are illegal. They were made illegal in 1935 by the National Labor Relations Act (the 'Wagner' Act), which just goes to show you how much of the New Deal labor policy was shaped by a fear of uncontrolled labor militancy. Of course wildcat strikes and a flash of widespread sitdown strikes in the early 1930s had made the Wagner Act itself politically possible, which is interesting given that in this way it tried to proscribe the conditions of its own possibility. But despite the many great things the Act did do, we musn't forget that the Act was not written by a working-class party or the workers themselves; its content represents the power dynamics involved in its passage (of which worker militancy was only one competing force among many).

Read More...

Summary only...

Unions are responsible for auto industry failures

This is one of my favorite of the outlandish statements repeated by conservatives as if it's common sense. 

Let's talk about the shockingly absurd implications of it:

1-That the auto industry has failed because of some failure of low-level labor, rather than because of seriously poor corporate decision making. (note that no one is blaming the bank tellers for the problems of the financial sector)

2-That guaranteed higher-than-average wages, job security, and benefits hurt worker productivity.

3-That guaranteed low wages and no benefits would make people work harder. 

4-That cutting benefits, job security, and wages, (killing the unions) would be worthwhile if it meant having a stronger auto industry in the United States--essentially that making an industry "competitive" is more important than empowering workers to live in reasonable conditions.

Obviously, all four implications are completely absurd, both logically, and as an indication of our social values. While I'm not sold on any kind of "bail out" for anyone without adequate federal regulation/control attached, I'm certain that anyone who suggests breaking up automotive unions is the solution to an ailing industry is really not a credible pundit. 

Read More...

Summary only...