To Win the Teachers Strike We Must Shut Down L.A.

Longshore, Transit, Teamsters – All L.A. Labor:
Join in Action with Educators, Students, Parents…

To Win the Teachers Strike
We Must Shut Down L.A.

ATU Transport Workers, ILWU, CSEW and Internationalists at January 18 strike rally in Grand Park on Day Five of the UTLA strike. (Internationalist photo)

LOS ANGELES, January 21 – After a full week – five school days – the Los Angeles teachers strike is stronger than ever. Picket lines have been large and spirited. “Rain or shine, we walk the line,” chanted teachers in the endless rain, with scores picketing at almost every location and hundreds ringing large schools. Despite vows by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) bosses to keep schools open with scabs and administrators, by week’s end less than one in five students were attending and principals called to close the schools. The mid-day strike rallies have been massive, with over 50,000 in downtown L.A. on Monday, January 14, another 50,000 marching on Tuesday the 15th, and when the sun finally came out, upwards of 60,000 jammed into Grand Park on Friday. Teachers roared their determination to make picket lines even stronger if the strike extends into a second week.

But to win, there’s a hard fight ahead. After lying low for a few days, the forces trying to undercut and destroy public education are raising their heads. The liberal media and Democratic Party politicians are trying to stampede the leadership of the union, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), into signing a contract cooked up in secret negotiations that would only offer up some crumbs, leaving the big problems in place. Minimal and temporary reduction of class sizes for a couple of grades, a few full-time nurses, promises of woefully inadequate funds from the state budget: nothing compared to what it will take to even begin to undo the results of years of schools being starved of resources. And those crumbs can be taken away the minute the District cries “budget deficit.” The privatizers who preside over the public school system are deliberately trying to run it into the ground. 

Speaking to the crowd on Friday, UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl compared the strike to a boxing match: “We have stunned our opponents, the billionaires, the District bureaucrats, the nay-sayers, the nonprofit/industrial complex,” he said. “We have stunned them by taking over this city.” Public opinion polls show 80% in support of the strike, so far. But the opposition is not on the ropes, not by a long shot. Even having teachers, parents, students on the strike lines, with tens of thousands of demonstrators in the streets and massive community support, it’s not enough. Now is the time to escalate. To knock out the privatizers and bust the union-busters we must MOBILIZE LABOR and Latino, African American, Asian, immigrant and all working people of this city to SHUT DOWN LOS ANGELES.

To win real gains over bitter opposition from the enemies of public education will take the power of the entire working class together with parents, students and oppressed communities throughout the city. This means building strong picket lines that no one crosses, in order to shut down the schools. At the same time, to defeat those powerful capitalist foes it is necessary to mobilize the entire labor movement. At the Friday rally we saw members of the ILWU (port workers), ATU (transit workers), SEIU (service employees), IATSE (stage hands), SAG-AFRTA (actors) and other unions. We need to see thousands of those unionists marching in contingents, and undertaking solidarity action at the workplace. If it’s teachers alone, the LAUSD will just try to wait them out. Want to win the strike? Make it cost. Shut down the ports, stop mass transit, jam the freeways. That’ll get the bosses’ attention. And it will inspire working people and youth throughout the country and around the world.

What “Deal”? Don’t Settle for a Sellout!

 So far, the walkout by educators in the second-largest school district in the country has had fairly good press. Even an anti-union rag like the Los Angeles Times (16 January) headlined, “Teachers bask in support for strike.” At a briefing on Day Two, the UTLA leader said triumphantly that the strike was the number one trending topic on social media, and that Democratic Party politicians including potential presidential candidates (Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Corey Booker and Bernie Sanders) had claimed to support the strike. But things will soon change if the teachers hang tough. The media are already floating the potential terms of a sellout “deal” to be brokered by Democratic mayor Eric Garcetti and Democratic governor Gavin Newsom. Garcetti has been “mediating” talks between the LAUSD and UTLA for the last several days.

A week of striking in the rain showed the determination of the teachers. It also had a festive quality: a street fair in Koreatown, a “Red for Ed marching band,” student dance videos for public education, car pool videos for the union. But opponents of the strike are beginning to mobilize. Already we’re beginning to see articles parroting LAUSD boss Austin Beutner’s cynical references to poor and homeless students depending on school breakfasts and lunches. The same profiteers that breed poverty and homelessness have the nerve to use this in their demagogic anti-strike appeals. Expect to see more union-bashing trash in the media.

While headlining on Saturday that “Hopes rise for a deal to end strike,” Friday’s Los Angeles Times suggested what “a deal that meets or exceeds reasonable expectations” would consist of:

“[A] final deal may look a lot like the district’s most recent offer in the key particulars. Peripheral elements could prove crucial – like a pilot program using union-backed reforms. Tougher accountability for charter schools at the state level also would be something the union could sell as a win.” 

Who needs a “pilot program” to show that drastically smaller classes are crucial, or that every school should have a full-time nurse and a librarian – as well as a library?! Every educator knows that you can’t effectively teach, much less give individual attention, to 45 students in a high-school classroom – or even 35, or fewer still in lower grades. To cut class sizes in half will require the hiring of thousands more educators at full union scale. The money is there – how the capitalist politicians come up with it is their problem.

And what does “accountability for charter schools” mean? The UTLA’s pamphlet Whose Schools: Community Representation and Transparency in Charter School Governance in Los Angeles (June 2018) talks of “disproportionate influence of corporations” and calls for adding a couple of parents to governing boards. But that won’t change the nature of this union-busting, corporate operation. Class Struggle Education Workers insists: Charters must go! Turn them into public schools!

From even before the beginning of the strike, the CSEW and the Internationalist Group have fought to build active solidarity from the labor movement. Motions were put forward and passed in the faculty union (CFA) of California State University and the Los Angeles transit union (ATU Local 1277) pledging to join the picket lines in the event of a teachers strike. From Day One, transit workers have been at the picket lines and the demonstrations in their red hoodies and t-shirts calling for transport workers solidarity with the strike and proclaiming the bottom-line union principle that picket lines mean don’t cross. Our supporters have also participated in organizing and preparing strike support together with members of the dock workers union, the ILWU, the powerhouse of L.A. labor.

From the outset, the CSEW has called for measures to win the strike, like building strike support committees, supporting student walkouts and posing demands defending educators in charter schools, in order to organize the unorganized. A key measure is for a mass strike committee of representatives to be elected at every school. If a tentative settlement is agreed to by the bargaining team, UTLA members should demand to see it in writing, and to have the chance to debate any proposed agreement in a democratic mass meeting of the membership. 

Democrats Are Leading the Drive to Privatize Public Education

Transport Workers, CSEW and ILWU joined picket line at Roosevelt HS after the strike rally. (Internationalist photo)

The drive to privatize education is behind the intentional underfunding of public schools, in order to make them fail. This is a racist campaign against a school system in which more than 90% of students are Latino (74%), African American (8%), Asian (8%), Pacific Islanders and Native Americans. Yet the underfunding (and the whole issue of charter schools) isn’t raised in the strike demands, on the grounds that it can only be addressed at the state level. The LAUSD pleads poverty, but 90% of local school funds come from Sacramento, and the richest state in the country is near bottom in per-pupil spending (L.A. spends half as much on every student as NYC). California pays $10,000 a year for each K-12 student, and $75,000 a year per prison inmate. But this fight isn’t about budget priorities, it’s about ruling-class interests.

Above all, there must be clarity about the bosses’ Democratic Party. Unlike the teachers revolt last year in a series of Republican-governed “red states” (West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, North Carolina), in California teachers face Democratic administrators and officials at every level. At the Friday rally, Caputo-Pearl said, “Democrats, right here in California, the bluest of blue states, allow privatization to happen by underfunding our schools and being afraid of the charter industry.” His conclusion? “Democrats have to stand up.” Yet Democrats lead the drive for publicly funded private “charter” schools. “Right here in Los Angeles,” said the UTLA leader, “Eli Broad and Austin Beutner are pushing the privatization agenda.” What he didn’t say is that billionaires Broad and Beutner are top Democratic Party donors, with close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama – yet another proof of how Democrats’ attacks on labor and the oppressed helped pave the way for raving Republican bigot Donald Trump in the White House. 

The fight to defend public education is eminently political, and in California today the immediate enemy in this fight at every level is the Democratic Party. Union leaders (along with many reformist leftists) criticize “corporate Democrats,” while looking for aid from supposed “progressive” Democrats in city hall and the state house. The governor, state superintendent of education, Los Angeles mayor and almost all members of the L.A. school board are Democrats, who also hold huge supermajorities (over 70%) in both houses of the state legislature, which they have controlled almost continually since 1970. They are the ones directly responsible for the perilous state of public education in California today. Yet both the UTLA and the LAUSD are looking to the Democrats to resolve the issues in the strike. 

The Democratic Party represents the interests of capital against those of labor, immigrants and the Latino, African American and Asian working people. The Democrats’ occasional “friend of labor” campaign appeals are sucker bait. They are on the other side of the class line from workers and the oppressed. Appealing to them is a recipe for defeat. Class Struggle Education Workers says: you can’t fight Democrats with Democrats, and you can’t fight Trump with Democrats – they all defend the capitalist system. The CSEW calls to break with the Democrats and to build a class-struggle workers party.

TO WIN THE TEACHERS STRIKE, WE MUST
MOBILIZE LABOR TO SHUT DOWN L.A.

Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here.