Public School Teacher Strikes Show Workplace Organizing Pays Off

While those at the top of the income pyramid continue to celebrate economic trends, the great majority of working people continue to struggle to make ends meet.  However, teacher victories in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona demonstrate that broad-based sustained workplace organizing, labor-community solidarity, and importantly a willingness to strike, can change the balance of power in favor of working people and produce meaningful gains.

Teacher Strikes

West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona are all considered red states, with legislatures that have aggressively reduced taxes on the wealthy and corporations, slashed spending on social programs, and gutted union rights for public sector workers by denying them the right to collectively bargain or strike.  Yet, after months of careful workplace and community organizing, West Virginia teachers launched a nine-day strike in February that shut down the entire state’s public school system and won them and all other state workers a 5 percent salary increase and a government promise to convene a task force to find ways to reign in worker health care costs.

Oklahoma teachers followed with their own workplace and community actions and a nine-day statewide strike in early April. The day before the start of the strike the legislature hurriedly approved salary increases of $6000 for teachers and $1250 for support staff, and days later a modest $40 million increase in the education budget.  This wasn’t enough to convince the teachers to call off their strike; they had demanded a raise of $10,000 for teachers and $5,000 for support staff, $200 million for increased school funding, $213 million for state employee raises, and a $255.9 million increase in health care funding.  However, after the head of the state’s largest teacher’s union called for an end to the walkout, saying that it had achieved all it could, teachers, many reluctantly, agreed to return to work without further gains.

Arizona teachers have participated in workplace actions and demonstrations to press their demand for salary increases for themselves and other education workers and a significant boost to the education budget.  The governor, hoping to avoid a threatened strike, announced a plan to give teachers a 20 percent raise by 2020, including a nine percent raise this year.  The teachers weren’t satisfied: they didn’t find the governor’s plan to raise their wages financially realistic, they wanted raises for all school workers, and they wanted school funding returned to its 2008 level.  In a statewide vote of teachers and other school personal, approximately 80 percent voted to walk out on April 26 if their demands were not met.  This would be Arizona’s first statewide walkout.

While the gains won in these states are not sufficient to reverse decades of concerted action by state legislatures to undermine public services and public workers, they are impressive nonetheless and should encourage a renewed focus on and support for workplace organizing and collective action.

Organizing To Win

These victories did not come easily.  Teachers were willing to take the bold step of engaging in a technically illegal strike for at least two main reasons.  The first is that they have endured terrible working conditions for years, conditions which also weighed heavily on those they teach.  For example, per student instructional funding in Oklahoma was some 30 percent below its 2008 level.  Some 20 percent of the state’s school districts were forced by financial pressures to adopt four-day school weeks.  Textbooks remain in short supply and out of date. Classes are so overcrowded that many students must sit on the floor.  And the state’s public school teachers and staff had not received a raise in ten years; pay was so low that many have been forced to work multiple jobs.

And adding insult to injury is the fact that state legislatures in all three states have slashed spending on education and teacher salaries in order to finance massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.  A case in point: The Arizona legislature has cut approximately $1 billion from schools since the 2008 recession while simultaneously reducing taxes.  No doubt the fact that such regressive policies were often supported by both Democratic as well as Republican lawmakers, as in Oklahoma, also encouraged teachers to embrace direct-workplace action rather than more traditional lobbying to force needed legislative changes.

The second reason is that strike votes were proceeded by months of organizing that informed and created bonds of solidarity.  West Virginia was a model. Forums were held in most schools which educated and also encouraged local leadership development, teachers joined by other school workers engaged in ever more militant school-based actions, and eventually strike votes were held in every school with the participation of all teachers and staff regardless of union affiliation.  Teacher activists, most of whom were rank and file union activists, used a variety of methods, including social media, to build a strong state-wide network to coordinate their work.  The strike was called only when it was clear that it had the support of the overwhelming majority of teachers, support staff, and school bus drivers.

This strong rank and file base was key to the strike’s success.  After five days, the Governor and teacher union leaders announced that a deal had been reached and called for an end to the strike.  However, the rank and file refused.  They held their strike until the state legislature actually approved an agreement that met their demands.

The Oklahoma strike was less successful in part because a weaker union movement meant fewer trained labor activists.  This made it harder to engage in school-by-school organizing and forge a strong state network. As a consequence the strike was launched without the same level of workplace organization and connection to other education workers such as support staff and bus drivers.  And as a result, it made it much harder for rank and file teacher activists to effectively oppose the teacher union leadership’s call to settle for what was won and to return to work.  It is likely that Oklahoma law, which requires that 75 percent of the legislature vote in favor of any revenue hike, also contributed to teacher willingness to end the strike.

Arizona teachers are now preparing to strike.  Teachers in Kentucky and Colorado recently engaged in one day walkouts, shutting down schools and demonstrating at their respective state capitals to protest low wages and inadequate education budgets.  Discussions continue in both states about the possibility of renewed strikes to win their demands.  We should be studying as well as supporting all their efforts.

Reasons to Celebrate

These teacher strikes are important and have deservedly won widespread community support.  They have raised the salaries of teachers and other education workers, thereby helping their schools attract and retain talented people.  They have also boosted state education budgets, which benefits the broader community, especially students and their parents.  They also shine a spotlight on the destructive consequences of past tax giveaways to the rich and powerful and the need for new progressive sources of tax revenue.  Finally, they show that workers can effect change, improving their own living and working conditions, even under extremely hostile conditions, through sustained workplace organization and audacity.

What’s Driving Trade Tensions Between The US and China

There is a lot of concern over the possibility of a trade war between China and the US.  In early April President Trump announced that his administration was considering levying $100 billion of additional tariffs on Chinese exports, after the Chinese government responded to a previously proposed US tariff hike on Chinese goods of $50 billion by announcing its own equivalent tariff hikes on US exports.  And the Chinese government has made clear it will again respond in kind if these new tariffs are actually imposed.

So, what’s it all about?

To this point, it is worth emphasizing that no new tariffs have in fact been levied, by either the US or Chinese governments.  The first round of announced US tariffs on Chinese goods are still subject to a public comment period before becoming effective, and the content of the second round has yet to be formally decided upon.  Thus, both countries have time to back away from their threats.

Also significant is the fact that both countries are being careful about the products they are threatening to tax.  For example, the Trump administration has carefully avoided talking about placing tariffs on computers or cell phones, two of the biggest US imports from China.  The US has also refrained from putting tariffs on clothing, shoes, and furniture, also major imports from China.

It is not hard to guess the reason why: these goods are produced as part of multinational corporate controlled production and marketing networks that operate under the direction of leading US corporations like Dell, Apple, and Walmart.  Taxing these goods would threaten corporate profitability. As a former commissioner of the US International Trade Commission pointed out: “It seems that the U.S. trade representative was very much aware of the global value chains in keeping some of these items off the list.”

The Chinese government, for its part, as been equally careful. For example, it put smaller planes on its proposed tariff list while exempting the larger planes made by Boeing.

Although the media largely echoes President Trump’s claim that his tariff threats directed at China are all about trying to reduce the large US trade deficit with China in order to save high paying manufacturing jobs and revitalize US manufacturing, the president really has a far narrower aim—that is to protect the monopoly position and profits of dominant US corporations.  The short hand phrase for this is the protection of “intellectual property rights.” As Trump tweeted in March: “The U.S. is acting swiftly on Intellectual Property theft. We cannot allow this to happen as it has for many years!”

Bloomberg News offers a more detailed explanation of the connection between the tariff threats and the goal of defending corporate intellectual property:

the White House is considering imposing tariffs on a broad range of consumer goods to punish China for its IP [intellectual property] practices. . . . the U.S. alleges . . . that China has been stealing U.S. trade secrets, forcing American companies to hand over proprietary technology as a condition of doing business on the mainland, and providing state support for Chinese firms to acquire critical technology abroad. A consensus is growing that these policies, designed to establish China as a dominant player in key technologies of the future, from semiconductors to electric cars, threaten to erode America’s technological edge, both commercial and military.

In other words, US tariff threats are, in reality, a bargaining chip to get the Chinese government to accept stronger protections for the intellectual property rights and technology of leading US firms in industries such as pharmaceuticals, aerospace, telecommunications, and autos.  If Trump succeeds, US multinational corporations will become more profitable.  But there will be little gain for US workers.

The auto industry offers a good case in point.  President Trump has repeatedly said that forcing China to lower its tariffs on imported US cars will help the US auto industry.  As he correctly points out, there is a 2.5 percent tariff on cars shipped from China to the U.S. and a 25 percent tariff on cars shipped from the U.S. to China.  Trump claims that lowering the Chinese tariff would allow US automakers to export more cars to China and boost auto employment in the US.

However, GM, Ford and other automakers have already established joint ventures with Chinese firms and the great majority of the cars they sell in China are made in China.  This allows them to avoid the tariff.  China is GM’s biggest market and has been for six years straight.  The company has 10 joint ventures and two wholly owned foreign enterprises as well as more than 58,000 employees in China. It sells approximately 4 million cars a year in China, almost all made in China.

The two largest automobile exporters from the US to China are actually German.  BMW shipped 106,971 vehicles from the U.S. to China in 2017; Mercedes sent 71,198.  Ford was the leading US owned auto exporter and in third place with total yearly exports of 45,145 vehicles.  Fiat Chrysler was fourth with 16,545.

In short, lowering tariffs on auto imports from the US will do little to boost auto production or employment in the US, or even corporate profits.  The leading US automakers have already globalized their production networks.  But, changes to the joint venture law, or a toughening of intellectual property rights in China could mean a substantial boost to US automaker profits.

For its part, the Chinese government is trying to use its large state-owned enterprises, control over finance, investment restrictions on foreign investment, licensing powers, government procurement policies, and trade restrictions to build its own strong companies.  These are reasonable development policies, ones very similar to those used by Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.  It is short-sided for progressives in the US to criticize the use of such policies.  In fact, we should be advocating the development of similar state capacities in the US in order to rebuild and revitalize the US economy.

That doesn’t mean we should uncritically embrace the Chinese position.  The reason is that the Chinese government is using these policies to promote highly exploitative Chinese companies that are themselves increasingly export oriented and globalizing.  In other words, the Chinese state seeks only a rebalancing of power and wealth for the benefit of its own elites, not a progressive restructuring of its own or the global economy.

In sum, these threats and counter-threats over trade have little to do with defending worker interests in the US or in China.  Unfortunately, this fact has been lost in the media frenzy over how to interpret Trump’s grandstanding and ever-changing policies.  Moreover, the willingness of progressive analysts to join with the Trump administration in criticizing China for its use of state industrial policies ends up blurring the important distinction between the capacities and the way those capacities are being used.  And that will only make it harder to build the kind of movement we need to reshape the US economy.