This column is devoted to reporting the resistance by working people to the employers' assault on their living standards, working conditions, and unions.
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OAKLAND, California-Hundreds of teachers set up picket lines at schools throughout the city February 15, beginning a third strike in their months-long fight to win a new contract.
The teachers, members of the Oakland Education Association, had been working without a contract for nearly a year and a half. They are demanding that class sizes, currently among the largest in California, be reduced; and that teacher salaries be increased. Oakland teachers have not had a raise in five years.
The school district has refused to meet teachers' demands, claiming there is no money available. District officials have come up with a class size reduction scheme that would take many years to put in place.
Conditions in Oakland schools are appalling. Teachers bring their own soap and toilet tissue. Many spend literally hundreds of dollars out of their own pockets on badly needed supplies and books not furnished by the school district, and the administration is proposing to cut a meager allowance paid to teachers for these purchases.
Most school buildings include a number of decrepit "portables", wooden temporary classrooms that have stood for decades. Last fall, parents at Lazear Elementary held their children out of class for weeks to demand a new school.
About 55 percent of Oakland students and 32 percent of teachers are Black, while 20 percent of students and 6 percent of teachers are Latino. The superintendent and top administrators, as well as many of the school board members, are Black. Attacks on affirmative action programs and budget cuts at California universities threaten to erode even these modest gains.
The administration and its supporters opened up a vicious public campaign aimed at undercutting the broad support the teachers had won.
A news conference at McClymonds High School, in West Oakland, a predominantly Black part of the city, featured Rev. J. Alfred Smith Sr., head of the Baptist Ministers Union, and Shannon Reeves, newly elected executive director of the Oakland NAACP.
Reeves, accusing the teachers of committing "educational treason," charged that the teachers were telling students to stay away from school and were only interested in picking up a paycheck.
Smith chimed in, claiming that the teachers' contract fight had nothing to do with the concerns of Oakland families, particularly the Black and Latino residents of the working- class "flatlands" areas of Oakland. Although he gave no evidence, Smith said that "the Oakland Unified School District may have African American administrators, but the majority of teachers are white persons who live outside of Oakland but will come to work tomorrow to get their paychecks. They are being influenced by white politicians." News media reports have promoted the views of Black parents who oppose the strike.
Union officials, teachers, and students have stepped up efforts to counter the anti-union charges. An attempt to hold an anti-union news conference at the administration building February 14 fizzled when 200 teachers, youth, and union supporters staged a news conference and rally of their own at the same place. The teachers then filled the auditorium where the school board was to meet, while those who could not get in staged a noisy demonstration in the hallway outside, chanting "We want a contract!" and pounding on the walls.
The race-baiting attack seemed incredulous to many. "How can they do this?" one parent picketing at Longfellow Elementary asked this reporter.
Jimisha Thompson, a student at McClymonds High, said the clergy and the NAACP were ignoring the plight of Oakland teachers and students. "It's not about race anymore. It's about money and how much you have to spend on your schools," she told the Oakland Tribune.
Trailmobile, Inc. workers walk picket line in Charleston, Illinois.
More than 600 United Paperworkers International Union members and supporters organized a demonstration February 19 to protest the company's replacement workers in the plant. The 1,200 unionists locked out since January 22 have received strong support from other workers in the area.
Jim Altenberg, member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union in San Francisco; Amy Belvin, member of the Oakland Education Association at Allendale Elementary School in Oakland; and Johanna Ryan and Meg Novak in Peoria, Illinois, contributed to this column.