The Road Back To Unionization Runs Through Public Schools

There are lots of books, articles, blog posts and so forth documenting the decline of labor unions in American life.  This recent article from the New York Times is probably as useful a thumbnail summary of those works as any.  Perhaps one observation from it does as much as any other fact to sum up that loss of power:  the fact that, within my lifetime, a president as Republican as Richard Nixon appointed a union man as his Secretary of Labor.  It's safe to say that Nixon took no pleasure in doing so, but Nixon was nothing if not practical (with the exception of Watergate) when it came to political moves.  He was simply recognizing the power that unions exerted back then on national elections, especially on the Democratic side, and so, as he did in other areas, he moved to co-op a potential political threat.

Today, Donald Trump has no need to worry about such a threat and, for all of his phony rhetoric about turning power back over to "the people," the reality is that his Administration is staffed with quite possibly the most plutocratic as well as kleptocratic personalities in our history.  So, in theory, there's no need to worry about a rising labor movement between now and 2020.

Or is there?

What happened in West Virginia earlier this year, as documented by Slate.com, was remarkable by any standards.  It demonstrated that, despite that state's to destroy union power by outlawing strikes and collective bargaining for public workers, workers cannot be denied their First Amendment rights to assemble and petition for a redress of grievances.  And make no mistake:  whenever there is an assault on union rights, it is in fact constitutional rights as well as economic rights that are very much at stake.

But it did much more than that:  it reaffirmed the reality that in the United States, while unions no longer support a significant number of manufacturing jobs, it is definitely supporting a large and rapidly growing number of service-sector jobs--in the process, redefining what it means (as pointed out by Slate) to be a "working-class" American.  And, at the same time, it identified a significant and widely supported object of government spending--education--that is also a large part of that sector.

The West Virginia strike by teachers led no less a business media outlet than Bloomberg to speculate about the possibility of similar uprisings by teachers in other states.  Well, it did not take long for speculation to become fact.  As it did in Oklahoma.  In Kentucky.  In Colorado.  And, most recently, in Arizona.

And make no mistake:  these teachers have the support of the parents whose children they educate, not only within their own states, but outside of them as well.  What happened in Oklahoma when the teachers there went on strike?  People from all around the country ordered pizzas for them as a show of support (and kudos also to the pizza shop that made all of the pizzas and all of the deliveries).  That kind of support doesn't happen to fringe movements.  And this expanding revolt of public-school teachers against red-state budgets and the corporate tools that pass them is clearly anything but a fringe movement.

You can see that in the unbelievably pathetic response to the Oklahoma strike by one Sooner lawmaker that the ranks of the strikers were filled in part with paid protesters.  He declined to name his source for this "information."  I don't see why he needed to do so; it really doesn't take that long to say "no one."  But you can see it far more clearly in the response by the Republican governors of the affected states, who are at least beginning to make real, if somewhat tepid, responses to the strikers by putting pay raises on the political and budgetary tables.

There's some suggestion that this teacher revolt might not have much impact on political issues other than education--and, given the fact that many of the affected teachers are themselves Republicans, there is at least some practical reason behind that suggestion.  Then again, it may be so much whistling past the proverbial graveyard; here is another Times piece, in which three Arizona public-school teachers, all Republicans, commit the cardinal Republican sin of--wait for it--asking for a tax increase in order to pay teachers.

For the Trump GOP, the teacher revolt is not a minor course correction.  It is very much an existential threat to the entire way of doing business over the past four decades, going back to the real beginning of the "Reagan Revolution" when Saint Ronnie, the first former union president to occupy the White House, busted the air traffic controllers' union and signaled the beginning of a war by Wall Street on the right of workers to organize in the same way that investors have the right to organize capital in corporations.

We have, as a nation and as a people, come a very long way down a very bad road since then.  I say all of this, as I have said here before, as the son of an educator who promoted public education.  But I also say it as a member of two unions with a very strong appreciation for what union power can do to make the lives of working people better.  And the only way back to where we were, back to when the American Dream was not the American Fantasy, is through organizing not only politically, but also economically.  If teachers can point the way--and I believe that they are now doing exactly that--it just makes me doubly proud.  In any case, it's time for all of us to express our American pride in the same way, to borrow a phrase, that we always have.  Together.